Persistence

Walter Gabrielson Painter

Chapter 8

continued

I moved back into the loft...

I moved back into the loft full time and stayed for nine more months. I was afraid every day and night. The only thing between me and them was a series of locked doors which at times didn't feel very secure. When you are weak, they instantly know it. In the downtown jungle there are only predators and victims, and everybody knows what is what and how much chance you have to keep your red meat together. The fear and violence about you is palpable. I watched out my window as people were beaten, raped, robbed. I saw screamers stand on the sidewalk or under my window yelling gibberish for hours. I watched young people drifting around with their highs, begging you to throw them down money for more. I saw a man break into the lower parking lot, hot wire a car, start it up and crash it repeatedly into twenty other cars, just destroying them and driving into them again and again until the car he was in wouldn't move anymore. Then he got out and walked away. The police never showed up. There wasn't a large police presence where I was; I think the donut shops closed at five. Hell with the place, let it go and pick up the bodies in the morning. I could see the predators during the day, young men with nothing to do, standing around with darting eyes and wearing brand new sneakers for a fast getaway. Good place for track coaches to recruit. They were looking over the herd for a straggler, somebody a little slow, somebody who looked like a victim. They get good at it. You get good at it or you perish. I developed a glowering rage to project on the street, letting them know that I wasn't to be messed with. If you walk around like a bozo down there they will snatch your heart out as you walk. Violence is so omnipresent it becomes casual. It was the world series of anger and survival and I was right in the middle of it. The only way out was me. I had two opportunities: I had a show with Karl coming up and a big commission due in the spring. Talk about incentive.

The commission was with Lew Wolff, a developer who had built a large hotel (bought by Hilton) out in Burbank next to the airport. He had designed a wonderful restaurant for it (Lew's A Gathering Place) and wanted me to fill it with paintings. We worked out the images, agreeing on a series of large and small paintings for the space. I think I wound up doing 17 in all. Lew was good to work with. Once he had approved the watercolor proposal he didn't meddle. He came downtown to see the paintings in progress and in a fifteen minute meeting worked out all the details (quite a change from the academic meeting of four hours of virulent debate to pick one graduate assistant). His carpenter worked with me and I designed frames to go around the paintings - they were oak with a shadow space and matched the booths - brought the art and the restaurant together.

Every day and every night I worked at both the commission for Lew and my upcoming show for Karl with the symphony of violence going on outside my windows. But I got through the nine months. I had to. If I failed the predators would get me sooner, later or today. I was focused on survival as I never had been, the prize was simply life or death. I made stringent rules. I would not go out at night. If I went out during the day in the van I would get back around five (that is the time it radically turns from a relatively benign workers town into the jungle). If I couldn't get back in earlier I would not come back until early morning, the only time of day it is a little bit safe down there. I would stay over at a friends or get a motel but I would not go back at night. I purchased no weapon for I felt that it would be just as disadvantageous to have one as not. I concentrated on healing myself, surviving and making enough art to get me out of there. My feeling was that Los Angeles and I were about to part company. I had come to the great city with so much optimism and for years I had been a small part of its cultural life. I had been educated there. I had come back from the service to be a part of it. I felt that I was more Los Angeles than Minnesota when I made that decision, more West Coast than New York for certain. I liked the freedom from history and dogma which plagues artists back East, I felt that a person with my limited means could afford financially and creatively to live and work in LA, and that it was a tempest that attracted and cherished weirdness and individuality. Despite aerospace. But perhaps these are all illusions and fantasies that you project on a town, a scene, a burning nova that draws you to its flame of power and excitement. On the other hand, you don't feel any of this in Kansas City, Truckee,North Bend, Fargo, El Paso, etc. Excitement comes from a confluence of energetic people rushing their dreams and greed towards an opportunity. They cook off, events ensue, results show, and it is marvelous to be a part of it. The LA Sixties were like that; sheer creative excitement that dissipated in the Seventies into years of contentious and thinly talented people rushing into the pool, one-issue agendas, so much art for arts sake stuff which changed weekly. (Who remembers the Copley Gallery on La Cienega that showed Ruppersberg and all the hotshot conceptualists until the family money couldn't support it any more?) Altoon died. Kienholz went to Berlin. Galleries were bumped from the La Cienega hothouse by boutiques and interior decorators, victims of their own success in raising a consciousness of art even the landlords couldn't ignore any longer. Culture is a delicate flower best enjoyed for a small season and then it changes, dies, reconstitutes. The price tag of admission was going up everywhere, a kind of taxation and excitement fee that only the most energetic and the young could afford. If you didn't catch property when it was low, you were forever out or doomed to the dangerous ghettos like downtown. When I moved downtown I was startled to see it had changed so much. Now it was Mexico City or 17th century London. People from the Far East and the Southern Hemispheres own LA now, it is their town and the diversity and richness of what they bring will be the next revolution.

I had relinquished my teaching job at Northridge. (Why get mugged in a faculty meeting?) Once I had built up enough financial resources I could leave. But to where? I didn't want to scour LA again for a temporary haven or be around the omnipresence of danger and drugs I felt was overtaking the city. It is one of the few instances I desired money, which translates to the power to select my surroundings and be somewhat immune to more crime. So I looked around. There was Flagstaff, but its 6,000-foot altitude and 9,000-foot density altitude in the hot months made it precarious living for me, I need the oxygen of sea level. In order to maintain business access to the city, I decided to draw a hundred-mile circle around LA. The boundaries extended to Redlands to the east, Orange County or Newport Beach to the south or Ventura, Santa Barbara or Ojai to the north. I didn't know much about Santa Barbara so I headed north and liked it immediately. This place is magical and man did I need magical now. I decided I would do just about anything to make it happen. I was right. You have to be that absolutist to tear yourself out of a bad situation that you have grown used to and to give yourself the permission to move to a new place where you don't know what will happen. The fantasy is somebody is going to give it to you! I got the commission up and that same day Nancy and I drove to Santa Barbara to check out the town again. We started looking at rentals and soon found a small place. Later I found a small studio space a half mile up theroad. We moved up, got married and that's the whole story. End of book!

Continuing Glossary of Contemporary Art Terms

School Of: An idea you can cheerfully follow because enough fools are already on board.

Selling Out: 1. What somebody else does. 2. The place where the rent must be paid and illusions put on hold.

Slides: Little two-inch power morsels easily sent through the mail.

Space: The distance at an art opening you want to keep between you and all your previous boy- or girlfriends.

Spouse: As in long suffering....

When I quit the teaching job it was the first time I had been free of the tyranny and security of the pay check, about a twenty-year run. I had walked away from a tenured teaching job into the murkiness of being self-employed. Few ever do. Attaining a full professorship glues people to the job for life. Luckily I never made it to full professor. The gang of thieves had made it impossible for me to achieve rank. As my art sales moved upward and approached my paltry salary the switch became feasible. The bad guys are always doing you favors; it just takes time to see it. I came back to downtown LA and called up every friend I had or thought I could depend on, and asked everybodyfor one day, a Saturday, to move me out of the building. It had taken me two weeks to truck everything in and up the elevators, with a crew we could expedite. They all showed up and they were magnificent. I no longer had the strength to lift much so they were my strength for a day and I still thank them. We loaded a truck so full it came down on its tires and had to be later offloaded to make it out of town. But I was gone.

My first two years in Santa Barbara were very lonely. I had staggered away from my entire fabric, my network, my thirty-year love affair with Los Angeles and I was out into the void. I looked to the telephone for solutions but it didn't ring. People don't call up Santa Barbara. I called LA people up and asked how they were doing? They said just fine but now they were worried about having their heads bashed in and I couldn't understand what they were talking about. It was fine up here. The unfairness of me leaving them behind made them want to vomit. I had managed to lever myself into the most exquisite, beautiful position you can achieve as an artist, independence with limitless time. But now I had no more excuses not to come up with my best work. I couldn't blame teaching, being downtown, the vagaries of the art world or anything. I had a gallery and time and Nancy and that was it. Life had rocked me but I was still standing, still persisting. Now came the worries and insecurities; after going through all these travails what did I have to say? No more diversions, I was at the crossroads I had worked so hard for, total confrontation with myself. Just a beautiful, scary place to be. I sat in my crispy new 500-square-foot storefront, a small, white room with an opaqued-out front window, a travel agency to one side, a Real Estate agency on the other and a bank across the street. One day an elderly resident had one of those infamous sticky gas pedal attacks and launched out of the bank's drive-up window and into the travel agency next door, which sent a lady inside the building travelling around the office. He went right through the spot I had been parked in fifteen minutes previously. I had gone home and played hooky to watch the Olympics. Was this new place lucky? There was a one-hour photo shop around the corner that put its rejects into the dumpster in the alley, and I practiced my dumpster diving and rooted through it for art material. You cannot believe what middle-class people take pictures of in the privacy of their own home. For the voyeur, this really beat cab driving.

As my life in Santa Barbara unfolded I realized that I was no longer being defined by events, I wasn't even living for them. When someone would ask me, "What's new with you?" I was at a loss to answer. I did not have any more stories. But my days were crammed. What was I doing? Some things you can't get away from, for instance I had a reoccurrence of cancer in my neck and I had to go in for surgery and more radiation. (I had throat cancer in the Seventies' miseries, surgery and all that, and they thought they got it all but I guess a rogue cell insistedon reminding me that paradise was not free either.) "Your biopsy is positive, Mr. Gabrielson," (right past "shoot him", one of those phrases you don't look forward to) the cheery little nurse says. What the hell does she have to be cheery about? Back to the medical dance again. There was one amusing sidelight to the affair. I got out of the hospital as early as I could and went back home to bed. (Part of my philosophy is not to hang around hospitals crammed with depressing people.) Nancy went off to work leaving me with the TV, which unfortunately had a broken cable box. Now I am stuck with a decision, do the right thing and meditate and stay in bed, or get up and drive over to the cable place and exchange the box (which is what I did). Not too difficult except I couldn't turn my head so I had to turn my whole body to change lanes. Standing in line at the cable place, I noticed that people were looking at me strangely. More than normal. Then I remembered that from my chin along the bottom of my jaw down to my neck and up to my ear ran a row of staples holding my face together. They don't stitch you up on these big jobs. They have a little disposable staple gun ($99.98) with disposable staples ($24.00) with which whack you back together and for a while you really look like something out of a horror movie. "OK, guy who looks like Boris Karloff come to the head of the line." Got really good service and was out of there in a flash.

As I sat in my little white box I felt myself descending into the primary ooze of myself. I worked and painted and assembled materials and built sculptures, but really I was sinking back in. As the chattering, external world of Los Angeles faded from my view I made closer contact with myself, I could feel it more and more every day. I felt myself becoming slower and slower. As I sunk away from the demands of being social, I felt my need for language slip away too, I stopped talking as much until I was almost mute. It felt to talk was as though I had to arise from a deep sleep, get up and get dressed and climb a hundred-foot tower and then perform an alien act to please someone else. My addiction to people and language became a withdrawal almost to the point that I feared running into someone I knew because I would have to crank it all up again, become the Walter Gabrielson they knew. I didn't find and still haven't found anybody in Santa Barbara to relate with. There is only Nancy and me and that is just fine. I am reminded of Buckminster Fuller who once took a year off and didn't talk or speak to anybody at all in order to concentrate on reevaluating and reconstituting his education. It is very apparent that when you are talking you can't be thinking, and to describe what you are thinking slows you down and you can only hit the high spots anyway. When you talk you not only stop your flow inside but also you stop listening to others and to your mind. When you are hooked on talk you become a participant in denying yourself, and you become part of the problem of not being able to get in touch with yourself.

The slowing down was also fun. In places like LA and New York you become a speed junkie (not the drug), you do everything fast. You drive fast, you eat fast, you talk fast. Life is all zipping from here to there. When people come to Santa Barbara they slow down, slow down, slow down. By the end of a weekend they are very slowed down and I imagine going back home is a shock. When you slowdown you discover amazing things. You get slower and slower until you are in tune with your whole being, functioning and playing with it instead of racing after externals. That is what happened to me, my career, my work, my thoughts, my success, my non-success, my thoughts, and my feelingsabout anything. They just slowed down where I could see and live with them. That is why my days were so full; I was full of experiencing me being alive and watching it also. It still is that way. I come to work and it is time to go home and I have lived a lifetime during the day. So THAT'S what you're doing out there!

Moving to Santa Barbara saved my life. It must have been instinctive. I had to seek the light and leave the muck of my previous life behind. I had explored all thepotential of that life and it told me it was over, but I stayed on too long and got caught by events of my own making. Somehow I survived and finally had the ability to walk away from it. Or luck. They say luck is when preparation meets opportunity. Now I know that life is always feeding back information to you just like your paintings when they talk back to you and you ignore these comments at your peril. I knew an artist, Mel Sanger, who also had a heart attack and came to see me downtown and I gave him a day. He said he couldn't stop smoking and I told him he had to or he would die. His doctor said that he should "think about it." I said, "Hell with thinking about it, your body just gave you a message, it isn't taking this crap anymore so you better listen or die." If I am going to give someone a day of my time I feel it is better to be blunt. Unfortunately most people in this situation merely want you to get on board and feel sorry for them and I don't have time to waste with that form of indulgence. So Meldidn't stop smoking and a year later he had another heart attack and then he quit. But by this time he was a basket case, he could hardly walk across a room. One night at the Zen center he died sitting next to Ed. Ed said that he didn't look like Mel any longer when he went, just a bag of look-a-like.

For many years in Santa Barbara I didn't interrelate with the community and then by a series of events I was swept into participating. First, I served on a jury and watched a trial from the best seat in the house (Artists seldom are able to serve on juries because lawyers are distrustful of creative people it seems.) and then I was asked to participate in the Contemporary Arts Forum, a smaller scale but alternative space much like LAICA. I was at first fearful that it would be more of the acrimony I had experienced in LA, but it wasn't. I have served on the Board of Directors and the Exhibition Committee for four years and, with Ed Wortz, I curated a group show called "ADDICTIONS." It was an idea I had for a long time, to see what artists could come up with about a form of human behavior, the addictive, compulsive kind. Most of the works were created for the show. We had a good catalog, something weird that Bob Smith with his excellent design sense helped out with. A good number of people came to see the exhibition and were moved by it. I talked with groups of high school kids about the implications of addition for them and I was surprised that most knew more about addiction than I did. The kids liked the idea that adults could talk about problems they were facing with paintings and art, and that art could transmit feelings they had every day.

In the late Eighties, I went to New York and stayed with Peter Plagens in his live-in loft in Tribeca and looked for a gallery for two weeks, I must have gone to eighty or more with no luck again. I think that's it for me. I can't see going back and going through that agony anymore. I have adequately displayed to New York what I do and they go for something else and that is that. Two amusing things did happen. One dealer expressed a great liking for the work but confessed, "They'll kill me if I show this." I was flattered. She is also out of business now. At another gallery I encountered a very strange situation, but with a place like New York I guess I shouldn't be surprised because everything is so intricate. A male employee, who ran the space when the dealer wasn't there, evidently was having a fight with her and wanted to get back at her in some way I think. He became all gushy towards me, assured me that she would really go for the work, that I would be in their summer show, and to be sure and come back tomorrow to see her and wrap up the details. I came back the next day and the woman almost went into shock. She said that she would never show something like this and wanted to know if I made up the story, etc. I got in the middle of someone else's drama. New York is the most amazing place, with millions of little scenes going on every day. When you live there, you become used to them, immunized to life in order to survive it. Doing my kind of work, I think I would go mad in the first month in New York. There is just too much material. I think that is why New York people become so sophisticated, so jaded, so crazy, and so bored at any place that isn't New York. They have the New York addiction.

Perhaps we artists should also call what we do an addiction. You always need a fix, you know the supplier, you love the high, you will do almost anything to keep on doing it. I have called this inquiry "Persistence" for that is what it has appeared to be. If I were starting out I might call it "Hope." What I look forward to every day is persisting another day and living and experiencing myself within that day, its highs, its everydayness, as Walker Percy would say. Every day has its pragmatism and its profundity. For instance, we recently went to London where I broke my foot and we almost were bombed at Covent Garden but we had a good time. I came back and had a miraculous eye operation. The doctor replaced my lens with a new plastic one while I watched and now I can see color different in either eye. Then we had to put our new cat down and I feel terrible about it. But I have started a new series of face paintings which are about character types that someone prominently projects: joy, coy, anger, fear toughness, intolerance, dread, denial, boredom and so forth. To date I have done 32 of them and they won't stop coming. I had an experience recently that should make anyone recoil. After eye surgery I went in to see the Doc who monitored how the eyeball was adjusting. During this visit he decided to clip a few of the sutures holding my new lens; I put my head in this contraption to keep it still and he put some local anesthetic on and we sat there and I felt the gradual pressure of a knife against my eyeball as he cut a suture and pulled it out and then did two more. The most terrible fantasy you can have: someone putting a knife in your eye and that was my ten o'clock. You see?

Continuing Glossary of Contemporary Art Terms

Stalemate: A spouse who has absolutely had it up to here with art.

Sycophant, Art: Hangers on who pay no dues and drink all the wine.

Timeliness: Getting lucky.

Ugh: The sound an artist makes when reading in a publication that somebody else got the there first with their big idea.

Vicious: An art review that only mildly praises you.

Wax Prolific: Being paid to talk about yourself with no time limits to a captive audience and the doors are welded shut.

I have come to enjoy working at making art outside the circus of a major artmaking metropolis. We need these places for inspiration and support and we also need to leave them before we become subverted by the very process of it. Since moving up here I have used my freedom to pursue a wider range of ideas; doing more social commentary, building vernacular sculptures, even making a few cloud paintings reflective of how nature dominates my present surroundings. But basically I am still committed to the people paintings, these small dramas that I find so fascinating. I go after mini-series of a particular idea: nothing but hands, women being women, two people in a square, some big works with a cast of twenty in each. The work appears to go on by itself, I paint it but is someone else actually coming up with these ideas? It has been six years since I have had an exhibition of any consequence but none appear to be coming at me so I keep on going. I make fewer really bad pictures, but I still do an appalling number of average ones. To keep up the quality control I have disciplined myself to destroy them early (at about 50% state of completion when I can see they aren't going anywhere) instead of battling them into the ground. You learn a lot from making a bad picture but no use having them around beyond a certain point. You might start believing they had merit. When I come up with a very good painting it is truly an event and when completed I walk around and look at it for a long time, just wondering, how did I ever get this far with something like this? There it is. The magic is the lure and the high, and when you hit it, you know why you are in this business. You really really know. The aloneness of this inquiry hardly bothers me as it used to. I guess I've learned something substantial by solitude; I wish everyone could experience it.

An artist performs an act of illusion. It is manipulated by a human being but it results in an inert product that is a collection of physical materials that anybody can buy at a store. There is seldom any societal requirement or demand for it; it all lies in the privacy and passion of the manipulator, some say the creator of the event. It winds up being a series of encodings that don't work well in the dark, but works once in a while out of doors and at best demands an uncluttered white space to allow reasonable decryption. Another person must privately decode the message and this individual has to be reasonably intelligent, open to suggestion, and many times aware of a staggering amount of recent history and philosophy just to get the message. Art doesn't make it easy on anybody, perhaps that is why so few people go for it. But none of that seems to bother those who like it. I watch people follow baseball and I don't see what the hell they are enjoying. For me, it is incredibly slow, played by millionaires, (I'm supposed to feel sorry if they lose?) and it is to be comprehended by factoring in endless numbers and statistics. Yet, you talk to a baseball fan and they are in bliss. So it is all a choice of where you put your energy and passion, one is just as good as another. An interesting bar argument would be: how do you measure the amount of enjoyment that one person gets from going to a symphony versus a stock car race? The followers of each would say, "To the max," and there it is. I have evolved my enjoyment, my proficiency, and my expression of my life in this thing called art, and I don't think it is necessarily better or worse that any other passion. It is a hell of a lot better thing to do than many other dissolute activities I can think of. It seldom hurts people and it often enlightens them. Not a bad way to spend your time.

But artists don't so much spend time, we create time within a universe, and everything within this universe has to be congruent, fit together, interrelate together. You can't do good work with bad family situations intruding, a day job that drives you crazy, a workplace that is hazardous, a support system that is hit or miss. Yet, if someone came along and simply gave it to you as a gift, you wouldn't be much better off. Like a carpenter, you have to construct it all yourself, with some help from loving people if it is available. Art isn't something you do while life goes on, it isn't just an intellectual obsession or itch that must be scratched. You must first build a life surrounding your art definition, you must take years to construct it from the foundation on up and then bring art from within this entire creation of yours. It is the youness of your work that is your power. I evolved my sensitivity towards people phenomenon first. Then while skating along on whatever time I could steal from the teaching profession, I built a life and a lifestyle that reflected this obsession. I lived down and out for years among the lower end of society and, within that experience, I forged my value system about what I wanted to make art. I also resolved most of the formal, conceptual, practical and support issues along the way. I then had to backtrack a bit, because with my focus on art I had ignored other dangers and dilemmas around me. I had to break it off and get out of town. But I went from one extreme to another, from too much input to too much solitude. SB isn't much of a place that you make art about, but having the art in your head it is a marvelous place to get it out. To redress my input problem I began work on an immense picture file. I worked on this for four years and now I have enough basic source material to look at or to just remind myself of what something looks like. But you can't make art out of a picture file either. The universe you build always needs work, now the support system is faltering so I have to get to work on it. The moderate, underfunded career means you are always captain of a leaky boat, bailing and rowing at the same time to keep it on course. You always seem to come up short, but that is an integral part of the course. If it got too easy, I would be suspicious about that too.

What I have to look forward to now is the intricacy and layerdness of both the sublime and the usual, to extricate some kind of insight from them while I keep myself on course. Everyone faces their days. You construct them and they come at you with surprises. I don't seem to have boring days.

One definition of boredom is not paying attention. How can I not pay attention? I am inside my day watching myself from the outside and also doing the shipping, receiving and phoning. The artist life is truly a grand range of insight and chores, nothing in teaching got this good. As I face my day a little bit more about me and my work gets peeled away. Even taking time off and writing this goddam book revealed a few things I hadn't thought of before. But that is about all the past revisiting I choose to do. Mostly I want to go after the elusive image that I never just get right. I don't know if I ever will. The elusiveness of your intent being realized is frustrating but part of this whole process. You get so close to it and then it just stops. Sometimes I think a painting is the sum total of everything I can't do. But then again, I see that I have imparted something to it and that will have to suffice for today. Getting to be an artist, being an artist, staying being an artist, and getting better at being an artist are the levels I am struggling with. It never ends. It doesn't get any better because just going through the battle is where the best there is, is. As long as I am at it, I am at the top. It isn't boring at all, but it isn't very dramatic either. You could never make a movie of it. In the movie the artist (a) stares at the blank canvas (crisis of inspiration) or (b) throws the paint bucket at it (crisis of frustration) or (c) rips it to shreds (crisis of failure). I just look at it and go "Oh Shit" or something, or "Beauty." It all gets very internal. Perhaps that is why the artist life cannot be perceived very well. All the important functions are flowing too far below the surface to ever be adequately dramatized or illustrated. Most artists I know are extremely level-headed, quiet people with little quirks that pop out if they let them. We don't like to display our passion because it comes off as corny and stupid. What we are really involved with on a day-to-day level is being in touch with and manipulating and resolving hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of interactive decisions. There are so many we can't begin to bring them up to someone else for they are already history. When someone calls me during the day and asks what I am doing, I latch on to some small detail and talk about it but it is always incomplete. It is liking trying to describe your thoughts when your mind is racing a mile a minute. "What are you thinking, dear?" Well. At the end of the day I seldom have physical exhaustion as I have mental exhaustion. I can't think about it as fast as the process demands, so it is time to leave. With art you work out the most intricate, engaging multi-level chess problem you have ever faced, and at the end of the day you go home with a glow and after dinner you go to bed and lie there thinking, "Got to hit it harder tomorrow!"

© Walter Gabrielson 1993
All Rights Reserved
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