Persistence |
Walter Gabrielson Painter |
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Dedication and Preface |
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| DEDICATION I would like to dedicate this book to my wife Nancy who always gives more and gives it first, her boundless love and support is my eternal fortune. QUOTES No really serious written work can get off the blocks without a few quotes from omniscient, irrefutable sources. I have three: 1. "Art is a cruel mistress." 2. "Once, a philosopher, twice, a pervert." 3. "Hey, you wanna one man show?" ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I want to acknowledge all the Doctors of Medicine who have saved me from myself or have accomplished enough body and fender work to keep things going so far. They include: Dr. Vogel, Dr. Yorke, Dr. Fingerhut, Dr. Lewinsky, Dr. Tsunekawa, Dr. Balter, Dr. Latta, Dr. Tacconelli, Dr. Poulin, Dr. Morcum, Dr. Grey, Dr. Foster, Dr. Heger, Dr. Merrin, thanks. Irene Acosta probably needs a new pair of glasses for struggling my pages on to the electronic disc universe. I would also like to extend my gratitude to Craig Svare for passing a savage pen through the manuscript. CAUTION: Don't read this book if you are young and want to become an artist. It is better to go at it without knowing anything about what might happen. PREPREFACE This is my story in too many words and not enough pictures. It is about how I have persisted in my dream of becoming an artist and all the sideshows and games that happened along the way. Everything actually happened. PREFACE In airplanes and art you can get yourself into big adventures and big trouble. It was the summer of 1977 and I was at 12,000 feet above West Virginia, just having cleared the Alleghenies but on top a solid cloud deck and with about fifteen minutes or less of fuel left and no place to go but down when it ran out. I was halfway on a trip around the USA in a Thorp T-18 that Richard Dehr and I had built. Two weeks later he would be dead in this airplane. I was accompanied by Noni Chernoff. We had come across country camping out under the wing, staying with friends, going to a murder trial, seeing artist Lance Richbourg in northern Vermont, and running around Soho showing slides of my work to the usual no avail. My career was in the toilet but nothing new there. That morning we had been delayed in getting off from Philadelphia because another artist with whom we had stayed decided to have an argument with his wife while I stewed in a corner. The T-18 is a handful of airplane for the unwary but a terrific machine once you learn to fly it. As an artist I had felt Marcel Duchamp's concept that artists can do anything (or practically anything) was appropriate. Why can't artists fly? Why can't we build airplanes if we can build sculptures? WE could and we did. It resulted in an expansion of my horizons ---- I could get away from LA to do business, give lectures to other colleges, travel at will. Richard had developed a business in windmills, methane generators and energy conservation, and used the plane incessantly to go to conferences around the country. We had been flying it for three years. Jim Turrell and I have agreed that airplanes and art both represent a form of risk that can be just as lethal. Airplanes we know. Art can be more subtle because it takes longer for the dangers to become visible. I knew from my experience and observations of the woes of others the gradual turn to anger and bitterness and the subsequent graveyard spiral of buoyant, energetic, creative artists of my generation. In short, it is a case of not enough support to go around for all those who practice art, the lack of resonance of our culture to art and the expectations of all the players exceeding any ability of the art world to deliver on them. It is a tough business if you could even call it a business. Success is not becoming famous, success is-----surviving! And so here I was in a fine mess I had created all by myself. The weather had speeded up and I was flying into a continual bunch of worsening stuff and low on fuel which is about 100% guaranteed to do you in. I was functioning intensely withthe problem, my focus was brighter than I have ever or since experienced. I would go all the way to the earth trying to survive my own stupidity. I felt no sense of panic or falling apart. In a curious way, it was a marvelous moment. It wall all so clear, so bright there on top of the brilliant white cloud overcast with the deep ultramarine sky above. For the last moment we were gods. As I passed a navigational point on the instruments I noticed a small, dark hole in the clouds that went all 12,000 feet to the ground. It was small, the airplane could barely fit in the tightest turn I could manage but it was hope. I stuck the airplane up on a wing and dove for the earth. How do you top an opening like that? Obviously, we survived, I'll get back to it much later. The story illustrates what I have come to learn about art, that you never really know where it is going to lead even if you are in charge of what is going on. I guess you have to be a personality who can live with it. For those who want to be in control of things, art is not the game to get into. The only way to experience art is to risk everything, to pursue the dream no matter what and then learn to live with what you get. In art, the cosmic joke is planning for the future. Right now I am thinking that I am showing some kind of arrogance by even writing this story. I know it is self-indulgent of me, is it worth anybody's time to read it? Is it just another great yawping after attention because I haven't gotten it with the work? Am I trying to be famous with this? My feeling is that the project is worth going down the road with for a while. See what is there. If I reproduce this, it will be by myself, I shall not go whining around to publishers (THIS TURKEY WILL RIP THE LID OFF.....) Perhaps I have something to pass on. But can experience be passed on or is it just another word for ent-er-tain-ment? The fact of my life is being a creative person in the United States during the hast half of the 20th, making lots of paintings, having some shows and essentially not getting any place with it. That is my external definition of what has gone on. I have gradually come to believe that the internal part of the reality is what I find pleasure in, and suppose is more profound. All artists start out with immense optimism and energy and hope, pointed toward some form of external rewards and definition and eventually crash upon the rocks with so little of it even being realized. The creative act almost always delivers big on internal values and seldom on the other. Or as Dave Hickey once put it, "In art, virtue is seldom rewarded and vice is almost never punished." So be it. Already I have a crisis. When I started for the eleventh time in the past five years on this project I dug up my old Smith-Corona CORONOMATIC, kind of your poor man's IBM selectric but with no balls. After a few queasy pages it went belly up, it appeared to be welded together with my whole fascinating story entombed in there. I went down to my latest cultural fascination, PRICECLUB, and got one of those new typewriter-sort-of-computer typewriters, your basic plastic white wedge that has good four-color pictures and a commercial on the box so you buy it and feel better right away. Ran back home, fired it up and discovered I was in the digital black hole. Talk about bells and whistles, you can't type, set margins, do anything without the manual, a graduate level tome that elucidates a complex series of codes and buttons to do anything at all. Doesn't even make any noise. Sits there like a big white plastic turd daring me to tell my story, all the time demanding that I learn all this stuff just to make it get off its ass and get to work. Clear example of the hose-kinking of technology. It is not a better typewriter and it is not a good computer, it is somewhat in the goddam middle and it is useless for me, who intends to stay computer illiterate to the end. So I closed it down, gave it to Nancy who loves it, says she will teach me how to use it, etc. etc. No way. I just realized that if I am going to talk about the PAST I better have the right tools, and the CORONOMATIC is where I am from. So I dug the S/C out of the trash, blew all the old dirt out with compressed air, juiced it up with some WD-40, fired it up and it works great now. I like the fact that the words are visible, it has that good typewriter snap and sound, there is a real bell at the end of a line instead of some warbling thing and the motor percolates and hums away like an old pal. It will have to go the distance. I believe I have lived at least seven lives. There was some art in each life even if I didn't know it then. Each life was distinct. I was a different person in each one, there was a different cast of characters in most of them, there was also a beginning, middle and an end to each although it was different to see it at the time. Even if you plan a life, it becomes a flow somewhat out of your control. You live below the surface obsessed with events and everydayness. Sometimes you know you want to "get somewhere" but when you get there the somewhere disappears like a hilltop that goes away once you are on top of it. You have goals but they become like the butterfly you see on a summer day. You capture the butterfly and take it home and you have a dead insect. The optimism of your youth is tempered by the responsibilities and drudgery of making your way through life. You can't depend on the Kennedys or god or Elvis to save your soul and your spirit. As you become richer you can be poorer, as you get older you can think younger, everything becomes a paradox and very ironic. Actually, life gets funnier as you go along. It really does. You have seen enough stories and enough pompous, righteous, officious people fall on their ass that you can hardly take any presumption seriously any more. But all that comes later. Here is a preview of coming attractions of my seven lives. I have a sense that in a previous life I was a cat or a tiger so maybe I have nine to look forward to. Or maybe this is it. Life No. 1 1935-53 Born Eveleth Minnesota, grew up in Orr, Minnesota until I was 18, of blue-collar but proud people, first generation from immigrants in a frozen, lake-infested leavings of former glaciers. Went to school for 12 years at the same school across the road. I was a member of the secret society known as small town folks out in the boonies who don't trust anybody who won't stay up there and subject themselves to the winters and other travails of being Minnesotan. Life No. 2 1953-58 Life in the academic factory, the transition from yokel to smart-ass city person, the luck to find an incredible circle of very bright friends and a life so rich that I didn't want to leave so I stayed five years. Life No. 3 1958-61 It is called serving your country or dodging the Army draft, depending on how you look at it. Officer in the USAF in Germany, discovered art in Europe, thought I might be able to do this strange thing and got out of the service at the end of my hitch; lucky, I wouldprobably have been part of the Vietnam fodder with the profession I was in then. Life No. 4 1961-66 Back to student high jinks at Chouinard Art Institute which was important, getting work at a lithography workshop, meeting and eventfully marrying my first wife Betty. A somewhat aggressive but transitional time. Was becoming a little old for this. I was 26. Life No. 5 1966-74 The middle years: starting out for real. Got a teaching job at CSUN, started a career in art, got a real studio, had a few shows, married life, starting flying airplanes in 1970. Life No. 6 1974-80 Middle years, part 2, the dreadful times. Got divorced, teaching went sour, career was not lifting off, friend gets killed, had cancer, was getting older but not wiser, revolving door of relationships, bitterness and anger flowering nicely. Life No. 7 1980 to the present (1993) Met Karl Bornstein, had many shows, had a heart attack, more cancer, met and married Nancy Goldberg, moved to downtown LA and got beat up and almost killed, moved to Santa Barbara, worked with Contemporary Arts Forum of Santa Barbara, found peace and infinite questions by going every day to the white box to work. Well, that's it, guess I can finish now. Just a few more pages and then I'll turn out the light. I am tempted to start the story in the middle because from there on it gets interesting. Nobody likes to read about somebody else's early life except their mom. But then you have to put the kid stuff in at the end in an appendix or something and it would come out kind of weird. Better to have the appendix out. So, I'll start at the beginning at the whippersnapper stage and amble on from there. Waiting to see if an artist emerges. Hope this thing comes out all right. |
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