I am fifty-one years old. If I were Shakespeare, I'd have only one summer left - though Shakespeare did not have as much to do to prepare for the unwinding of his mortal coil as I would. He lacked drive-in movies - which I would try to see once more before I went off.
He was not overtaxed with longish trips: I'd want to go to the near-ends of the earth and gaze upon marvels. Sweet Will was a homebody. If I had only this year, I wouldn't come home - second-best bed be damned!

As is likely, however, I will make it another year or two and won't have to worry about cancelling a cellphone plan that isn't scheduled to run out until after my fifty-second birthday. If not, I'm sorry, my dear, to be so thoughtless.

Another very palpable legacy - perhaps the only one - is my artwork, rolling stock that's reasonably well sorted into racks and boxes at my Richmond "studio" - a highfalutin' way to describe a storage closet that had been, on a wing and a prayer, aesthetically upgraded, gussied up, and walled in nicely in order to be pressed into public service as a gallery. The public, however, managed to stay off bad East Grace Street and stuck to the great broad way larger, more elegantly euphonious places have cognated. Broad Street (two words that stand happily alone in
Richmond) has a decent ring, but it ain't Broadway.

I decided to become a full-time painter after having tried it out for a year in Brooklyn, where I was better off outside (I always work on-site) anyway.
This was 1994. My father chose, very fortuitously, to die that summer, and bequeathed me a kind of "initial"
inheritance. His amiable third wife, and my favorite stepmother, was very much alive and would live off the principal of the estate - if I understand the arrangement correctly. With what I considered to be a fairly substantial sum of money, I moved from Brooklyn to Syracuse, New York, where I had a few friends, and began painting soon after I was able to schlepp all of my unstored possessions up three narrow flights of stairs into a wonderful eyrie from which vistas of another broad street were available from both sides of the house. The high ridges of Schiller Park could seen from the balcony. Ah, wilderness!

I "decided" to become a full-time painter because I could - and because I'd given up writing. I couldn't get much of anything published. Double jeapordy: I was unable to finish bigger projects I'd begin, with a wildly inspirational hundred and fifty page kick, over a manic period that rarely exceeded five days. My short stories were, moreover, too long; my essays too meandering; my satire too "broad" - or so said The New Yorker, which seemed to me its most ideal repository.
My several plays continued to get sifted down into the final heat of play competitions and were then tossed aside.

I was not new to painting. I had tried to keep both - painting and writing - on an even keel, and managed a kind of painful lopsidedness, which did not permit any kind of coordinated effort. I'd drop one and do the other. In this way, neither really got done.

So I tossed a coin - or, rather, heaved a typewriter - and came up with the idea of painting instead of writing.

Syracuse was the ideal place for that. I was completely snowed in after the first month I was there. This permitted the sort of full-time schedule flat-footed Brooklyn would not allow, and I must admit I thrived. I shopped with the lonely man's appetite for disposable things, and fed depressive genes with starches. For the most part, I was so enraptured with my new-found freedom that the habitual circuitry did not fire. My god was ecstatic and had no ear for Irish notions of despairing loneliness. My loneliness
- if it be that - was dedicated to an old work ethic my Germanic forefathers had bequeathed to its dour progency and passed onto my own father, who mistrusted joy - unless it could be had with some sort of male
bonding ritual.

My Syracuse routine was as simple as it was rigid. I got up early in the morning and started painting.
When it got to be dark, I ate a little something and painted until it occurred to me that I should slog off to bed. The old man who owned the building liked to have fun with me, a "downstater" who couldn't possibly know what ten inches of snow was like, and wove a few tall ones about impassable streets and men not finding their way home on their own block and freezing to a lamppost. Having seen the snowplows and the salt-houses and all the other winter paraphenalia most other cities manage to do without, I was confident that even lost old men could grope their way to a doorbell and lean against it if they had to. In fact, Syracuse's snow management skills are second to none.
I never heard of anyone ever getting stranded there - or getting cold, for that matter. Syracusans were (and remain) sensible people who knew how to make themselves comfortable. And did.

By degrees, as it were, I became the isolate most Syracusans, with their arcane social networks and neighborhood taverns, hardly ever become. The old man was frequently the only person I would talk with for days at a time. His youngish wife gave me a tour of their second-floor apartment once because she thought she had a knack for painting and wanted me to appraise her work - which is to say, she wanted me to come around and pronounce her a genuius. When I failed to become delirious in the face of her night-school attempts at idealized landscape and petunia-in-a-bottle still life, I was dropped from the social register. "What does he know?" I'm sure she'd asked the husband, who had, wisely, kept his counsel about those lousy paintings.

I had a sort of blowout after a trip to Memphis and broke with my old routines. I wasn't interested in working for the long, leaden months of December and January, but began to bounce back in February, and was all right again by March. At that time, I met a woman at a bookstore. Being neither young nor reckless, but merely tied somewhat daffily to the present, we lost no time moving in together. By that summer, we were commmuting out to her hardscrabble little property in the Alleghenies where I would look out at the low mountain ranges in wild surmise and wonder how it was possible to have ever been in Brooklyn. I painted there too. From her mid-Nineteenth-century farmhouse, I turned to field and wood, but came back to the man-made subjects that most interested me: a tub-shaped Ford truck, ramshackle outbuildings, the wasp-overtaken attic I reached by a flight of stairs so narrow I instinctively bottled my shoulders walking up them. Andrew Wyeth knew such stairs intimately. I almost felt an intruder into territory already claimed
by a more forceful talent.

I resumed my old routines from her smallish house, even after I ran out of money. She was overcommitted to my artistic development and did not pressure me to get any sort of job - though I would go off on a money tangent from time to time with a recovering alcoholic who'd - against form - become a housepainter after he'd taken AA vows and gone on the wagon. He became an on-again, off-again houseguest in an attempt to flee a girlfriend who might bean him one day and steal all of his money the next. If he liked you, he'd call
you "Rabbinowitz".

After another winter, she and I decided we should move and set out to see the Eastern Shore, where the yearly snowfall did not make headlines; if necessary, we might be able to put up a tent somewhere as we trolled about for a place to live. But no such luck. A storm came up and drove us landward - toward Richmond, Virginia, as it turned out. I decided to have a "eureka" experience as we exited 64 and found a funky little enclave full of drowsy people and houseplants that had somehow proliferated into monstrous, fruit-heavy, mythic-sized trees, shrubs, and vines. I breathed it all in and, well, it was "eureka" all over again.

We found a realtor and gave him instructions to find us something cheap and ugly, preferably in a place called The Fan, named for its sudden taper as peripheral areas pressed in on it. The realtor sent us a video of a place that had somehow escaped the house police and was still on the market at around fifty thousand - outlandishly cheap even in that pre-gentrified era. We took it and moved in. And, once, again, I went back to my old routines.

We broke up some years later because of a romantic contretemps that shouldn't have really driven us apart, since our relationship had become essentially platonic. But I was for some reason skittish about it and talked gorgeously around the whole thing. I ended up with the house for some months myself - a dust-moted place largely airless, and hot as a stove-lid during the final months of its vacancy.

By that time, I'd had a great many exhibits, both of my own and others' devising, and seemed to be on my way to a solid career - or at least as solid as a career in painting could be. We'd blown into town as free-booting outsiders and remained fully on the periphery of Richmond society. She scared people with her notions of progress and equality. She embraced everyone equally - a no-no in such a stratified world as Richmond can be. The well-heeled folk didn't like to see her giving homeless people soft drinks. The people she worked with found her daft sense of inclusiveness infuriating. I think even some of the homeless people didn't like her making up to certain other homeless people. For my part, I made people nervous with my darting movements; my intense, if misguided, dedication to the notion of a professional life; and lack of interest in the local brahmins - except as interesting intellectual properties. I made fun of people mercilessly, but democratically. People in the South can be touchy and don't like you laughing either at, or with, them - unless they make the joke first and laugh for a long time before you do.

Since that time, I've been in my "old" studio, a fine old building the tenants neither markedly improve nor significantly worsen. I opened it up as a gallery, which, as I've said, was not well-attended. All that time, however, I had been fitfully productive and now have an estate it would be very hard to disperse quickly - even if everybody I knew were to come in SUV's and haul the stuff away armfuls at a time.

And, now, over ten years after having left Brooklyn and left my longish stories, three-character plays, and eccentric humor in file drawers, I'm ready to go back to writing. It is hardly unusual to have forty or fifty-years - Gulley Jimson's while-away time - to fool around with doing one thing, but I seem to be cyclical sort who needs to abjure and embrace; whose creative juices are stirred now and then by breaking off, or away, from something. And so it appears to be time to give up painting - which has given me a decent, if worrisome, sort of living for a number of years - and go back to the thing I'd dropped, somewhat ignominiously, both because I'd had it - and, again, because I could.

It is both exciting and melancholy to make big changes. You weigh what you're losing against what you fervently hope to gain. You reflect on missed opportunities and miscalculated adventures. You develop "ifitis": if I'd been in another place; if I were another sort of person; if I'd been able not to burn bridges at this moment and maybe waited a while.
I would pronounce my post-midlife switch-over as a melancholy one. At this point I will not paint a new picture lest it get embroiled in yet another misadventure with a dealer, curator, buyer, or any other person who might express a half-hearted that will die; a momentary enthusiasm something else will divert; a genuine, if fleeting, interest that vanishes the next day. And this is not even to address the politics of the matter, which are most wearisome when you're the sort of outsider I am. The definition of the outsider is, for me, someone whose connections have a negative charge.

I received the cue I needed the other day when I ran into a young lady who was painting out on the Mall here in Washington. Her picture was conventional, but arresting, and I could see, in her, myself those ten years ago, when I was full of fire and enthusiasm, couldn't wait to get "out there" again, and wanted, genuinely, to share what I did with people who were willing to give it a good, honest look. She'll go on to paint for years and years. I can only hope my writing will catch fire the way my painting did those
ten years ago. And I do. I really do hope now.

Ever searching for persiflage and tomfoolery in the way of artspeak and imagery, I comb the shelves now and then (they're too-reliably stocked with the same tired stuff) and occasionally find a gem-in-the-rough that needs our fullest attention. I have found one in American Art Collector (#8). It features such imperishable interpreters of the American scene as Bruce Handford, watercolorist; Glenna Goodacre, living successor to the collectivist sculptors of old Rogers'
Groups; Christel Minotti, heiress apparent to Matisse (and quite a money-maker to judge from her very own "Price Range Indicator", which is posted with every artistic profile.) There is somebody called David Knowlton, whose large works now fetch $3,100 (down from $3,000 in 2000. This is apparently leap enough to warrant recognition.) Kent Wallis does assembly-line paintings that belong in the finest cheap hotels, though the magazine singles such work out as epitomizing "truth (and) beauty." It also has a "spiritual quality." Michael Flohr is an artist that has to be seen with sunglasses lest the potential art-lover suffer from an acute strobe effect. He is, however, showing in a San Diego Gallery, which is possibly well aware of this problem and may have a whole box of Ray-Bans available. It doesn't say this outright. What the gallery does say is this: "Michael Flohr's works capture the nostalgia of American life.
Collectors from all walks and all ages can relate to the humanity that Flohr captures on the canvas. The urban street scenes and lively bar scenes could be from any time period in history. Michael Flohr is our top artist in the gallery. He is a talented artist and a wonderful person."

A man named James Thorne, of "Exclusive Collections Gallery", wrote this; he obviously suffers from the strobe effect himself. He also writes as if he's just learning the language. I won't even go into how unfamiliar history must be to this man. If Flohr's tacky restaurants and obviously Second Millenium nightlife seem timeless to him, he's really got to start cracking the books again. This kind of perspective just will not wash.

I must admit to being somewhat gleeful. I think I have found the Worst Art Magazine. There are, however, some moderating influences. A man named Stephen Magsic does occasionally excellent paintings of the kinds of subjects Robert Cottingham and Richard Estes made acceptable back in The Day. But he does them with greater feeling; I would even say panache - though the word denigrates him somewhat. The Bernaducci.Meisel Gallery has mounted what appears to be an excellent group exhibit - though I can't believe a word the reviewer has said about it. Why is it that so many of the writers sound as if they're more comfortable in another tongue? (Few of these writers are credited, showing that the magazine at least has some sense of this defect.) Listen to this anonymous scribe as he or she rhapsodizes about a painting called "Sole Morning" which "demonstrates a more subdued feeling of summer, with a serene seascape that exemplifies his (artist David Dewey's) superb treatment of tonality and color." This is a thesarus speaking and not a real person with some rudimentary grasp of what one's native tongue can and cannot do.
The eponymous Frank Bernaducci, however, has the best quote. When speaking of his brainchild, he says it "presents not only a seasonal review but attempts to explore a wide range of visceral emotions. . ." I should say emotions are visceral. I'd hate to have any other kind myself.

Another excellent artist, in the mold of Huey Lee-Smith, also comes to light in the magazine; it was worth the price just to know of this man. His name is Aron Wiesenfeld and he has a handle on what it means to be alone and perhaps afraid in a land not of one's own making. There is also a bit of Tooker in his sallow-faced isolates, his dour perspectives, his uncompromising honesty. How he got in a place like this baffles me, but I'm used to seeing this sort of dichotomy in the art world, where the bad and the ugly occasionally cross swords with the conscientiously well-made and authentically heartfelt.

I just expressed wonderment at Wiesenfield's presence:
his gallery has taken out a full-page ad. Gotta get a little something for that!

I must, however, pause to explore one man's gaudy, but apparently impregnable, self-regard. He is John O'Hern and is Curator of the Arnot Art Museum. In his article, Secret Visions, he brings to light a few good artists who are characteristically out of place in American Art Collector. First he tells us about George Inness. Seems to me that any serious art collector ought to know about old George. But I'm just quibbling here. Let's let him tell us that Inness painted in the style of the "French Barbizon School" which was "noted for. . .painting in a darker palette with lose brushstrokes." I think he meant "loose brushstrokes", but he's a museum director and I'm just a high school graduate, so what do I know?
He also points out that Inness' paintings "suggest a spiritual basis to Nature." I love it when people capitalize words like Nature and Prosperity and such.
It just makes me all tingly inside.

The painters O'Hern chose are all pretty interesting:
Daniel Morper, Ann Lofquist, Alan Bray and Ben Aronson. Skipping around, here's what he says of Daniel Morper's interest in something Hopper and Burchfield introduced almost a century ago and doesn't really need exculpating. "Rail yards and rail cars (that foreign English again!) are seldom seen as objects of beauty. Even when they occur in the majestic beauty (there is it again!) of the high desert of the Southwest, they are overlooked or regarded as eyesores." I don't think people working in the yards overlook them. And a lot of train buffs in that locality no doubt find them quite fetching.
Who the hell, then, is he talking about? Us? All sorts of man-made things have appeared in paintings for a long time. Railroad stuff is old hat. Mr.
O'Hern doesn't need to draw attention to a lack of suitability that isn't really applicable. He goes on to say that Morper's skies "rival the real thing."
Well, whoop-de-doo! Morper's a realist painter; that's his job. Do all the rest of the artists in the article - or in art generally - fail with their skies?
He goes on to say that Morper "chooses times of day and conditions the layman would most likely just pass through." This phrase evokes the hobo. I think he means "pass over." That foreign influence again.
Perhaps Mr. O'Hern grew up speaking Gaelic?

This is really too rich. I've spent the last half hour scouring the magazine for other tid-bits of the sort I've already supplied, but let them suffice. I think Joseph Jefferson said you shouldn't enjoy yourself too much, and I must admit that I got somewhat carried away, so I'll let whatever I've already said stand. But, oh, there's so much more! I just can't wait to dive in for another peek. I really think I've found the very worst art magazine in
creation.