(I wrote the first part of this entry to a good friend of mine after I came back from a trip to Louisville, GA, where I was invited to hang a show. On the trip back, I decided to get down to cases and do something possibly worthwhile.)

This, the best among my Louisville paintings, was done inside a little enclave behind one of the main highways, where the town’s second “shopping mile” lures people away from East Broad. Only black people live there - black people with an astounding absence of ill will considering the conditions under which they live. Of course, I don't pity them because they have way too much life-force to make you feel anything but a respect and admiration, albeit seasoned with discomfort. (Some don’t ask you to see the painting; they just come right up to you and look.) The women were - for want of a better word - "sassy", while most of the men came at you pretty straight. A fit-looking laborer in his early fifties kept on coming back, not necessarily to assess progress, but because he had a proprietary feeling about the place I was painting, which was transferred to me. Though he didn’t say as much, I think he had a certain stake in me getting things right. He knew the place very well and didn’t want somebody mucking it up. Another guy said wait a minute and extracted a painting the intern at the gallery had done of him as a kind of visionary saint, complete with Biblical inscriptions. He wouldn’t hang it on any wall; he carried the painting around with him in the trunk of his car so that he could show it to other people. If it were in his bedroom, he’d just look at it, which was obviously inadequate to him. And, man, was he proud of that picture! I thought about how so many people who commission expensive portraits consider it their due and grouse about particulars when they don’t like them. This man’s reaction struck me as more grandiose, and more humble, at the very same time. Ain’t I hot, but can you believe somebody wanted to take the time to do it?

The kids were starry-eyed for the most part and couldn't get over the fact that somebody was doing a picture in their midst. Some had to be coaxed to see the painting as something I was doing right there. (“Oh, that’s that house!”) Then they wandered off, untroubled by the conundrums and contradictions that preoccupy most adults.

I was thinking that, should I spend time down there again, I should probably spend a whole lot of it in this neighborhood. I think I would begin to incorporate figures in my work – something I have been heretofore reluctant to do. There figures in a landscape seem more natural - not posed the way so many paintings with figures often seem to be. One of the reasons is that - at least during the summertime - people live out-of-doors. (I should say black people live out-of-doors; the whites flee, for the most part, to their air conditioners.)

On a side-trip to Savannah, I was introduced to the work of one Christopher A. D. Murphy, who was a fairly clear-sighted artist when he wanted to be and a mediocre regionalist when he didn’t. He’d studied at the Art Student’s League with Frank DuMond and thought he’d stay a New Yorker until The Crash came and decided the fates of thousands of people who might have hung on in the Big Apple the way people do when times are good. But he high-tailed it back to Savannah and did the sort of paintings you’d expect him to do: of streets and buildings shot through with amenable decay; more durable landmarks that were not; undistinguished still life; good portraits of painter-friends and other exceptional people he’d met in the course of his career. Yet a very different strain of his nature seemed to be awakened whenever he decided to “put” black people into his work. In these paintings and drawings, we see a more complex response to, uh, local color than is discernible in his more garden-variety attempts at garden-variety parochialism. Race was, and, to a certain extent, is the central preoccupation of Southerners – whose somewhat dismal legacy in this regard still comes back to bite them. Yet the average portrayal of black people by otherwise decent and fair-minded artists appears rather sentimental, as if ‘dese good old black folk are charming props - innocuous survivors of a minor holocaust that spared the majority and made things easier for the history-conscious to stomach. Even Norman Rockwell – he of the simpering all-American – got it right later on in his career when he decided to oppose racial injustice with a picture of a white man comforting, pieta-style, a black man who is dying from gunshot wounds. For the most part, however, white artists have been remarkably soigné about race and haven’t given us much to reckon with. (Black artists are a different story, though most were sanely opportunistic enough to cross the Mason-Dixon Line as soon as it was conveniently possible.) Photographers are the notable exception. Most were fairly comfortable with the sleek brutality of the photographic lens – a creditable thing for they are justly lionized. Winslow Homer probably did the most honest picture of black people up to the time of the Great Depression, even if his choice of scene might appear, to the super-sensitive, somewhat condescending. In his case, I think his choice stemmed, in part, from formal concerns – chiefly the aesthetics of color. And, by this, I don’t mean race at all; I mean red, yellow, blue, and white – from which every conceivable combination can be mixed on a palette. Anybody who knows of the Homer oeuvre is familiar with this painting: of black folk, presumably on a plantation somewhere, trying on massa’s finery. I think it’s called “Carnival” and it is not condescending in the least. It shows real people doing something real people do: appropriating the dress of their “betters” in a show of genial defiance on the one hand and perfectly enjoyable mimesis on the other. And it is a gorgeous painting, which takes full advantage of shimmery fabric against lush greens and, of course, the maple-rich skin-tones of black people. They’re just having one hell of a time – as anybody would – playing around with stuff they don’t normally get to even see, let alone put on. I’m trying to rack my brains for equally honest imagery of black people and can’t come up with anything besides this. Some years later, Robert Henri did what I would unhesitatingly describe as the noble head of a black child. It’s a pity that Henri didn’t venture out of the studio to find this kid doing something somewhere, but it’s more than good enough given the dearth of pictures we might look at today and not wince inside of our skins.

But back to Murphy. His pictures of black people, while hardly revolutionary in technique – though they are sound and skillful – are somewhat revolutionary in terms of their honesty. It was an unusual thing in those days to see black people who are not serving the ends of facile propaganda or cloudy commerce. And here they sit, stand, muck about: real black people in the South long before Rosa Parks refused to take a seat in the back of the bus; long before Bull Connor turned his hoses on; creeping decades before King went down to Memphis and got murdered. I must say that, in this regard, Murphy’s work is a real shot in the arm – and a kind of precedent for the sort of work that began to materialize in photography, but which has expanded to include the non-mechanical. (Of course, Andrew Wyeth did some soul-piercing work with black people, but his black people do not represent a particular region. Nor would it be useful to ask what he would have done if he’d been a Southerner.) But in the work of Christopher A. D. Murphy we have a smart, Southern-born artist reflecting something his contemporaries thought about all the time, but felt they could put off until pushed flat up against a wall – which is, of course, exactly what happened. Here we have somebody who turned a sympathetic, but not sentimental, eye on a phenomenon that was ever-present, but curiously refracted, as if the eyes and hearts of an entire region could not cast a steady look in a certain direction without turning to stone – or being called a n*****-lover by friends and loved ones.

I must say I really like these pictures, partly because they’re well-done, but partly because I see an artist who could have really thrown some serious mud up on the wall if he’d a little more courage. Or maybe just more time. It was hard for people who weren’t rich to live in Savannah – or anywhere – in those days. And I know Murphy didn’t make a living from his work. So he did what everybody else was doing: he took a job. And, as far as I know, he stuck with it.

As to my picture, you could say it’s a cop-out. There are no black people in it either, though, to my mind, they inform it completely. The second day I was there, pressed against my chain-link fence with its quotient of forty thousand gnats and six dozen mosquitoes, people came and went as people do in a neighborhood where there are few boundaries. They cut through yards, they jay-walked, they bounded onto the sidewalk from a flimsy-looking porch joined to its tiny, heat-struck plot of earth by a worn flight of steps that probably needs to be repaired more than any other part of the house. Whether it’s because there are fewer air conditioners, or because of the curious restlessness of those whose jobs don’t fulfill them, people around there want to be out and doing something. It’s possibly why there’s so damned much activity on the streets there and so little in the white section. And because the houses are closer together and more shabbily made, people figure that they might as well be outside of them because, when you’re out, you have the illusion that everything is yours. I know I do.