Rehash of an obsession and some quotes to prop it up

Here's the next page from my book of 284 Drawing Prompts. It looks pretty much the same as the prior page, because I botched both pages in the same sitting, and during that time I had lost my will to make art — all my motivation had gone down the tubes (this was about four days ago) — so the results appear more like views of dustbins or trash receptacles than hymns of praise offered up to this world of perception. (The prior page, by the way, accompanied my plagiarism of Shakespeare's Macbeth, which I titled MacBryan.) The prompt for the drawing below was actually a DOUBLE prompt: I can’t tell if you can tell (cuz you never talk to me audibly, O gentle reader), but the page was divided diagonally from top right to bottom left, and the respective sectors came pre-printed with the prompts "Cool mailbox" and "Four-leaf clover".

Dear diary,

There are certain Big Truths that have appeared on the timeline of Reality, and humankind has refused to digest them: we opt rather to pretend that they’ve faded away: we treat them as if they are fads that have passed.

But these problems are still alive (yes I call all Big Truths problems); we just don’t acknowledge them. So let me acknowledge one of these problematic annoyances:

Being shallow & repetitive, I’ve talked about this subject before, here in the pages of my diary, but until we digest this Truth fully, I will continue bringing it up: I’m talking about the question: Why did the people who lived in the days before photographs paint oil-portraits? And what would they think of our modern cameras?

I wonder if even the finest portrait painter from ancient times would abandon his profession after locking eyes with his first photograph.

Cuz if most of the people of your culture value reality, then the photo beats any painting. We modern artists who love the human touch and who see imperfections as evidence of individual genius are in the minority: that’s why we’re all presently impoverished. We’re the losers in this game.

But maybe there’s hope. Maybe the same thing cannot happen to the art of, say, sculpture. Cuz I think that even so-called normal folk inherently enjoy idealizing; so when you behold, say, Michelangelo’s statue of David, you are pleased with the “Here’s the goal, mankind” aspect of the thing — whereas, if you were to just dip the average male corpse in preservative, or project its tridimensional appearance holographically, museumgoers would just say “Ew,” and shield their eyes with their hand & peek thru their fingers.

*

I was cajoled into this subject by yet another quarrel that we endured to its bitter end last night at Movie Club. We all met (in the virtual realm, because of the plague) and discussed many issues that I myself cared nothing about. But then I heard one fellow voice an opinion that perked my consciousness by precisely one notch. This fellow, a fan of horror films and fake violence (which is, by the way, the opposite of my taste: I’d rather see every type of love represented on celluloid: spiritual, intellectual, physical...), I say, this fellow made the argument that Picture X is superior to Picture Y due to the fact that the former film went to the trouble of exploding actual packets filled with chocolate syrup to represent the blood-spill from gunshots, whereas the latter film inferiorly employed computer-generated imagery for its special bloody effects.

Now, my stance from time immemorial has been to laugh at and denigrate CGI (computer-generated imagery); but the utterance above marks the first opinion that swayed me slightly toward the side of liking CGI. (And how fitting that I was convinced by someone arguing in the opposite direction!)

My point is that the cinephile who preferred the appearance of real fake-blood splattering on the big screen in the theater, as opposed to a computerized approximation of the identical phenomenon, was basically rehashing the tired old prejudice known as “reality trumps fantasy”. And it goes without saying that I am all for fantasy.

PROOFTEXTS

Now, to fortify all these points that I made above, I’ll end this entry with a barrage of quotes from scriptures of two beloved artists, Walt Whitman and Giorgio de Chirico. These excerpts shall center upon the following vital subjects:

• beards,
• swimming,
• death,
• and the representation of reality (photos vs. paintings).

First, from Whitman’s “Song of Myself”, section 5, where his own soul makes sweet love to him, almost against his own will (note the mention of the beard):

I believe in you my soul...

I mind how once we lay such a transparent summer morning,
How you settled your head athwart my hips and gently turn’d over upon me,
And parted the shirt from my bosom-bone, and plunged your tongue to my bare-stript heart,
And reach’d till you felt my beard, and reach’d till you held my feet.

And the end of section 46 of the same introduces the concept of the swimmer:

Long have you timidly waded holding a plank by the shore,
Now I will you to be a bold swimmer,
To jump off in the midst of the sea, rise again, nod to me, shout, and laughingly dash with your hair.

Then in part 11 the above call is answered (again, note the beards & hair):

Dancing and laughing along the beach came the twenty-ninth bather,
The rest did not see her, but she saw them and loved them.

The beards of the young men glisten’d with wet, it ran from their long hair,
Little streams pass’d all over their bodies.

Next, the tragic passage from Whitman’s “The Sleepers”:

I see a beautiful gigantic swimmer swimming naked thru the eddies of the sea,
His brown hair lies close and even to his head, he strikes out with courageous arms, he urges himself with his legs,
I see his white body, I see his undaunted eyes,
I hate the swift-running eddies that would dash him head-foremost on the rocks.

What are you doing you ruffianly red-trickled waves?
Will you kill the courageous giant? will you kill him in the prime of his middle-age?

Now finally a passage from Hebdomeros (pages 73-74) by Giorgio de Chirico, which rounds up all the above into a single reaction that is at once marvelous and subtle, and which then ends on that very same note that we struck above: fantasy undergirding reality...

On the wall above his bed Hebdomeros had hung a most curious picture painted by one of his friends, an artist of great talent who unfortunately had died very young. He was an intrepid swimmer and once, having wished to attempt a river in flood, he was swept by the current and, despite his own efforts and the efforts of those who tried to save him, he disappeared in the eddies. [...] Hebdomeros sincerely regretted the death of the young artist; he kept a photograph taken a few days before the reckless attempt that was to cost him his life; this photograph shows the artist from in front, his face adorned with a black beard that contrasted with the almost infantile expression of his features. “He had a passion for beards,” said Hebdomeros whenever his friends asked him for details about the young artist’s life; “he loved certain aspects of the past, of the relatively recent past that we find in the portraits of our parents in their youth. All the same, he used to shave, though for the photograph he had let his beard grow, as film actors sometimes do to look more convincing in rôles where this ornament to the male features is indispensable; but they are wrong, quite wrong, for a false beard always looks more real on the screen than a true one, just as a film set made of wood and cardboard is always more ‘authentic’ than a natural one. But try telling that to the film directors who spend their time looking for fine sites and picturesque vistas; alas, they understand nothing!” Hebdomeros fell silent and stared thoughtfully at the gentle arabesques of an oriental carpet he had just bought.