‘It’s Something Else’
Dull and watery to start, and blindly in this way, Enamelac on corrugated board, quite fuzzy, VI and VII (1969), it feels quite different from the choppy horizontal rhythm, the thick oil paint of the Winsor (1965) series on coarse linen, different from the swathes of matte enamel of the Standard (1967) polyptych pulled across reflective steel, clear how they feel, import, avoided isolating auditory sense, but Lennie used to practice on a silent keyboard, which means you really have to know what notes you’re playing because you can’t hear anything—directness, mark, effect, his one-time stroke, predicated subtle—visually, to play and think is impossible. I do all my work slowly, very slowly, and never think that when you paint, and he would now just go ahead, connect it, play it, hear, record, and do it, learn to sing one’s breath, every note, every phrase, every beat—he had me sing the solos bird half speed and it maintained the full effect of the melodic continuity of line, slowing down the records 33 to 16 RPM requiring, well I did them three at a time and I had them next to the wall and I cleaned them and they were coated with lacquer and they would all be ready and I had a kind of assembly line situation, and it was, and it was going, so when I began to paint them I had to have the paint ready, and I had to have the brush ready, and the consistency of the paint and when I painted them it had to be done quickly and it was just a one-time stroke, and then again, and right across, and sometimes if my, I don’t know if there was a certain twitch or something, the stroke might miss a little bit as to how it went across or maybe it’d be too much, too much of a drip, or something would happen where it just didn’t come out, but I would do the three and I could look at the three and I could do them very quickly, it only took me maybe fifteen minutes, and then I could look at them and then I could see that one was not quite right as the other two and maybe all three would be okay but there might be one that would not be and I would put that one aside and do three more so it was really just a matter, how it looked to me and how it felt, I mean I’m very aware of what the paint is going to do, I know how the paint is going to react on the surface, I know it, I’ve done it, it’s difficult to explain, but it has to be direct, and very sure, there can’t be any dawdling, it has to come out right away and it was just one time, the reed and so the note starts out then and the fingers once put forward, not retractable—never retractable, and sometimes we’d be asked to play at Chumley’s, play at Chumley’s, sometimes, on an off night, just for fun, but actually Lennie wasn’t, he was not, I don’t really consider him, he was . . . he wasn’t very good as a teacher, I mean I might have gone on with the music, I might have gone on to do, but he was very cold, kind of frigid, you know he had a certain approach, he wasn’t able to teach in that way of opening someone up, up to themselves, to their own personality, I think maybe the reason that I went, chose painting over music was because of my, my personality, it was a thing about my personality, it’s because of who I was and who I am and what I could do, because painting was something I could do alone, and I was by myself, and this was, this was, good. Though I do like other people—Bartok, Charlie Parker, line recitative strokes, I never got tired, a little buggy at times maybe, a little bit on the edge, but with color, I’m not at all involved with color, I use it more as a, as a contrast, and I usually prefer, it’s not a matter of deciding I don’t think, but well you know it’s strange, you’d think collectors, you’d think that with collectors, well I, I know better now, but you would think that they would know what it is that they have, what it is that they’ve got, but they don’t, but they don’t, they don’t seem to know what the painting is, I’ve seen paintings hung, someone had two small paintings of mine and they were hanging in a hallway, maybe they were a foot apart, maybe two, along with other paintings, other pictures kept in frames, and it was totally misunderstood as to what they were, there are of course situations where they are proper, where the person understands what it is they are, what it is they have, but, a lot of times, not. I’ve seen strange situations, even covered in plastic, and of course there’s nothing you can do, there’s nothing I can do, it’s just nuts, it’s in a private situation, it’s impossible, though in a public, when it’s public, you can take the plastic off, do what it needs, remove the frame if that’s the problem, do something else, although it’s odd, I still do find it odd, so really, really odd that they could seem to, think they like it, even love it, yet refuse to understand the way it is and what it is and how it works, the thing they’ve got, but I was just, I guess now, was naïve, I was very naïve, and in fact I have one if you want to see it’s over there, it’s in a drawer, and there’s another one I found, I don’t know it quite exactly, I was doing then these solid, solid white, these paintings with the color underneath, a little pencil line just off, and if it wasn’t for the music maybe not, I would have tried it just the same, but it was important now to try, to see it what might happen, what could happen if I tried some other, other way, and so I did, and I still do, I mean look at this wall, look at these pictures, it’s exact, and yet it’s not, it is, no matter how I try it or how long, it’s something else, it’s always something else, and that’s the way I do, I do it, what I like I guess, it’s something else.
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