August 2002

The Patron  

Crawford Sims phoned the painter to say he was on his way over because he needed work for his ranchero. “artwork from the local artist,” he said.

Sims was himself a personality who produced and hosted his own syndicated television show, whatever that means. Here was the painter’s chance to cross over into the world of real money. His ship was about to come in. “You’re a hard man to meet,” Crawford said. “It took me a while to track down your number. You hiding from someone?” he quipped.

Sims walked through the house, took a look, saw this and that, made a few comments about minor, incidental things like the quality of the frames, the thickness of the paint, and the view through the front window. “Boy. You sure got some picture window, don’t you?” Get it? Picture window, and you an artist looking at all the pretty mountains. Just look at those mountains,” he said. “It’s a real wonder isn’t it?”

The painter offered him a cold beer and followed him out the back door onto the porch. “What I still don’t understand,” said Crawford, “is why you don’t use all this wonderful nature and all the beautiful things in it. Why do you live all the way out here and paint the way you do? What’s the point?

The painter handed him the beer and offered him the chaise lounge. Crawford settled down and looked long at the painter to see if he had made his point and what the painter might say. “Stay here Crawford while I go bring you out a painting.”

It was a handsome oil done with greens and blue-grays against a secondary palette of yellow tones. There was scoring in it that revealed red-orange underpainting so it stood out in relief. The painter said, “Crawford, take a good look right here in front of you. The yellow wall, the green oleander, the blue sky. And now look at the painting. It’s the same palette, the same yellows with their murky stains and bright reflective highlights, the greens in their richly saturated purity, and the blues here in a foggy rendition of the sky.”

The painter implored him like an actor does the crowd, “Crawford, you must know that the mountains are a prison and the sky a living hell if you can’t see through them — into their dynamics and creative force. It’s about jumping a rung and letting your eyes see the metaphor like a template makes sense of the unseen.”

Crawford snickered, belched air from his nostrils, and took another swallow. The painter sussed-out the stench of a dead conversation with the antennae of a psychotic. They were his adaptation needed to survive, to exist as he did between the cracks of society’s mind like an astute bug sensitive to its light and dark scenarios. And if that was not enough, he also suffered from all the disregard and insult as does every other sane soul that sees through the shame of this world made mad in the rigorous glitter of industrialized ads, muzac emotions, and the twenty-four seven loops of maniacal hypnotic devotions.

Sims was in discomfort as if pressed into a moment of actual clarity, at a crossroads of fate that annoyed him; at which point he struggled up to put his foot down and open his mouth at the same time. The man was red in the face on a squeamish head and all the painter could do was watch him like a little tin one-man band wound too tight to dance. So the painter backed down and took a seat while Crawford finally managed himself up, adjusted his pants and sat back down to stretch his feet out.

The painter murmured, “I sure damn sure am sick of this.” Then a flash through the emotional mood of the cultural moment occurred to the painter as an energetic semblance of some intelligence, perhaps a ghost or spirit that stood by Crawford and spoke. “I’m stuck with this, a man whose thought is nailed to the anachronisms of two thousand years ago, to the bad translations of a tabloid press and their accounts of a looted icon. He’s a technocratic sump whose mind is owned by the logos of its consumption, a megamedia dump for the relentless slush of prefab-image rerun-runoff. Pity him,” the spirit said. “He’s a defeated man who’s succumbed entirely to the tyranny of his own life’s memory as a disco ditty on a banged-up amp, unable to rise above the falsetto of this own cliché. Pity us both,” it said, “as you pity your own plight in his company.”

At that the painter’s own spirit said back, “But that’s why I care. I really do care that he see into this paint ing, sees its invisible world made visible. Show him how well put together it is, like a story, little chapters of color here and there that lean together in this massive syntax that takes shape against the opposition of this next instance. Have him look here at the workmanship, how passages of paint lead with their texture into channels, rivulets, lines, implied perspectives that create distance through scale timed by the footprints of the brush. In fact, tell him it’s an invocation to the square of speed, mass, and light.”

“Ooo la la,” said Crawford’s spirit, “that ought’a lift some skirt.”

Crawford got up, showed his empty bottle to the painter and with all the touching civility of their common cause asked if he recycled. “I like this bottle, don’t you? I always wanna get it when I see it in the cooler.” Then said, “Well, it’s been great. I hope we get a chance to meet again someday. Maybe I’ll catch one of your exhibits and we’ll meet there. Won’t that be special. I could say I knew you when.”