Beginnings; A Pipe and a Ten Speed

9 June '75

Spent a pleasant night in the field, wondering and starting at every little noise like the city slickers we are, and headed into Lubec in the morning; a pretty town where the people are very friendly to strangers. It would be a nice place to live. We met Mike Sweeny, the town signcarver, who moved all the way from California to make signs here in upstate Maine, and loves it. He does very nice work with an electric router - the signs look hand-carved (now I want an electric router).
Acadia ark was as nice as it was two years ago. Really the most beautiful park (place!) I've ever been. Rode to the top of Cadillac Mountain, took the loop road, and exclaimed over the flora and fauna of tidal pools. We city slickers are easily impressed by small animals, such as shrimp and raccoons. Beautiful land and picturesque little towns and the wonderful rocky coast of Maine!

10 June '75

It was sprinkling lightly when we awoke, and since we did not immediately pop up and strike camp, it was soon pouring down. We wend and had our first real breakfast of the trip (pancakes and sausage rather than a doughnut and milk) and returned to dismantle a soggy campsite.
We are definitely getting into he thought of small-town life - all the of the little towns just look and feel great to us. Rennie and Barbara's place is all animals - I learned to kick geese in the head today. For diner, we had $2.39 lobsters (the smallest available, which were as big or bigger than $5.00 - 7.00 restaurant lobster), steak, rolls, clams, and homemade blueberry pie. I still can't believe it.
Rennie said that Rockefeller's, Kennedy's, and the like own some of those big homes on Mt. Desert Island ( Acadia). He says Maine land prices and taxes are rising rapidly.

11 June '75

Had enormous breakfast and lunch (by standards of this trip), kicked at the geese some more and pushed off for the White Mountains. Inadvertently retraced my 1972 route through the White Mountains, which are dramatic and beautiful - some of the best scenery so far. The ride along 118, 4, and I-9 through New Hampshire and Vermont almost belied my last sentence - the prettiest towns and hills imaginable; I could live anywhere along there. My thoughts are full of investing in Maine real estate and sending for books on alternative construction methods advertised in my Mother Earth news. Ran out of Parrot House cigars.

12 June '75

Spent night in Brattleboro, Vermont and left for Deerfield, Mass., written up in June, 1969 Nat'l Geographic. No Williamsburg, but it's pretty nice; met a gravestone rubber in the old burial ground - now I want to usd gravestone rubbings in paintings and drawings. Next we drove to Highland Falls to visit Aunt Mae and the grave of Geoff's namesake grandfather at West Point. Central Mass. and Conn looked mighty cluttered and ugly after northern New England but western Conn and NY were better. The Hudson Palisades from cliffside route 218 were really beautiful. Aunt Mae kissed Geoff and joked about needing a handsome man about the house; an amazingly spry '78er.
The trip was over when we reached the NJ TPK. For two weeks I've heard almost no radio, seen almost no TV or traffic lights (or Blacks, as I suddenly realized in Highland Falls). Thank heavens it was midnight in DC and very little traffic. If feels like hell to be back.

13 June '75

If still feels like hell. I'm glad we're in Springfield - It'll really be a drag to be in Mt. Rainier, riding in the car today I didn't turn on the radio (reliving the trip as best I could?) I must follow Geoff's advice and buy a pipe to give me a lift. Also a ten speed bike.

The Scourge!!!

6 June '75

Cold today, quite cold due to the high wind which swept the plateau all day and funneled down narrow streets. Still, there were people sunbathing on the Plains of Abraham - I have noticed that Quebec's public places are mercifully free from the scourge of the portable radio. We visited the Museum of Contemporary Art, which was small but quite nice - saw an exhibit of sculpture (Henry Moorish and geometric), paintings by [a] Qeubec artist; he didn't create his first work until age 50, thirty-some years ago. Encouraging to say the least.

7 June '75

Rode thru Parc des Laurentides today, a rather bleak former logging area of innumerable little dirt roads, strange blasted-looking aras, and little lakes. There are only two paved roads in an area over 50 miles square, which as far as I'm concerned in the proper way to run a park. Route 17 along the Saguenay is definitely the second best scenery to date - high, dark mountains, beautiful, dark-looking streams and lakes, very few houses, noble vistas thru gaps in the hills. Missed the thrice-daily ferry as St. Simeon, and so holed up at a small campground. The only other campers were a Quebec trio - Pitou, Bernard, and Claire. Drank beer and conversed in their broken English and our broken French.

8 June '75

It was worth missing the ferry to wake up beside the St. Lawrence. Spent most of a beautiful morning 8th in line (of an eventual 70) for the 10:30 ferry. Met Roy Trannante, a lab technician from Labrador City, NF, which sounds like the end of the world for snow and isolation. He is a native Newfoundlander and loves it. Very self-assured and into the hot car mystique. His idea of a vacation is to drive 800-1000 miles a day if possible, at 80-90 mph.
The scenery throughout New Brunswick was somewhat disappointing. If was not overly dramatic or beautiful, and the moment we crossed the Quebec border, it seemed to go downhill. The graphics were not as good, the countryside seemed more cluttered (also more American, and hence, less foreign - sigh). Ended up a long, dull day of driving at Lubec, ME, easternmost point in the U.S. We could find nowhere to camp, and as soon as we told a grocery-store keeper, Howard Jones, or our predicament, he offered us his land to stay on and shanghaied a friend in the store to lead us out there at night. We had not been parked on his land 1 1/2 minutes when two men drove up to find out what we were doing there. Solicitous (nosy?) neighbors, these downeasterners.

Communication Issues

5 June '75

If I thought Montreal seemed French, it was because I hadn't seen Quebec. Geoff, our world-traveller-in-residence (whom we incessantly question about Europe) assured our grateful ears that old Quebec does indeed seem somewhat European. We found a plain, cheap, rather comfortable 4th floor room across a small park from Chateau Frontenac. Comfortable beds, a refrigerator (beer, bread, meat) and a table. Geoff insisting that by European standards, it is a great room. Chateau Frontenac is magnificent to see - it seems so much the landmark of old Quebec that it's hard to believe it was build between 1890-1921 as a resort hotel by the Canadian Pacific Railway. I wonder if the residents as the time deplored it as a monstrous highrise which blocked their views of the St. Lawrence?

Many of the locals speak English as poorly as I speak French, and one of my triumphs of the day was asking simple directions and buying stamps in French successfully. It's like a game to me whereas Sharon knows enough French that she knows how poorly she speaks it, and avoids doing so out of embarrassment.

In the evening we sat for awhile in a marvelous twilight at the fountain between our room and the Chateau. Earlier, Geoff and I had wandered far along the Governors Promenade (a boardwalk by any other name is still a boardwalk) high above Le Baisse Ville and The St. Lawrence.

We dined on Gaspe Lobster.

P.S. This evening before the fountain and dinner, I took my first bath in 1 1/2 years. I wouldn't have enjoyed it anywhere but in a 4th floor bathroom in Old Quebec.

Flipping off Bambino

3 June '75

For breakfast, we bought bread, milk, and orange juice and ate in the park. This of course is something one could do in Washington or anywhere else, but one never see,s to think of it until he is on vacation. As a matter of fact, Geoff thought of it.

Saw St. Joseph's Oratory on the Westmount, a new-Baroque basilica that is thoroughgoing 50-60's modern on the inside. There are displays of crutches, canes, and all sorts of braces left by pilgrims claiming cures, and a great sloping rack of hundreds of red prayer candles with "Saint Joseph Patron of The Church" spelled out in white candles like people holding up placards at a stadium.

We spent out first evening in an outdoor cafe (first for Sharon and me), one of 5 or 6 along place Jacques-Cartier in Ville-Marie, the old section of town. We were not disappointed. In the toilet, a little one-eyed man told me, first in French and then English, "man is not a camel. He cannot hold water 24 hours." Later this same fellow, who called himself Bambino ("if you ask me questions, you will hear a lot of fucking lies") stood outside the rail by our table expressing grave concern over Sharon's bandaged eye. Geoff flipped him to buy 2 beers (Geoff lost) and I gave him a cigar. His friend (the artiste) begged a quarter from Geoff.

The people one one side of us who spoke poor English, passed us joints of very weak dope. The people on the other side were young French separatists. They were more eloquent in English, and we discussed politics et all until midnight. We expressed surprise over the liveliness of Montreal at 11:30 on a Sunday or Monday night, and were told that the town used to jump 24 hours. Now, by law, it closes down at 3am. The separatists said that they appreciate it if a tourist tries to speak even very poor French because it shows he is willing to make the attempt. Quebecois say "bon jour" rather than au revoir.

So far the three of us prefer O'Keefe beer to Molson or LaBlatt.

4 June '75

We spent last night in a student type guest house McGill University for 2 dollars apiece. Our roommate, Jeff, had just ridden his 10 speed bicycle 1000 miles from Calgary to Montreal along Canadian route 1. He was trying to sell it for $350 so that he could continue travelling around the world.

We ended up our three days in Montreal with a bread-cheese-peanut butter-sherry picnic atop Mont Royal. That's what we ate for dinner, to - today was our lean day to make up for spending money the last few days.

Nil scenery beyond Montreal. Stopped the night in your typical pack-em-in campground near Drummondville, Que. Mercury vapor streetlights, even, but it was almost empty and so rather pleasant. I won my first game of backgammon from Geoff by mercury vapor streetlamp. Our brand-new nylon tent is lightweight, airy, light, and roomy enough for three.

Like Metal Under a Welding Torch

31 May '75

Celebrated Veteran's day with a ride through beautiful NY state, singing old, off-key (not morally) songs and marvelling at mountains.

Passed through the pastel cottageland of the Irish Catskills and arrived at Schoharie. Doubtless it is like tiny towns anywhere, but now that we are here, its special charm seems evident. In historic Schoharie, people leave their skis and bicycles on the porch. Unlocked.

1 June '75

No phones, no TV's, sporadic plumbing, not cheap either. But now I always want to stay in places like the Parrot House. We ssat up late out in the poorly lit hall (10-11' ceiling, old fashioned light fixtures, dumpy furniture) playing backgammon, smoking, and drinking tap water (no ice, either). You could never do this in a Holiday Inn. You wouldn't want to, even if there were a lounge at the end of the hall.

Pleasant wedding, very pleasant reception, danced with everybody. Uncle Ray made a hit with people in general. Sharon's whole family singing "I've Been Working on the Railroad." They dance much more than Mary Beth's family does. Bill and Marybeth have quite a view. I guess if you are going to live in the mountains, you should always live where you can see the sunrise and/or sunset through a cleft in the hills. It was so orange - like glowing metal under a welding torch.

2 June '75

Travelled to Canada via "America's Most Scenic Highway, 1966-1967," I-87, which well lived up to its reputation. The Adirondacks are stunning and fairly empty of human presence. Montreal has a definite cosmopolitan feeling - "all of those continental-looking males," as Sharon said. One also tends to feel that many of the French-speaking females look sort of French. Mont-Royal rivals Roch Creek Park as an urban getaway. It offers wonderful views on all sides, and most of the people cluster about Le Chateau on the southern end. The rest of the 10-12 acre summit is fairly wild and empty. Canadian beer has a deliciously un-American tang which Geoff ascribes to higher alcoholic content and a lack of preservative chemicals.

Scumbled

30 April '75

I have always known that my work would develop and change with time, and it has. However, my excursion into minimal composition, while not as wrenching as Larry Poons' abandoning ellipsoid dots for thick, scumbled surfaces, was a giant step. Perhaps I could compare it to Frank Stella's development in that I kept about half of my arsenal (my textures) and changed the other half (my shapes). It was a successful step, but it leads me to wonder "what next?" Stripes will be exhausted some day, as were dots and the giant protractor exhausted, and I shall once again wish to start boldly anew. A false start of half a dozen paintings and several months to discover the end of a blind alley would be a great waste and yet my more rigid format may preclude a more predictable and successful "development." Stella as changed 3-4 times and made great art. Smith was cut off in the prime of his "Cubi" period. Frankenthaler, Francis, and some others have lost that original fire in their successive incarnations. Nevelson has mined the same ground for years, but the result always glitters.
How many times will I (Have to? Want to?) change? Where will that next step take me?
I don't even know whether I am striding out across the world or spiralling in to find myself. It really does not matter.

Improbable Schemes: Part 1

Last summer as I sat staring out the window at life's colors while working at S&B, I solemnly promised myself that I would not spend the next summer inside an office.

Here it is next summer, and there I am again (My God, this time I've even given the bastards my Fridays).

So here I go again: I solemnly swear that I shall not spend next summer inside an office, drawing lines or anything else. How hard it is to guard against security and normalcy. I have more money than most people ever save before age 40, and I'm working against my will. When I was laid off, I thought that if would be the truly correct and normal decision to go on unemployment and paint full-time for several months. If I had not been married (and that is a criticism of my won weakness, not of Sharon) I would not have sought another job.

How I admire Geoff Desobry's complete aversion of work and his exchange of small savings for 4 months in Europe. How I envy Steve or Bill Vought their long-term personal businesses and 2-3 day work weeks.

My, what unaccustomed bitching! I hope this will be the most negative (and last negative?) pages that ever this diary shall see. It is the 5 day work week (under particularly niggling circumstances - not heavy pressure, but the constant annoyance of a disorganized boss) which has filled me with woe. In the last month I have changed from a fortnightly dope smoker to an every-other-day toker.

And how sweet it is.

Change of Subject

It is hard to sell good work, or new work. Paintings should sit around for awhile - although one always has an opinion of them when they are finished, finishing art differs from finishing a race. Some of my paintings have been finished half a dozen times, only to be added to or altered time and again (sometimes to the better, occasionally to the point of contrived overworking), sometimes a month later.

The answer: not every painting can be the best. Some must be average. Some will be failures and it's hard to part with good work. Rather, I try to steer people toward "average" paintings that move me less, or toward older paintings, whose value and importance in my oeuvre, although considerable when they were done, has since been eclipsed by better work or different work.

Which presents this dilemma: is the artist disseminating his second rate work to public view while he keeps the good stuff at home, out of sight? Can he build a reputation out of "seconds."

The answer: not very painting can be the best. Some must be average. Some will be failures (and should be learned from and then painted over or destroyed). It is no dishonor not to hit a home run on each attempt, just as it is no dishonor to make god use of the doubles and triples.

Also, it is of vital importance to have a body of work to show - and I'd say that at least half of that body should be my best. Reputations are build much faster on shows than on scattered paintings in scattered living rooms.

I can't support myself at my work anyway, right now. It would be foolish to sell off best paintings for a few hundred dollars whose promotional value (toward a future pay of full-time painting) is not easily estimated.

And lastly, they are all part of me - I reserve the right to do with them as I will. Some will never leave; I want a living history close by where I can breathe it in.

Like an Indian Head Penny Nowadays

11 April '75

Last night was submittal night for the NVFAA show judged by Lawrence Alloway - and for me, it was the first evening of spring. As I stood outside John Arcuri's beautiful old apartment bldg in my old denims, with blowing hair and sprouting mustache in the arm gauzy light, I felt rebirth and energy flow through me. The ride down the daffodil lined roads of Rock Creek Park and beside the silver Potomac, passing joggers and bikers, was as dramatic as the cadmium orange ball of the sun painting all the river backwaters near National Airport. After leaving our paintings we returned to John's to reinforce our waning glow with still more sherry. On my way to pick up Sharon, I was moved by my annual (approximately) whim to wander again down the basements of McClean Gardens. Ah, roots (ah, bunk), I could see again the spaceships, submarines and tunnels of my youthful fantasy in those fine old sinuous, up-and-down basements with all their exposed vitals of steam piping, conduit, panels and gauges. I spent many hours of rainy, and even sunny, days with my friends in that subterranean labyrinth. It felt good to see it again. I did notice that the good old apartment hallways seemed much more like those of Hyattsville and Mt. Rainier than those of the "home" of memory. Also, they had cut down the rose bushes where we would see the Japanese beetles of summer drowned in little kerosene traps. (A memory like that is like an Indian Head penny nowadays).

21 April '75

I would not have been so long away from my writing had I not mislaid the notebook and been unable to find it for a week. It was, naturally, under a pile of papers and detritus in the studio.

Like being newly in love, or like a recent convert, I find all my thoughts these days occupied by "creation," a subject (feeling?) as wide as life itself. There isn't 15 minutes of spare time each day (not to mention much time at work, cleaning house, eating) that I don't think of painting, or cartooning, or composing. Creation is the source of my happiness, the irrigation of my love, my proof against bitterness and ennui. Like a love anew, it causes me to regard the world anew. I see my friends and either applaud their projects and energy or hope that they will yet discover life. My God, how can the Dave and Nancy Snyders of the world come home and watch TV each long evening - how can a Kathy Lyons find primal satisfaction in her job as a government administrator? It boggles the mind.

I remember how blithely (a scant two months ago) I was resigned to doing no music, because I was a painter, because there was only time to paint. I remember how the cartoons had bloomed and withered within me starting with last year's impeachment hearings, but were left undrawn (despite strong encouragement from Sharon and from Frank Bowie) because there was only time to paint.

I was wrong - there is time to do what you want in this world; there is plenty of time for cartoons, painting, and songs because there must be, because creativity is life. For years, Sharon and a few others (Dolores, Frank Bowie, John) have encouraged me to go pull steam, to not deny myself, and they were right. The weeks-old change from "painter" to "person" has been a shock like going to sleep at home and waking up in the woods. I wouldn't have thought that such a naturally happy person as myself could have found this joy - I didn't even know that there was so much more joy to be found.

It makes me realize that the next discovery of personhood will be the regaining of the woods. I haven't been camping in 3 years although I have all necessary equipment, although I have experience, although thinking of camping (and then never doing it) is like a kick in the heart. Seeing this month's Nat'l Geographic feature on the Adirondacks didn't help any, either (ah, New England; Ah, upstate). This solemn pledge I make: From March thru October each year from now on, I will get in 6 weekends of camping. That's not even a weekend a month, and that's not even cold weather ( I've slept in the frost before). And I can do it. I can do anything - I know that now.

Ah, but there's the rub.

There may be enough time in life for the work of creation, for love, for smoky mornings beside the lake, for biking the C&O Canal, for seeing Europe; but there is not enough time for "WORK." Work is a thief - it subverts your time and energy away from life, and all that is dear thereof. I work to be pain, period. I regard an office an a warehouse, a supply source of art material, xerox copies, long distance phone calls, and whatever else will better enable me to complete my own projects. Work is but a small adjunct to real life - never could I measure my life by my job, not if it were in a studio. I pity those who work on other people's projects 5 days, and spend their most precious commodity, their own time, in spendthrift TV viewing and "relaxation."

Not that I knock the noble process of unwinding; I too, drink, smoke, and spend time away from the studio in non-productive pursuit. But I spend all the time I can creating - witness the languish of this diary as I have begun to use those daily commutes for music writing. When I arrive home from "work," I still have plenty of energy for work.

How I pity those who spend all that is good within them on other people's projects, who have only "relaxation" to look forward to, who eat, sleep, and work never knowing what it is to feel themselves expand, grow tall, and become aware of the beauty of all life through the power of creation, the work of the soul.

Bombast without Dignity

4 April 75

The yardstick I often apply to a newly written song or fragment of "memorable melody" is this: Does it sound as if it could have been by Procol Harum, Jack Bruce, or Yes? Festival is my Procol Harum song, beginning with a memorable and bombastic theme and progressing tightly through 5 or 6 dramatic sections including a very Procol Harumesque descending line for piano-bass-guitar.

I have several Yes songs, for there the standards are a bi looser - a Yes song can ramble much more, can be strung together of more diverse parts and depend less on a dramatic central theme. This is not to say that composing in the Yes manner is necessarily less rewarding or less viable than striving for the landmark successes of Procol Harum. Nonetheless, I believe that Yes' willingness to salvage nearly-successful themes with their high, sweet, harmonies (vocal) and to render a cliched grandeur to those over-long cadenzas by means of Moog and Mellotron, helps to explain why a number of groups today sound like second-rate Yes. I know of no group which sounds like Procol Harum, or ever has - for Procol Harum's music is built on simpler blocks which are harder to copy: 1. The tight structure of their songs 2. Robin Trower's bugle-like (in that it is used as an accent and not as a rhythm or filling) guitar work 3. Consistently solid, non-flashy bass playing (much to staid for my playing tastes, however much I love to hear it) 4. Haunting organ parts which are not cliched 5. magnificent production. The baking orchestral parts are never as overbearing as on Yes' Time and a Word, but like Trower's leads, begin and end deftly and timely. Procol Harum does restrained and intelligent music, solid and usually moderately paced but with striking accents and moments of greatest lucidity. Yes may be more ambitious, but its very diversity (and it's rocky tempos) is almost a mockery of itself, and Yes slips too often into cliche, bombast without dignity, and prettiness.

Unfortunately, Procol Harum since losing Robin Trower (whether that is the cause I cannot say) has become very much Gary Brooker and his Band. While still head and shoulders above most other groups, the concentration of power and responsibility in one person is quite apparent (Fisher and Trower, after all, both wrote and sang Procol Harum songs), and the result is less exciting then formerly.

I am an artist.

3 April '75

Quotation from:

You Can't Go Home Again, by Thomas Wolfe, Chapter 11, Page 170-171:

"Character may feel when he pauses for a moment from the brilliant exercise of a talent that has crowned his life with triumphant ease and success almost every step of the way, and notes suddenly and with surprise, that most of the other people in the world are fumbling blindly and wretchedly about, eking out from day to day the flabby substance of grey lives. She realized with regret that such people are so utterly lacking in any individual distinction that each seems t e a small particle of some immense and vicious life-stuff rather than a living creature who is able to feel and to inspire love, beauty, joy, passion, pain, and death."

These paragraphs struck in me today a chord that they might have left unsounded last month; strike out some of the superlatives and they describe my mood very well. Not in memory have I felt more alive and creative than I o now as my music, painting and drawing come together (indeed, my painting has languished a bit in this 2 weeks of unaccustomed diversity). The thought that Sharon, my mother, my brother, my friends may not personally realize such satisfaction is a real pain to me (I do not say they are unfulfilled - just the thought of possible unfulfillment hurts, because fulfilment itself feels like popular descriptions I have read of religious conversion, albeit a rather quiet and peaceful conversion).

The question constantly recurs to me: what do people do?, who have not the joy of creation. Is one's life lived in order to raise one's replacements in the human regiment, so that they may do the same?

I progress in writing music, although it does not improve my reading; I find it easier to write a dotted rhythm than play it. I even experience trouble reproducing my own music. I have been playing my bass more. My drawing of "Gerle Cafe" for the program of Bob Rayel's recital is one of my best drawings ever, and a very successful illustration. My newest stripe painting, Roots: Broken House progresses smoothly.

How well that triumphant catalogue points up the truth that being an artist is almost wholly a state of mind. I can recast the whole panoply of my activities in a way equally accurate: Brooke Stauffer is an electrical draftsman who does drawings that please the small circle of his friends who see them, who paints 6-8 hours a week and sells a few here and there, who has never shown at any gallery, who has written 15 songs that few people will ever hear ( at the rate he's going), and who is an under-employed commercial artist of unknown potential.

Such dismaying appraisals probably have applied to most of the artists and musicians I admire, at one time in their lives (and a long, long time it may have been for some of them). Like me, they knew they were artists, and that simple fact was more important than "real life) itself, for one is an artist because of self-knowledge more than because of any amount of popular acclaim. One is not an artist because people call him (or her) an artist, but because one is an artist.

I am an artist.

Holy Saturday!

29 March '75

I feel that someday I will look back on this week as a watershed time in my thought and life as I do on that week in November long ago (more of that later) when I stopped worrying. It has been an unremarkable week of personal triumph in small ways that add up to more than the sum of the parts: I distributed my cartoons, I did a cover illustration for a concert program (Gerle Cafe) with which I am most happy, my office logo presentation is turning out very well. Perhaps more important, I have finally written out the piano bass line of my 2 year old Procol Harum-like song provisionally entitled "Festival." It was easy, and seeing the concrete notes on paper brings it to life for me as never before. For a year, the notion of doing a demo record of several of my songs has shrunk into itself within me, one of those things that was "in the future" as I painted on. For that matter, so was cartooning something "in the future."

But today, this week, I have an ongoing painting show, a good design project, good cartoons and illustrations turned out, and I am a giant step further toward realizing, with Sharon's help, my music. In a quiet way, it is the best I've felt in a long while.

On the way to church tonight to hear Sharon sing (I am told it is Holy Saturday) we heard on the radio a song by John Lodge and Justin Hayward, my two favorite members of The Moody Blues, who have cut an album on their own. I take it as a good omen for rebirth and a new life.

These things sneak up on one.

Anything I Wish

20 March '75

It took long enough (as is inertia's way) but at last the ineluctable inertia of simple time and life have overcome my private store - within one week I am the cartoonist of The City Partisan and have executed and stuffed into envelopes the first of my procrastinate cartoons to be distributed to senators.

Each of these deceptively momentous tacks has been too long, not in the plotting, but in the mere waiting and forgetting. Much credit, as often is the case, must go to Sherry, without whose unwanted and peeved (about my hesitation, my time-wasting) reiterations that I "could be a good cartoonist," I would still be a would-be.

I have adopted the modern cliche of line screen zip a-tone used by MacNelly, Peters, Oliphant, and Wright. In the long run I naturally expect to develop my own nascent style (which is there, but too-seldom expressed) but for the present I would be happy to blend Ralph Steadmen with the afore-mentioned four, stealing cheerfully because even in stealing, enough of me will hit the page to prevent plagiarism.

Now I have love, cartooning, painting, composing, and alto recorder to do after work. It's a good life (and it keeps me off the streets, nights).

21 March '75

How good it has felt, this last week, to get up at 6:45 (outraging entire body) and work for an hour before going to 'work' a half hour late. Breakfast eaten, music playing, it feels like as extra day jammed into the 24 hours. Later I feel more alive because I was 'doing' something. (And sometimes I feel tired, but I need myself fore than I need my sleep).

29 March '75

I have come the realization that I can do anything I wish in life.

Inocuousness

18 March '75

The popular envy of the artist may be based largely on the prevalent romantic misperceptions about his life. Those artists, after all, who choose to pursue success from a grimy garret (or from a subtropical paradise) are the distinct minority. Most artists hold work-a-day jobs which leave time for creation in the interstitial and left over spaces - those same times when grass must be mowed and bookshelves built.

If I seem to complain, I will add that it is still the most satisfying life I have yet known, for the mind may dance when the feet and fingers may not. It is, though, hardly the careless world of the public imagination, or if it is, it will be a hungry world of compromised comforts like that of the ordinary unemployed. Many people, of course, have undergone such limited privation as students or when first on their own - it is not a grim life and it has its simple rewards, but for many who have gone on to other habits of life, the ordinariness and bother of limited money would seem magnified.

So it seems to many artists as well. As untrue as it is in many ways, artists are just plain folks too.

Drawing for reproduction is marvelously free. One can add, delete, cut and shift as he never can when doing a "drawing;" A blotchy sheet of different papers. "wite-out," blue pencil lines, and magic tape prints as cleanly as a 30 second sketch.

How the Words Flow

13 March '75

This is the third overcast day in a row (and the first it was snowing) - doubtless that is why I am in such a good mood and feel like writing this morning. Yesterday I read in Casteneda's Journey to Ixtlan that Casteneda for years had "aways wanted to be an artist and for years I had tried my hand at that. I still had the painful memory of my failure."

I am perplexed by confessions like that one. What I suspect that he meant was that for years he tried to paint still lifes and was not satisfied with the result, and that rather than alter his focus or concentrate on this spirit and will to create he allowed simple technique to defeat him. To be an artist is largely a matter of will - by Casteneda's (supposed, according to my guess) standards I might not be an artist. I do not, I have never had a show at a recognized gallery, I support myself by working as an electrical draftsman. Yet all this amounts to little beside the private facts of my life and mind: I live painting and music, my work is good, I see in all of my life and in all of imagination relationships which must be expressed in (my) new ways.

Neither technical skill, broadness of vision (sometimes a microscopic vision serves. We are not all Picasso), blood, sweat, or tears compensates for strong will, self assurance (the artist, and for that damn matter, every person, must realize that for the practical purposes of living and creating, he or she is the most important person in the world), and thought.

Indeed, I feel vestigial guilt pangs reading the all-too-common complaints of the artists's pain - I have never felt any such thing. My work is sustenance and happiness in itself. Rather than regarding the "pain of creation" as the artist's red badge of courage, I would regard such recurrent and bitter feeling as the clearest proof in the world of unfitness for the work of art.

Like the "mouse" of medieval siege which penetrated the strongest keep, I find the desire to create an "object of beauty" continually eroding my cherished rationalism-minimalism, the more so as some of my 1973-4 traditional works come of age and leave the net ( Bob Lyons just purchased "my Father's Funeral" rather than have it appear in my next show and risk someone else purchasing it. He was crestfallen when Nick H. bought "The Cone" out from under him). I have 3 stride paintings in progress but will start next a traditional painting, the sketch for which is more than a year old. I also have in mind a rectangular stripe painting which will be less severe in design than my first 5 - you might call it a more "traditional" Stauffer also.

How the words flow, the more one writes. What was hard labor has become conversation. Conversation with myself in any spare 5 minutes of the day. Sometimes I am mildly surprised by my own banality, but more often I am pleased to find a more and more lucid body of reasoning, recollection, and conjecture taking shape as I write.

Life Lessons on the Train pt. 2

I have yet to experience the pain which is my traditional doom as an artist. There are periods unavoidably, of little reward (the blahs, in vernacular), but that consuming depression, or self-hatred so recently evinced by San Gilliam's striking a fellow airline passenger in Rockne Krebs described as one of his usual depressions following a period of work, shall never claim me. Work is my uplift, my identity. I tend to feel that disturbed persons make disturbed artists (Jackson Pollock) and that no truly professional (a description of attitude) artist could experience pain through his (or her) work. As much as success is at the back of my mind this week's work is at its front. Knowing myself as I do, it will always be thus, and non-recognition (such as having my paintings rejected 3 months running at the art league gallery) will have no lasting deleterious effect upon me.
In fairness, I must admit that since the Stauffer philosophy recognized all neuroses as both self-induced and rather easily self-cured (or exorcised), lasting neurosis becomes by corollary, pitiable. This has colored the previous monologue.


Only 5 of the 20 or 30 songs I've written (in considerable detail. No simple fragment of melody for me) have ever been heard by another ear, 4 that were played by Roger and the Outasites, and 1 that I taught Sharon. Yet they are as precious to me as painting or love itself. They are an ongoing body of work which is constantly being weeded out and added to (some of my first songs have died stillborn, left behind by changes in me or in popular music) and "making it" a a singer-bassist-composer is perhaps a more hoped for fantasy than "making it" as an artist. Of course, art one can do alone, in a room - music of my sort takes people, practices, organization, commitments, dependence on others. Conversely, if I did have a success in music, it would be with Sharon beside me, singing or playing piano (or now I try to write recorder interludes) and that would be a nice way indeed to "make it."

For now, my songs are a bubble in which I breath, work, love. It is a rare waking hour that I do not hum an old song, polish a guitar part, try to assemble existing fragments and newly-invented melodic lines into a new entity. In this way I spend, without touching my bass, 4 times as many hours on music as I can on art. I can do my music at work; the unrewarding "work" at which I support myself. My music is like a portable atmosphere I carry with me in a harsh environment. [Ed. note: I was so charmed by that image that I had to use it. Even after arguing with myself for about a minute. Actually, considering my happy disposition, that was putting it rather strongly.]

Now, I can see how writing can clarify one's own mind to oneself in a way I never had previously suspected. Never before have I expressed my thoughts about my songs to myself or anyone else; I am glad to have done so, tonight, on the train from Washington to Baltimore. I shall put up this diary now, and sleep.

Life Lessons on the Train

7 March '75
Taking the train to Boston. I haven't taken a train for 9 years and the station seems as other-worldly as a movie. This is no modern transportation terminal, but an old fashioned, cliched place of high vaults, cavernous marble men's room, and long corridor, stairs and platforms poorly lit by old-fashioned incandescent fixtures which seem to create (rather than just leave) pools of palpable shadow between.
The predominant color is institutional light green (dirty) and one is reminded of a NY subway station.
I wonder if train stations in Europe are like this one - I am enjoying myself very much, and wonder if I would [blank] many nights in the stations of Europe. Probably I would, since I have the happy faculty of being able to enjoy, or at least find interesting situations which most people would find objectionable. Novelty, irony, and downright triumph over (or quiet acquiescence in) apparently appeal to me.
I am sitting in the smoking car although I could find no cigar (union station closes up rather earlier than Port Authority but terminal), because the adjacent non-smoking cars were older and not so nice as this one. It is almost full.
This being one of those great waste spaces of life to which I have earlier alluded, I shall use some time before trying to sleep in setting down more of the Stauffer Philosophy, both part I (life) and part II (art).
Getting angry or upset never helps. It merely destroys one's capability to reason and deal with a situation without altering the physical situation by one atom. Calmness, even in the face of outrage, preserves one's own peace of mind, which as far as I know, is the ideal state of life. Certainly, in a fight to argument between friends or lovers, the ore sensible (or loving, or reasonable) person will capitulate as soon as possible. Since all friends or lovers expect (except in the last, bitter stages of waning care for the other) to make up again, it is obvious good sense for one party either to refuse to dispute altogether or to make up immediately, even in mid-sentence or at risk of losing face. I once annoyed Sharon immediately after an argument (and probably more than she had been annoyed during the argument) by asking her how long it would be until she wished to make up. I explained that since surely she would eventually no longer by angry with me, whether 2 hours or 24 from then, it would be more sensible for her to stop being angry with me at that moment, and so avoid wasting time. I do not remember that she agreed with me.
Anger and upset waste time, both your time and the time of all those who are forced to listen to you, whether they be the focus of the upset, sympathetic listeners, or unwilling witnesses.

I-ROC?

20 February '75

Richard Senerchia was over tonight, and comparing the stripe paintings with "world" (probably the zenith to date of my "traditional" compositions) and "landskip" (my first hard edged painting to use any sort of shaded or graded color - in the "sun" shape). he told me that he'd always preferred my older work because it displayed an element of irrationality.

I later began to think that perhaps I was taking my art a bit too seriously - it is easy to be seduced by artforumlike self-consciouses and rationalization of every brush stroke or spray-can pass.

If my paintings are to reflect me, they should not be 100% complexity and finality anyway. I am, after all, the happiest person I know. So I resolved to put the grin into my painting-in-progress "Roots" (the forms suggest the gold "fish scales" which were my very first happy invention [although I actually stole them from the hood of a greaser's custom-painted Chevy]). And to give credit where credit is due by re-christening it "Roots: Broken House" after the moribund, long-deserted Senerchia property so named by Richard's four-year old daughter Martha. I enjoy talking about art with Richard more than with anyone I know. He disagrees with me in a most cheerful and thoughtful manner His reply to my key-note remark about creating interest rather than beauty was a defense of beauty as an art standard which I with I remembered well enough to set down. I would certainly trade my subscription to artforum to hear it, if I could. (Alas, I cannot, for I've no subscription to artforum).

28 February '75
Seeing the Richard Anuskiewicz (sp?) at the Corcoran Biennial makes me realize that there is a school of "Art by Exertion" that demands one's attention whether or not it's any good. One simply cannot ignore a work with hundreds of 3/16" tape lines laid so precisely with hundreds of edges of acrylic paint sticking up with router-like exactness 1/32" above the plain of the canvas - even if it's a dull idea. I feel the same way about photorealist store fronts and used car lots and about 10'x12' pencil drawings.
And in fairness, I suppose my stripe paintings seem equally tiresome to some people. I would not agree (naturally) because I try to offer a great deal in each one. I've never understood those who can approach a canvas with but one idea and try to stretch it in importance until it fills the while surface. At best, this works one time or for one person (witness Ellsworth Kelly or Jackson Pollock) - there is, after all, everything to be said for expanding perception about techniques , about a color, about what a painting is.
And then witness Jules Olitski - his painting at the Corcoran had nothing to say that wasn't old in 1960. But he said it in one texture, one color, 5'x9'. Such a color and texture I would use for a 4" stripe among 15 contrasting stripes, and thus hopefully emphasize its real beauty? Strength? Innocuousness? Of course, some of my paintings may be too cluttered and busy - I'm still discovering whether greater success lies in restraint, going bananas, contrast, harmony, fewer stripes, or perhaps something else entirely, which might be called a sense of humor, more of me in each painting. I know that I shall find a new way to bring my textures and patterns alive as I did in my "traditional" compositions. I've so many textures and patterns waiting for expression that I've no choice.

Minor Qualms and Washed Out Walls

The Diary of Brooke Stauffer:

January ’75

I have long intended to begin this diary, if that indeed be the proper designation for a casual and probably not daily record of what I consider important thoughts.

With luck these thoughts will concern art in my life, and while I would hope that they will be faithfully preserved as they occur, I know that most of my writing will be done, as is this, in the waste spaces of life – car trips, bus rides. At home I would sooner make art play music, or simply be with Sharon than spend time in such self-conscious service of my ego. As a determined non-collector of knickknacks and memorabilia (I periodically search through my bookshelves and record racks disposing of those volumes and discs which I know I shall never again wish to read or hear) the undertaking of my written self has been put off time and time again. As a habitual non-writer, I find myself laboring over these words so that these pages wily be lucid and expressive (how I shy away from the self-important honest), for I shall seldom revise them. The year-long intention of this diary (which was inspired by reading David Smith by David Smith) was finally ended and the writing itself begun by my re-reading of the same book. I only hope that I may discover myself as he did. I doubt that these ratiocinations will y as useful or necessary to another as smith’s writing were to me.

I would rather create interest than beauty. I cannot define beauty, and on the whole reject it as the measure of art. Interest is, to me, much more self-evident, as is the lack of interest. I can respect and appreciate a great deal of art that I do not “like” because I can understand in the part the process of the artist. There are so many choices and options which the artist considers and rejects in the search for interest? Meaning? Self? That he can appreciate the choices made by other, even though he may have rejected them in his own work.

6 February '75

I find that my stripe paintings are more interesting in the doing than in the appreciating, at least for me. The process feels intellectually honest, but as finished objects they are not as interesting or "attracting" as the work of my "classical" period.

Also, of course, stripe paintings are very much in the Washington contemporary tradition - I suffer minor qualms about the honesty of selling out to a popular mainstream, but I quash those misgivings as best I can. In fact, 15 or 20 narrow stripes of color and texture react more interestingly together than do 8 or 10 color-textures in my more traditional types of composition.

I am still (most self-consciously) fighting with myself about art-as-process versus art-as-object, doing what I think important vs. doing "modern art," etc.

Things Going For Me:

1. Unfailing conviction that I am the most important person in the world, in the sense that all I have is my life. If I do not do as I wish with it, I shall have no second chance and no one else to blame for my choices.

2. Complete self-confidence and a cheerful disposition. Thick skin. Other people's doubts and misgivings about my work, while they hold interest, do not inspire dismay.

3. Good health. Sick abed 1-2 days per year, hung over and/or indigested 3-4 times per year. Headaches of short duration 4-5 times per year.

4. More love and encouragement then I previously expected the existence of in this world - thank you, Sherry.

13 February '75

I have long photographed my paintings against the wall of my brick apartment building; it was conveniently nearby. However my stripe paintings, which are very busy and strongly linear in orientation did not look good against the red-brown grid. Accordingly, I slipped over to the nearby 7-11 tonight and drove 3 nails into their back wall of white-painted concrete block.

15 February '75

It is an excellent background - everything comes alive on the white wall, and I even like the large texture of the concrete blocks.

18 February '75

I love the way the world looks on overcast days. The colors are subdued and distinct, and certain shades (particularly the new green of spring leaves) stand out in extraordinary (I do not use the word in its modern connotation of fantastic or unbelievable) contrast to the surroundings. Paintings are best photographed by cloud light; direct sunlight can wash out the colors, create highlights, and overemphasize the white wall against which they hang.

Cloudy days are excellent work days. Time passes unperceived, the lure of the world outside the studio is diminished. I love to paint on cloudy days. Stripe paintings have a certain intellectual validity (how those artforum words keep cropping up) and attractiveness to the aspiring serious painter who had begun to question (and have questioned) his "traditional" compositions. In fact, they are the most sensual paintings that I have ever done - the many thin curves of color and texture react together so strongly that the number of my subjective and arbitrary choices was never greater. I am having the time of my life, cloaked within they respectable egotism of modern art.

This Blog

is a tribute to my late father, a man whom I wholly admired and loved, and was taken just a little too soon. That being said, while rifling through his personals, I came across a journal that he kept for 3 years from 1975-1978 proving that while he was my father, scout-master, pine-wood derby builder, knower-of-all-things-fun-to-do on a rainy Saturday afternoon, and dedicated parent, he was also a cocky 25 year-old, newly wed, broke hippy artist and musician!

All I can say is that it's profound to see him, and my mother for that matter, in such alien circumstance. I am writing this blog as I read so I can be just as surprised as anyone who reads this at the insights into his brain, most of which I could not have fathomed before. Granted, prior knowledge of Brooke Stauffer is useful for understanding some of the more incredible revelations that I gain while reading, but I hope it's entertaining regardless. So enjoy, laugh, wonder, and understand why everyone who ever met him looked up to him, respected his intelligence, and thought him just a little odd.

Greg Stauffer