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