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.