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.