Into the mouth with my other dose, ten minutes of staring at the blankness, and then I started to draw. It’d be a group scene, I decided, eight guys just sitting around a saloon, no, at an outdoor party, like a wedding, just a bunch of regular guys who liked a belt or two after work, and the drawing went very fast, no detail, just blocking in the relative positions of the figures. After I’d got that down I mixed up a big batch of flake white and added a little ochre and azurite to it to make a neutral gray, and then I blocked in the outlines of the figures.
They say I can do only heads, and this is my answer to them. Carducho and the other royal painters, they mock me as an upstart who knows how to imitate nature but has no conception of how to make a true painting with ideas, in the Florentine style. All of them, Carducho, Caxés, and Nardi, will never forgive me for having won the competition His Majesty ordered for a painting of the expulsion of the Moors, and I have heard they were joking that I only won because I am a Moor myself, being from Seville, where there is so much impure blood.
Yet I am painter to the king and I am usher of the chamber, and will rise higher still. If these calumnies on my blood reach the king, he will not hear them; besides, I am well in with his grace the count-duke of Olivares, and his word should sustain me against all slanderers.
I finish the outlining and return to my apartment. I am short with Juana, as I always am when I am on a new painting and I go to bed early. Again these strange dreams of hell, monsters of noise and light that’s neither from sun nor candle, infernal light that warps all colors into impossible shades. I go to mass early and pray that these dreams may cease, and then back to work, this time with models.
I have Antonio Rojas today, a mason, and I give him as much wine as he wants. He grins like an ape at me and I take his likeness quickly and then dismiss him with a clap on the back and fifty maravedí. Then comes in a butcher from the royal kitchen who I paint as my Bacchus.
When he has left me I look at the unfinished painting. There is something wrong with it, but I don’t know what it is-perhaps the figures are too crowded together in the foreground, as if they were all sitting on a rail. I have tried to correct the composition, but it is still unsatisfying. The faces and figures are from nature and full enough of life, but the space they’re in is not real space. There is a secret here I don’t know, and none of the fools who paint in this kingdom can advise me. Not that I would ask. Yet, God willing, His Majesty will like it, I think, and it’s still better than anything Carducho ever did.
A boy comes in with a message from His Majesty and I must leave this and change my clothes to be fit for his presence. I believe he must have decided on the portrait of his late father that he mentioned on Friday last. That arm is not right either.
I came out of it walking down Canal Street in a cold rain, wearing a T-shirt and jeans and no shoes. When I got back to my loft I was not surprised to see my canvas was full of Los Borrachos, or The Feast of Bacchus, by Velázquez, not the completed painting, but the underpainting and two almost completed faces, the Bacchus and the guy in the middle with the sombrero and the drunken grin. The paint was still a little wet and you could see where he, or I, had repainted the peasant on the extreme right, giving him a new head, and where the figure in the back had just been painted in, in a failed attempt to give the whole thing more depth. I could see what he meant about Bacchus’s arm-it was set into the shoulder a little wrong and the foreshortening was off a hair. The face was terrific, though.
I took a shower, changed my clothes, and carefully made myself a Gibson with my dad’s silver shaker. Pearl onions are among the only foodstuffs in my refrigerator, those and olives, because sometimes I prefer a martini.
Thinking back, it occurred to me that I must’ve spent a couple of days at least in Velázquez’s life this time, given the work on the painting, and so I was curious to see how much time I had actually spent in…can I still call it real time? The little screen on my answering machine told me that approximately thirty-four hours had passed since I had set up the canvas, something my belly was starting to confirm, and the Gibson was having an unusually powerful effect on my brain and balance. There were fifteen messages on my machine, said the little lights, and I ran through them and answered the one from Mark Slotsky.
“Where’ve you been, man?” he demanded when he answered his cell phone, before I could say my name. This still annoys me, that technology tells us who’s on the phone, another little erosion of the social. There were saloon noises in the background. “I’ve been leaving messages,” he added. “You heard I bought Kate?”
“Yeah, thanks. I presume you have a Winslet fan you’re going to shop it to.”
“A Velázquez fan, actually. Terrific piece of work.”
“Yeah, right. Listen, can you come over now? I have something you ought to see.”
“Now? I got Jackie Moreau here. We’re at the Blue Orange. What’ve you got?”
“More Velázquez. Really, you need to see this.”
He agreed and twenty minutes later the two of them came in, both antic with drink, but they quieted down when they saw what was on the easel.
“Jesus, Wilmot, what the fuck is this?” Mark said.
“What does it look like?”
“It looks like Velázquez’s Feast of Bacchus, about a third finished.” He looked around for a pinned-up reproduction, and when he didn’t find one, he said, “You’re copying it from memory?”
“I’m not copying it at all. I took some salvinorin and I was back in 1628 and I was him. Painting it, I mean, and when I came to this was on the easel. Pretty neat, huh?”
“It’s incredible,” Mark said, and leaned close to the painting, touching it tentatively with a fingertip. “Have you ever seen the radiographs of this thing? I mean the ones published in the literature.”
“No,” I said. “I’m not a scholar like you. Why do you ask?”
“Because what you got here is an early version, without the pentimenti. You know, if it wasn’t fucking insane and impossible, I’d almost believe you were telling me the truth.”
Jackie said, “Can you be other people too? Because if you were Corot or Monet you could have yourself a nice little business with this.”
And we laughed, and then Mark stopped laughing and said, “What’ll you take for it?”
“It’s not finished,” I said, “and it’s not for sale.”
“No, really. What’ll you take for it?”
“Ten grand,” I said, meaning it as a joke, but he whipped a checkbook out of his jacket and wrote a check with a gold Montblanc the size of an antitank round.
I stared at the yellow slip of paper, stunned. “You think there’s a market in unfinished old master copies?”
“There’s a market for everything. All you have to do is create it.”
I didn’t know how to respond to that, so I turned to Jackie, who, like the sweet guy he is, was grinning like a monkey, enjoying my good fortune.
“I thought you were going to Europe,” I said.
“Tomorrow. We were having a bon voyage at L’Orange Bleu when you called. You were invited, but you did not return all these calls.”
I said, “Well, let’s continue the party.”
“Agreed,” said Jackie. “And the drinks are on you.”
There were a lot of drinks, and we closed the place and poured Jackie into a cab after he’d given us more than one Gallic embrace, with kisses. Then Mark hailed a cab of his own and told me he’d have some people come by for the painting in a week or so, when it’d be dry enough to move. I went back home and when I got there I took it off the easel and turned it to the wall. It was starting to freak me out a little.
The next day I was awakened from the sleep of the sot by a pounding on my loft door, and it was Bosco; he wanted to show me something, his latest. Nice to see a guy still excited about art, so I went down to take a look. He’s been talking about doing this for a while, using the barrel of 9/11 dust he collected back then, a
major critique of what he called the fascist hysteria that enabled the Iraq war.
In his loft the masturbating girls were gone (sold to some rich creep in Miami, he said), replaced by a huge Plexiglas case that must have measured ten by ten by twenty feet. It was equipped with lights and TV projectors and peopled with his trademark rag dolls. He made me sit down in front of it and switched it on.
A great show, I have to say. He had video loops of Bush and Giuliani playing on the faces of dolls dressed in clown suits, and video loops of the planes striking the twin towers projected on the background. He’d made pneumatic models of the twin towers that expanded upward and collapsed in spastic jerks. At the foot of one tower he’d built a little trackway on which tiny figures made up as Orthodox Jews escaped from the building before each collapse and vanished down a miniature subway entrance. The air compressor that operated the towers also shot gusts of air to blow little Styrofoam dolls dressed as cops and firemen and civilians up into the air to fall down again, these figures suitably charred and blood spattered, complemented with tiny amputated heads and limbs. And he’d filled the whole box with the actual gray 9/11 dust, which made interesting clouds in the space above the yapping dummies as well as ever-shifting drifts on everything in the box. The sound track was a densely layered mix of politicians speaking, newscasters casting, explosions, and screams of anguish; from a separate speaker came hysterical laughter. This speaker was embedded in one of those amusement-park chortling torsos that used to grace penny arcades back in the forties. He’d re-dressed it as a Saudi Arab.
“What do you think?” he asked after I had stared some minutes.
“I think you’ve outdone yourself with respect to sheer offensiveness. It’s as if Duchamp had presented his urinal filled with piss.”
“You think so? Well, thanks, but I really wanted to rig it with gas-you know, for real flames? But I was worried about the dust igniting and also the gallery was freaked about the fire insurance. Maybe I could use colored foils or plastic film-it would flap pretty good in the breeze in there, you know, for a fiery effect.”
“I think it’s perfect as it is, and besides, you have the video projection of the actual flames. Are you really going to show this in a gallery?”
“Yeah, Cameron-Etzler’s giving me the whole of their SoHo space next month. It’s going to be big.”
I told him that I thought it would be and left for my place, trying without much success to keep the envy out of my heart. I looked through my recent sketchbooks and thought about what Chaz would paint if he were going to get big, recalling my recent subway thoughts, that notion of deep analysis of modern faces using traditional techniques. How to generate dignity and keep from descending into kitsch? Man Ordering Pizza. Woman Looking for Metrocard. Is it still possible? Not anything like photorealism, no, everything steel but the breastplates, the bumpers on the cars all phony, a copy of a Kodachrome slide flashed onto the canvas. Structure, weight, authority, the authority of the paint applied on a living surface: sprezzatura. Velázquez’s dwarfs and grotesques, revive the bodegones but with what we’ve experienced in the past centuries added-it has to show on the faces. I smoked half a pack and filled my paper shredder with sketches, but nothing came, and after a while I gave up and went out.
The next three weeks passed in the same state of suspended animation. I did a little job for the Observer, Bush as Pinocchio with the long nose in the manner of Disney, with the other characters as current pols, and passed up a couple of other similarly distinguished jobs, living on the ten grand I’d gotten from Mark, hoping I’d have a breakthrough before I had to leave for Italy to do the fresco. But no dice; everything I did looked like shit, and someone else’s shit at that.
To increase the torment, one Sunday I took the kids to the Metropolitan’s American figurative painting show. Milo waltzed off with his electronic art critic pressed to his ear, trailing his little oxygen tank on wheels, and Rosie breathed God’s own air but had only me to tell her about art. The place was jammed; everyone loves figurative painting in their secret heart, even mediocre pieces, although practically everyone makes the mistake of confusing the mere image with painting as art.
They had big posters up with remarks from the famous artists. Richard Diebenkorn had this to say: “As soon as I started using the figure my whole idea of my painting changed. Maybe not in the most obvious structural sense, but these figures distorted my sense of interior or environment, or the painting itself-in a way that I welcomed. Because you don’t have this in abstract painting… In abstract painting one can’t deal with…an object or person, a concentration of psychology which a person is as opposed to where the figure isn’t in the painting…And that’s the one thing that’s always missing for me in abstract painting, that I don’t have this kind of dialogue between elements that can be…wildly different and can be at war, or in extreme conflict.”
I feel the same way, Dick. And Tom Eakins weighed in with: “The big artist does not sit down monkeylike and copy…but he keeps a sharp eye on Nature and steals her tools. He learns what she does with light, the big tool, and then color, then form, and appropriates them to his own use… But if he ever thinks he can sail another fashion from Nature or make a better-shaped boat, he’ll capsize.”
We small artists capsize anyway. It would be so much easier for me if figurative painting was well and truly dead, dead as epic poetry or verse drama, but it’s not, because it speaks to something deep in the human heart. What I would like is a drug that informs me why I can’t just have a normal career as a modern figurative painter.
Again, I mention all this to show that my life was progressing as it has for years, whiny, discontented, blocked, occasionally suicidal, except the kids kept me from that. This was the life I had, these were all the memories I had, except for the memories of being Diego Velázquez, which, of course, I knew were being induced by a drug.
Anyway, we stared at the wonderful paintings along with the mob, and dear Rose asked me where my paintings were hanging, and I said they weren’t, and she asked why, and I said that museums only hang the very best paintings and that mine weren’t good enough, and she said that you should just try a little harder, Daddy.
Good advice, really, and then we went back to my place, and Milo played with the computer and I tried harder and Rose invented a new art form using shredder waste and a glue stick to make fantastical collages, multilayered weavings of colored strips, just the thing, if they were twenty-five feet long, for the Whitney Biennial. And watching her I thought about Shelly’s theory that creativity sprang from the child self and that returning to that self under salvinorin might jumpstart the process on a higher level, and I found myself looking forward to my next dose. I suppressed the thought that even in the drug state I was a pasticheur, that I wasn’t mining my own past but that of someone else.
Then it was time for my next appointment at the lab, but when I arrived the receptionist, instead of handing me a clipboard, told me again that Dr. Zubkoff wanted to see me in his office.
I went in and he gestured me to a seat and gave me a grave look like there was a bad shadow on my CAT scan, which he probably practiced in med school and hadn’t had much of a chance to use in his career. He said, “Well, Chaz, I have a little bone to pick with you.”
“Oh?”
“Yes. You didn’t tell us you had a history of drug abuse.”
“I wouldn’t call it a history-”
“No? Two commitments to rehab, one court ordered. I’d call that a drug problem.”
“I sold some pills in a saloon, Shelly. It was a horseshit bust. I was doing a favor for a friend of a friend and he turned out to be a narc. That’s why the involuntary-”
“Yeah, whatever, but in any case you can’t stay in the study. It’s a confounding variable.”
“But I’ve been clean for years.”
“So you say, but I can’t be testing you for drugs every time you participate. The other thing is, my staff reports you’re uncoo
perative and aggressive.”
“Oh, please! Because I didn’t describe a painting in a fantasy?”
“Right, you’re supposed to tell us what you’re experiencing on the drug. The accounts are part of the study.”
And then he talked about the Velázquez stuff, which still disturbed him; that wasn’t supposed to happen on salvinorin.
“So what is it?” I asked.
“Something else. Something confounding.” He seemed to search for a delicate way of saying what he wanted to say. “An underlying psychological issue.”
“Like psychosis?”
“I wouldn’t go that far, but clearly something odd is going on with you that is unlikely to be related to salvinorin, and unfortunately we’re not set up to give you the help you need. My advice is to check into the hospital here, run a full battery of tests, complete blood panels, EEG, PET scans, fMRI, the works, and make sure there’s no underlying pathology. I mean, for all we know you could have some kind of endocrine imbalance or an allergic reaction to salvinorin, or, God forbid, a brain tumor.”
I said I’d think about it. Shelly shrugged and we shook hands and that was it, out on my ear.
Then they asked me to sign some releases and I was officially expelled from the study, and I have to say I felt bereft. On the ride downtown I started thinking about where I could get some more of the drug. I recalled that it was one of the few psychoactive drugs that had not yet been made illegal and I figured I could get hold of it somewhere in town. Then I thought to myself, Don’t be crazy, Chaz, that’s all you need; if Lotte found out about it you’d never see the kids again. Thus my subway thoughts.
When I climbed out into daylight my cell phone said I had two messages: one from my sister, and the other from Mark, and he was all about his Italian gangster businessman wanting to get the palazzo ceiling done this fall, before the next rainy season in Venice, he was having the roof fixed and he wanted the work on the fresco to go on simultaneously, and could I possibly see my way clear to going early, he’d negotiated a bonus, 25K if I started the first of the month and another twenty-five if I finished before Christmas, and I called him right away and said fine, since I wasn’t going to be in the drug study anymore.
The Forgery of Venus Page 11
