Ten Thousand Things
After a break-up I was desperate enough in Berkeley to take an evening yoga class. Afterwards the teacher asked if I wanted to stay and do some oil painting. It sounded like the old joke about “come up and see my etchings.” In any event I said yes. I hadn’t made any image since flowers with crayons in kindergarten. The result that evening could charitably be interpreted as a sea creature.
The next day I bought some acrylics and good paper and began an orgy of painting. Being an utter amateur helped. I would forget to eat. I hung the results on my living room wall.
A friend came to visit, bringing one of his friends. After we talked a while, the stranger asked whether I had been discovered by a gallery. Breezily I replied, “not yet.” “Well,” he said after a pause, “how much would that painting be?” By that point it had emerged that he was a professor at Stanford. Thinking the query was a joke, I named a price in the hundreds. He asked to whom he should make the check. I just gave him the thing.
I continued painting that year, and later even had exhibitions, but soon gave up the craft. The reason was that I had sought to adopt a practice that I didn't know how to do and thought that writing was more my métier.
In old age I wrote a book, Enlarging Our Comfort Zones, about the merits of doing things that make you feel awkward and, like growing up, require intense learning. I tried this not only with making visual art, but also with such riffs as acting as a book creation coach, supporting citizen diplomacy, founding a journal, and moving to a small town that is an incubator of social inventions.
To return to painting, I found that people interpret images by expressing their preoccupations. In showing a piece that I called “Ten Thousand Things,” I was told by a hot young thing that it depicted an egg and sperm, by a New Age lady that it showed universal energy flowing around a creature, and by a Buddhist friend that it displayed insistent objects screening us from emptiness.
(For more material on the 1980s, see my book, Enlarging Our Comfort Zones)