The troubled canvas of the mind

"Artistic temperament sometimes seems a battleground, a dark angel of destruction and a bright angel of creativity wrestling" - Madeline D'Engle

On most days, my watercolors are off by themselves on the other side of my office, puddles of dry paint on their plastic palette.  But they're starved for attention, like a loyal old dog; making eyes at me while I work.  Whimpering.  But I can’t.  I really can’t.

The ochres and oxides, cadmiums and crimsons, don’t mix well with Outlook and Excel.  It's one or the other. 

Once in a while, I’ve tried and failed.  And have received confirmation.

I am convinced that there is an uncommon cerebral characteristic an artist must possess to acheive creative greatness.  The ability to separate one's mind.  A mechanism that can switch off the deductive, rational, and proper sorts of controls normally present in the conscious mind. 

Without this functional aberration, those that pick up the brush are mere mortals.  The potent and requisite creative energies are locked, fractured and blurred, as if trapped beneath the artic ice. 

This separation is the secret ingredient of genius.  It melts the ice.

But from where does it emerge?   Perhaps it’s a divine gift of creation.  At times, the gift is evident and applied from a young age.  But it is often muted; instilled in souls who are eventually pulled toward the creative abyss as if by some giant electromagnet; their anxiety only assuaged by the discovery and excerise of their craft.   Often their journey is enhanced by alcohol, opium, or absinthe.

Perhaps one of the best known of these troubled souls is the post-impressionist artist, Vincent Van Gogh.   He had an excessive, emotional, and unstable temperment.  Van Gogh suffered from many psychoses, including depression and bipolar disorder.  He contemplated his own death verbally and in some of his paintings.    He was miserable with his work and only sold one painting during his lifetime, "The Red Vineyard", which he painted in 1888.   It is on display today in the Pushkin Museum in Moscow.

He admired and painted alongside fellow artist Paul Gaugin.  But, after an argument with Gaugin, Van Gogh cut off part of his left ear and gave it to a prostitute.  Finally, at the age of 37, after a particulary intense period of painting, he shot himself in the chest.   He died in his brother Theo's arms.  His last words were said to be, "La tristesse durera toujours", which is French for "The sadness will last forever."

His colors were rich and vibrant.  Some said that they had an almost spiritual quality.  His brush strokes were sometimes short and choppy and at others full of circles and swirls, depending on his moods.  He brilliantly used canvas space and lines in his composition.  His works are among the most admired and appreciated in history.  

Perhaps Van Gogh's colors and brush strokes and composition reflected - or soothed - his tortured mind.   And just maybe, their manifestation on canvas was indeed spritual.  

Van Gogh was moody and unpredictable.  Few could appreciate the genius that his temperment channeled.   But it could well have been delivered from the heavens in the starry night.  It was the secret ingredient; both empowering and weakening.  It enabled his swirling and colorful and vibrant energy to flow from mind to brush to canvas, and it changed him.   It released his many demons. 

And yet it gave us the Cafe Terrace, Sunflowers and other treasures.  These works will last forever. 

The sadness was only fleeting.  

That One Phone Call

At the Dayton (Ohio) Mall, a skinny twenty-something kid with blonde hair and glasses was helping a customer decide which version of Lotus 1-2-3 they needed for their IBM.

Standing next to shelves of magazines and bookmarks, long before Kindle, he was both bookworm and geek - and perfect for the job.

He was there in Dayton because "B Dalton" was testing a startup venture called "Software Etc." And my brother, we had worked at a store in Chicago, was the right guy to run it. Better than anyone could imagine.

He lived in an apartment complex nearby. When I once visited, his was a bachelor's paradise. Mall food for lunch and pizzas for dinner. Cable TV before everyone had it. (Cable, what's cable?)

A grey cat named Beaker who chased crumpled paper balls across the apartment, and a fishtank that could only be managed by a marine biologist. Or my brother Carlos.

Computer parts and accessories filled the place, and he tinkered and toyed and invented with them like a mad scientist, building his own versions like he was in the Cupertino garage in which he belonged. His apartment was an embryonic version of E-Bay, with packages shipping and arriving daily, cocooned in bubble wrap, just like he was, cocooned in his bachelor world.

He taught himself Fortran and Cobol and probably Chinese. When I visited, he put on his Bernie Kosar jersey and we played Nerf football by the lake as the snow fell.

He had a basketball game on his Commodore 64 PC from a new software company - Electronic Arts.  It was called One-on-One, and we faced off as Dr. J and Larry Bird. It was their very first game.

He was no ordinary guy. Inside that lanky and likable frame was a great scientist. But who could really see that? His company loved him, but they were happy to let him work forever, shanghaied next to the Gap. 

Then one day my parents called.

On a land line. Probably on their yellow phone next to the green chalkboard in the kitchen. My mother had her expectations - and she was calling about them. Mom was nothing if not smart, and she sensed that there was a greater scientist to emerge than the one hiding in the bookstore.

She and my father urged him to come home and finish his degree; to give up the pizzas and the paychecks. They offered help, and although I never knew the details, I knew it was something that he could never have done without their help.

He moved into a run-down apartment on Loomis street, near the University of Illinois in Chicago.  A world away from his cozy Ohio apartment. But, once back in school, he soared through his bachelor's, masters, and PhD degrees.  

I visited him in San Francisco, where he was studying at the University of California in a post-doc program. We rode our bikes through Golden Gate Park and ate mexican food in his rented two flat. We flew his radio-controlled plane off of the towering cliffs north of the city.

His next stop was New York, where he is today. A funded department chair and renowned, respected, scientist. A kind and gentle father. A good man.

It reminds me of the profound nature of our choices and actions as parents and human beings. We are teachers and advisors; coaches and critics. We share sadness and happiness. We inject hope and we dry tears.

Most times, the margin of error is insignificant as to be lost in moments of the mundane... But some parenting choices are existentially difficult. And we hope that in the end, looking back, we see with perfect clarity that we got it right - exactly and brilliantly right. 

Like picking up the yellow kitchen phone to call my brother in Dayton. My brother probably answered the phone in his Bernie Kosar jersey, thinking "Now what?"

He could never have imagined that a few short years later he'd be a PhD pilot soaring his geek plane over the deep blue waters of the Bay ... and thinking about how to solve the mysteries of protease inhibitors.

The F1 life is the good life

Our LG washer was the hardest worker in the house, a robotic servant that would have fled the place in tears had it not been connected by copper tubing and hoses. 

The green LED was blinking.   A display that once showed the progress of a million loads of laundry now just showed "E10".  The production line had suddenly come to a screeching halt. 

On a hopeful call to Sears, the telelphone technician asked, "Mam, are you you sure it says, 'E10'? That's not good." 

And so it was off to the garage for my tools.  After an afternoon of trial and error, I discovered a way to bypass the problem and create a Rube Goldberg work-around that included a hose and a bucket and two separate cycles.   The bucket would need to be monitored or the room would flood.  It required slightly less effort than a washboard and a creek.

Sears must have been busy fixing E10's, since it would be seven days until they could be there.  But they had the code and the problem, so we waited for the fix.

After a week of bailing water and numerous conflict-generating floods, the technician finally arrived.   He quickly diagnosed the problem, and stated (as if we already knew and he was reminding us), "You know, we don't carry these parts, they'll need to be ordered."   Evidently they were only available from supply locations in Australia or Antartica or somewhere.   A locker on the space shuttle.   But they weren't in Florida and they definitely weren't on the service truck sitting in our driveway.

I've spent my adult life keeping this production line moving.  Drains, garbage disposals, dishwashers, dryers, lights, toilets, irrigiation systems, windows, furnaces, air conditioners and even washers (if you count the jerry rigging as a fix).   Tommy has handed me tools and held the ladder and learned the basics, even down to the swearing and the trips to Home Depot. 

I am proud of the end result.  So I'll have Julie look under the sink to marvel at the plumbing joints and seals.  Run the water or flush the toilet.  Make Matthew look at the ductwork behind the dryer.  Demonstrate the light switch.  Occassionally, Julie will spread her arms over a folded pile of laundry and say, "Look everyone, isn't this folded nicely?"   And I deserve the teasing.

My sister had a similar problem with her sub-zero refrigerator.  The LED display said "F1".   It was a comical and costly problem to fix.  Since then, my sisters have a code for a complicated and expensive problem.  They call it an "F1".

Our F1's have only been mechanical.  They mark the progress of our family over the years.  They give us points in time to remember other things.   Me up on ladders or with my head under the sink or crouched behind the washer.  Trips to Home Depot with Tommy, always highlighted with "Depot Dogs" and Cokes and the extra flashlight or tool.  A side trip to buy a Batman or a Barbie. 

And we fix the F1 or the E10 and the production line starts again.  Laundry gets folded with silent appreciation.   Life moves on.  And it's a good life.

When you find yourself

In a meeting room at St. Francis Hospital in Blue Island, our small group practiced injections on navel oranges, training to administer vaccinations to childen living in some of the poorest conditions in the hemisphere.  Then, we were innocent, unchallenged, and unchanged.  But our experiences were coming.

In Guatemala, I discovered that one of the lonliest places on earth was in the back of a taxi listening to the scratchy music of a mariacchi band on the radio.  It was as far away from home as I have ever been.   The driver dropped me off at a taxi stop in the middle of the night and in the middle of nowhere.   It was miles to the nearest town, and I had my ratty backpack and nowhere to stay.   I remember looking at the taxi sign and the empty, inky darkness and thinking, "Oh my God."   But I found myself.

I rode horses through shallow streams in the Dominican Republic.  Traveled to villages in the steamy tropical mountains where I swore that I'd remember people actually lived like this.  Dreamt of cold bottles of coke and the chilled water fountains in my college dorm.   Slept on a cot draped in mosquito netting.  It rained every day, and in the muddy brown water flowing down the roads, I could see the changes coming.

On the top of a hill in a small town in Mexico, I lived with a doctor and his family, where I spent many nights with them around the kitchen table, drinking coffee and eating sweet rolls, or 'pan dulce'.  Watching their smiling faces around the table, I would translate Beatles songs for them from English to Spanish as the doctor played his guitar.   He had played the songs for years but never knew what they meant.   Afterwards, we'd walk out into their courtyard, still singing and laughing.  The stars were so close and bright you could clearly see the milky way.   One night, a neighbor came to the door in a panic.  We ran down the hill to his clinic, and he asked me to help him as he delivered a baby. 

Then I knew how I wanted my life to change.  And it did.

When I see pan dulce in a local store, it reminds me of the sweetness of those experiences.  I smile and remember the Beatles songs, sung in Spanish around the kitchen table.  I see the endless brilliance of the Milky Way and remember those other people under the same stars.   I hear a mariacchi song on the radio while I'm on some errand in my car and breathe deeply.  No one understands.  But the memories feel so good.  Those summers changed my life, my direction, me.

I want this for Tommy too.  He'll resist.  But it might be the best thing that could happen to him.  Too.

When you find yourself
In some far off place
And it causes you to rethink some things
You start to sense that slowly
You're becoming someone else
And then you find yourself

When you make new friends in a brand new town
And you start to think about settlin' down
The things that would have been lost on you
Are now clear as a bell
And you find yourself

Yeah that's when you find yourself
Where you go through life
So sure of where you’re headin'
And you wind up lost and it's
The best thing that could have happened
‘Cause sometimes when you lose your way it's really just as well
Because you find yourself
Yeah that’s when you find yourself

When we go through life
So sure of where we're headin'
And we wind up lost and it's
The best thing that could have happened
‘Cause sometimes when you lose your way it's really just as well
Because you find yourself
Yeah that's when you find yourself

(Brad Paisley)

The Birth of Venus

Even in my heavy Marist High School prep jacket, I still only weighed about 130 pounds.  I could eat those hamburgers and fries from Red's every meal and still not gain a pound.  Man, those were the days.

The problem was that I felt skinny.  Scrawny.   When I worked at Dominic's on 115th street, the tough guys worked in stock or in the meat department.   Although I tried, I just couldn't seem to grow out of my size 28 slim jeans.   And I wasn't a body builder.  One of my good friends who worked in the meat department consolingly told me, "Don't worry man, you eventually start gaining weight." 

He was right, but I had to wait about 20 years.  Now my 20-something coworkers look like I did in my prep jacket.  Except they're in suits.  But I'm me.  And it took me so long to get here - and skinny is worse than my 50-year old chubby. 

But it's not the same for everyone.  There is a great big line drawn by our society and it's sketched way beyond chubby. 

And now like peanut butter and chocolate, our obsession with people living beyond the line has been married to the american circus that is reality TV.   The "Biggest Loser" casts misfits with wannabe drill sargeants in a frenzy of psuedo rehabilitation.   And the unfit millions of couch potatoes sit on them and watch, mesmerized.  Some claim it's just the kind of thing they need to get motivated.

And yet, amazingly, some people still naively believe that artistic ideal of the human form is plus-size.  That the beautiful woman is the full-figured woman.  That Peter Paul Ruben's paintings idealize the female form as generous and curvy.    

But, while I think "Rubenesque" once may have been a compliment, it is no longer.   The figures in the Rubens paintings are exaggerated.  There could be little public agreement that this might be considered a model for the artistic human figure.

But the truth can be found in the work of Alessandro di Mariano di Vanni Filipepioticelli - also known as Allesandro Botticelli.   His most famous painting, the Birth of Venus, depicts the goddess Venus (Aphrodite) as she emerges from the sea at birth, standing upon a shell.   Her shell is blown to shore by the Zephyr wind-gods.  She is showered with roses. 

This painting is generally considered to be among the most treasured masterpieces of the Renaissance.

Allesandro's Venus form is not that of those painted by Rubens.  She's a beautiful goddess, a symbol of the coming spring.  She hasn't been living on the treadmill, but she isn't exaggerated either.  She's not a waif.   And Allesandro's representation of this type beauty appears, Venus-like, again and again in his work. 

And you know what?   She could be wearing a Florida State sweatshirt and jeans and be considered an american beauty.  Yet our society argues and obsesses about weight loss and weight gain.   And what's normal. 

Of course, we recognize the health implications and debate who is at fault. 

But we are undeniably a society that is big and getting bigger.   The National Center for Health says that 63% of Americans today are overweight with a Body Mass Index (BMI) in excess of 25.0.  

They can't all be afraid of being scrawny can they?   Or maybe they think the human form is at its artistic best when the painter has to get out the extra tubes of gamboge yellow and crimson?

To get motivated, you don't need to watch the Biggest Loser.  And you don't need to wonder about whether Rubens would have appreciated you.   Take a look at Venus and Aphrodite and the real artistic ideal of the human figure.   Not some reality TV Frankenstein being chased by trainers with pitchforks.