I, the Divine (9 page)

These [Asian] paintings I could get into and they made me wonder who I was. By contrast, Western painters tried to tell me who they were.

—
J
OHN
M
C
L
AUGHLIN

DAVID AND I

I can almost see David, calm and inscrutable, disconnected, getting into his car, a gray older-model Nissan, and driving away. He arrives at his home somewhere in the city, some place I do not know, is greeted by someone I do not know, a woman most probably. His car may be modest, but not his home. It is where he entertains. The house has beautiful views of the Bay and the Bridge, floor-to-ceiling windows through which he and his woman can watch the sailboats.

I can almost see David at the Museum of Modern Art looking at the newly acquired Mondrian, thinking the master must have copied McLaughlin, the California painter whose work I taught him to recognize.

“Look,” he will say to the woman. “This painting is by someone trying to imitate John McLaughlin. Why, look here. He left the masking tape on the painting.”

“Who’s this McLaughlin guy?” she will most probably ask, unconcerned with the answer, but, having been indoctrinated with inane politeness since her youth, she feels obliged to ask.

“A California painter who was the obsession of a woman I went out with once.”

David left me before I could teach him Mondrian.

I can almost see David having a picnic in his backyard when his sisters come to visit. He may have a barbecue going. The woman entertains the sisters with stories of how she and David met, how she knew they were just perfect for each other. A laugh here, a giggle there.

The brother-in-law whispers in David’s ear, “She’s quite a catch.”

“She sure is.”

“Are you going to reel her in?”

“I’m seriously thinking about it.” David smiles with his brother-in-law, two conspirators in the game of life.

I can almost see David everywhere I go. He has been an indecent obsession. I was always told time is the great healer, obliterates memory, sublimates passion. Not true. I was never a plaything of time. David left me over two years ago and I have not seen him since, yet I still feel for him as if it were yesterday. There are certain things that transcend time. Nothing seems to have changed with regard to my feelings for him. I am stuck in quicksand.

DAVID AND MCLAUGHLIN

I met David at a low point in my life and he gave me direction, became both my compass and my anchor. I was flailing and he gave me focus. For the first few times we were together, we did nothing but spend time in bed, exploring each other, literally and figuratively. I did not see him enough, since he was constantly busy, which meant that the minute he showed up at my doorstep, I dragged him into bed. I did not realize at first that he felt most comfortable in my bed, when we were alone, no one to see us together. It was in my bed, with me naked, irrespective of whether he was nude or not, that he felt the least threatened.

Our first outing was to the Museum of Modern Art. The curator had set up the corridor with paintings by California artists, Northern California artists on one side and those from Southern California on the other. David and I looked mostly at the Northern California painters because of their use of colors. As we were walking, a painting on the opposite wall stopped me in my tracks. It called to me. “Sarah,” it said, “look at me.” It was a simple painting, of a style that had never appealed to me and which I had considered pointless. Yet I was rooted to my spot, spellbound. It was a medium-sized painting, thirty-two inches wide and thirty-eight inches tall. The main surface was smooth, no signs of brush strokes, the color a yellowish white—it was actually a mixture of zinc white, cadmium yellow, and a touch of raw umber—with a yellow rectangle, slightly off-center. Eight horizontal and four vertical black lines of varying lengths and thicknesses intersected at various points in the painting. I was not seeing a painting at all, but a three-dimensional mobile object, a live sculpture. The black lines moved back and forth across the space. The yellow square pushed farther back into the painting, creating a depth difficult to comprehend. Colors burst through in unexpected places. It was my introduction to John McLaughlin, the painter who opened my eyes.

David could not understand why I refused to move from my spot. “You like this painting?” he asked me.

“Yes. It’s beautiful.” I looked at him, hoping he would not think me a complete lunatic. I could not understand my awe.

“What do you like about it?” He looked at me, intrigued more by me and my reaction than by the painting itself. I tried to explain, surprising myself by doing an adequate job. I could not elucidate the spiritual and emotional aspects of the painting I saw, but I showed him how the lines moved, how the intersections of lines changed colors as you looked at them, even though they were painted black. By the time I was done, he agreed it was a good painting, saying he would consider putting it up in his house.

“I wish I could take it home,” I said. “I’d love to have it.”

“Even if you could,” he told me, “it would probably cost you a fortune.”

“It would be worth it. I’d pay anything for this painting. If the museum would sell it to me, I’d buy it in a second. It’s so grand.”

“You’re being silly,” he said. “This is a nice painting and it would look nice in your house, but why would you want to pay so much for it? It’s only paint on canvas. No, it says here it’s on Masonite. That’s probably cheaper. This isn’t something unique.”

“What do you mean it’s not unique? I’ve never seen anything like it.”

“No,” he said in all seriousness. “I don’t mean anybody can do the original, but anybody can copy it. You can do this. You’re an engineer. If you like this painting so much, why don’t you make one exactly like it? It shouldn’t be too hard. Don’t you think?”

I had never thought of that. I looked at the painting and began to wonder if I could copy it. I did not see why not. That was how it started.

It took me seventeen paintings to achieve an adequate copy of the McLaughlin. I tried painting it on canvas, on linen, on Masonite, and learned about texture. I tried different kinds of paints. I painted the square by covering areas with masking tape, by using a ruler, as well as freehand. By the tenth painting, I got the colors right, but it was only on the seventeenth, once I figured out the correct measurement and placement of the lines, that the painting worked. David was encouraging during the whole process. He could not tell the difference between each painting, but he was patient as I tried ineffectual explanations. He liked my first attempt as much as he did my seventeenth, so as a present, I gave him the first painting. I considered it the perfect gift. It meant the world to me at the time. From the moment I put paint on canvas, I realized a pleasure so primitive, so intrinsic to my nature, it is hard to fathom how I could have gone so long without it. I wanted David to share in my pleasure. I wanted him to have something of me in his house. Little did I know I would never see the painting again. Once the painting left my house, I lost it. David never trusted me enough to tell me where he lived.

David was instrumental in furthering my artistic career. He had been to a small gallery’s opening and told me about it. He suggested I give them a call since they seemed to exhibit abstract paintings. I spoke to the director, a wonderful woman, younger than I, who supported herself as a waitress and had converted a small garage into a gallery to show her friends’ artwork. I told her I was a beginning painter and would like to have her opinion on my work. She showed up within thirty minutes, saying she had nothing to do that afternoon. She loved all sixteen of the paintings. She wanted to exhibit all sixteen paintings, in chronological order, to show the progression, even though the final painting was an exact replica. The exhibit was not a resounding success, but it was not an embarrassment either. We placed the sixteen paintings in order, with an elaborate explanation of the methodology used. It may have not changed the art world, but it was instructional. Having my work exhibited changed my whole view of myself. I was no longer as lost. I had a purpose for waking up in the morning. And for that, if nothing else, I will always be grateful to David.

David suggested I take classes, that I might learn more about painting. I took an extension class at the San Francisco Art Institute. On the first evening, the teacher told us there were two ways we could
not
paint in his class: we were not allowed to paint diagonally and we were not allowed to paint black. For the life of me, I could not figure out why a painter—of middling success, I might add, but still a painter—would come up with such arbitrary rules. What was wrong with the color black? My first instinct was to leave the class and never come back. I stayed, though, and for the entire tedious semester I painted nothing but black diagonals. I had black diagonal lines crossing solid-colored canvases, black diagonal lines crisscrossing each other, black diagonals all over the place. The teacher never said anything to me the whole semester. At the end of term, I was the only student to receive an A for the class. No other student received a grade higher than a C. I did not take any other art class after that.

By the time I had my second exhibit, I had developed a distinctive painting style, consisting of large, square canvases with colored bars on a solid color background, always two colors, thinly painted. The owner of a New York gallery wrote saying he would show my work in his gallery for three weeks if I was able to pay the expenses. The deal was fairly straightforward; I would get a New York show, in a SoHo gallery no less, if I paid two thousand dollars plus the cost of shipping my paintings. I was hesitant at first, unsure if it was simply a vanity exhibit. I agreed on the deal because of two things: the owner said all proceeds from the sale of the paintings would go directly to me until I recovered my expenses after which he would take his commission, and David thought it was a great deal because of the publicity I would receive. We scheduled the show for January of 1995, just over two years after I began painting. Luckily, I ended up recouping a lot more than my expenses from the New York show. I had shipped my paintings by UPS and they destroyed two of them, one on the way to New York and the other on the way back. I had insured them, thereby receiving four thousand dollars from UPS. So, of course, on my resumé, I include UPS as a major collector of my paintings.

David always came up with excuses for not attending any of the openings. He did show up for a reception in San Francisco, after I had nagged him for weeks about it. It was on a Thursday night, and that was not
our
night. He begged off, hinting over and over about other plans. I was surprised when he showed up. He stayed for about twenty minutes. We barely talked as I was busy with other people. He waved at me when he came in, walked around the gallery, and left without saying good-bye. For a long time after that I had to hear about how I had ignored him.

David’s disillusion with my art matured slowly, reaching its apex with the emergence of Baba Blakshi. Baba was my response to the hypocrisy of the art world. She was never meant to grow, burgeon, and mature. A local gallery put out a call for entries in an exhibit called “Apparitions.” The curator wanted artwork dealing with the concept of visions, apparitions, and materialization of icons. I am not sure why the idea intrigued me, not being anything I would usually have considered, but from the moment I read the advertisement in the art magazine, my mind was overwhelmed with possibilities. I proposed two pieces; both were accepted. The first was the now-infamous Jesus-on-a-Tortilla. I had a local printer make a metal plate with an embossed line drawing of Jesus, taken from
Head of Christ Crowned with Thorns,
a painting after Guido Reni at the National Gallery in England. I had wanted a Michelangelo Christ, but the Reni had the exact insufferable suffering look I loved so much. I heated the plate and threw flour tortillas on it. The result was a stack of Jesus-on-Tortillas. This, of course, was a reference to a true story from 1978, about a woman in New Mexico who was frying her tortilla and saw the picture of Jesus on it. She had it framed. Believers arrived by the bushel from around the world to glimpse the epiphany. I gave the world a whole stack. The second piece, Jesse-in-My-Toilet was a little more intricate. I had to have a plumber build it for me. I used an actual toilet bowl, with an internal pump to recycle the water. I had black light installed under the toilet’s rim, which turned on when the toilet was flushed. Inside I had someone paint a portrait of Jesse Helms that could only be seen when the black light was on. Hence, whenever the toilet was flushed, a barely visible picture of Jesse appeared.

David did not appreciate my pieces. He suggested this could be the end of my serious artistic career; no respectable curator would take my paintings seriously if I presented a toilet as art. I explained Duchamp and the urinal,
Fountain.
I was not doing anything particularly new or shocking. I simply thought it was amusing. I told David I would not enter the pieces with my name, since I had no interest in them being associated with me. I would come up with a silly name, like Duchamp did, a joke name. I came up with Baba Blakshi. My serious painting would not be affected (I was wrong, of course, but for reasons different from the ones David mentioned).