Malaspina '07


FOR THE SAKE OF NOBLER INTENTIONS

Cushioned by idle comforts, softened by southern Californian lassitude, David Schoffman’s calcified intellect has turned malignant. What madness! Tempted by the faint purrs of public acclaim, (such an unlawful prize!), Schoffman has tricked me, (yes, tricked me!) into participating in an exhibition with him and Micah Carpentier.

If rousing the dead were not crime enough, he acts as if our hideous blood feud was but a lover’s spat. Has that drunken spider gone insane!? Schoffman, living as he does in that ivy-mantled tower of international renown, thinks time has healed the deeper vitals of my rage!

It has not!

I have, however agreed to this exhibition, in no small measure due to the infinite charms of Delia Cabral, owner and director of DCA Fine Art in Santa Monica, California. (If Brecht survived those miserable palm trees, so can I).

Cabral (which in Aramaic means “sternest minds amaze”) is a remarkable impresario who combines a flawless eye with a deep commitment to tasteful elegance. She does this with the dreamful ease of bladed grass. She is patient with my worthless rages, imperturbable toward my luxuriant complaints.

The exhibition will take place in August. I may or may not come to the opening. I will not show my finest work. I will not be vengeful nor will I be forgiving.


Carpentier '81

PETULANCE

The charming and comely interviewer, Francine Claudel, is a renowned vedette of the French stage and screen. Her stature in the Francophone world is analogous to that of Halina Reijn’s among the Dutch or Sinead Kennedy among the Irish.

By no means an expert in the arts, her questions to Schoffman were pleasant, well-meaning generalizations aimed toward the typical viewer. What prompted David’s vitriolic riposte was the simple inquiry as to the “style” of painting he engaged in.

As all painters know, “style” is a word used mostly by philistines and knaves eager to characterize a person’s oeuvre as neatly as one would characterize an ice cream flavor.

Poor, unsuspecting Francine used the wrong word to the wrong guy but as they say in L.A. “it made great television!”

Here is the notorious segment from TF1's series "AMERICAN PAINTERS" aired on February 15th 1991