WHAT IS OBVIOUS MUST STILL BE STATED
I feel that I must rise to the defense of my friend and colleague, David Schoffman. Someone described his works at DCA as “puny pageants of painterly dexterity.” Another naysayer dilated over “the triviality of his technical mastery.” My favorite was the Dutch critic who called his work “the high watermark of vapid formal complexity for the sheer sake of perfection.”
It seems apparent that these observations are unaccountable to the actual history and conceptual underpinnings of these important pictures. Accustomed to the predictable academicism of post-modernism, David’s breathtaking originality evaded the scope of their understanding.
Far from the withdrawing roar of influence, distanced from the anxious gloss of history, Schoffman watched a thousand sleepless nights from his hilltop studio in East Jaffa where “Rattling Traffic” was conceived.
Based on the prison diaries of 17th century mutineer Carlos Bones, these works are meant to echo the artifacts of Bones’ cloying discontent. Bones, as he longed for what he called the “coughs of the strong seas,” drew strange pictograms on the margins of his scattered papers. Soft rain, surf, shorelines, splintered circles, rainbows twined with ribbons, shadows and piers are but a few of the images found in these diaries.
“Rattling Traffic” is the curve that mediates Bones’ bitter longings with Schoffman’s lamplit exile. Any close reading of David’s work makes this point more than perfectly clear.
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