His eyes were like tongues inflamed. He had been up all night and his lids were a soggy crimson (had he been weeping?). His unsteady voice was like a dogcart over gravel. His hands were black with charcoal, his nails, early moons of soot.
He had been drawing.
It was Paris in the 70’s and David Schoffman was known as the hardest working, most unproductive painter among his peers. Sustained by faith, hope and Pernod his long apprenticeship was cheered only by the occasional trip to Rome. He was in the habit of working all night in an improvised studio a few blocks north of the Basilica of the Sacré Coeur. He was at war with what he called “the thunderous silence of Watteau and the silent thunder of Rothko.”
In those days, painting was more a confession then a profession. “Career” was a foreign phrase from the taxonomy of landlords and martinets. Painting was an obsession, a calling, a slow spiral into the perils self-knowledge. It took residence within the entrails of an artist with a fixed and incorruptible mastery. It withstood mockery and failure. It was the insatiable lover.
I am brought back to these memories as I vacation presently in a small villa in Kusadasi. Watching the wind sift through the palmettos, I hear the fishermen casting their nets into the quiet Aegean. Trawling for eel and octopus is also not a “career.”
We were right in those days. And we continue being right.
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