THE WILTING OF THE GREY WOLF

David Schoffman insists that the two or three unsold drawings from Live Draw are emblems of virtue. He maintains that had his work lost its edge, he would have sold every last scrap. The fact that he failed to delight everyone equally refutes my contention that he has migrated from the avant-garde to a populist, decorative mode of expressive denial.

He deludes himself.

I was told by a friend who was in attendance at Saturday night’s bacchanal that Schoffman’s work flew off his pad like ravens and that collectors vied for position with ham-fisted greed and ungainly enthusiasm. This friend, who shall remain anonymous for obvious reasons, told me that David concealed several drawings, looking toward DCA Fine Art’s follow-up exhibition, “Live Draw Detritus” where “unsold” works from Live Draw would be displayed.

How cunning my friend has become! This former lion of perilous artistic experimentation has calcified into a leathery reminiscence of hard-earned achievement. He is now content to be the pharisaical apologist for tinsel and frippery.

Oh David …. What lovely drawings … and so inexpensive!

Les Ficelles Silencieuses de Dessins

Something is most assuredly amiss.

For twenty-two years I have greeted each new day with a pain au chocolate, hot milk and the early edition of Le Vers L’Avant, the Midi’s finest newspaper. I rely on its inky pages for a mature, dispassionate rendering of the world’s events. Free of idle speculation, puerile gossip, tendentiousness and hype, L’Avant is an artful relic of a non-existent past.

I was therefore irritably confounded when today’s Art and Culture section led with the following headline: “The Sorcery Of Chalk: David Schoffman Stuns California Crowd With The Silent Strings Of Drawing.”

What a half-lunged, nimble-tongued burlesque! Empty of analysis, vacant of scrutiny, Schoffman could not have received better press had he paid for it! Sending a journalist to DCA Fine Art in Santa Monica to cover the farcical “Live Draw” was bad enough. The toadying servility of the reporting, comparing Schoffman to the likes of Dominique Pécuchet and Veronique Bouvard, two of the Republic’s finest living artists, was a rancid exercise in American style public relations.

I have cancelled my subscription.

LIVE DRAW
EIGHT ARTISTS - THREE MODELS - LOTS OF PAPER

I detect a weakening in David Schoffman’s convictions. His normally strident tones have turned dulcet and accommodating. He seems battle weary and tentative. There is neither thrill nor frenzy in his carriage and those of us who have grown accustomed to his ardent theatricality are now left with only the gaunt niceties of respectable politesse.

Could this signal the curfew of his creativity or merely the solemnity that comes with age. His former self was a shapeless ecstasy, an intellect inflamed, a noisy chorus of urgent enthusiasms. Now he is a vacant precinct of predictability and habit. Where he once sought provocation, he now strives toward effortless geniality.

Perhaps this explains his flirtation with “public drawing”. Maybe Live Draw signals the tug of an inevitable decay, a muffled retreat into the featherbed of pleasing picture making. It could be that the false calm of insouciant color and nimble line are precisely the ideals toward which Schoffman currently leans.

The public will have a chance to evaluate all this on Saturday night, May 24th at DCA Fine Art in Santa Monica.

I’m grateful that I can’t attend.

LIVE DRAW

What shapeless buffoonery! What ill-timed chicanery! Has age yielded no wisdom? Has profit fouled all perspicacity? Has throbbing Mammon thrusted the former vicar of the avant-garde into the cozy innocence of FIGURE DRAWING!!!

David Schoffman is about to break artistic wind, betraying the finely crafted monuments of his illustrious career, by participating in what is mockingly called “Live Draw.” When I read about this carnival of paltry exhibitionism in the otherwise respectable periodical Art Ltd, I was stunned into a state of pagan speechlessness. The former valor of my dear friend David has now been crushed by the common cause of gain.

In our early days together, David and I forswore the antiquated exercise of life drawing as a relic. For thirty years we honored our vow to pursue the new and relinquish the grizzled clichés of the Academy.

And now this!!

If only for their rarity, I would love to purchase one of his drawings. Though the camel-dunged products of his perfidious treachery will undoubtedly be lovely, (David was always a gifted draftsperson), their real value will be as documents of decay and artistic discourtesy.

THE KISS OF THE MARKETPLACE

David Schoffman‘s career reflects the immense disorder of his peculiarly peripatetic ambitions. He tries to find merit in everything equally. He wanders like a tramp from exhibit to exhibit, packing his résumé with a trail of incompatibles.

In 2008 alone he has shown his lucid watercolors at Camillo Galeani’s Galleria Cavallo Puzzolente, his Gunwale lithographs at Kunstsheide Berlin and his unfinished series of encaustic medallions at the Nijmegen Art Fair.

I admit that commercially his kettle continues to boil but he is reaching boat-bottom in ideas and execution.

And now, in Santa Monica, California, he is about to participate in the madman’s mission of drawing in front of a gallery full of spectators. On Saturday evening, May 24, David will be featured in DCA Fine Art’s rekindling of its popular Live Draw exhibition. Three fabulously naked models will apparently gambol about the gallery while a group of eager artists attempt to render them without distraction. Schoffman’s impromptu works typically sell (at absurdly low prices) while he’s in the midst of making them.

It’s all terrifically crass, though I would advise coming early.

CLANKING TOWARD IMMORTALITY

Humble as brine and bashful to a fault, David Schoffman dodges the sinless bouquets of acclaim with dignity and grace. The turbulent spank of celebrity is something he eschews. Disarmingly chaste in matters of self-promotion, he prefers to remain unseen and have the radiance of his work speak for itself.

I was therefore stupefied to find my good friend David splayed shirtless on the cover Doucement magazine, the mint of Parisian middlebrow journalism. Sandwiched between an incurious puff piece about Jacques Dutronc and an over-exposed photo essay on Palestinian medical students in Havana was a five-page interview with Schoffman. In it I learned that he climbs a rope ladder for exercise, that he hates cabbage and that as a child he tried to teach himself Greek by memorizing the folk songs of Vasilis Karras.

Perhaps in an effort to burnish his image, David has decided to venture into the cloudy realm of bourgeois respectability. Maybe he is trying to correct the prevailing image people have of him as the fastidious roué, charmed equally by invidious caprice and naked intelligence. Maybe he feels the need to dispel the rumors of his encroaching madness. Maybe he is dissatisfied that the central hymn of his legacy is a cadaverous fable of unrequited appetites.

Or maybe he is in a waking dream, rattling the cage out of boredom.