TEST CASE

The impregnable bliss of drawing was the subject of a recent study conducted by the New England Conference of Cognitive Orthography. Though laborious and broadly infuriating to most artists, the assembled scientists concluded that the wreckage incurred from the gruesome task of rendering illusions two-dimensionally were abnormally though not unfavorably effecting electrolyte rhythms.

The panel of researchers wired six artists to a systole displacer in order to track the impulse vectors of the sinoatrial node. They found that the brain, though disdaining most pains rather welcomed the atypical discomforts accompanying drawing.

David Schoffman was one of the participating artists and chose as his subject the traditional practice of drawing the nude. Though his QT levels were consistent with the other artists, his augmented limb leads, based on the standard European hexaxial reference system, were way off the charts.

The scientists reached the conclusion that the drawing of the unclothed resulted in an “inarticulate pleasure” unique, singular and myocardially unquiet.

CONFLICT OF INTEREST

The San Francisco Bay Area art-collecting consortium Lysidas is one of the west coast’s most vigorous supporters of contemporary art. Chaired by Milton Edward of Goldman Sachs, this group of discerning visionaries has pooled their considerable fortunes in support of some of the best young California artists working today.

Having recently opened a Los Angeles office in Century City, Lysidas wasted no time raking through reams of unsolicited disks and slides, acquainting themselves with the local lay of the land. Iris Tehila, CEO of Herodotus Systems and the longest sitting member of the Lysidas board was quoted in the Art Newspaper, remarking on the “…wealth of untapped talent, the nascent brilliance, the dauntless dexterous intelligence” she found in particular among Los Angeles painters.

They recently hired my scrupulously mercenary friend David Schoffman to guide them on May 30th through the galaxy of Culver City galleries during its annual ArtWalk. He will undoubtedly begin his trek in the back room of DCA Fine Art at 5797 Washington Blvd where a cache of his very own works on paper will be prominently displayed.

Quel malfrat!

FLAGITIOUS TIMES

The life of many painters is buried in unease. Repairing daily to the devotions of the studio, tending the bitter, artisanal trade in solitude, the painter’s fatal meeting with self is a ritual of terror.

How David Schoffman remains so vacuously superficial is one of life’s great mysteries. A flashy, spry bon-vivant whose handmade shirts from Astor & Black and suits from Warwick Hall betray a clawing refinement and a Galilean lake’s-worth of thin-skinned vanity.

His character does not square with his painting.

The same beaked promontory from where he clasps his cuffs come the most complex, poetic and moral pictures of our century. The image above from his “Body Is His Book” series is a miraculous excavation from the unplowed grit of our contemporary discourse. Its high seriousness is unembarrassed and unapologetic.

Will the real David Schoffman please be revealed!

ACADEMIC RIVALRIES

The faculty at L’Institute d’Art Chronique du Havre includes such luminaries as Zeno Peter, Frank Lazarelli, Claudine McAuliffe, David Shaar Yashuv and Monique Manet. David Schoffman and I have lectured there on several occasions, both together and individually. I think we both agree that as art schools go, L’Institute is better than most.

They recently staged a most novel and unique exhibition. While hosting the cumbersomely titled Fourth Annual Symposium on Contemporary Commentary and Dialectic, they asked all the invitees to spend 20 minutes drawing their colleagues. The results were an eccentric compendium of radically divergent notions of both drawing and portraiture. Each of the 284 participants submitted a work that was ultimately hung at the Institute’s Goddard Gallery.

The show was called Non Possono Disegnare from the Jacko Barbu song of the same name.

Schoffman’s rendering of critical theory professor Louis Versuchend and me is posted above.