from Postcards from Charybdis: David Schoffman and GouacheAPOLOGISTS
Few people recognize the moral universe represented in the works of my good friend David Schoffman. His wide circle of friends include a fair number of well-known poets, including Damian July, Malo Flannigan, Darine Joković and Hakan Silverman. He seems to have found in them some real sympathy.
The poets understand Schoffman’s infantile effulgence, his willful and cupiditous obscurity and even his anguished, taciturn and far from ennobling resentments. They see in his work a mocking abdication of high-mindedness. They understand how the languorous luminosity of his pictures act as clumsy surrogates for seriousness. With fawning forgetfulness they blink at his vaporous deceptions and his unctuous equivocations.
In her introductory essay to the catalog Postcards from Charybdis: David Schoffman and Gouache, Lelli Kabiri, (whose own work is a spit-gob of hyperbole and cant), tells of her first encounter with Schoffman some 25 years ago.
He had the voice of a dead man. His soft, dewy breath whispered like a fading melody. He was more liquid than solid, more courtly, more kingly and as elegantly self-assured as Death itself. My loud heart knuckled under his loathsome silence. He was an artist of the first order, mute, impertinent, careless and invincible. A Mayakovsky with crayons.
Feh!
Few people recognize the moral universe represented in the works of my good friend David Schoffman. His wide circle of friends include a fair number of well-known poets, including Damian July, Malo Flannigan, Darine Joković and Hakan Silverman. He seems to have found in them some real sympathy.
The poets understand Schoffman’s infantile effulgence, his willful and cupiditous obscurity and even his anguished, taciturn and far from ennobling resentments. They see in his work a mocking abdication of high-mindedness. They understand how the languorous luminosity of his pictures act as clumsy surrogates for seriousness. With fawning forgetfulness they blink at his vaporous deceptions and his unctuous equivocations.
In her introductory essay to the catalog Postcards from Charybdis: David Schoffman and Gouache, Lelli Kabiri, (whose own work is a spit-gob of hyperbole and cant), tells of her first encounter with Schoffman some 25 years ago.
He had the voice of a dead man. His soft, dewy breath whispered like a fading melody. He was more liquid than solid, more courtly, more kingly and as elegantly self-assured as Death itself. My loud heart knuckled under his loathsome silence. He was an artist of the first order, mute, impertinent, careless and invincible. A Mayakovsky with crayons.
Feh!
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