PREPARATORY SKETCH

"There is no more perfect witness to the pains of painterly deliberation than the preparatory sketch."

So wrote the late Burbery Slater in Amaryllis: Painting's Secret Sequence (2004), his encyclopedic art historical tour-de-force. His thesis can be summed up as follows:

Painters have always suffered a particular infirmity of the mind. From the blind fury of inspired impulse to the mortal calculation of careful forethought, the honeyed Muse visits artists in a variety of forms. Painters possess the unique ability to recognize what he calls "the eupnea of solemn arousal" enabling them to assume the prophetic diction of color and form.

It's a sappy theory to say the least and it's a disservice to my friend David Schoffman that he used two reproductions of his work to illustrate his idiotic argument.



Slater mentions no less than 200 contemporary painters to summon his false surmise. I am pleased that I am not among them.

Micah Carpentier, "The Song of Degrees" 1972

To this day David Schoffman is devoted to the memory of Micah Carpentier. David's obdurate and earnest fidelity to Carpentier's legacy has become, of late, something of a fetish. When he died, Carpentier was working on "The Song of Degrees", a series of drawings scrawled in a tempest of perverse fanaticism on discarded paper bags. His goal was to complete 1000 bags and he scavenged the streets of his native Havana in search of the perfect refuse. From Miramar to Vedado, no dumpster was left unexamined.

Currado Malaspina's short film on the subject is a classic and those interested in a deeper understanding of Carpentier's life and times can view it on YouTube

Perhaps Carpentier was the visionary that Schoffman canonized in a recent essay in Pribeus. I have my doubts but one thing is indisputable: The two of them are the most eccentric artists I have ever met.

David Schoffman's alarming essay, "Machines That Speed Too Slow," published in 1992 in Olympus Quarterly is as appurtenant now as it was prescient then. Triggered by the appointment of Jerry Embudo as director of CCMA, Schoffman's infamous jeremiad is now required reading in most graduate programs in Museum Studies.

Embudo, as many people in the art world remember, was a veteran commercial art dealer and notorious kingmaker. Sterns/Embuto in its heyday represented the likes of Caeiro, de Campos, Carpentier and Danton. The idea that the cultural and pedagogic mandate of a major art museum was handed over to a merchant was highly controversial, to say the least. Schoffman scathingly exposed this brazen betrayal of principles in a 3000 word screed of such vitriolic eloquence that even the barons of the agora (those, of course who could read without moving their lips) were moved.

Some saw Schoffman's catalog of grievances as a naive tilt toward the windmills of wishful thinking. They took particular pleasure in believing that the publication precipitated the ruin of his robust career. Others, by contrast, saw it as a courageous cri de coeur that catapulted a critically acclaimed painter into a wealthy one.

I remember thinking that it was just another self-serving pageant of David's pharmacopia of adjectives coaxing some trivial succès de scandale into personal gain.