David Schoffman's life has been soaked in the half-joys of worldly resignation. Somewhere between the barefoot tranquility of Buddhist detachment and the poisonous lake of incompetence lies the flawed bell of Schoffman's life.
In a word, he lacks all agency for anything outside the consecrated esplanades of his art. To David, the material world is a dry cake of necessary transactions, a death-cough of tedious repetition. Only in detail can David quiet the throbbing clatter of living. His studio is a cataract of half-finished gullets. With breathtaking sublimity, each picture reflects the intimate embrace of painterly engagement. Every gesture is deliberate. Absent are the loitering flints of accident or afterthought.
And yet his life is the sum of his neglects. It is a wreckage of random outcomes, a product of his rootless passivity.
Some would romanticize this as the quintessential "artist's life", the wages of genius, the steady sacrificial candle-drip of a visionary.
Some wouldn't.
