It's almost laughable.
Despite the mercurial whims of callow critics whose compass needle is presently fixed on southern California and in the face of fickle but friendly collectors whose over-eager appetites clamor for product of Pacific provenance, my good friend David Schoffman continues to withhold his paintings from view. Precisely at the moment when the Art Fair class is smoldering in a delirium of feral desire and the demand for Schoffman's work is at it's most formidable, David chooses to disappear.
Cloistered like a leper, he remains quarantined in his studio absorbed in his work. Prompted by an absurd and antiquated ethic, he insists on refining and reworking pictures that, to put it crassly, are good enough.
I think there is anger behind this posture of nobility. Treating his work with such high seriousness is a musty relic of Romanticism. Behaving as if the last thirty years of contemporary art never happened betrays an arrogance that has rightly alienated Schoffman from his peers. Stoically laboring over minute brushstrokes and meticulously mixing paints - (oil, of course) - on expansive and orderly palettes are abject, self-indulgent vices masquerading as polished virtues.
Meanwhile his paintings pile up like clover mites. If he's not careful, his loyal cadre of incredulous collectors will discard him like last week's losing lottery ticket.
On top of all this he doesn't return my calls. He sends cryptic messages by way of his over-worked (and under-paid) studio assistants. He is beginning to cultivate a reputation for being "a perfectionist," read: "difficult." He is aloof.
This is all to say that David Schoffman is an antique, a remnant, a wasted rind of an irrelevant past. He's a reactionary who still thinks that painting "matters." His sincerity makes the rest of us look bad.
I hope his mildewed canvases rot. I hope his reputation twists in the fetid winds of score settling innuendo. I hope his stock nosedives into a cesspool of inconsequence. I hope his beautiful paintings are rendered incoherent by the erudite misreadings of influential academics. I hope he runs out of ideas.
On top of all this he doesn't return my calls. He sends cryptic messages by way of his over-worked (and under-paid) studio assistants. He is beginning to cultivate a reputation for being "a perfectionist," read: "difficult." He is aloof.
This is all to say that David Schoffman is an antique, a remnant, a wasted rind of an irrelevant past. He's a reactionary who still thinks that painting "matters." His sincerity makes the rest of us look bad.
I hope his mildewed canvases rot. I hope his reputation twists in the fetid winds of score settling innuendo. I hope his stock nosedives into a cesspool of inconsequence. I hope his beautiful paintings are rendered incoherent by the erudite misreadings of influential academics. I hope he runs out of ideas.
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