JACOB AND ESAU

It would foolish to pretend that a life spent staring at unfinished canvases coldly confronting one's glaring inadequacies on a daily basis would be a life void of anxiety or stress. 

For well over a decade my dear friend David Schoffman has been laboring like a serf on a series of works whose ultimate resolution has been as elusive as a sperm whale. Every attempt, every botched opportunity, every missed metaphor has etched a line deep into David's dented temple. Every failure of form, every misdirected shape has sewn another wrinkle around my good friend's milky blue eyes.

He is not broken but he is aged, his hair, white as laundry soap, has thinned into fine meek meadows of downy dander.

Schoffman in front of the still unfinished painting The Covenant of Otto (left: 1999, right: 2013)

Some say he has gone slightly mad. As evidence they cite his forgetfulness, his sudden flights of dreamy inattention and his sloppy, frivolous and amateurish drawings.

Gone is his stridency, his vinegary wit and his eloquent, dinner party disquisitions delivered extempore under the spell of excessive spirits. David is now diminished, even dull, slowed by the solvent vapors of his studio, a toxic cocktail of turpentine, cadmium and lead. His former effulgence has been replaced by a mild composure and a disinterested complacency.

And so The Body Is His Book: One-Hundred Paintings remains unfinished and David's draining energy is absorbed more and more by crossword puzzles, the dog park and his silly little watercolors.

The competitive side of me rejoices in David's inactivity. Of all my contemporaries it has always been Schoffman who represented the only palpable threat to my dominance. Together with me and a couple of other hardened art world veterans we have occupied the thin, brittle peak of critical preeminence reducing our colleagues to virtual insignificance. And now that Schoffman has been laid low by fatigue and infirmity I'd be lying if I claimed to be sorry.

But David Schoffman is a cunning little bastard.

 Could all this be nothing but a diabolical ploy?