A Portrait in Process
Monday, February 26, 2007. Endnotes.
Jon began his portrait of Kurt Cobain soon after his weekend show at Loosenz hair salon, part of the annual St. Clair ArtWalk. It was Jon’s first public showing of his work and he stayed drunk from the Friday night opening until tear-down Sunday to get through it. The centrepiece of the show was “The Good Doctor,” Jon’s large, head-and-shoulders portrait of the late Hunter S. Thompson. The famously irascible journalist is imagined in a moment of absorbed and even serene contemplation, liberated from the self-generated props that attached to his image and obscured it. No porkpie hat, no cigarette holder, no cigarette even. No drugs or alcohol in sight. No handgun. Even his equally famous collaborator, the artist Ralph Steadman, is absent, though symbolically present, Jon tells me, in the circles that hover near Thompson’s thinking head. They are the minatory orbs and eyes that rush from the horizon at the viewer in Steadman’s manic drawings. They have become more like soap bubbles, pure placid geometry. Forms. They look Platonic, I tell Jon at the opening. He wanted to depict Thompson as he was, “an intellectual,” Jon says.
If he were art-school-trained, Jon tells me the first time I visit his studio (or his painting room, or the unicorn room, since Jon never calls it a studio), he would paint a picture from the background out. Working from distant space toward the viewer and the focus of interest. But he always does the figure first and has to devise a background for it later.
“The background is the hardest part,” he says. “Always.” The circles that float about Hunter Thompson’s head, cinching the abstract space he lives in, were the very last additions to the painting.
Jon grows agitated thinking about backgrounds. He pours himself more wine and makes jabbing motions with his brush.
“I’ve got the figure, but then some kind of background has to go in. But then I have to change the figure to fit the background.”
He points to where Cobain’s dark bathrobe, still rough, meets an even rougher, just patched-in, background of lighter gray. Moves his brush agitatedly on and off, just above, this borderline.
“Back and forth. This, then this. It’s frustrating.”
After the Artwalk show, I next saw Jon at a group tarot reading at my apartment. It was early January. Jon showed me an image on his digital camera of the new painting he was trying to finish for a four-artist show at the end of the month. Cobain was drawn in pencil on a grid on another large canvas, with parts of his face, and particularly his hair, already worked up in paint. When I expressed pleasure in the half-done look, with the underdrawing showing through, Jon said he had considered showing it that way. But then decided against it. He was unable to finish the piece despite marathon sessions until 4 and even 6 a.m. (he starts work at 9 each morning, as a framer in an art shop). At the opening, despite viewers’ interest in “The Good Doctor” and another completed painting, Jon said he didn’t “feel part of the show. I’m in it, but I’m not.” There was no new work.
When we first enter his painting room with our bottles of wine and beer, Jon shows me his visual starting points. A photocopy of a magazine picture of Cobain, in the early days, before he was famous. Behind him, an eager-looking head off his right shoulder, is his bassist Chris (now Krist) Novoselic. On the other side, removed a little, a slouching temporary drummer with a moustache and a mullet haircut. Looking “out of place,” as Jon says. It is before Nirvana’s final lineup.
Jon made a copy of this copy, cropping the other two men out of the picture so Cobain stands alone. He drew a careful pencil grid over the image, numbered down the lefthand side, to help with the transfer to the large scale on the canvas.
The other visual aid is a textbook drawing of a hypodermic syringe, with its parts – plunger, barrel, needle – separated and labelled.
“He was a junky,” Jon says a couple of hours later, when I remark on the lack of musical references in the picture. “A great musician. I mean, hearing Nirvana changed my life. But a junky.”
The act of painting puts new spaces around Jon’s words; they seem softer, more measured. His normal speaking voice is gentle and modulated, even a little courtly, but when animated by a passion, the words tumble and spill, like a swift smooth river hitting jumbled rocks. When I made the banal observation that there were no guitars or other musical props in the background, a loud guttural “Noooo!” pounced on my words as if to swallow them. At the tarot reading the most accurate thing said by the cards, everybody present agreed, was that Jon is “violently passionate.” He was pleased by the characterization, calling it “something to live up to.” But the approach and withdrawal of painting – leaning to the canvas, concentrating on a stroke, coming back – impart a more meditative rhythm. Violent passion exists alongside, within, a certain measure and control.
He says he gets tense, wound up, before starting to paint. Usually he smokes a cigarette or two, to calm down and to put off entering the room. “Frustrating” is the word he uses most often in connection with painting. Once in the room, though, he stays for several hours at a stretch. Up to six or seven hours.
It’s only when he comes out that he finds out how long he’s been in there, since there are no clocks or watches in the room. It’s a “timeless” place. He tells me that he’s asked friends to remove their wristwatches if they’re visiting him in there.
Usually he’s alone, but he has no problem with someone else visiting. “It’s irrelevant,” he says.
Around and above Cobain’s head is a halo, so far just in white gesso and pencil, like the halo above Christ’s head in Byzantine paintings. Six syringes, needles inward, pierce it at regular intervals like sun rays. Cobain has shoulder-length hair, chiselled features, large intent eyes. Is wearing a dark robe, his gaunt chest bare. I’m surprised for some reason to see Jon is not shying away from the Christ comparison. Is going straight at it.
JH: He does seem angelic to me. Maybe that’s ironic.
MB: It doesn’t seem ironic to me.
JH: No?
Jon paints with only one colour: Payne’s Gray. Mixed with titanium white in various proportions to produce different tints. (Or should that be shades? Colour + white = tints. Colour + black = shades. But if your colour looks black to begin with? The blues in the composition of Payne’s Gray would seem to make tints the more correct word . . . though shades of gray sounds more right. . . .)
Straight out of the tube, Payne’s Gray looks black. Not a matte black, though. There is an elusive sheen of blue that catches the eye. On the tube of Liquitex acrylic – the only brand Jon uses – the composition of Payne’s Gray is given as bone black, ultramarine blue and ultramarine violet. Jon mixes in white in various quantitites, but the most frequent tints that strike my eyes in his paintings are, from darkest to lightest: black (straight Payne’s Gray), dark blue-gray, lighter gray-blue, gray, and white. The effect is not monochromatic (though technically it is) so much as coherent. A world defined by certain laws and strictures. A world of bounded permissions, perhaps.
(Beside me on my desk, a kind of talisman as I attempt this portrait in words, is the “business card” – Jon puts quotes around the words when he says them – that Jon had printed for the show in September. It gives his name in capital letters: JON HISCOCK, and underneath, in tiny lower case letters: an artist. The third line, in an intermediate font, is his phone number. The letters and numbers are black on a white background.
On the back is a ten-second sketch Jon supplied at the opening. A scrawl for his unruly thick black hair, lush black eyebrows and Elvisy sideburns. Dots for his more or less permanent Wve o’clock shadow. Straight large nose. The near side of the face firm in line, the other wobbly, cut up by shadow, or turning. He’s there, fleetingly.
On our way out after the second opening, the one he wasn’t “part of,” wasn’t “there,” Jon lit two firecrackers. One exploded on the sidewalk and the other he tossed into a parking lot. The parking lot attendant threatened to call the police, who had a RIDE trap set up nearby. After a brief slurred argument, Jon slouched away, shoulders hunched, sweatshirt hood pulled up.)
Not long before I leave this first night, Jon tells me that I’m “dead wrong” about something. I don’t remember what we were talking about – we didn’t record the meeting and I put away my notebook after the first few minutes – but I’m sure he’s right. I think so even as he is saying it and I remember it that way.
Dead wrong. It is a familiar feeling to have while working on something, perhaps not more so on a portrait than on any other kind of project. In doses not too toxic it can be a good push forward.
I’ve watched Jon paint, talking between the silences, for three hours. It’s midnight when I leave. Jon says he feels stirred up and will probably paint a few hours more.
He goes at it till four, as I learn the next day.
One topic we keep circling back to is the mystery of one’s subjects. How beyond what you know about why certain subjects attract you – givens of temperament, of personal history – there remains a puzzlement, often an irritation. Motifs repeating themselves. Variations on themes. Like cranks who go on making the same point long after you’ve acknowledged and understood it. Or think you have.
As soon as I got home, I jotted down fragments I could remember accurately from our exchanges about this.
JH: I don’t know why I paint celebrities. Celebrity disgusts me. (Laughs.) The business of celebrity.
Jon’s largest and most successful painting to date is “The Good Doctor.” If he can finish the Kurt Cobain, he would like to paint Charles Bukowski. Thompson, Cobain, Bukowski: they’re celebrities of a certain kind. Outsider figures, individuals from the margins who could have remained there, but their gifts found an audience and they occupied the spotlight. Each one of Jon’s figures, whether a celebrity or not, is alone on the canvas. The space is never shared with another figure. And it is shared with very few objects.
JH: I’m interested in individuals. Or individualists. Each person stands alone, don’t they? I mean ultimately. (Murmured, with long pauses. This seems, to both of us I think, a sterile line of thought. Pre-programmed, automatic.)
And most of Jon’s paintings, and all of his best ones, are of suicides. (Or attempted suicides: a girl with a ladder of scars on her wrist.) Thompson, Cobain. Bukowski, for all his self-described excesses, died of leukemia in his seventies. That may be why Jon says he doesn’t “feel much connection with him,” despite liking his writing. I would be surprised if Jon paints Bukowski. It will be a departure.
MB: I don’t think I could trust someone who hadn’t considered suicide.
JH: No, I agree. I don’t think you could.
MB: They wouldn’t seem quite human.
JH: No. If you haven’t grazed the bottom you . . . haven’t lived. Have you?
Jon begins the night’s painting by painting over what we agree to call his “endnotes.” These are the last, loose strokes he makes right at the end of the last night’s work. They amount to an idea, a starting point. In rare cases they might furnish a line that can be cleaned up and kept. More often, they are a gesture towards such a line, so they get painted over and the better line tried in their place.
The endnotes of a month ago are tendrils of Cobain’s hair. Jon spends all the time that I observe tonight working at strands of hair. Painting over the endnotes, first, in Payne’s Gray straight from the tube. Then trying new curves of hair. Or firming up, outlining, other strands. Painting out, painting over, he says, is what he is doing most of the time. Waiting for a painted-over section to dry so he can try it again.
Jon prefers to work close to the floor, crouching or kneeling. He positions the canvas to allow this. At the start of the evening, he turns the canvas upside-down on the easel to work on the needles in the halo. He tapes one of them off with masking tape. But as soon as he starts on the needle, he stops. Turns the canvas right-side-up and begins on the hair. Except for an attempt to firm up a jawline and define the collar of the bathrobe, the hair is the focus of the night’s work.
It amazes me to see how the quick adjustment of the bathrobe collar, just a preliminary sharp angle that will be “rounded back” later, pulls the face above it into sharper focus. Touches of abruptness, of severity, work like necessary struts amid the tangle of curves and ovals, drooping hair and worn fabrics. Like the glint of something man-made in foliage. Jon nods in agreement when I quote a comment that Payne’s Gray doesn’t exist in nature. It approximates things, it verges on them. But it’s artificial.
Jon keeps a hand mirror with a bright red plastic handle near the painting. He turns his back on the image and views it in reverse in the mirror.
“It lets me see things I wouldn’t see.”
JH: Your subject must say something about you. Don’t you think?
MB: I’m not so sure.
JH: That it says something?
MB: That it says something directly.
I explain – confusingly to my own ears – that subjects do speak about the artists that choose them, but often in tricky ways. It’s not a straight line back. As I speak I’m standing back from my own halting words, listening to them skeptically. Could you ever be quick enough to catch your true subject? Jon is doubtful and so am I.
“I try to be straight,” Jon says. “I try to be direct.”
“I wish I could be looser,” Jon says, making sweeping motions with his hands. The brushstrokes of the painter he is imagining at the moment.
“You seem loose to me,” I tell him. He does. His tolerance for the unfinished background, its hovering nagging question. The endnotes. And the ability I see to follow his nose, press hunches no further than they lead, reverse himself a thousand times.
“I’d like to be loose.”
Friday, March 2, 9 p.m.–1:30 a.m. A Mouth Emerges.
Over the four-plus hours I watch Jon work tonight, Cobain acquires a mouth. “Not his mouth,” Jon emphasizes. “Just a mouth.” I sense he is trying to leave himself room to maneuver, keep himself loose and looking. Once you say, That’s it, you’re blind. For better or worse, you’ve stopped. Discipline and desire are both involved in delaying that point. They are two sides of staying with something. Trying to keep up with it as it moves.
Jon rarely calls his subject by name. Never Kurt or Cobain, and only occasionally Kurt Cobain. A name has come to seem as superfluous and inadequate as it can become with a spouse or with anyone who is constantly in the room with you. When it is employed, as it may be in moments of anger or frustration, it is to try to reassert a distance that has long since vanished. The edge of bitterness that creeps into the name at such times is the acknowledgement that the distance can no longer be recovered. You’ve left the safe home of names.
Kneeling, outlining hair strands, Jon tells me that he grew up in a home that was “terribly repressive . . . extreme.” “No outside influences until around puberty. They came in then from friends. He” – he means Cobain, Cobain’s music – “helped me become my own character. An individual. To start becoming.”
But Jon talks less tonight, and I ask fewer questions. When I arrive at 9:00, he’s been painting for two hours. He started right after he got home from work, skipping supper. His music’s playing: The Cars, Talking Heads, The Motors. He gets up as soon as each side ends and turns it over or selects a new one. He buys the vinyl albums at Vortex, the used record and CD shop. He’s never painted without music playing and says he never will. He couldn’t. “The silence,” he says, and laughs loudly at the very thought.
“A funny-awful story,” he tells me. After working till 4:30 Monday morning – “very drunk and stoned, but working right up to near the end, not just sitting contemplating the last 2 hours” – Jon got himself in to work at 9, then had no wish to confront the studio after his shift. “The mess, the bottles . . . and the painting, of course. The painting.” (Does he ever put a painting away so as not to see it? I interrupt. Turn it around, hide it? During the month-long layoff, say. No, he says, never.) “Finally, Wednesday night, late, I came in. I heard a hum. It was the turntable, going around and around. Two days.”
“What was the record? Do you remember what was turning?”
Jon stands with his head bent, trying to get it. Finally he does.
“Judas Priest! ‘Breaking the Law.’ I love that song.”
Pot, he says, can help the painting, but it is a more deliberate calculation and a finer one than alcohol. “Just enough . . . an edge . . . not,” he gestures at the armchair. Not sunk paranoid in the chair, “contemplating.”
Though he thinks there will be a great deal of contemplating with this picture. He keeps using the word, as if getting used to an unpleasant fact. I can’t help thinking of a boxer in sparring sessions, or early in a fight, absorbing solid but acceptable body blows. News it’s better to learn early rather than be surprised. Establish a baseline, a threshold.
The work of the night will be the mouth. That’s not clear to either of us at first. But there’s a sense of something impending, to which everything else is preliminary. We front-load our questions and answers into the first half hour, getting them out of the way. After that, when Jon sits down to take a break, we just chat, about the painting or other topics.
The size? He has to think about it. 3 feet by 5 feet. From his chair, Jon says, the face looks “Satanic” as often as it looks “angelic.” I check an impulse to say that the same person could play Christ or Satan in a movie; that might be an elementary casting principle. I hear my own voice more tonight, worry that I’m talking too much.
From close in, usually kneeling, Jon holds the painting by its edge with his left hand. The way you would grip someone’s shoulder you wanted to hammer home a point to. His face is two inches from Cobain’s. He lays his right forearm across the painting to brace the canvas, hold it steady while his wrist and fingers move with the brush. When he ducks away for more water or paint, the canvas bounces, taking some moments to come to rest. I ask him about the problem of this bounce, the jostling it produces.
He nods, it’s a problem, but with a blank look in his eyes, as if I’ve just brought up the problem of it being cold in the winter.
“Is it better with a small painting? You can stretch it tighter.”
“Worse. Then I put it on the floor and lean on it. All my weight. It sags. Pulls loose.”
Is it a portrait he’s painting? A question that came to me the other night and I forgot to ask. Jon says it’s a good question (I’m not sure it is), but we get no further than agreeing that we’re not sure just what a portrait is. As with a lot of common words – love, work, art, friendship – there’s really nothing beyond a usable common understanding, a tacit agreement that we’re scanning the same terrain when we employ the word. And even that falls away quickly under scrutiny. It’s not a likeness in the usual sense of the word, we agree on that. But “likeness” is another word that seems to crumble, dissolve, as you handle it. Likeness to what? How like?
First the old mouth has to disappear. This has already happened when I arrive. Yesterday Jon tried to work on the mouth but it “turned huge” so he painted over it. The old mouth shows through the gesso, a dark blur, as if behind a diaphanous white fabric pinned over it. Fabric is the wrong word, though, since the hanging white shape looks large and slabby, meaty, like a cow’s tongue. Without a mouth the chin looks huge, melting – yet Jon is not a surrealist. He’s not strictly a realist either. (Though what would strictly mean?) These categories won’t help.
The hair, especially on the right side, has been tightened. Many of the strands are outlined in black, so that a single curve of falling hair could be, in isolation, its own painting: solid black outline, blue-gray interior, white highlight. Jon mumblingly refers to such touches as “graphic elements.”
The effect of the more finished hair is to pull not only itself into better focus, but the whole face. It seems to have emerged from thicker to thinner fog, or from deep underwater to closer to the surface. Strangely, the untouched parts get pulled into tighter focus along with the worked-on bits. The eye wants to resolve. It tugs the elements toward a provisional resolution.
The endnotes of the layoff, which were painted out last time, have returned and found their form, at least for now. White tendrils of hair, longer than the main mass of hair, curling inward on either side like long commas or fish hooks.
And there are new endnotes scattered over the canvas. Decisive ideas in different places, whose overall effect is of a surge, an attempt to lay hands on the image and yank it a degree closer out of the fog. Loose white lines, one on either side, suggesting arms of the bathrobe. Up till now the robe – or perhaps a baggy sweater, a shapeless cardigan leaving the chest bare, Jon isn’t sure – had been an amorphous black shape; it is surprising how much these delicate wobbling verticals, just in gesso, lighten it. A shape like a large X-acto blade, with the point up, has been outlined in black on the throat. This large, hard-edged lozenge attracts the eye. In some crude way it bodies forth a voice, the musculature of making sounds. Tapering black lines, creases more like slashes, go up beside the mouth – where the mouth was – like the Joker’s painted laugh lines. Along with the “huge” mouth, whited out but looming, the effect is clownish. A circus clown’s painted face. Jon points this out and chuckles at it. The art bus has its destination, serious, but along the way you get treated to these comical sideshows.
And: it helps to laugh sometimes at the one you are wrestling with from two inches away.
There aren’t six needles in the halo, there are eight. And they aren’t spaced evenly, they stab in at different intervals. I miscounted the other night and imposed my own symmetry, even though Jon told me he liked “irregular symmetry” and I told myself to take note of the phrase. Attention is hard. Hard to achieve at all, harder to maintain.
Now, an hour into the night, I notice a small dark circle on the near cheek below the right (Cobain’s left) eye. A mole? I ask. A “heroin scab,” Jon says, chuckling again, but for now he’s letting it pass as a mole or birthmark. He has others in mind.
The 3″ slit in the lower right of the canvas is another thing I didn’t see before. It’s in the hastily painted light gray of the provisional background, which doesn’t even reach the top, petering out in smears into gesso. It’s easily missed, part of an area that the eye dismisses. (One consequence of any careful observation is the realization that normal looking is a swamp of so many assumptions and other booby-traps that it amounts to sheer disregard. Functional blindness.) All of his canvases are torn, Jon tells me. He gets them from the store free, and patches them along the way. He takes me into the bedroom where “The Good Doctor” is hanging. The rip was in the ear, he tells me. Peering close, I see a slight bulge in the paint surface. Jon tells me to stick my hand around the stretcher edge to feel the canvas from behind. I feel the stitched-up seam, like touching a scar.
We both agree that it feels better to use what’s at hand. Fix it up, work around its flaws. It would be horrible to work with shining new tools and materials. They’d be chasing you out of the room.
“I’m going to do the mouth tonight,” Jon says around midnight, several hours into it.
I register my delight by punching the air with bowed head – a rock star’s fisted tribute, or John Carlos’s Black Power salute at the Mexico Olympics – worrying even as I do so that I’m queering things. To an artist working, overt enthusiasm is glucose: a quick rush, then sugar blues.
But Jon isn’t paying close attention. Seems sallow, sunk in himself. Sunk in the chair, staring at the canvas. Everything so far tonight has been a long ramp. Our exchanges often signalled this:
JH: I don’t like this (as he outlines hair, applies highlights) . . . this boring . . . tediousness. . . .
MB: Fussy, you mean? Finicky.
JH: Yeah. The hair’s done, I think. Does it look done to you?
MB: It looks good.
JH: (muttering to himself) Well, I’ve still got to do it.
Poling through a swamp, or paddling, or running on land – some sort of locomotion that requires more exertion than depressing a gas pedal – you don’t sight by the thing you’re passing at the moment. Or even by the landmark just up ahead. Muscle and time are still needed to pass those things, but your momentum, the rhythm you’ve acquired, makes you confident in doing so. On the other hand, you don’t want to fixate overmuch on the furthest point you need to reach. Assuming you can even see it. Craning that far ahead is dispiriting, counterproductive. Middle sight works best. Try to bring the next stage into focus, concentrate on bringing it closer, sharpening its details – that means you’re advancing – then, when it seems assured, though still a ways off, let your eyes drift up the shoreline to find the next mark.
It could be a rough analogy.
MB: . . . being tolerant of chaos . . . but not too much . . .
JH: . . . within limits . . .
MB: . . . fixing . . . form when you find it . . . but not before . . .
JH: You need both things. . . . that’s the hard . . .
I don’t want to impose too many ideas on this. I need to watch. Look.
Jon springs out of the chair, walks to the canvas and begins dotting the chin area rapidly. Rapid pecks at it, like a woodpecker. The brush tip a pointed beak. Flick, flick, flick.
“You’re doing the stubble first?”
“I need something to put the mouth in.”
It all happens very quickly. In no more time than it took to shape and neaten a strand of hair, the lower third of the face is dotted with Payne’s Gray straight from the tube. The mouth area is still a blank white oval. It is strange how these quick black whisker dots – too dark, but he will add various grays and whites to them – seem to build up flesh and dimension. Because hairs must grow out of something? I don’t quite understand it, but I’m seeing it. Layers of skin are thickening out towards us. And the black Joker slashes are receding behind them. Jon must have seen that potential in them before, must have built this flesh somewhere already.
MB: Not so satanic with the stubble. Or angelic.
JH: No. It’s humbling.
A shadowy, unshaven man is taking shape on the canvas. He looks more real, but also more anonymous. A stylized Kurt Cobain has given way to him. It is a bit unnerving and miraculous, this power of the stubble. Dead cells extruding, sweat and pores, problems, sleepless nights. The “done” hair is too good for this guy, too neat. A bum is wearing a rock star wig. Jon seems jittery, anxious or just keyed up, into it. He keeps stabbing in more specks. “It’ll be much lighter,” he keeps telling me or telling himself. Murmuring it, face next to the canvas. “Lighter . . . softer . . . with some whites and lighter grays. . . .” Ducking down to load the brush at the little pool of pigment, then peck, peck, pecking it in again.
He’s worried about going too far, but it isn’t a time to hold back. The idea’s got to be seen through. Give it its full strength, its due, then see if it’s lawful in the piece. Otherwise you’ll never know.
JH: Once I start painting I never look at the reference pictures. Not until much later. But when I do, I’m always surprised how close it is. Take a look at the hair.
MB: It’s true. The way it falls. The curves and shapes.
JH: Even individual strands . . . small details.
MB: Maybe you’re imagining your way back to it.
JH: Or just forgetting. (loud laugh) Forgetting then remembering.
MB: Taking the long way home.
JH: Yeah.
Jon takes a step back, stares at the painting with a numb expression. He looks tired, a bit irritated. Sick of it, maybe. He dips his brush into water, then into the Payne’s Gray, making a more watery black. Then starts adding this watery gray with a loose wrist, smearing it back and forth with what seems a sloppy motion into the stubble, starting below the nose. Swish, swash, more water, pigment, swish, swash.
I feel a start of fear watching this. Why are we giving up on the stubble so soon? It seemed promising. After watching the quick but precise dotting of the stubble for the last half hour, the offhand negligence of the new strokes especially unnerves me. Without warning I’ve been yanked from Seurat to a kid slapping paint on his dad’s garage. Why? What just happened?
Soon, though, the new strokes become a little more measured. Rounding the mouth, Jon adjusts his own rhythm, reining it in a little. And I see that he hasn’t abandoned the stubble idea. Not at all. We’re at least one crucial stage from that. First we have to follow this bum all the way into the shadows where he broods and lurks, where he lives. He certainly won’t come out into the daylight to meet us.
Once more, just a few minutes before the night’s work ends, I wonder if fatigue and discouragement are running the show. The white mouth oval shines like a flattened moon out of the stubble-shadow. Now Jon starts swiping loose diagonals into it with the dark watery gray. They are the most slapdash-looking strokes I’ve seen him use yet. They look close to doodling. I’m puzzled, then I understand. The white is just too glaring. If it’s too late to construct a mouth tonight, the area has to at least become a darkness. He’s painting the mouth endnotes.
But, no, that’s wrong again. As I watch, with a bewildered dawning joy, I see the loose criss-crossing lines begin to suggest a shape. Something familiar in this nest of streaks, evolving from the jumbled dark. Two lips, full, fleshy . . . crease in the upper . . . black slit between them. I’m watching it, but I can’t say how it’s happening: with the casual-seeming swipes, and no shade other than the straight Payne’s Gray, the variations coming from more or less water and the start (darker) or end (lighter) of a stroke, a clumping or trailing-off effect.
It’s as if the mouth wants to evolve. It seems to rise out of the canvas of its own accord, assembling itself out of whatever odds and ends are available in the swamp.
In which case the essence of this drawing – drawing in paint – is letting it happen?
Supplying the raw materials, minimal guidance, but otherwise getting out of the way?
It sounds eerie, but also intensely comforting. The bewildered joy has quieted to a steady pulsing warmth in my chest, like someone has thrown a loose blanket over me.
Cobain has a mouth. Cobain? Somebody does.
“Not his mouth,” Jon says again as he slumps in the chair. It’s rough, provisional, it will change a dozen times. He mutters this all again but without insistence. He seems satisfied, too. Also very tired.
“That’s it,” he announces. “I’m finished for tonight.”
But he goes on staring at the figure in front of him. We both do.
“The eyes,” he says. “The eyes are going to be a bitch.”
Tuesday, March 6, 9:30 p.m.–1 a.m. Interrogation.
Jon has whited out the mouth again. He says he did it just before I arrived. Over several hours the night before he had worked on the mouth, trying to modify it toward the “smirk” Cobain habitually wore, a trademark sneer that was always hovering. But he went too far, it got away from him and turned into a grotesque. He’s not sure if what he envisions is even possible. Expressions that hover, that hint, are at least as hard to maintain in paint as they are in life.
Jon has also reduced the range of beard, pushed it to the perimeter of the face, and at the same time made it thicker, the hairs longer. He wants to know what I think. I answer cautiously. It seems too lush, too pruned. Scruffiness was the essence of grunge, shaving sporadically. A well-tended beard can be more work than clean-shavenness.
“Hm. You may be right.” Jon is longer getting to work tonight – fussing with brushes, changing the record, getting another beer – and he asks me more questions about aspects of the painting. He hasn’t done that before. It worries me a little. Whatever place soliciting advice has in art, I don’t think it’s near the beginning of a project. Closer to the end, as part of revision and refinement, it can feel purposeful, productive. Early on it feels more like flailing.
The making of art is so tricky and dogged, like someone following you so stealthily that no matter how fast you snap your head around, you’ll never catch more than a bit of coloured fabric disappearing into a doorway. Following you? I wonder at the image that bubbled up. If you’re making the art shouldn’t you be the tracker, the gumshoe? Staying with the target no matter how hard or shiftily it flees. Yet it does feel like both: following and being followed. Staying with, and staying ahead of. Keeping your eyes peeled both ways. All ways. Which takes how many sets of eyes? I’m drinking wine.
MB: The mouth in the photo is wide. Thin-lipped. You can hardly see the bottom lip. What I see is really a black line. A bit of edging at the top. It looks like a gash.
JH: I know. But that won’t work.
MB: It’s a slit, basically. A black line. A crevice.
JH: It turns into a moustache.
I remember some advice I got from a teacher, a famous writer I’d paid for a correspondence course with, in the one year I sought instruction. “Be bold in your solutions.” It helped, when I remembered it, and when I applied it at the right time, in the right situations. My teacher himself seemed to follow it indiscriminately. His writing employed so many high-wire acts that ultimately you couldn’t believe any of them. You sensed a net everywhere.
MB: One thing about Cobain, his features are big. Big jaw and chin, nose, big luminous eyes. A shelf of brow, crowding down.
JH: Yeah.
Jon sounds slightly suspicious, defensive. Another reason to avoid advice.
MB: I don’t think you can go wrong by going dramatic with this guy. Contrast. Exaggeration. Like you say, you can always pull it back later.
JH: Yeah.
Fortunately, we move past this and Jon evolves his own method for the night. It amounts to a step-by-step interrogation, a mode I haven’t seen him use before. Posing each question and answering it in words and paint. Increasingly, the words fall away.
How wide is his mouth?
Wider. Wider still? Jon follows the new longer line, a real face-splitting crack that he comes at from various angles, fleshing in lips, thinning them back, modelling in several shades of gray. After an hour he gessoes the whole thing over, waits drinking in his chair, and begins again.
Where is his mouth?
Maybe it should be lower. The present placement is true to life, but it’s not working in paint. Something’s wrong. The chin is too dominant, too distant . . . detaching from the face. What about here? Halfway into a promising mouth, he whites it out. Too low. Tries a median mouth. Median height, median length. Better.
What about stubble on the upper lip?
Not beard, stubble. Stipple it in. Not too heavy. Not a moustache. The strangest thing happens: this extra hair, stubble tips poking through, actually lightens the beard I found too heavy. It reduces it visually, clips it back. Because the eye seeks a middle point, knowing how hair grows? Something even stranger: there’s the the suggestion of a smirk! The stubble is actually lifting the lip. Smirk, snarl, sneer – it’s hovering. How? Jon doesn’t know exactly. We’re both chuckling, gurgling like pleased babies. Sometimes you just take what you can get.
What about darkening around the nose?
Some fairly dark gray, storm cloud smudges, pushed in alongside it. More black, straight out of the tube, under the nostrils. This too helps the mouth. Lengthens it somehow, mobilizes it. It’s like a transfer on Silly Putty: tug at any point and it affects the whole. Features distort, come alive.
The forehead?
Gray smears, dark, darker. Strange at first, this dark oval patch like a skullcap slid down in front. Across. Across is magical: the brow shelf building. Across, roughly. Tissue over bone. Drop down and try some on the upper cheek, near the beard line. More collateral gains. The beard that was too lush now fits even better, the new shadows have trimmed it back. The blank white forehead was distorting things. Remember that. Factor in the unfinished. When in doubt, bring it along partway. Sketch its volumes.
A friend of Jon’s is making him a website. They’ve joked about using his name to advantage, perhaps with the insertion of a space: HIS COCK’S ART. How many people looking for porn sites would stumble on that? A fraction might stay for the art. This relates to the legal battle fought by the original owners of the name Nirvana. “A hippy band in England,” Jon says. Whatever their settlement in court, their real winnings might be a continual stream of stray online customers, long after their real sales had dried up.
I wonder how many sloppy shoppers might click on J.K. Rowlinge, author of Hairy Potter and other Magic Tails. One thousandth of tens of millions might even be a living.
JH: I could care less about money. It’s recognition. Recognition of my art.
MB: True.
And mistaken identity never furthers that cause. Reverses it, in fact.
Jon puts on about the tenth album side, sinks in his chair. The figure stares out at us in patient puzzlement: How we gonna work this? It’s at least a more companionable challenge. The stubble-smirk, the new mouth, the darker smears, the hacked-in forehead: they amount to a new, small purchase. Which means everything.
Doggedness has disclosed a few surprising tricks, even some minor miracles. What started out as an almost dejected inquiry has turned out to be the most solid night of work yet. Pinsteps became leaps.
I realize that all night I’ve been returning to the throat shape, paying tribute to it in glances. Jon hasn’t touched it tonight, but in previous endnotes he slabbed more, and darker, paint onto it, and rounded off its X-acto-like blade. It’s heavy, solid and mauled-looking. I keep coming back to it, barely realizing I’m doing so. This plate of crude metal welded into the throat. That mouth is working. It might be the mouth. The rest of the painting has caught up to it a bit tonight.
MB: How did you settle on this palette? The Payne’s Gray.
JH: It happened a long time ago. I was using the other colours . . . all of them. . . . Then I started using less . . . reducing. . . . I found this.
MB: How long do you think you’ll use it?
JH: I’ll use it till I’m done with it. I know I will be . . . someday.
(Dumb question. The only possible answer.)
Payne’s Gray is named after the watercolourist William Payne (1760-1830), who developed the mixture for use in underpainting. Two centuries before “Do It Yourself” became the guiding ethos of punk music, Payne was part of a movement by some drawing teachers to adapt salon painting techniques so that amateur painters could use them. Payne taught his students how to block in a painting with broad washes, paint clusters of leaves using a brush tuft split into several points, and create rough, rocklike textures by “dragging” thick paint. Payne was attacked in some circles for his how-to guidelines, but non-academic painters embraced them eagerly.
Underpainting?
For the next four hours Jon paints the eight needles in the halo. Standing up; he says his legs are sore from so much kneeling. He goes from needle to needle – barrel, plunger, varying the amount of liquid present – using the whole range of Payne’s Gray he’s worked out, all the degrees of his monochromatic “spectrum.” He doesn’t seem oppressed or impatient with the finicky work tonight. I have the impression of a creator enjoying an interlude of comfort with his creation. Establishing that comfort . . . perhaps even storing it up, banking an earned familiarity against a time when the piece will turn its back and stalk away, a stranger deaf to your entreaties. Jon paints swiftly, seemingly contentedly. He asks me occasionally about a detail – the placement of a highlight, how much detail might be desirable on the graduation marks on the barrel cylinders – and I offer an opinion. I go long stretches without looking at the painting except in glances, and Jon doesn’t need to step back or regard it from his chair. We chat about other things. The conversation has an esoteric, free-ranging mood. Telepathy comes up. I tell Jon I consider it an established fact, something always operating to a greater or lesser degree, but at levels seldom available to our conscious control, we know so little of it. But are moving about, deciding things, according to its dictates. Really? Jon expresses amazement, though not disagreement. He says that the spirituality of his upbringing – his parents are Salvation Army officers – “crushed” all vestiges of his own spirituality. It is the second time he speaks of crushing. When I mention the difference the shadows worked into the forehead have made, smudgy cloud-like strata he’s been layering in since my last visit, he says, referring to the white forehead untouched for so long, “Yes, that forehead was just crushing.” We talk about how recognition of other humans is possible despite wholesale changes in their appearance. None of the usual suspects – even the eyes, the “windows of the soul” – seems adequate to account for this. You would know someone you know well even if he/she were wrapped in bandages. Wouldn’t you? “You’d feel their presence,” Jon says. Something like telepathy seems the only possible answer. Unless the personality itself has changed, as happens when love ends, or when a friend changes radically after an interval, an absence that may be temporal or due to mental illness, addiction . . . something disruptive at the roots. Again, telepathy. The signal is coming from another station.
He’s not sure how he can get the needle tips as fine as he wants them. We discuss tiny brushes, perhaps drawing the finest tip along a straight edge. Then he decides he will try a razor blade. Get the tiniest amount of paint on the edge, press it down and off. It will be hard to minimize the paint, keep it from beading thicker. He nods. He’ll try it soon.
I wonder if there is a companionable phase that is also necessary to making art. Nothing so sly and meretricious as setting out to “make friends” with the piece you’re working on. It’s more attentive and respectful than that. It could be a matter of getting used to the fact of something in your life, the presence of it. And that could be related to adjusting your energies for the long haul, accommodating yourself to what something is going to demand of you. Partly it must be simple fatigue, a need to juggle the pace. It can’t be war all the time; not even war is. Or a part of war is periodic ceasefires, carols between the lines. Those don’t contradict war so much as they make it possible. All-out battles would end soon, one way or the other. The all-consuming soon consumes itself. It is rare.
Jon takes no breaks at all over the four hours. That is a first. Another first, he tells me, is that he painted for several hours during the daytime yesterday. I feel excitement hearing this, which I am careful not to show. For the same reason Jon is careful not to overload his brush with paint, and curses viciously when he does so. I would be happy to think that on this piece he’d reached the stage where effort, no matter how great, does not include the effort to make effort. Self-sustaining momentum, no need for lash or spurs. Fatigue, at least the most debilitating kind, has far less to do with going than with not knowing where to go.
The throat piece catches my eye again, but not so aggressively. It has been worked back into the figure more, a bridge or passage between the chin and the upper chest. “Dark,” Jon says, pointing with his brush at the black area where the throat disappears, or has begun to, into shadow under the bearded chin, “in there. I dropped it back into the dark there.”
Monday, March 19, 9 p.m.–1 a.m. London Calling Elvis.
All night is devoted to getting the needle tips right. They have to be fine enough but also dark enough, a tricky combination. Jon has already tried laying down the razor blade with Payne’s Gray on its edge. The paint blobs a bit, lays down unevenly. He tries taping off the upper needle and running the black-edged blade up into it. Better, but still unreliable. At times a good dark line results, other times it goes faint in places. He tries running the blade the other way, down off the tape into the white of the halo. Better, the best yet. But . . . the lines are inconsistent. And when the method involves a one-time application, they can’t be adjusted easily if at all. How can any of the methods tried so far yield seven needles (the needle of the eighth syringe disappears behind Cobain’s head) with a uniform darkness and thickness?
Painting is intensely pragmatic. The art of the possible. Stretching the possible, to be sure – hence “intensely” – but a part, perhaps the largest part, of stretching the possible is learning the inventory of what is possible and adding to your own store of it. What can happen, what can be made to happen, between the painter’s hand and the viewer’s eye: you enlarge the possibilities by solving problems. One after another, an endless chain of them. Every tool is custom-made. Even if you borrow it from another, it must be adjusted to your own purposes: the grip changed, the blade changed. . . . Even the most specific demonstration by another can only furnish at best an idea, a starting point.
What is perfect? never comes up. What is fixable? comes up constantly. Errors that look equivalent to me – wayward blobs, blotches, tiny smears – produce diametrically opposing responses in Jon. “Fixable,” he’ll say calmly, “I can fix that.” Or: “Aaargggh! I can’t fix that.”
Time and again, a needle is tried with a new method, the result considered, then painted over again with gesso. Try, gesso, try, gesso, try: the rhythm of slow breathing. “Waiting for paint to dry,” I say. Jon just grunts, lost in thought. He commented in an earlier session on the amount of time he spent waiting for paint, watching it. He sounded meditative, not displeased. To repeat it now is merely to remark on breathing.
Like last night, Jon seldom moves back from the painting. During the paint-drying pauses, he stays close, his eyes moving about. I stay close too, behind him or to one side. I am reminded of two doctors (or a doctor and nurse) at a bedside. Or a surgical table. You may pause but you don’t leave the table.
The area of the inner halo, where the needle tips are being tried and retried, is getting lumpy and ridged with paint layers, with tiny furrows where the razor has cut into the acrylic surface. Frustration edges into the process, a hint of worry, knowing that there is only so much mauling the surface will take. The accumulations from the previous attempts complicate each new one, making its success less likely.
A reverse technique, two hours in, works best so far. Painting a line of black, letting it dry, then pressing down the blade and working thick white along one side of it then the other. Pulled away at the right time, a black line the thickness of the blade remains. It looks good.
Too good, it turns out. After Jon completes several more with the new method, he steps back to view it from a few feet away. I join him. The needles, so perfect, are too fine. They are needles on the canvas, they don’t resolve as needles to the eye.
More esoteric methods are imagined and discarded: cutting a slit in tape with an X-acto blade, making a stencil in effect; wrapping the razor blade in something to add a layer of thickness. . . . The method that works finally involves using a thicker edge – an old Bell calling card – and taping either side of it. Painting black the thin slit between the lines of tape. Peeling the tape off. Some bleeding occurs, but: “Fixable.” The line is right: dark enough, thick enough.
Despite the many obstacles encountered with the needles, Jon seems comfortable tonight, undismayed. This is working. His occasional strangled cries are working. He asks me to choose the music during the last hour. This is a first. He says he’s sick of his own tunes, he’s in a rut with them. I put on London Calling. Then an early Elvis Presley record, right near the start. “I Got A Woman.” “Tryin’ To Get To You.” “Blue Moon.” It is amazing how companionable the two records are. The thumping bass, the rockabilly verve. A certain raw twang to the guitars, an ache in the voice. A throbbing liveliness . . . you know without needing to ask that this record, this very one, was high on The Clash’s personal playlist. They had it playing where they lived. I’m sure of it. Jon agrees. “Even the covers,” he says. Some energy of the streets, a chipped-brick, frayed-nerve gaiety. Anarchic yodelling – they both have it.
Sunday, March 25, 9 p.m.–1 a.m. Untitled.
“I want it to be beautiful,” Jon says, a remark into silence after we have been talking about the pattern of overlapping checks, in various grays, that he has been building into Cobain’s bathrobe the last few days. Watching Jon’s hand go straight to a spot and brush in a rectangle of paint, then lift off, pick up more paint and come down again in another spot, without hurry and without hesitation, I am curious about what guides his choices of what tint of gray to mix, what size of shape to lay down, where to place it. All these variables. Jon answers as best he can but we must resort often to the word “instinct.” It may be imprecise (or maybe not) but other explanations seem false, formulations in retrospect. The inquiry dwindles. Jon keeps on painting. “I want it to be beautiful,” Jon says.
I want it to be beautiful. I look at him. Of course he does.
I pick the records again. Gordon Lightfoot follows Joan Jett at one point. The contrast is too severe – or if severity is not the point, then at least unfruitful. It forces a rupture and a choice. We go with Joan tonight. That is the mood. It reminds me of Jon’s mantra, his modus operandi: “I’d rather go too far. I can always pull it back.” It’s a method that courts clash and dissonance: much of it will be noise, but a fraction will yield usable sounds. Weird piquant chords. Plowing way over at the edge of the field you find stony, unproductive ground (ignored for good reasons as well as bad), much labour . . . but also the rare arrowhead. Not just last year’s manure. We talk about the deplorable dereliction of radio station DJ’s. Sitting on mountains of recorded music and playing the same five tracks by U2, the Stones, Led Zeppelin. Even a station calling itself The Edge never trying the simplest raw experiment. What edge?
Edge of Main Street.
MB: You’re leaving the shoulders black?
JH: So far. For the contrast with the hair. I want to bring them down into the checks. Fold the black down into it.
MB: It’s amazing how quickly this pattern is building up a sense of fabric. The texture of it, bulk. Quilty . . . with a sense of spaces . . . floating. Yet dense at the same time.
JH: It looks like something he’d wear. Something he found in a thrift shop.
MB: They’re rectangles but they’re giving a sense of fibres somehow.
JH: They’re checks but it’s not a checked, a checkered shirt.
MB: Not one of his plaid lumberjack –
JH: No. Not that. Though . . . it could be anything he wore. Something old.
MB: Old and shapeless.
JH: Something he wore.
“Smells Like Teen Spirit” is in this pattern Jon is developing, as much or more than in the facial features above it. The checks so similar, identical at a glance, yet each one different. Its own shape. Like a school of fish, ranks and layers of sameness, yet within the school organic entities, separable (with difficulty), particularized (briefly). Unidirectional shiftings, yet cross-currents within these. Lines of code superimposed, the digits swimming out of focus. Cobain dead before the internet. Before MySpace, Facebook, YouTube. Grunge: the last non-internet phenomenon? Is that part of the homesickness?
So far Jon has worked in three phases of checks, all in tints new to this painting. The darkest first, then a lighter, now a lighter still. Perhaps a lightest one, close to white, will fleck in sporadically, playing off the whites in the face and in the halo. And the darkest phase is to follow. Bringing it back in some measure, tying it to, the black it started from. The black still showing strongly through the interstices between the checks. Carrying power through three overlapping layers, in slivers.
The checks are horizontal on the sleeve, suggesting its volume as a cylinder. Then vertical on the front panels, framing the scrawny white chest. Still just a gesso chest, two nipples roughly circled in. It will have to be worked up farther next, Jon thinks. The painting has come far enough that unworked sections can’t be left too long dangling. There’s an ongoing accord of parts now.
Some of the checks float right off the figure. Some straddling the line of the fabric edge, some right off it . . . in space beside the arms, on (above?) the chest. The effect is eerie . . . and right, somehow. An effect of blurring, decomposing even. Deconstitution . . . flakes lifting off in places. A test pattern that leaks out the edges of its box.
“It happened by accident the first time,” Jon says. “It was late – 4 or 5 in the morning – and a couple of my checks slopped over. I kind of liked it, but wasn’t sure. So I tried it in a few more places.”
I can always pull it back.
Talking about this painting when he’d just begun it, Jon had in mind a “mohair look” for the fabric. Fine hairs going every which way. A hairy chaos . . . luscious. One night he tried a few test hairs with his airbrush. (A machine that broke soon after and which he can’t afford to fix. He’s in no hurry to do so. He likes the effects he’s getting without it, and it was a bitch to clean. The cleaning drove him insane every time.) The result was stupendous, and strange – something he doubts he could ever reproduce, airbrush or no. Without knowing how he was doing it exactly, he found he was painting smoke. Perfect smoke, a smoke simulacrum with the airbrush. Wisps, spirals, eddies, layers – Cobain was wearing a coat of smoke. A patch of it anyway . . . getting larger, larger. . . .
“Did you think of keeping it?” I ask.
“I did. For a moment. But it was too good. You know? Like a PhotoShop effect. It looked like a photo of smoke I’d shopped into the picture.” He shakes his head at the memory. “I really couldn’t believe what I was seeing. I still can’t.”
MB: Is painting more fun now than it used to be?
JH: It is. (continuing the checks) It is for sure. It used to be a real . . . nasty nightmare. (laughs, a bit hollowly) I didn’t know why I was doing it sometimes. Why I was putting myself through it.
Seeing Jon get his arms around this thing has been exciting to watch. Watching him approach this painting in passion and doubt, lay hands on it cautiously, then more and more firmly. . . . I can’t imagine witnessing its like in writing. You can see the process of drafts, of course, the writer’s changed mood and confidence if a way is found . . . but so much is internal . . . leaving just a paper trail. No real equivalent for the physical parry and thrust I’ve witnessed. An actual grappling with an object in space. There aren’t bigger thrills in art.
Jon has a new idea for the background. An effect like rain – he makes drizzling motions with his fingers – smears coming down from the top . . . trails. Stupidly, I say something about that fitting in with Cobain’s west coast roots, not to mention his depressions, the heavy weather he lugged around. Jon looks apprehensive. He’s uneasy at how quickly his notion jumped me into narrative. Especially when doing so is not my predilection when looking at paintings. On the contrary.
Jon never gets through a night without fretting aloud about the background. But the fretting has changed, slowly and imperceptibly. It’s no longer the nervous mumbling, wisecracking, of a guy who doubts he’ll ever date a particular girl. Now he knows he’s headed for a meeting, an encounter. Nothing about that encounter is predictable, least of all its outcome. It could still all fall apart. The chances of that are always high. But he will have his chance. There will be a meeting, a relationship. Knowing that is the opposite of swagger. It’s walking . . . doing it.
Friday, March 30, 9:30 p.m.–1 a.m. The Life With.
MB: How long do you think you’ll be working on this? Do you have any idea when it might be finished? Even a rough one?
JH: No. None at all. It could be months. Even longer, I suppose.
MB: And you’re fine with that.
JH: (laughs) Yes I am.
It’s the end of March. More than a month since Jon resumed work on the portrait and I started watching him. Almost three months since he first showed me a photo of the painting underway. Subtracting the month he abandoned it, he’s been working on it at least three months. When I ask him about when he began it, his memory is vague. “Sometime before Christmas. I remember making the grid. And then the transfer drawing – I remember that well.” He muses, shakes his head.
MB: No moment when you thought, I’ll do a painting of Kurt Cobain.
JH: No. No.
Not that he remembers. And perhaps not at all. This is familiar. There is the life without before, and then the life with. The transition zone between them is hard to recall. Outside Hollywood or novels, the “illuminated moment,” the first sight that changes everything, is not so common. To be so charged, it would have to mean that a glimpse of the life with has infiltrated the life without. That can happen, of course: an illumination. But usually it is only after the life with has revealed its meaning, its changed course, that its beginnings get invented or coloured retrospectively as legend. It seems more comforting to believe that the course of a life can be invaded, radically disrupted by a new idea, a new person . . . an enlivening obsession . . . rather than sprout that obsession slowly, by invisible degrees, as a branch swells a new bud. Strange: since the latter offers more hope. (Or does it? In the botanical version, the organism already has all it needs to unfold. And often you’ve sunk so low that you can’t believe you retain any inner resources that could surprise you. You’re too fortified in routine, immured in it: you need attack, something brutal-angelic to shatter the walls. Yet what peaceably boring city would not be without its fifth columns, punks in alleys and boardrooms, appearing to acquiesce to the status quo while unceasingly looking to cut deals that will end it?)
After we have been listening to a record of Leadbelly singing snatches of old songs, just his voice on an old tape recorder, Jon puts on Kurt Cobain singing Leadbelly’s “They Hung Him on a Cross.” Just voice and guitar, chunky electric chords. It is the first time Jon has played Cobain while painting this. He comments on aspects of the song – recorded as a demo for a planned tribute album – while continuing to paint his checks. He’s beyond the danger of psychic swamping now. It’s all grist to his mill.
He works more black checks, straight Payne’s Gray, down into the other four layers of lighter tints. In one section he goes too far and a section of shoulder acquires a disturbing perpetual motion, as if it is decomposing or vibrating . . . blurry shiftings . . . it is hard to look at. “I’ll have to white all that out and start again.” Yet – something about it works. Though too far gone, it may bring back something of value. Leave it for now.
He begins on the chest. With a larger brush he begins laying in white and gray tones, building up the surface. The looser, larger gestures look relaxing after the checks. Paint loads and brushstrokes create a small juicy slapping. Black lines get added in, five of them, for the lines of sternum to navel, pectoral muscles, bottom of rib cage. The effect, especially after Jon starts working these lines into the gray-white, is of a crude voodoo doll figure: body, arms, legs. Like the twined-stick manikins hung up to terrorize in The Blair Witch Project. After a while of brushing in paint, Jon starts dry-brushing areas for blending. Stabbing and sweeping across in short, forceful strokes, jabs with stiff bristles with just a bit of paint. “Terrible on the brushes . . . it burns them out fast. But it works.”
MB: Do you think you’ll have to abandon this one again?
JH: It’s always possible. I hope not.
MB: What would force you to?
JH: Hitting a wall that’s just . . . too big. (laughs) These checks, maybe.
MB: Too big in the sense of too difficult?
JH: Not to do but . . . more like wandering around . . . not knowing where. . . .
And abandonment is at least one direction. Away.
Jon’s painting room is one of the most comfortable places I’ve spent time in. Nothing needs to happen there so anything can. Anything might. Jon’s right, it isn’t a studio. There’s no need to consecrate a place that’s already working.
The chocolate brown walls, the turntable and speakers, the sagging plaid armchair with throw, the curtain always pulled shut (sometimes with a towel around the edges to block all outside light): they are the fixtures of the cosy rec room. The mole’s hole. But it is an adjusted rec room, tweaked to an individual sensibility: the Johnny Cash photo, the Unicorn painting, the wood “panels” (so realistic and yet so impossible), the mounted toys. . . . It is an adjusted retro. Expressing what exactly? Perhaps nostalgia for a world that knew nothing of him but was ready to welcome his arrival.
The background comes up. It always comes up. It is the question that can never be answered, the one that remains . . . the one that stands in for all of the other, answerable ones. Various ideas get floated. The drizzling smears (“like rain, not rain”), smoky effects, some kind of grid, a geometric pattern, a sort-of-sandstorm of fine black points (pointillism injected with air, dispersing . . .), soft fuzzy lights (I picture luminous late dandelion heads, hovering . . . I don’t know what Jon is seeing). Jon nods at each idea, his own or mine. All have acceptable elements, none has grabbed him. He needs one that grabs him. That leaves him no choice. He flops down in the armchair, which tonight he is calling his “perspective chair.” He looks discouraged, contented.
Something obvious about this portrait of Cobain, so obvious that I took it in without realizing it at first, is the unusual placement of the subject. Or rather the direction of the gaze. In most portraits where the figure is positioned to one side of centre, the figure’s gaze travels across the picture plane. The viewer looks into the same pictorial space that the subject is looking through. The shared visual space creates an intimacy, and is partly what gives rise to the familiar comment about portraiture: The eyes follow you anywhere in the room. With Jon’s Cobain, on the other hand, the eyes can’t be met, no matter where you’re standing in the room. I’ve tried finding them from various points: they won’t be met. You can gaze at them, at him, but you won’t encounter someone looking back at you. The figure, off-centre left, gazes out of the picture space, or into an extension of it (which from our point of view amounts to the same thing, since all we have is the bounded rectangle). He stares out of the space he’s painted into, but not into the space you’re looking from. The effect is unsettling, quietly frustrating. The meeting you desire can never quite occur. You must be a voyeur, and remain conscious of that. From the first time I saw the painting I was aware of this tone of absence, of departure, of abstraction, without understanding the pictorial elements creating it. The subject is leaving the space you’ve concocted for him, but not to enter any space you can imagine.
“Exiting the stage,” Jon calls it. Exactly.
Tags: Issue 76