Last year I was as the AGO, when there was a an exhibition of Constable drawings. My first impulse was to look around, dismissively, not concentrating, but as I moved through the galleries I became absorbed by the mastery of space, detail, of graphic gesture, the delicate wizardry and expressiveness of a mere pencil. With my involvement in photo-based and conceptualist forms, I had stopped painting and drawing, apart from diagrams for light-boxes and installations, and even these I d begun to create on the computer--to generate , rather than to draw. That first, dismissive look around the gallery, well, clearly it was defensive, a palisade behind which I could keep from self-scrutiny an old now infrequently fulfilled need to feel out the spaces of the world with my finger tips and to follow breathlessly its lines and its gestures. But the drawings of Constable were, finally, too powerful a reminder, and I began to experience a longing--maybe like Kramer even a yearning.
For Constable's drawing was drawing as I first understood it in my adolescence, from the age of 14 or 15, when learning to use pencils, pens, charcoals, conte was for me like apprenticing to a mystery and invested with the transcendence of all that was yet to be. I drew wherever I went, often just looking down from the window of our first floor apartment into the crowded street; or in the summer, when I was 14 and 15, on Sunday picnics with large groups of family and friends at Van Cortlandt Park; or in The Bronx Zoo, sketching animals, or in its Botanical Gardens. By the time I was 16, in my last year of high school, I was in Manhattan whenever I could get there, always with a small 6 x 9 inch sketch book, on the train, or the station, or the Metropolitan, in its restaurant, or outside on a bench on 5th Avenue, or at the Museum Of Modern Art. In my last semester at De Witt Clinton High School, I had an early schedule so that from 2 to 5 I could work delivering parcels for a stationery firm on 42nd Street across from the multi-storied brass facade of the New York Daily News Building, and between deliveries I'd sit on the dark, splintering biomorphic wooden benches in Grand Central Station sketching people, or in the park behind the New York Public Library. Eventually, the time I spent drawing so over-ran the time delivering that the harried, bald-headed man who dispatched the messengers, politely let me go.
After my mother died, my father gave me a package of my drawings and paintings that she had saved. I was 34, a writer, an English professor. I had tried to enrol in art courses in my first year at C.C.N.Y. Perhaps its intellectual traditions tacitly discouraged entering students from becoming artists, because space just wasn't made available for them in the art department, which is possibly why, when I did finally take a semester of drawing in my third year, I came away with little about drawing, less about art, but instead with a bleak but momentous memory of the instructor's wounded belief that the world around him truly thought that art was not the product of intelligence. I had already made my decision, began studying literature, after a year of drifting. Nevertheless, he stood as an insidious, confirming argument against my becoming an artist, as persuasive as the economic one, which was my father's and my failure to get into Cooper Union Art School, which I'd tried to get into because it was free and all I could afford. Entrance was based not on a portfolio, interview, recommendations, but on a written exam, given in a large dim Victorian auditorium. I was sixteen, I failed, and it shook my confidence in my talent.
When I opened my mother's package, I was slightly stunned by what I found, so well had repression done its work. The sense that, whatever else I was, I was also an artist, played in the background of my life like white noise, heard only when something redirected the intensity of focus with which I pursued the literary person I'd become, and then I would take out some watercolors, some pencils, take them to the beach or a lake side or a picnic, and withdraw for a brief while into a calm saturated with light. It was the same experience of light and its brilliance, but far more restless, for which like an addict, whenever I travelled, I'd head for the nearest museum or gallery. Being an artist became an exercise in nostalgia. But on opening that package, surely my mother's final gift to me, I could no longer be satisfied with the sublimations of nostalgia. I was like an amnesiac presented with a book of old photos miraculously remembering the lost life and wanting, however nervously, to repossess it.
What I found in the package were mostly drawings and a few watercolors, most made when I was 15 and 16, and since my great model in painting was Dufy, even my watercolors were a form a drawing. There were studies of trees, the intricacies of their trunks and branches, skies with clouds and notations of sky colors, anatomical drawings, studies of feet, of hands, portrait sketches, landscapes, life studies of animals (The Bronx Zoo), horses (from books), and using every media--pencil, pen, ink and wash and charcoal, watercolor, crayon; there were essays in advertising art, black and white fillers such as I found in magazines, cartoons, and finally one of the 6 x 9 inch sketch books that I had always carried with me. It's obvious now why I was so alienated by the intellectually wounded professor of drawing: clearly art had been for me, as it still is now, an act of intelligence.
It would be almost ten years before I actually attempted to make art in any determined way, but I did make a move the very next year when my wife Susan and I started up Four Humours Press, where for seven years we printed limited letterpress editions of hand-made poetry books in our print shop in the basement of St. Paul 's College at The University of Manitoba. We always worked with an artist, who'd supply linocuts or woodblocks or else drawings from which we'd make metal engravings. Finally, I couldn't resist cutting my own linocuts and woodblocks. I was about 42. Today I think of myself as an artist, and only in a small way as literary person or writer. There was no single moment when that reversal of self-perception occurred. It was a process of years, at first trying to balance increasing involvements in visual art with a fully engaged literary career which I had at last to let go of and to watch it float away from me like the contents of a capsized boat while I drifted to shore in the sunlight buoyed up by a life jacket that seemed as yet small and undependable. But there was one moment when I knew I'd risk the journey back into my adolescence, to recover its loss. I had been making woodblock prints for about two years, mostly in the summers. There was a lovely woman at The School of Art who taught a course to first year students, Helen Coy. A friend of hers Margaret Tettero was teaching a summer class in drawing which Helen was sitting in on herself and she got Margaret's permission to invite me along. They played a kind of good cop/bad cop--Margaret telling me that some legs I had drawn looked like noodles, Helen encouraging, nurturing. But once I began to draw, to feel the contours and spaces of the world against my finger-tips, the breathless quiet, the buoyant, joyful tension, I knew that I would not want to, or even be able to, relinquish it, and yet I did.
I did, though not entirely or in the same profound way and with the same profound sense of loss as earlier in my life, because what I do still requires working with images and is a mode of visual thought which takes form as objects in space. But the other day I saw a small exhibition of Greg Curnoe's work at the Winnipeg Art Gallery. He was essentially a Pop artist, but his drawings grew out of an earlier, a modernist sensibility, and as I looked at them, again like Kramer, I had a yearning, maybe a longing, and soon found myself in St. Vital Park sitting on the grass at the lake side drawing the children and the quick gestures of the ducks as they dived head first for food.