XV

W

ork drove me onward, motivating all of the moments in my Florentine life. Each morning, on awaking, I would first roll over to look upon my latest canvases. In the night, restless I might switch on the light to remind myself of the problems and the potentials of my latest work in progress.

The prospect of meeting my Beatrice, of spending a dinner listening to her, perhaps having her nod as I spoke to her, watching her sit down on the edge of her pedestal and laugh, did more than excite my molecules. The pressure concentrated my current state, making change unthinkable. I brightly burned.

There were long, circuitous treks through the city where all the while I would be visited by inspirations with neither order nor seen reasons so I would some times find myself spinning, figuratively and physically, with my arms churning like an orchestral conductor or I cut the figure of some harried shadow warrior, carving out the air before me with compositional karate chops.

Composition, for me, is the art of carrying the viewer's attention point along the two dimensional plane using all manner of tricks or techniques. The eye follows lines and gets swept up with the pursuit of them but should they make contact with a hard edge, the confused spectator is thrown out of the picture and where they return to it is near impossible forte artist to determine beforehand. Angles are therefore to be discouraged in composition that wishes to control the active viewer with some certainty.

Hooking the viewer at a specific start point is fairly simple. As the eye gravitates toward faces, any oval in the upper third, particularly if it is a participant in a strong contrast will serve as a start point. If the eye does not instantly find uh a form, the top fifth of a tall rectangle will pull it in. Immediately thereafter, the mind will allow the audience to circle the face-shape once and then fly out of it at speed. When you see a stranger on he street that is looking at some object, notice that you will look to what that stranger is spying before you ever have opportunity to take in details of that onlooker's apparel. We see more than we recognize at the peripheries of our attentions. Those blurred forms and colours though are sending eager signals to the brain telling us which next thing is likely to deserve our focus. So if we hope to see what the subject sightseer has spied, strong, encouraging shapes that enter our periphery with the turning of our head can induce us quite unconsciously to stray from the straight and narrow line that shoots from the stranger's eyes. Try to view a classic, linear building with a circular movement of the focal point. It is nearly painful to do so.

A good composition has a time dimension. The viewer is taken on a journey and as he navigates the space, the work accelerates with sweeping arcs or slows with tight circles and eye-catching details. As you finish the intricate and complicated route through the Raft of the Medusa and are hurled from that upraised arm and off into the horizon, you are obliged to linger there exactly as one does at the end of a Beethoven symphony. The last visual chords hover in time while you contemplate the approaching sail. The ability to manipulate the time dimension of the visual arts pushes it toward being a form of music.

I would wake and walk with this music in my ears. My gestures, physically mapping out the time and momentum of the intended appreciation, were a dance. It was hardly a beautiful dance. When I am in that mode, I look remarkably ridiculous yet I care half a whit for how others might perceive me. I had been six months in Italy and, but for my monthly meetings with Anne, I spoke hardly a word to another human. It never occurred to me to talk to myself and nothing encouraged me to make speculative contact toward gaining some kind of a friend. There was a definite and crippling language barrier but even if there were not, I would have remained throughout my days in comfortable silence.

My eccentricities were heightened during this time. I was under-nourished, creatively hypersensitive, and isolated within myself. It is difficult to determine how much pleasure I took in these rampant idiosyncrasies since, as we all know, artists are peculiar. If my gait was erratic then my path was true.

I was no victim of this Romantic fallacy though. To comport and compose myself as disordered or disorganized would have no impact on my creativity. Were I to wear all black and don a goatee, I would not suddenly become a genius anymore than putting on a French maid's uniform would excite me to clean my tiny apartment any better. Rather, when I find myself crawling on the floor beneath Rodin's thinker to get the correct viewpoint, I can ward myself from embarrassment with a shield that says that society will forgive my peculiarities if I can justify them in the name of art. I can make myself ugly, turn people away, or just be that oddity that invites derision so long as I can give the world some beauty through my craft.

While a young malleable University man, my brother was stumbling along a bumpy life and looking for purchase.

"I think I'm going to become an environmentalist. I'll work on saving whales and all that stuff." he said with sobriety.

His seriousness made the punch line ring out loud and long.

"Will I need to grow a beard?"

Eventually he did go on to grow a beard after he became a Captain in the Coast Guard.

My tossed craft swung wildly on its single anchor but, despite the swells and winds of a clouded fortune, it held purchase. I dare not cut myself free to sail for home port, not while the tempest continued. This storm though, it seemed, was a mounting force of nature. Her hold was near empty, her captain nearly mad. That one thin chain was my doom and my salvation. It led into dark depths that I could not fathom but I was drawn to follow the lead of that line, down, to climb its length and drown.

I course across more kindly waters now but those days of gliding the ways of Florence were free and happy. Even in the depths of my impassioned panic, I knew that I was living in a situation that was more Paradise than Purgatory. I was free to pursue my Art, free to pride myself on impractical philosophies, and free from all the demands of a society.

When you climb a mountain to view the majestic skyscape and absorb the wonder of the world, while Caspar David Friedrich paints your back in stark silhouette, you are necessarily obliged to induce angst. Romantics revel in being dwarfed by a great world. There is grand satisfaction in feeling crushed by a sublime horizon.

The artist conceives of himself as heroic. If I did not create it, I indulged conflict.

XVI