Portrait of a Franz Kline Brushstroke.
Otherwise known as the "...Ninety-Mile-Per-Hour
Brushstroke".*
*Cicero, 1965.
A study, series of paintings, and article by Paul Hall.
An interpreted reality within pure abstract expressionism. An account of the difficulties Paul Hall had doing this series.
The argument was that, well, of course, the advantage of abstract art is that it shows the accidental and therefore more closely emulates nature than the Naturalist Representationalists would... And others responded with the old sure-tell-me-another-one routine. So what is it? Art? The greatest art ever? Or is it a hoax?
One of the highlights of my many visits to the Museum of Modern art, that institution supported by the wealthy avant guarde patrons of New York City, was Natalie Wood. The only thing I could think of was to get her to sign my sketch book, but her body guards whisked her away before I even got close enough to ask. Of course I couldn't blame them. There I was in old blue jeans and a field jacket filled with splashes of all colors of oil paint, a scraggly beard and long hair (about four inches long, unheard of in the mid 60's unless you were a pop singer or something). But I wasn't looking like that because I wanted to, but because I was concentrating producing artwork. It was a means to an end.
There was the hope that everybody was wrong about how hard it would be. They were wrong, but not as I hoped. It was harder. I was already learning to live with the missed meals, sometimes for days in a row. The strict budgets, and the 12-or-so-mile walks for want of bus money. Worst of all the lack of time. That led to sleep depravation in order to get some work done in the early hours of the morning. And then the stress and the sleeplessness. And finally the advent of the escalation of the "Vietnam Conflict".
I joined the army and volunteered for the infantry, but instead ended up an information specialist in Washington, D.C. where I encountered some of the rank and file of what Eisenhower labeled "the military-industrial complex". Oh well. Better label than never. That's where I did the works pictured below (among others):
"The Border Guard"
"Revelation of the Handicap of Beauty".
"The Dream"
"Planet of Flowers"
"Performance"
Perhaps my frequent visits to the Museum of Modern Art in New York had prepared me for looking deeply into things to see something if anything in them. What I saw was a conglomerate of government servants trying desperately to prolong their tenure into some semblance of government careers. I tried to tell myself that I was shocked and surprised that the conflict extended over those many years, but who am I?
What do you tell those guys like Joe the career government servant whom I worked for in "T7" (not G.I. Joe, but G.S. Joe) after it's over and the war was either won or lost? "OK, you can go home now. You're free to go and start all over again. No more job or career for you here."
This is how I attempted to describe it in my piece called "The Military Industrial Complex":
"Scrambled legs over easy and tired muscles around saucered eyes. It's a comical dance done by the funniest: the serious. I'm there, you're there, we're there.
Only those who are able to 'count out' are forgotten, left to the clouds where the silence can be seen in the trees.
...And the mad, mad, maddening, hastening dash of shuffle-and-rumble, of pile-and-stack, of 'build-you-bastards!-Build-and-dash!' and of the cry of 'oh-my-God!-oh-my-God!' to the missed bus before the worsening storm... reaches an insane pace here. Here, more now than ever before when those who, by having less, had what they never knew, comes a time when "RUSH" kills it's victims in the newest of strangest ways.
And that very 'now' which passes into dirty silt beyond the fertile deltas of time
... is 'headed to'.
And that's all we can say. 'Headed to'."
Well, that's one view anyway. There were those who weren't artists but enjoyed emulating my disheveled NYC appearance which I had adopted (the "Bohemian Lifestyle", to achieve an end and that was the production of fine art) but they used it as a form of perpetual costume party to frequent Lower West Side hangouts on weekends.
They descended in hoards, all with some inane desire to become one of the in-crowd; elitists whom we called the "plastic hippies" who blamed people like me for causing the Vietnam conflict, labeling us "the universal soldiers" who caused it all. -- And seriously I often wonder why I hadn't done as many friends did and that is to emigrate to other nations rather than to become embroiled. To run away from it all; from all ten or twenty sides of the argument. All I wanted to do was paint. Hey, we're all wrong in some way.
But then it was my military training I leaned most heavily in my ensuing 26 years of world travel when my three years of active service was up. It was the training and the discipline that got me through the extremes, the privations, and the hardships. I traded in the Bohemian method for that of civilian soldiering. Or maybe it was a bit of both. I was always the artist who found himself never quite fitting in anywhere. Always the conflicts of the creative mind against just about any other kind of mind out there, try as I might to get along.
Well, well. The jury is still out. As a Krispi Kreme fan from the 50's, I'll just have to say "I doughnut know." Once at a hostel in Mt. Isa, Australia, when asked what I thought "time" was, I responded that "...It's a tiny little island in forever. Call it "time". You read the books so written in the stars and in the life..." To which the guy who asked responded in disgust, "That's a poet's definition". I said, "Yes. But nevertheless, a legitimate one."
As I later wrote in an old hotel in Brisbane:
"And now the rhythm's pondered into the metered line, and remittance is forgotten for statements that will rhyme.
For beyond the shabby hallways of forgotten old hotels where rooms connect like fortresses
Is where the poet dwells."
It's been a long road ultimately twice around this little blue Earth. A couple of hundred thousand miles. I've seen a bit of our beautiful little blue planet; the ice fields of Greenland, the Eucalyptus rain forests near La La Falls in Southern Australia, The Giant's Causeway in Northern Ireland, new cities sparkling like snowflakes in the sand under the jet in the midnight skies over Saudi Arabia, bush fires going for miles and miles in the outback of Australia, monsoon thunderclouds lighting up like blinking lanterns on a Christmas tree in the air over the Indonesian Archipelago . It's a beautiful world. Troubles come and go but the beauty remains. The world may have it's disappointments, but it does have some spectacular views.
After trying to get back into art school in California and not being able to meet the finances, I packed up my paint box and backpack walked to the road, stuck out my thumb and headed east.
So when I found myself back in New York City after hitch hiking across the USA in a week, one of the things I remembered I wanted to do is the get back to the Museum of Modern art and see if the huge Franz Klein paintings were still up. There they were, huge as ever, giant black brush strokes against a white background. It was as my painting teacher at the School of Visual Arts, Mr. Cicero said. The man painted with these "huge ninety-mile-an-hour brushstrokes".
It was a daunting project to do these landscapes which I saw in the brushstrokes. I remember what a time I had getting that done.
There was still the unsettling feeling that my journey was not complete. I was trying to get to Paris where I had a chance to try to get into L'Ecole Superior Des Beaux Arts to continue my art education. Little did I realize that it was going to be less of an art education voyage and more of something resembling "The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner".
By the way when I finally got to Paris, I was accepted by the Art School all right, but the Department of State wouldn't allow me to use my GI Bill college money to go to school there because a few years earlier there had been student riots. I told them angrily how it was OK for the GI's to face war while in the service but they couldn't be trusted to avoid a few measly riots in a non-war situation. They threw me out. Then I finally got over to Oxford University about the same time Bill Clinton was attending there.
While I was in New York I was trying to raise the money to get over to Paris by driving a cab. I started out living in a ghetto in Delancy Street, in a cheap apartment on the 6th floor.
The place was hacked up by the fire department after numerous fire alarms where they chopped up the stairs and put out the fires over the decades. The rain would run down the steps through the shattered skylight in little waterfalls, flushing the bums' defecation from the first few levels of steps where they slept and washing it out into the street.
I lived next flight up from the roof. In the ghetto the roof is often referred to as "Junkie Heaven". Heroine junkies used to bang on the door asking for matches and spoons.
Then I totaled a cab that had bald tires in an awful thunderstorm on an elevated highway over Brooklyn. It was a road filled with rush hour oil dribbles that floated as a viscous skin on the tempest's torrent. It was more than 50 feet up and I almost went over the railing. It was a spectacular crash even for forty mph. Wear your seat belt. It can save your life. The company fired me.
I worked for a week in a commercial art dive in midtown where I was fired for trying to draw straight lines without a yardstick. Then I lived for a while off my savings fighting off the subconscious images of the accident. I used to go up on the roof when I could be sure I was alone up there. The street lights blotted out most of the stars and the planets were the only celestial bodies visible in the summer nights as the Latino bongo sounds and the piercing whistle signals from the streets below added to the sense of despond of the murky soup of the Lower Manhattan July. I later wrote in my song "Anger":
"I saw the planets wend their way above man's sense-filled local sights,
for in man's blood pumps an ocean spray;
Too loud, man's finite plights."
Finally, the savings were exhausted and I was covered with bed bug bights. I used to visit Richard's place at Lake Hopatcong where I would pull his sailboat out of the moorings by swimming ahead with the rope in my teeth.
"Richard" whom I had known since a child in Japan back in the '40's, lived in the Village, and said his friend who was also called Richard was willing to put me up for a while for free. I was keen to forget trying to get back into art school for a while and just go ahead and paint. Perhaps I could leave the taxi driving days behind me.
Richard's friend gave me a place to stay where I painted an oil from a magazine photo of a Russian peasant plowing a field with a horse. He bought the painting. Later he wanted me to go. Apparently a few of the bed bugs had traveled me from the ghetto.
So the first Richard finally was going out of town on business and allowed me to stay at his place for a while. It was at that place that I painted "The Four Seasons" or otherwise called "Sunlight". Eventually he returned and I had to move on.
"Sunlight"
An old ex School of Visual Arts classmate then agreed to share his loft and the rent thereof with me. That lasted for a month before the clashes I had with him there became unbearable. He had the side of the loft with the room and I had the side with the door on the sawhorses next to the cat box.
That's where I started painting those big canvasses like "Nautilus Planet". The actual three canvasses I did there were I later tried to sell in a flee market in The Outer Banks of North Carolina, where they got either thrown away or stolen by the owner or some of his cohorts.
"Nautilus Planet"
Nautilus Planet was started at Jerry's loft but later finished at the same place where I painted the Franz Kline Brushstroke series in Staten Island right near the church tower that I drew in my work called "Tempos Fugit" . I also did another large painting that one of Richard's friends bought for fifty dollars (I sold them cheap in those days) saying he was going to hang it up in his boat house in Porto Rico.
"Tempos Fugit"
Finally I looked around in the papers and found an add to share rent with about five or six others in an old house in Staten Island. That's the house where I finished Nautilus Planet by tacking it on the living room wall and working on it there. I covered a bit of this in my detail on "The Night Club Violinist" . I stayed there from about October of '70 to April of '71 before my first trip to Paris (well, at least since 1954 when I was eight years old and I visited for a few weeks with my family).
The Nightclub Violinist
At first I moved in to a nice sized bedroom which I shared with my friend Randal Deihl, a surrealist who had shared three places with me in Oakland, California. Eventually I moved to an unheated room in the basement where the wind whistled in during the winter cold and I fell ill for a while. I forget now what paintings I got done in the basement, whether it was the Nightclub Violinist or The Franz Kline Brushstroke series, but I only remember that it got so cold, that Randal let me go back into his room to do the paintings.
I went to the Museum of Modern Art with a cheap camera and when the guard wasn't looking, snapped a series of photos of the details of certain parts of a painting by Franz Kline. Here are photos from 1970 of a single brushstroke in a Franz Kline painting:
(click
on the thumbnail to see the enlargement)
I began to see landscapes in the brushstrokes and needed the photos to make the landscape paintings from the strokes. Since the theory was that the brush stroke was an "accident" thus becoming an actual part of nature, in a sense, theoretically, I was actually doing a painting of a natural thing just like I would if I painted some scene. The result is this series of paintings.
First I did drawings (click on thumbnails to see enlargements):
Then I set about to do the paintings. first I did a series of studies on cardboard. Remarkably the cardboard oil paintings protected by two or more coats of "gesso" primer by the Crayola company have outlasted some paintings I have done on the so-called pre-primed canvas available at that period of time.
click here to return to the Staten Island Period table of contents.
The study came out well. At the time I was really scared to do too much work on corrugated cardboard. I talked with other artists around me about it. Some thought it just shouldn't be done. Others thought chemicals in the cardboard would come through to the oil paint. But I was driven by poverty. Look at all that cadmium red in the study! Back in those days, nineteen seventy, a tube of cad red was five bucks when you could get a pound of hamburger for seventy-five cents. So I put a double layer of Crayola Gesso on some cardboard and did a couple of studies. Then I stretched the canvass and did a final painting based on the first study.
As my studies progressed I realized that the things I saw in the brush stroke seemed more and more to be like something out of "The Inferno" by Dante. It seemed as though I was visiting the Museum of Modern Art to look at this work of Kline in such a detailed way and thus doing became privy to a sort of a, for want of a better phrase, view of hell.
A tree being torn apart, figures (not shown here, that sketch
may be lost) in a machine gun nest frozen in a scene of violent and perpetual
war. The study above is what looks like a premonition of the oil fires during
the First Gulf War. And the final painting: 
all in red. It reminded me of the Biblical account of Christ's three days
in hell. There is the figure on the top of a ridge, still wearing the
crown of thorns, talking with a woman stuck in a ditch about her plight. 
I think of it as an examination into just that: the human plight. As far as that goes, I think the best description of Hell I could come up with off hand would be a totally man-made environment. The so-called hermetic environment, devoid of life. A setting for the final act of a world of negativity in which all but the achievement of indifferent human beings is despised. As I wrote in one of my songs written in Brisbane, Australia: "Beware of all the trinkets of brass and steel and clay, for stars and seas and surfaces are moving every day. If you cannot move with them, you'll crumble like the rest that, in the hardened bitterness, had blundered every test".
But back to the brush stroke. Though he maybe hadn't planned it, here are two artists, Kline and myself, working in a strange way in tandem to produce a sort of insight. Perhaps I came up with another premonition. Maybe this is some sort of admonition that senseless human endeavor might lead to some postmortem epoch of extreme destruction in which each unwitting individual might participate.
I find it advisable to include in each endeavor some sort of kindness and compassion. As my motto goes, "Tread carefully through this mysterious world".
Click here to return to the Staten Island Period table of contents.
Click the thumbnail to see the digital art used for the background,
"Image118pastel2".
Click here to return to "Flowers beside a New Hampshire Forest, Gallery Nine".
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The Paul Hall art literature directory
The Notorious White Pass Trail of Dead Horses...
Copyright © 2003 [Paul Hall]. All rights reserved.
email address:
art@paulhallart.com
...Otherwise known as the "...Ninety-Mile-Per-Hour
Brushstroke".*
*Cicero, 1965.