Visions of the Cantilevered Walkways of Gold
Note from the artist:
This work was done in my cramped hotel room in Caracas, Venezuela back in summer of 1997.
I had worked for a couple of months as a mechanical assembler in the USA to save up some funds to make an attempt to get back into full-time painting. The difficult part about that episode of fund-raising during that time wasn't the months I worked at Kimchuck Electronics, but the difficulty I had finding a job previously to that. I had just come in from Australasia and had spent a considerable amount of time job hunting.
I had already tried to get a job driving a school bus there in Bethel, Connecticut.
Bus driving seemed easy enough. All I had to do was take the course the bus company gave me and then take the test and get my license. The rest was just a matter of doing the job. Wrong. After going to the expense of paying the license fees and taking all that time doing the driving course, the company let me know what my route would be the same day I was to drive it. They had given me two routes, high school students and grade school students.
They let me take a bus out to "familiarize" myself. I took a wrong turn that ended me up on a Connecticut back road that must have been somebody's rural cow path to the market place a century ago that maybe some series of towns thought should be paved for old time's sake. I ended up in another county and when I finally found a place big enough to turn around in it wound up to be another school bus depot where they inspected my bus and found a set of snow chains they had loaned to the depot I would be driving for several years before and never got back. "Look," someone said holding up an ancient dusty rectangle of paper full of holes, "I found a dollar under the chains!"
Now, I don't know why stuff like that happens to me, or maybe it happens to everyone out there and they just don't write about it. But coincidences like this happen to me or I happen to them at regular intervals. I wrote about that in my article "The Night I Picked Up Andy Warhol In My Taxicab", when I just happened to have been driving my cab down a back street in the East Village and picked him up in the middle of the street.
I just got back to my bus depot to start my first run. So when my high school students boarded the bus, I made a brief announcement that it was my first day and that I might need their help to learn the route. I was a bit suspicious when I looked at the bus load of grins staring back at me. Most of them ended up trying to guide me to their homes to get me to let them off at their front doors. I couldn't possibly do that and still get back on time. But, when I insisted to stop only at the designated points on the list given me by the company that's when all hell broke loose.
Even during my three years in the army, I had never heard the volumes of vitriolic profanity that was poured out upon me in one brief hour by that busload of kids. In all my world travels, I had never met a nastier bunch of people nor encountered a greater degree of hatred than I during that brief time with those students. The next bunch were the grade school kids. I wondered what kind of monsters they bred in that town! It was a solid non-stop bedlam. In the mirror I could see a kid beating up a bunch of others in the back seat but by then I was too tired to do anything about it. A clay inkwell came hurtling from somewhere in the mid section and shattered against the front windshield.
By the time I got back to the bus depot, the parents of the teen agers who had hurled their abuses at me with obscenities and insults, had complained about me to the boss. She met me outside the door and fired me on the spot, refusing to even pay me for the day's work I had done. I don't know what kind of lies those kids told their parents, but they had their way. Hey, nobody said it would be easy and I was prepared for it not to be. After weeks of job hunting, I finally found a job working at the electronics factory as an assembly worker.
A couple of months later I had enough money to get to South America. It wasn't easy. First of all, I had to walk for a couple of hours to get to work. Once I had to do that while fighting a case of the flue. My co-workers were furious at me especially when they all caught the flue, too. Once the police picked me up. Someone had reported me for walking along the roadside. I guess in their part of America it's a crime not to own a car. Fortunately that only happened once.
I ended up in a small room in the Hotel Myriam in the center of Caracas, Venezuela. I lived on a meager diet of peanuts, tuna fish and bread (with a daily ration of the local red wine and lots of great Venezuelan espresso) and was coming along pretty well for a while: I had made a few friends and things were working out all right. I managed to get six paintings done and this is the first time I worked in acrylic. In the small inexpensive hotel room with facilities down the hall, the acrylic was less cleanup.
I was hoping to get some work done outdoors but my friends frantically persuaded me not to. Apparently it would be dangerous. In fact, one evening while I sat at my small table writing, I heard a gunshot. The hotel guard had just shot someone climbing up the side of the building to try to break into my room through the window. He insisted on giving me the shell for a souvenir .
Finally, because the "visa trips" to neighboring Trinidad were too expensive, I decided to head back to Australia and New Zealand for a while where the street singing (busking) was pretty good.
The painting is of a person walking under the top of a huge enclosure on a highway of gold past flowers as big as skyscrapers.
The figure is actually from a photo of myself on "walkabout" through the former gold-fields of Australia in my stone-washed Levi's and Dock-side loafers. There was no one with me there, that's from a self-portrait photo on the timer of an old pentax automatic. Could it be that I was envisioning walking on gold fields that might still be there? (click to see painting at top of page)
The flower is an actual "still life" of one solitary carnation bought down the street and painted three times.
While there in Caracas I also wrote a brief anthology of poetry called "A City Song" and I might get around to putting it on the site someday.
Click here to return to The Visions of the Seven Walkways of Gold.
Click here to return to Voice Introduction for Oil Paintings, page one.
Click the thumbnail to see the digital art used for the background,
"Image120pastel1".
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email address: art@paulhallart.com
This work was done in my cramped hotel room in Caracas, Venezuela back in summer of 1997.