I stayed in. Thought about things. Slipped into a frame of mind that questioned why I'm writing. Why I've all but stopped sketching, let alone painting. Remembered I planned for years...through high school and after....to be an artist.
Fell in love with abstract expressionism, but wanted to mix its subconscious non-representational emotion and gesture with the human form.
Male human form. Everybody was doing women. I'd even begun seeing the Andrew Wyeth paintings of Helga, here and there, and started wondering if I could find some way of combining that precise beauty with the careful freedom of Willem de Kooning and lovely men.
But it never happened. Oh, I did paintings. Male nudes. Single. Double. Groups. Working in acrylics on board. Sold some to collectors. Gave others away. Did some off-beat designs of cityscapes that became t-shirts and posters. Then for some reason turned to writing.
But even in my writing I tried to paint images with words. And still, working on a piece of gay erotica, I'm fighting to build more than a picture in the reader's mind of what is there and happening. Not just the action and emotion, but the blending of background and foreground and colors and styles. A life, not merely a tale.
Then today...after thinking about what I posted yesterday, for Taking Nicky...I suddenly wondered if I've just been wasting my time on something that was counterproductive to my true reason to be. Words cannot take the place of images. Never. You can try and come close...and worlds can be build in one's mind and emotions touched...but nothing supplants actually seeing.
So I feel like I've spent 50 years riding the wrong horse...and now cannot even get myself to do a fucking sketch. To pick up a paint brush, again.
How fitting I'm feeling this way on Friday, the 13th.
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