Selected Essays & Reviews
Story of Waterston
In which turtles, the Buddha, a painter & other beasts speak their minds.
Darren's father, a paramedic, has arranged for him to witness and participate in an autopsy. He will assist in the dismantling of a young man who died in an automobile accident. Artists often find their way into such circumstances. Touching corpses first hand, drawing and painting them. Artists have a distinct hunger for the hyper real, to see the human form in its most humbled state, to view the systems and structures that underlie our outward appearance. Dead people prefer the artists' awed gaze to the medical examiners. That's not a fact easily proven. Nonetheless, I'm convinced it is true.
This particular examiner has a fondness for the 18th Century composer Johann Sebastian Bach, whom the good doctor listens to while he works, electric vibrating blade saw in hand. A blood-encrusted CD player, which sits on a table several feet away from the corpse, booms out muscular cello pieces performed by Yo-Yo Ma. An autopsy traditionally begins at the chest with what they call a Y-cut, where an incision is made from shoulder to shoulder and then from the center of the chest down to the pelvis. This allows access to all of the major organs. When it is time to get to the real goods, an incision is made into the back of the neck, scalp is pulled over face, top of skull cut into, and popped off like a coconut. A clear bit of liquid comes out, zero blood. And there is the brain in all its glory, like a big, ruffly piece of tofu, all in this perfect package.
Darren: "He easily pulled it out, cut the attached brain stem and membranes and then put it on a dish. I was in awe. I kept staring at it, fixating on it, all the different parts, thinking this little chunk here is everything Mozart ever wrote and this little bit here is every memory this young man ever had. It just verified to me that we are not our bodies. Consciousness is not part of our physical being."
The brain is thinly sliced into one-inch pieces like pound cake. The examiner searches for the exact spot where frontal lobe damage occurred.
Darren: "And then he found the smallest amount of blood. The doctor told me as soon as that little bit of blood gets in the brain matter it's over. I was amazed that that's all it took to end this man's life."
The experience lasted over three hours. Afterwards Darren takes himself to International House of Pancakes. He orders a stack of buttermilks and begins to weep.
Darren: "In this dream I had, I was in a church. I was brought into the side reliquary-chapel and presented with everything my body had ever shed since I was born, all in little bell jars and alters, starting with my umbilical cord, all the teeth that I had lost, and all the hair and skin my body had shed. There were vats of urine, tear drops, semen. It was incredible. There were pieces of old glass that had stains on them. Some were collections of spit and eye lashes, there were scrims from every cut I ever had as a child. Every conceivable remnant. And then my birth mark. I had this birthmark removed from my back. There was my birthmark, all dried up on this little pillow, underneath the bell jar."
Shortly after he attended the autopsy Waterston transcribed the moles and birthmarks from the flesh of friends and reproduced them in several paintings.
Waterston's paintings are very much of the body. Talking about them is like slinking into a discussion of David Cronenberg movies. The body imploding, all surfaces sprouting, oozing, dripping, causing great poetic havoc. Waterston has a great sense of mutational improvisation. His plants turn into human forms, slip back into plantness, mineral, vapor, ozone, abstract particles.
Darren: "I try to figure out a way of mark-making that somehow feels like visceral fluids of the body, whether it's urine or semen or blood or the waste of the body. Some sort of pictorial space is created. Flesh becomes sky becomes something else—some reference to landscape where you're not quite sure how you're entering into it. I'm trying to assemble a very seductive, copulating kind of a world in flux. Things in various stages of mutation, being born, dissolving, rotting away—something that's very bedazzled and jeweled against something that's really fetid. It all flows into a divine chaos."
This understanding of the endless cycle of birth and death fits right in with Waterston's intense interest in Buddhism. A fundamental principle in Buddhist thought is embracing the impermanence of all form and experience.
Waterston was born in Fresno, a quiet California city best known for its agricultural production. He grew up surrounded by grape and fig orchards. A perfect, uncomplicated world: burning hot summers, cold foggy winters, a place to dig deep holes into the earth and disappear into a secret universe. An avid bug collector and junior botanist, he developed an interest in the inner workings of nature at an early age, painting and drawing his observations. Two years out of high school, fueled by an interest in the Dutch Masters and Northern European painting, Waterston got on an airplane and studied painting at the Academie der Kunst in Berlin and at the Fachochshule fur Kunst, in Munster, Germany. He prowled around museums, studied early secular painting, illuminated manuscripts, art history, theory, and Renaissance painting techniques. He interned at an archival museum, learned to speak German fluently, and became skilled at book binding restoration. He taught monks how to take care of their archives. A year later he was back in Madness, USA. He got a B.F.A. in Communication Design, rather than a Fine Arts degree at Otis College of Art and Design in Los Angeles, where a paint-hating theory ghoul oozed out the memorable phrase, "Painting is dead and we are encumbered by its corpse."
Waterston now divides his time between two remarable workstations. He lives two blocks from the ocean in Santa Monica with a pack of remarkably active turtles. One of them is as old as he is. They live in a pen in his backyard near a rectangular reflecting pool and stands of several different varieties of bamboo. Waterston spends most of his time, however, on Denman Island, a quiet place in British Columbia. He has a studio tucked away in the woods, a short hike from his house. Here is his place of solitude and most concentrated studio time.
Waterston is not a 10-armed Hindu deity (maybe he secretly is, it wouldn't surprise me), but he still manages to work on ten paintings at the same time. His studio is lined with large and small rectangles and ovals, all staring out begging for another coat of glaze.
Waterston is a romantic artist with hyperclassical painting skills. He's able to do amazing things with paint. Veins, fog, mist, ghostliness, white, brushy, poltergeisty coils. Animals in each other's asses. Snakes. A circus netherworld. Guardian of terrapins: he is an extremely intelligent fellow, short hair, five foot nine, pretty fingers, twinkly-blinky eyes, refreshingly unhip, a perpetual smile that masks a woeful heavy heart.
Turtles's Song
There are five turtles in the backyard, a momma and poppa turtle in their mid-thirties, and a trio of youngin's. Poppa turtle thinks our kids are teens but they still like to hang out at home. Darren-human is Lord and Master, protector with the big face, our lettuce and broccoli provider. I know him like the back of my claw. Our days are full and our eyes bear a strong resemblance to black pepper corns. We spend most of our time crawling over rocks and chewing up piles of greens—mostly we're just kickin' it in the sun, poster models of the slow groove. I cannot begin to explain how great it feels to have the little ones climb on top of me and wander across my back. Makes a grown turtle shed a tear. My shell is shaped like the Pentagon but that doesn't make me a Republican. If I could sing that would be the first line of the song of my life, but I can't carry a tune. The tail under my wife's ass is an arresting little stump. Our scales and hard shells give people the impression that we are descendants of the Triceratops. We are frequently associated with the fast moving rabbit. The tortoise and the hare, a contrast in styles, as they say. And we, of the Kinosternidae family, are always held up as the winners of speed-race lore, icons of patience and perseverance. We are the warriors who are in it for the long haul, the scalely bastard, the reptile who reeks of soul and never quits. I fear the rich and their fancy taste in food. I see them with their extra large soupspoons, slurping and spilling. I ain't going out like that. We are vulnerable to upper class people who luxuriate in the gamy broth of the turtle. Turtle soup tastes like tea made with liver and a handful of copper pennies. Call me a demented turtle, I don't really mind, but here's how I'd like my life to end if I can't complete it naturally with age. I'd like Darren-human to tear my shell off my body and leave me vulnerable and raw. I choose this method precisely for its degree of agony. I want to feel something significant because I know I can turtlize this pain and transcend it. I want to lie in the dirt and be attacked by seagulls, vultures and hawks. Be pecked to smithereens. In the ends that's all I really am, all any of us are, a piece of meat.
Darren: "I imagine my paintings being in a constant state of flux. I never feel that the image I end up with is this static thing. It just happened to be that in this suspended moment, it all coagulated just like this. When I leave the room I like to imagine that the paintings continue to undulate and dissolve and that the actual process that I went through just carries on."
The painting that paints itself, responding to shapes and movement, doing what the forms and lines suggest, is in spirit so similar to what the seminal French novelist Alain Robbe Grillet wrote about in his essay The Novel that Writes Itself. Waterston's paintings dictate their own next moves, and he is their humble servant. There' always a set of signs banging into one another, suggesting new freaky associations. Strong paintings know where they want to go, what they want for breakfast, who to sleep with. Like corpses and live bodies they know how they want to be tinkered with. No voice per se is necessary for them to speak their mind. An active painting is like a rigorous traveler that helped pack the cargo and suggested alternative routes. So many roads to consider. The idea that paintings themselves suggest various directions in which they might develop seems like a slight echo of Buddhism's references to "The Eight Fold Path" that the faithful should follow. Though Waterston doesn't consider himself a Buddhist, strictly speaking, his work is permeated with imagery from Buddhist art.
Thus Spoke the Buddha:
I am plump only for appearances, to look like the cheerful protector, the coach of a wrestling team. My crusade, if you call it that (and maybe you shouldn't because crusade sounds aggressive, heavy, rigid) is not about suffering. Purely the opposite: It's important that I bear little resemblance to my Bible belting associate, Jerusalem Slim. If you see me with a smile on my face it is not just because I am contemplating sex, which is a great funny thing that causes much laughter (the act of humping, is it not ridiculous?). I will tell a story now. I was once at the top of a snowy mountain and I watched a mountain goat misjudge a rock and fall a thousand feet to its death. There was a certain grace to the animal's fall, like a shooting star drifting slowly across the sky. The goat bounced gently from ledge to ledge before crashing through the top of a fir tree and landing beside a worn out, unskilled hunter, a sorry fellow who couldn't trap a butterfly, let alone gather food for his starving family. This was a man who watched his parents die from lack of food and now his wife and children were days if not hours away from ceasing to breathe. He threw the goat over his shoulders and walked the carcass back to his weakened wife and children. Goat is good, they shouted, which in German sounds almost exactly like a prayer. Amen.
The drip, it's like an uncontrolled zip (see/think/picture Barnett Newman's long neck tie). When you see a drip in a Waterston painting streaking down a panel you're not just seeing a painter allowing paint to be paint; you're seeing a virtual leak of the elements. A fluid that's actually being secreted from a disc, bulb, or ball. Molting… mutating.
The surfaces of Waterston's pictures are shiny like silk, but they're also hard and mean business, like the enameled fingernails on a tough gal. They look lacquered, shellacked. Having said that, it's fair to say that Waterston is a sexy painter. Every painting reeks of sex; either what will happen, could happen, should or shall happen, hovering there with ripe tensions. Often the paintings venture into the fantastic. In Bliss (Plate No. 1) a strange cord descends from the top of an ultramarine sky. The cord has two leaves sprouting from it and a very fancy caterpillar. A coiled up snake stretches for a moth-like thing. Four bulging fig-shaped balls hang from the bottom of the cord. Sharp thorns protrude from them. One ball is bleeding red, another festers in decay. All the flora and fauna are moving together like synchronized swimmers. In Lover's Tale (Plate No. 25) a bird with customized wings, string wrapped around its body and a cone around its beak pisses into the mouth of a cheerful human head. In Charmers (Plate No. 24) two heads are connected by a thread which seems to be a body fluid conduit. In Epiphany (Plate No. 54) a sequence of remarkable things take place: A figure standing contraposto on a raft made out of giant breasts watches over a landscape connected by descending leaves, strings and hooks; the head of a horse with wings sprouting out of its ears leaks its innards onto the backs of two rats fucking. There are hanging lanterns and hidden buddhas and cryptic red and white things that look peppermint striped. Birds watch, nooses dangle and various particles droop. Most pictures have the vertical atmosphere of a tropical rain forest or Chinese landscape painting, with an assortment of things hanging from the tops of paintings implying the infinite.
Darren: "I want the paintings to allude to something much larger, as if you're only seeing part of something. I like the idea of how much information we take in from our peripheral view and depending on what we focus on, there's a sense of this whole other thing playing out on the sidelines, or behind us. I try and paint what I think is going on around me, bringing these peripheral elements into the forefront, on equal footing with the other elements. I imagine I'm in the middle of a cylindrical enclosure, turning, searching. I stop randomly at one point and begin to paint there."
Pictures like these make one feel better about being alive, safer, experiencing the imagination in full swing. Everything is capable of morphing into something else. It's no surprise that Waterston is a fan of fairy paintings, with sleeping figures flopped over velvet couches and furry rambunctious nymphs having their way, taking delight in the moment where the human blob is most vulnerable, not conscious. Fairy paintings are excessively theatrical: goofy goatboys serenading a netherworld of dancing, floating spirits, everyone naked, sporting wings, magic wands, up to no good, full mischief on the to-do list.
Darren: "I've always been intrigued by early Victorian fairy painting. Almost always there's some underbelly that is menacing and shadowy. I'm curious about the interaction between the playful and the subversive. Those paintings are illustrative explorations of the pre-Freudian subconscious, playing with metaphor in a whole new way. Looking at those figurative fairy paintings informed my own use of the human body as well as the irrational play of scale, where a head is the same size as a dragonfly. I wanted the body to be made up of the same sod or detritus as a lump of earth or some sort of little fecal mass. Whether some kind of fern, insect or body part, I wanted it to look like it was from the same substance. The use of the silhouette helped to take away the fleshiness of the human form. I was working a lot with ornamentation as well, trying to play along that fine line where something becomes incredibly decorative or you take that form and try to charge it up with something else. The little fragments of body were more like signposts than illustrated scenarios."
Buddha's 2nd Fable:
I am terrified of spiders, a man says, they frighten me more than guns, mental illness, nuclear war, and robots. Having said this, a spider, as if on cue, descends from the ceiling. Oh my god no, the man shouts, somebody please help me. A neighbor comes running. What's the matter? one neighbor asks another. Look, a toxic shock California black belt spider, he says, pointing. The helpful visiting neighbor assumes a cool rescue persona, walks into the kitchen and grabs a small juice glass and a post card that was magnetized to the refrigerator. Kill it man, kill it, the spiderphobic man screams. I'll just relocate him, how's that? the spider catcher says as he traps the spider in the glass, but a Byzantine style lamp and wing chair and ottoman were in the way. He can't quite cap the mouth of the glass with the post card so he slides the glass over a few feet. The panic stricken spider scurries all around the glass and when he approaches the lip and wall all his legs are accidentally ripped out of his body. This pleases the frightened man who believes the spider had murder on his mind, but it breaks the heart of the man whose plan was to toss the spider into the garden, safe and sound.
Waterston's brush strokes have a theatrical quality, where the exact mark made is what remains. Figures reappear like characters in a novel: the euphoric rats that prefer sex to trash, the floating heads with misty spinal cords, the monkeys, the fig bulbs, et cetera. One rarely sees a painting without a bubble. The space Waterston creates in his paintings is a gravity-free zone where all elements are in suspended animation, where a kind of exquisite torture may take place, as if the paintings were under a deep hypnotic state, or within the confines of an aquarium. Most of his pictures have an arresting contaminated aura, as if the objects in the paintings were trapped in amber, preserved in honey, sap, syrup, embalming fluid, or the gel inside an eyeball.
Darren: "I often think that a painting is the aftermath of an experience far greater than the object itself, something more meaningful or transforming. I'm left with something that's the shell of an experience that was much more interesting to me than the actual painting itself—the remnant of something physical, emotional, the whole psychological state of painting."
It takes a lot of nerve to decorate your way to heaven. To not say a word but to just dress up and beautify endlessly. To believe that via ornamentation one could arrive at a worldview. Beauty is something to be studied for long periods of time; so you can really know it and carry it around in your mind for the rest of your life. Waterston's is a perverse world held in unusual balance. Where coils, swirls, drips, cords, flowers, clouds, gourds, palm fronds are equal to saliva and urine and spodey-ode (sperm, sperm, and more sperm). I can't help but thinking how happy all these moths, worms, Buddhas, and bodiless heads must be with their new life inside Waterstonland.
I start to see parts of my own life turning Waterston. A trio of flies do aerial maneuvers in the center of my playpen, I mean office. A fourth fly occasionally cruises into the air space and participates, interrupts. These are the smaller, quieter flies that don't make any noise; therefore I do not hate them. Not sure what their life's work is about. They don't seem food bound. They're almost gnats. They hover in a circular pattern for hours. Two disappear, one remains, continues on its own. Three and a half feet off the ground. And then suddenly the fly gnat is gone. Where did it go? Why did it stop? I wasn't looking close enough. It's right in front of me.
Benjamin Weissman