Domestic Left #16: Oils on Paper
Alert readers of this newsletter may have noticed a recurring theme of me dabbling in the visual arts, from photography to drawing* to painting. (*yes, there's a photograph at the top of that one, but if you scroll further down, there's drawings. I promise!)
A couple of months ago, I bought some oil pastels (basically crayons for adults) ... and I think I may have finally found my ideal medium. For one thing, the box of pastels and the 8 1/2 by 5 1/2 inch spiral bound book of heavy “mixed media” paper I bought to draw in fit easily into a backpack, so they can travel with me, and are easy to pull out while on a hike, or sitting alone in a coffee shop or bar.
I find the way that they slowly saturate the paper immensely satisfying, and a fine way to steer between the fear of making a fatal mistake and the obsessiveness of endless reworking. Drawing with pen requires a full commitment to each stroke, while acrylic paint can be painted over ad infinitum. With pastels, to the degree that I’m looking to be figurative, I’m much more comfortable starting with a few bold strokes — once they are on the paper, they can’t really be fully covered up, but they can be reshaped and blended into new colors and shapes by adding more oil around them. On the other hand, at some point the initially rough and welcoming surface of the paper becomes smooth and glossy and little can be done besides smearing what is already there.
It’s been a learning process, of course, but I’ve developed a technique that suits me. I’ll get an idea, which usually consists of a few basic shapes (sometimes figurative, sometimes abstract, sometimes in between) and some color fields. Sometimes its a scene or object that’s in front of me, sometimes it’s a memory, sometimes it’s a phrase — usually, some combination of the three. I’ll sketch out the shapes and mix the colors for the fields by, say, lightly rubbing the whole area first with red, then with brown, then with orange.
Once the basics are on the paper, I’ll go over the whole surface of the paper again, with increasingly heavy strokes, filling in the white space, thickening and blending the colors together, adding highlights, until the color is as dense as I can get it.
The whole process is remarkably quick and intense, like the Midwest thunderstorms I grew up with rather than the long, drenching rainy days of New England or Pittsburgh (even though the latter is what is portrayed in the first image below).
Last night I finished reading Ben Ehrenreich’s Desert Notebooks. I’m sure I will have more to say about it in future editions of this newsletter — right now I’m still turning it over in my mind — but I thought it worth sharing one surprising thing I learned from the book, and the documentary it reminded me of. (Which is why this is below a video icon, not a book icon.)
During the Paris Commune, the French revolutionary Louis Auguste Blanqui — who was elected president of the commune in absentia by the workers of Paris — was locked up in remote prison of which he was the sole inmate. During his time there he composed a treatise on the nature of reality and the universe, Eternity By the Stars, which (at least according to Ehrenreich) presaged the many-worlds interpretation — the idea, beloved of science fiction writers and apparently nowadays increasingly taken seriously by astrophysicists and cosmologists and the like, that every decision point (human for Blanqui, quantum for the scientists) splits the universe, ultimately creating an infinite multiverse in which everything is not only possible, but already true.
The first quantum physicist who seriously proposed this idea in scientific terms, it turns out, was the father of Mark Oliver Everett, the singer, songwriter and only consistent member of the band Eels. In 2007, Everett made a documentary about his father, with whom he was not close and who died when Everett was 19. The elder Everett was essentially laughed out of the academy after he proposed the many-worlds interpretation, and spent his life working for defense contractors and drinking heavily.
The documentary, Parallel Worlds, Parallel Lives, is available on YouTube and well worth watching; it’s interesting and touching and a good reminder of the possibility of wonder in the universe, and of connecting with people even after death.
If you read only one thing about the Supreme Court right now, read Corey Robin’s “The Self-Fulfilling Prophecies of Clarence Thomas” in The New Yorker (or at least on their website, not sure if it will make it into the print magazine):
“Once upon a time, Alito’s claims of systemic danger and state incapacity [in the Bruen decision, striking down gun control in New York] would have been dismissed as the rantings of a mountain survivalist. But, after decades of mass shootings, his assertion that the cops can’t protect you reads as a corollary to the left’s warning that the cops won’t protect you. What makes both beliefs plausible is the failed state that America has become, with no small amount of help from Thomas, the right-wing Court, and elected officials from both parties.
“Today’s felt absence of physical security is the culmination of a decades-long war against social welfare. In the face of a state that won’t do anything about climate change, economic inequality, personal debt, voting rights, and women’s rights, it’s no wonder that an increasing portion of the population, across all races, genders, and beliefs, have determined that the best way to protect themselves, and their families, is by getting a gun. A society with no rights, no freedoms, except for those you claim yourself — this was always Thomas’s vision of the world. Now, for many Americans, it is the only one available.”