The Logos

1

I have always thought of her face as a mistake. Always—even before I could see the world wouldn’t turn out as we’d hoped. Where was it, though? The flaw. I suppose you could just as well ask, which of her faces did I mean?

There was, to start with, the one where she looked at you sidelong, her head tipped low and her eyes scrunched by a light pure enough to erase her. Claire was a whisper then, or only an echo of one, her face pulling away from you with a glance so slight you couldn’t be sure you weren’t imagining it. But how could you say there was anything to find fault with here? With blending into light. With admitting no edges. With looking askance even. I realized that.

There was another face of hers. It looked at you dead on and wasn’t so far from guileless in the end. Yet something managed to spoil it, turn it feral. I suppose fear was drawn into it, the sort that has a way of inspiring the same. But how exactly? Was it the chalky skin, the way it made you feel as though merely being alive, and not some special exertion, had sent her blood into retreat? Or was it the tawny hair that went tumbling around her face, as if, moments before, something had happened, and ever since she’d been whipping her head back and forth, scanning the scene in terror? It might, though, for all anyone could know, have been as simple as the steep descent of her nose, which, even when she was stock-still, seemed to slash at the air in defiance.

But how could it have been the nose, really? Considered on its own, it was simply precise—exquisitely so. And her hair, however confused, fell only in mild curls, swathing her face just as though she’d woken from a long and fearless sleep, nothing like a nightmare. The apertures of her eyes, yes, perhaps they were a touch wide, at least for a genuinely settled mind; and against that pastel skin, the dark irises leapt out at you with frightening speed. But wasn’t it a bit churlish to say eyes could be too open? And if they seemed to reach your own more quickly than you’d expected, well, shouldn’t that rate as a gift for intimacy, something to be envied, not faulted or feared?

So, then, a third face. This time Claire had almost entirely untensed it, though somehow this didn’t lend her the smooth and lucid neutrality you might have expected, and that I must have been seeking in her, in one way or another—from time to time, anyway—while sifting through an infinity of attitudes toward life and art. Instead, she seemed open and generous now, and so content she didn’t even need to smile for you to know it.

How could there be any mistake here, you would ask? But this was precisely the issue. What you saw in her, you saw everywhere now. The floorboards of my ancient and once-grand townhouse apartment, so worn they looked by this point like some kind of pressed wood, the slabs dimpled by the unfinished feet of the aluminum stool she’d perched on, which was, by contrast, almost space-age in its polish; and then the window behind her gridded with grease pencil, putting you in mind of a prison as you looked out over what was in truth only a placeholder of a park, making bars, virtual or otherwise, wholly appropriate: all this appeared just as serene, as gilded, as she did. You’d never have imagined the raw feet of the stool stabbing into the floor, as if by merely sitting on it she was digging herself a hole. And you’d never imagine the true state of that park, all its steaming metal and concrete, with the trees giving cover to the dealers and muggers as they did their business with spun-out teens and, more recently, the homeless, who made their beds there when they couldn’t tolerate the shelters any longer.

Nothing managed to mark Claire off from her surroundings. Instead she seemed to warp the room itself, and even what was to be found beyond it, in that park. That the distortion was rather pleasant, like Vaseline on the lens, didn’t prevent this sense of unreality from vexing you, no less than any apocalyptic vision you might have projected onto the scene outside my window. In truth it was hardly that disturbing, if not quite banal either. There’d been a rather inventive killing carried out in the park in the summer. A runaway teen had her face collapsed by the fat edge of a laptop so hulking you would have had trouble conceiving how many product cycles back it must have come into being, before all its circuitry disintegrated through a life outdoors.

It was hardly a land of unmitigated cruelty or despond, the Bronx. Something as simple as the peculiarly heavy ice-cream truck traffic in the neighborhood told you that much. There were three or four trucks, all monocolored slabs of blue, various versions of the sky, and each considered the area its turf. The rivalries were often less than collegial. But then sometimes you could find all the trucks clustered by the rusting iron gate of the park in the afternoon, all doing brisk business, positively thriving. The neighborhood folk must have drawn a sizable portion of their sustenance from these carts, which were stationed along the streets at unusual hours, early in the morning, and often near midnight, times of day I hadn’t imagined had much attraction for an ice-cream vendor, before moving here from Brooklyn. They sold a Mexican ice-cream of which I’d grown quite fond; I would pick it up on my many walks around the neighborhood, which was just north of the Patterson Houses and not so far east of Yankee Stadium—yet far enough, I suppose. It was by a large margin more ice than cream, with bright, artificial colors that misled you as to its flavor, which was extraordinarily mild, if not simply notional. The entire business was already so peculiar that one of the drivers had not long ago thought nothing of selling tamales right alongside the ice-cream—and why not? They were exceptional specimens. My days growing up across the country, in the Bay, equipped me to recognize this. The tamales came frequently to serve as my dinner, whenever I heard the driver’s distinctive jingle in the street. It made a sort of tuneless ringing. The bell was broken. You couldn’t miss it.

Even so, I thought, no world could be quite as charmed as this face. Perhaps it shouldn’t be; there might be something slightly vulgar in that. These were matters on which my opinions had been shifting, after a long period of relative stability; but even now I tend to think of this look of Claire’s as too pure for its own good.

One last face then. Perhaps the one that mattered most. There was nothing behind her when she’d made this one, so the background seemed empty (actually it was the palest blue, but you didn’t notice this). What called out to you instead, as her gaze ever so slightly missed yours, confronting something that must have been just behind you, over your shoulder—almost on top of you, really, who knows just what it was—were the gentle symmetries of her ears and cheeks, her chin and brow. Her hairline, freshly visible now that her locks had been pulled back, described the upper bound of what was, structurally, a more or less ideal façade.

This time, unlike the third face, there was nothing unreal about it. Nothing utopian, I mean, the sort of thing that can get boring, that you sense must be masking complexities. For one, her expression wasn’t quite placid; no, it was very much of this world: suitably, interestingly agitated. Whatever exactly it was that was over your shoulder, perhaps just some quotidian treachery, ensured that much.

Still, as your gaze traversed her face—as mine did then—it was hard not to notice your own loss of focus, as your eyes began to stray and other thoughts, almost any thoughts, would take her place. This was difficult to make sense of—it was a great face, full of story—until you accepted that an absence of error, including, this time, the error of ideality, the blankness of an unadulterated joy, could still amount to one. This, you might say, was a face too real for its own good. Truth, precision, no less than brazen fantasy, was not quite as profound as you would think, not until it was stained by its opposite.

As I began to dwell on this thought, or rather to dwell in it, to consider whether it was merely a compelling formulation for being koan-like, or whether it held some deeper integrity, and in this case the truth of the matter was genuinely elegant (if recondite), I was overcome by the intensity of our negotiations that day, which had been anything but elegant. I’d had to sit Claire down, roughly, on the high and shallow windowsill. She’d been wearing heels for no good reason other than that summer was halfway through, and that was her way in summer. I coaxed her partway to her feet from there, and for an instant she seemed ungainly, in a manner I associated with beauty, or if not that, then with what was even more desirable than beauty, and here I don’t mean truth, as nothing was less characteristic of her than ungainliness; it was its exceptionalness, rather, that brought it a kind of poignancy and weight. I’d taken her hands and wrapped them around the sill, leaning her shoulders against the pane, which was hot with summer sun, even without any light cascading through. From there I steered her frame against the glass until I was satisfied with the pressures, the pushes and pulls, the sense of rising action conjured through the slight strain of this posture.

After I’d located this interest, manipulating her person by going just past this point, into what I imagine was quite painful territory, shaping the arch of her back, the weight flowing down through her calves—you had to overrun things slightly, watch them fall, to know you’d found the peak—after I’d set her back in the strongest possible position, from my point of view and not hers, of course, though if she really were the artist I believed her to be, she must have known in some way that it was for the best, however much she ached, that is when the pleading began. My own, I mean: Can you just stay as you are? I’ll be fast, I promise. I backed away from her, never leaving her with my eyes, toward the easel on which I’d pinned my paper. I started whittling down the black charcoal pencil, holding the knife at an angle just off parallel with the pencil itself to produce the longest possible point. I could see her track the shavings as they fluttered to the ground around my feet. I called to her then, seeing the burgeoning revolt of her entire body: just a couple of minutes. Hadn’t I done the same for her, and more than once, as she’d molded clay in my image?

Once I’d gotten the pencil to a soft sort of sharpness, I held it by its base, with two fingers, upright, and stretched my arm out toward her till my elbow locked, as if I were trying, absurdly, to hand her the pencil from fifteen feet away. What I succeeded in doing was just to superimpose the plumb line onto her.

I held the pencil horizontally, too, staking out all the ways she took up space, and the way she, or rather the light leaving her, intersected the plane of the picture I was attempting to build. As I swiveled the pencil in the air, capturing proportions, marking her boundaries on a broad sheet of laid paper—the eleven segments of the so-called hinged I, the angle of her spine, the vectors defined by her arms as against her legs, which had a reddish hue to them from the Bronx light behind her; how the width of her sharp little nose compared to her mouth and eyes, and how exactly her earlobes aligned with her cheeks—I could feel her dissolve into these lines and curves and contiguous regions of color, all these interlocking planes that constituted her position in space. After a time, this is where a certain sort of perceptual attention, rigorously pursued, invariably leads. I felt I could hardly see her at all anymore, not in any ordinary sense. All I could see, no less than Monet or Pissarro painting in open air, was the trace she left on me. When I wasn’t feeling particularly jaded, this vanishing had always struck a note of despair in me, the remove it created from the tangible world I knew—or believed I did.

It was certainly still her I could hear, though, the occasional whines she made as I reconstructed her on paper: whines that were not without pathos, as I kept Claire posed this way for a remarkably long time, just as my method demanded. Long enough, in the end, to sketch her down to the knees, and fill in much of her face as well, those details I knew so well, and not just by sight. All the while my fingers took on a rich black shine from blending charcoal without my paper stump, smearing specks of carbon onto the heavy paper, the fineness of which tended to repel them without real pressure. It made my hands ache.

The several pencils I used collected on the lip of the easel. I switched between them for the line work, those and a few graded sticks of vine charcoal for the deep modeling. The softest of them laid down so rich and black it looked not only shiny but liquid, in the manner of other media entirely: ink or acrylic or even oil. I stopped re-sharpening with the knife after a while and let the line fatten naturally, the tip of the pencil simply melting away at even a delicate touch. To this I applied ink, with an old tarnished nib from a set I’d had since my Cal Arts days. I’d taken them off a favorite teacher, Sarah Arles; she’d been dear enough to me to have to steal from, just to keep something of hers when I left for New York. Firming up some of the contours this way, emboldening the hatching and then introducing white, dipping the same nib to achieve a marbled effect, these highlights wound their way around the basic tone, colonizing it like kudzu. The support itself, in that faded blue, paler than any sky I knew, had tiny ribs crossing it that hinted at a planar grid, along one axis anyway: the famous Grid we still hadn’t managed to relinquish, so long after Constructivism, and even longer after the geometric abstraction defining all those rejected Salon pieces of Cézanne’s. Yet the drawing atop it remained fluid, curvilinear, unorientable in Cartesian space.

Claire’s face ended up quite finely finished, in high contrast, with great depth, the sort her body never had the chance to take on. For at some point, perhaps on the second day—or was it the third?—she mutinied. At the time, this was unprecedented. In hindsight I suppose it was the first glimpse of a greater abandonment to come.

Now, though, as my gaze drifted from her face, down to her shoulders and the windowsill, the whole of her world, the one I’d transferred to paper, grew increasingly vague, provisional, the very definition of space turned ghostly, its sense of volume dissipated. What she’d said later, I remember, in explaining her balking at my wishes, which was a minor disappointment on its own perhaps, but something quite different when you realize it was the first refusal, really, and that refusals of all kinds would flow ever more freely thereafter, as if some sort of resolve had been permanently shattered by the act, never to reform with its original strength, in the manner of broken bones, was that her neck had gone stiff from having to turn toward me. It was true, the pose I’d asked her to hold could be excruciating over time: I’d wanted her body to hang between two of its prime postures, sitting and standing, maintaining a suspension in which relief was impossible to find, with reflex leading her ineluctably from one point to the other. But I have a hard time believing this was the deepest reason she’d found the position impossible to sustain. That was really a failure of the will, simultaneous with a failure of seeing the point of these sessions now. It’s true that I had stopped showing any of these drawings; nor was I using them as preparatory works toward paintings, the very thing that might have shored up her resolve. Instead, I placed them with a few buyers I’d picked up through my dealer, Sandy Hinton. These were private collectors who’d stayed loyal to my biographical studies, if that’s what they were, even after I’d seceded from Sandy’s louche Upper West Side gallery, his first space from twenty years back and still his headquarters, pleasantly distant from most other institutions of fine art. I demur at the word studies only because I can’t say I was trying, at least in the end, to get to the bottom of anything, or to clarify something’s nature, and it seems to me that’s what studies are for. Investigation. Research. For me, these works, which were indeed closely attached to particular persons, sometimes fifty or sixty pieces all involving a single subject, you could see why someone would think they were studies, were more akin to pronouncements. I was concerned with surfaces, ultimately, with grafting onto each of these people new skin, new nerves, and in doing so, finding a new place for them in my mind.

Of course these collectors had remained interested, Claire said. That had nothing much to do with sympathetic understanding, and certainly not with loyalty, merely the fetish of completism and the whiff of profit, hoping to see out the last fizzles of this dying project, to seize it for resale or display later, or else donation to some museum down the line that might help make their name. Weren’t they all of that type? In the end, I think this was slightly too simple, and anyway I am sure Claire would acknowledge her remarks were driven by something else that had begun to simmer in her by then. Still, they were less off-base than I would have liked.

Whatever it was, there had never been an occasion on which she’d abandoned a pose once begun, as we considered modeling to be a kind of mutual duty. She’d also never criticized my work quite like this, insinuating that I wasn’t genuinely trying anymore, that I’d capitulated in some way. In fact she would sit endlessly, most times that I asked, however many sessions were involved, if she thought something of moment were taking shape. Sometimes, in the early days, I came to think she spontaneously took up poses in my peripheral vision, or repeated various motions or gestures, extending the time it took her to complete some mundane task like mixing paints, say, or watering the plants she’d brought with her when she’d first moved in, knowing that this is how ideas worked for me, surreptitiously, and that by performing thus she might provide, without a word, the precise stimulus I needed. These poses were often barely distinguishable from her merely carrying on with life as if entirely unseen, like a bather in a Degas. (She was going to water those plants regardless, after all.) She would do these things for me while I sat with a sketchpad and drank, or even just stared off into the distance, twirling a pencil in my fingers—anytime, really, an instrument was at hand.

That day, though, or the next, whichever it was, I can’t remember, I believe it took place far from the easel—the moment, I mean, when she declined to pose any further, though she’d not done it noisily, instead gently pinning it on the irrefutable aches of her body. That must have been the turning point. These were sketches I was fussing over, she would have thought, unworthy of the months I spent bringing them polish and finality.

Drawing, for her—she drew all the time, had to—was something merely practical. She was a sculptor by training, an artist of literal space, and lately she was the kind who installed things—the favored sort of artist these days. The arts of figural space, painting foremost, had been mostly out of fashion for forty years and counting. Who ever thought icons like Schnabel or Prince to be level with Polke, Rothko, Richter, Keefer, and Hamilton? There was Hockney, I suppose, but he one note wasn’t worth listening to very long. No, for most, painting as a medium hadn’t been at the vanguard since the 1970s, maybe even the 1950s. It was actually drawing that had begun to have its advocates since the turn of the century, probably through the apotheosis of the sketch in all its forms: everything that was incomplete, unfinished, fragmentary—in short, epistemically infirm. Really it was moldy French thought, not terribly compelling the first time around, in the 1960s, given a second life by the internet, a medium effectively defined by its incompleteness, its indiscriminate if exhilarating admixture of knowledge and ignorance. Had digital culture actually sundered painting?

Claire’s resistance to my drawings might have really come down to this: she didn’t care for what she was beginning to see in them. She’d been in thrall to my paintings, and I knew this precisely not by what she said—how much can you know of someone from what they volunteer?—but rather by the way she would ferociously study them when she thought I was otherwise occupied, for instance, building frames, cutting canvas, or grinding pigment, which I sometimes liked to do myself. There was one thing she’d actually said, I suppose, quite offhandedly: that it was my work that first convinced her she was a sculptor—something about the life I could fit, or find, in two dimensions, she didn’t think she was going to catch me at that. There was also the suggestion, correct actually, that in three dimensions, the same dimensions in which we live our lives, I was rather hopeless next to her.

I don’t really know how much to take from this. It could have been a simulated offhandedness, maybe only a kindness or encouragement to me. More likely it was a convenient way to cut ties with a medium that anyway had little momentum in modern life. Or perhaps the real meaning of the compliment, though this is not a generous thought, might have been less about my paintings, their character, and more about the sort of reception they were getting. It was this that she wasn’t going to catch up to—which, to be fair, she might have been right about. I had been unusually well-received.

At the time we’d met in the city, four years earlier, I’d only been out of art school a short while, yet even then, as she liked to point out, I wasn’t what you’d call an unknown. A prospect is what I was: my brother, Ty, our resident sports fanatic growing up, would put it exactly that way. Painting had been what I’d graduated in, a recently resurgent major, according to the mixed-media people and those of new genres. But that it was in need of a resurgence said more than a little about its long-troubled state, as did the terms on which it was gaining re-entry. It was coming along with the return not merely of figuration but of outright narrative to art: graphic-novel, comic-book-panel narrative almost, where painting was claimed to outclass many other forms in its concentration, economy, and lucidity.

The actual sculptors in my graduating class were very few. Mallet-and-chisel sculptors, I mean, who treated the study of classical technique and hand fabrication not merely as a dutiful tributes to the past while apprenticing as mixed-media workers of the conceptual or political variety. But Claire, who’d trained in Chicago, at SAIC, was just such a sculptor. She loved to cast bronzes, in particular, or anyway she had when I’d met her, and this is what I found most compelling about her. She was terribly fashionable in her person—well-liked and widely desired—yet not in her tastes. Where exactly she got them from was therefore something immediately intriguing about her. You wanted to unravel this.

I, though, I was a painter, and at just the right moment, apparently, ready to help bolster a true renaissance of the form, now that drawing was already in full flight. What’s more, I was a painter of the figure, which no longer signaled something fusty and remote—as Claire’s bronzes could—but now scanned as personal, vulnerable, authentic. The age made people hunger for these, the very qualities that would have been ridiculed in art circles as maudlin or naïve only a couple of decades ago.

In school, I would often include textual layovers with my figures and tableaus, whether in paintings or lithographic prints, even with some of the tenderer ones. Sometimes these works were typographically sophisticated, blending humanistic and transitional fonts so thoroughly, and without a hint of pastiche, that the origin or era of the founding idea became irrecoverable. Certainly it was difficult to call them modern. Although I was hardly a type designer myself, colleagues who’d gone far beyond Thinking With Type sometimes helped me complete one-off typefaces, usually slight bastardizations of ones they were already working on. More often, though, I achieved these syntheses myself, staring at musty type-specimen books and then hand-lettering in a kind of free improvisation on the standards, like a jazzman.

Photomontage, they’d sometimes call the results, a depersonalization of the personal or some such. Others thought of illustration first. Both were undercooked readings, based not so much on a fundamental lack of discernment as an inability to take youthful work with any real seriousness. There are some things that can only be believed or grasped when the messenger is right. Eventually, though, it began to be understood that my real models lay much further back, in Van Eyck and Steen and Saenredam, where phrases and proverbs are often wispily inscribed onto the canvas. Generally they are placed within pictorial space, although somehow they appear to overrun it; it’s as if these bits of language are inscribed both onto the canvas, as an artist’s signature is, and into the painted scene. Unlike certain paintings executed further south, in Italy, where such words, when they do appear, are usually poetic or biblically aphoristic, these ones seem almost captions for the work, like internal title cards, making the ones on the gallery walls otiose. At the time, in college, I preferred to keep words and images more or less coeval, neither one symbolizing the other. Some were only fragments of text, three or four words at most, while others were as long as a paragraph. But I don’t really want to discuss this, to tell the truth. The technique itself is now entirely a thing of the past for me. Not because it was unsophisticated. The best of those works, I believe, can stand with the works of more developed artists. The real reason for silence is simple: you would almost certainly misunderstand. That’s why I abandoned the approach—people were taking these images and narratives a little too well. Context was betraying me. Words have this problem. It’s why I left them behind once I got to New York. I haven’t even titled a picture since college, never mind integrating text with it. People actually have to look now.

So what was it audiences saw in my figures, then mostly acrylic and oil, realistically depicted, contemporary? I relished their newfound uncertainty. These images, for one, weren’t especially clever or ironical, having been studiously shorn of conceptual or post-conceptual suggestions. Nor, however, could they be called personal or earnest, that common point of retreat. Where else could you go? There was always the realm of whimsy and nonsense; the entire twentieth century was peppered with works of this order. But I avoided any hint of irrationalism, as well as that other safe house, kulturekritik. How to describe them, then? What was it that my art did, exactly, if not illustrate ideas, divulge subjectivities, highlight iniquities? What is an art, a contemporary art, that isn’t ingenious, confessional, indignant, or insouciant? I suppose I have left naïve art out of this catalogue, but that’s just because my own biography, the years of careful study—much of it undertaken in high school—and the technical fluency it had given me, ruled out any such interpretation. What else am I forgetting? There is the neoclassical, something that seemed to draw Claire. But no one sensible would be tempted to claim I was primarily after homage or replication, even if those Dutch painters had once given me ideas. The short of it was that my college work, though always centered on figure and narrative, befuddled all who looked on it. Despite this, a reverence persisted—I will get to why—one that gained me entry into the art circles of New York not long after I’d moved, and without much of the anxiety suffocating the more career-conscious of my peers. My professors, if they no longer claimed to understand my new, wordless direction, were apparently convinced that I, at the age of twenty-six, was on my way toward something significant, even if what they imagined as significant seemed like nothing much to me.

Where, then, did this belief, this faith, stem from? This is what

I think secretly infuriated Claire, though she herself owned the belief as well. Perhaps it came down to the sheer confidence of my line, which was irrefutable, or the speed with which I’d absorbed my lessons in methods and materials, in draftsmanship especially. Actually those kinds of measures are useless in gauging an artist’s deeper gifts, but then, these were academic artists. What could you expect of them? There were other things they might have been reacting to, genuinely telling things: for instance, the uncommon shape, and depth, of my reading. In the years before and through college I might have read as much as I painted, owing to my father’s deep library (a lawyer of rank should not only have one, he liked to say, but spend half his life in it) as well as my mother’s curious notions about the needs of the developing artist. It meant that whenever my cohort would start to talk about art or criticism, I would end up drawing the discussion down paths that led beyond French and German theory, beyond art history, toward matters the others seemed only to have a passing acquaintance with: the logical form of agency, say, or the metaphysics of qualia, or else slightly unpredictable historical matters—the Commercial rather than the Industrial Revolution, or going back a bit further, the slow diffusion of hominids over the Earth’s surface, millions of years ago, rather than European colonization of the New World. The trust I had in my intellect found its extension in my hands, as a creator of shadow, say, or of raking light, or of projecting mass without line, or of shine without source; the way I could quickly and without fuss make a brass lamp’s glow, that of the metal, overtake the brightness of its flame, as if this were routine.

Ultimately, I hadn’t learned to think seriously only after I’d learned to draw and paint. With so many artists, including some brilliant ones, the thinking, even when it grew sophisticated, was retrofitted, so that it retained a trace of ornamentation. I, though, was relatively late to pick up a brush. My mother, herself a curator at several museums in Los Angeles, and more recently an arts administrator in San Francisco, was something of an aesthetician, with her own theories of artistic development. She thought it best to delay any focus on art until my high school years: it would be more valuable for an artist, or just a child, to split his time between books and brushes. I don’t know what I think about her theories now. She would cite various psychologists when my father made gentle inquiries, but I never really looked up her references. And if they had all turned out to be just-so stories, it wouldn’t have mattered in the least. She saved me from training in art before I was also poised to train my mind; hence I learned the two languages, of sense and thought, more or less simultaneously. I studied history and languages (German and Spanish) along with natural science with as much fervor as my studio courses in art, so that my competence in both grew at about the same rate and I experienced them from the first as seamlessly bound.

This is why my work, and even more, my measured hesitations, the diffidence I would evince toward ideas—and not merely my own—could leave others rattled. People in my presence seemed to lose confidence in the usual language surrounding art. Even professors, who would take the bombast out of their voices and talk to me in short little Anglo-Saxon words stripped of the cloak of high theory. By sophomore year, I was addressed with a certain generalized wariness, or else a pronounced irony that anticipated the unlikelihood of convincing me of very much. I can’t say I didn’t enjoy the spectacle of apprehension. It earned me the unusual privilege of never actually having to use gratuitous terms of art like practice, or nod eagerly and knowingly at the first mention of Lyotard or Rancière, or worse, draw up artist statements in their argot.

But let me not paint the picture too brightly. There was a clear weariness in my cohort too, whenever I began to unspool my own thinking, as if I were willfully causing trouble, flouting the ground rules of art-school chatter, the ones we were all in some way aware of but had decided not to fiddle with, for fear of closing off the possibility of instruction. So I can’t say I was liked. Nevertheless, by the time of graduation, my teachers seemed to consider dealing with me salutary, in its way, or at least it gave them the impression that my almost violent insistence on independence in picture making would have to bear fruit. Although I didn’t pursue graduate studies or even seek grants—and perhaps, thinking back, I should have; it might have saved me from all that followed—I still had the feeling that they would have made personal efforts to place me.

I doubt, though, that anyone could have predicted what I ended up turning to after graduation, even while never actually moving away from figures and worldly forms. I began to make a subterranean reputation in New York through what Sandy would eventually call my longitudinal studies: paintings of the same person, with varying degrees of transparency, whether of the Dutch or Italian varieties, in various settings spread across ordinary time. The series were developed over years, and it would take at least several months to render even mild transformations of my sitters, the kind that can never be contained in a single image or moment. So it was really only after three years, just as I was beginning my work in earnest on the Claire series, that a fuller awareness of what I was doing took hold in the city’s art scene. What was it? The composition of visual biographies, mostly of unknowns: my previous superintendent, begun really only to win favor; the man, probably a procurer, who spent an inordinate amount of time in the street behind my house, working the stoop; my great friend from childhood, Immo; the eight-year-old son of a rising Bushwick gallerist; and so on. The individual paintings would sometimes appear in magazines, notably Cosquer, or be seen in people’s homes, in the private collections of the friends I would sometimes give them to, or even in public showings of several pictures from distinct series. But really these projects could only be grasped or experienced in aggregate, in shows where the entire series to date might be laid out—shows of which there were increasing numbers, as time wore on and more pictures came into being.

It wasn’t my handling of paint per se, or almost anything formal, that struck people first about these images. I’d made it a point not to draw the eye to the surface, where attention had for too long lingered in painting. It was rather what I was able to tease out of my subjects, good and bad, the flickering modulations I registered, the apparent identities I could show to be subtly non-identical. Formal and subjectual revelation emerged together always, and usually only across pictures, over time: in the particular patterning of my violation of power centers, say, or the rule of thirds, or my diversion of eye pathways, or simply my management of pictorial distance. I would sometimes depict the central subject as slightly too far off, for instance, making you want to view certain paintings, quite large format ones, from just inches away, however foolish you looked in doing so, as if this might help you approach the person herself. At first, of course, my close friends had wondered what I could possibly be doing, painting such apparently unambitious works; there was even the thought that I’d somehow given up, that all my doubts had led to an implosion. Four years later, though, I could safely say I’d vindicated the sort of complicated confidence my professors and peers had in me, even if they’d all nearly lost it along the way, at one point or another.

The success of this project was predicated absolutely on its execution being non-mechanical, given how close, in other respects, the results of my work, the collections of images over time, were akin to personal photo albums, the modern variants being a matter of social media. What was mentioned again and again, though, was just how unphotographic even my most scrupulously realistic pictures were. What were viewers reacting to, if not to the fact that compositionally, moment-to-moment, these paintings were channeled through my hand in a way that mechanical media like film, video, and photography cannot be? Whatever you do to them, using fisheye lenses or chemically burning the prints, photographic objects have a profoundly automatic dimension: the dull, thudding passage from input to output, when the image is truly set. They’re stamps, im-press-ions of a kind, and although they can be tinkered with in all sorts of ways, this brute, mindless imprinting is at the center of it all. Everything leads up to it and away from it. Painting, on the other hand—at its center lies nothing like that. There is in fact no center. It simply goes on, permanently malleable, every revision being of the same nature as the original, and not something fundamentally auxiliary, as with photographs, which can be doctored, yes, but never reshot as one repaints or redraws.

Every stroke is mediated, formed by hand, which is also to say by the mind—seismographically. You don’t simply set something in motion, the way you click a camera shutter or (if you ever do) pull the trigger on a pistol; you’re present through the entire flight of the bullet, nudging it this way and that until it hits its target—or misses. Yet so many of my colleagues, I hesitate to call them friends, that’s just what they do: click, arrange, shoot, collage. My hand, by contrast, is always in the mix—yet not in some expressionistic way, dripping with subjectivity or affect. No. These pictures are two-way mirrors, poised between the world and me, integrating one with the other.

What I’m keen to say is that there is, with my profiles, no going back to basics, to some simpler, predigital time. This is why I can’t be lumped in with those who spearheaded the resurgence of drawing and narrative, which felt reactionary to me; iterations of this sort of movement come around metronomically, every few decades, this pang for the past—often a past that was, only a few generations earlier, rued for its forsaking of some more distant past. Far from longing for a return, I was interested in analogue techniques precisely to make good on the promise of machine utopianism, a promise made by Marinetti and the rest but never kept, despite all the vast mechanical and digital innovations since then, far exceeding what they could have imagined a century ago. Their dream, at its core, was to push us right to the heart of electric life—and I mean that literally, life since electricity’s advent, this being the moment the modern artist had aimed to penetrate. But, in my view, the very one-wayness of mechanical reproduction has always been its irremediable limitation.

Photographic processes, cinema, television, have their charms. That can’t sensibly be doubted. If they didn’t, we wouldn’t have the world we have, and those avant-garde manifestos would never have been written in the first place. Photographs are, in the bluntest sense, spectacular; it would be obstinacy to think otherwise. There’s simply something alluring about the mechanical capture of surfaces. This goes back to the camera obscura, whose upside-down images were oohed and aahed at for centuries before the camera proper came onto the scene, even though its photo-esque images—images that are behind so many fine paintings of the past—now seem but distant echoes of the world. To our eyes they have too much of that strange liquid luster and peculiar lack of scaling we associate with the Dutch masters, like Steen and Van Eyck. These qualities did not go unnoticed by contemporaries like Constantijn Huygens, who observed in those images a peculiar sort of magic, the sheen of reality itself that elevated life to another plane, such that you could almost forget what was true and what was only glamor. But actually, looked at long enough, longer than Huygens lived, it has taken an intergenerational memory to uncover this, we can hardly deny now that however spectacular they might appear, photographs are also (and probably consequently) the least incisive images; they tell us least about what counts. Painting, however, even highly realistic work—take those Dutch pictures themselves, like View of Delft—painting can’t help but exist right at the nexus of mind and world. And that’s true even when it dazzles—even when painterly properties are de-emphasized, in the manner of Close and other photorealists who used modular analysis to mathematize the construction of the picture plane. Painting, with the possible exception of flawless trompe l’oeil (and do any examples really exist?), interferes with immediate, unselfconscious interpretation, in a way that most photography, its brutishly causal cousin, does not, cannot. You have to confront a painting’s slight irregularities, and through them the irregularities of its maker, just as much as you confront the world depicted by it. And these traces of the maker affect your sense of the image’s significance, provide a kind of subjective map. You’re forced to see that the world depicted before you issues from another world: two worlds side by side, or at least one as seen through the other, and you, perhaps, the viewer, forming a third world.

And drawing? Until recently I’d shorted it in the usual way of painters, as a medium for preparatory work and little more. Now I see it as more incisive than painting, more meditative, and more closely tied to the movements of the hand, even to writing—as the Chinese have long known—and through this channel to thought itself. It would be too easy to say that drawing carves things at the joints, cleaves form. But even if it doesn’t quite represent form itself, it is certainly a way to see form. Drawing achieves this only by trading away some amount of spectacle for insight—although, not long ago, I discovered that pastels, with the purity of their pigments, especially the soft, crumbly kind, hardly mixed with a binder, these pigments with their concentrated brilliance could dazzle as well as anything, even outclassing oil. For proof, there are of course the pastels of Degas, which after the age of forty dominated his production, his subjects being mostly bathers, prostitutes, danseuses. Something as simple and startling as his rendering of gaslight proves the point. I always think of this light when I think of him, and the ballet and café concerts the lamps united in their ghastly glow.

In any case, it was just this quality of drawing, the way it could take you down to the bone, along with my gradual transition toward the medium, that Claire began to loathe. What was wrong with the paintings? she must have thought. Within two years of graduation, Sandy took me on and commemorated the occasion with a solo exhibition at one of his satellite galleries, lately among the most charmed on Bogart Street. Myself, I found that part of Brooklyn oppressive; the ubiquity of the arts community, transplanted from the art schools of America, unnerved me. I left as soon as I felt I could, which is to say, only after earning substantial write-ups in Artforum and ARTnews. A solo exhibit at the Serpentine followed, and I’d been given to understand a place in the Whitney biennale was forthcoming. It never materialized. I was told I’d run down the wrong artist with a woman on the judging committee. Apparently, after several drinks, I’d told her that his notions were simply of no account. That sounded possible to me, when I was reminded of the artist. None of it mattered. It cost me nothing among the few people who had judgment.

At the time I’d been composing the charcoal piece, though, a few months earlier, Claire had become open in her dislike of my switch to drawing and dry media. Once, not about this drawing but another done shortly after, she declared, with an exasperation I rarely heard in her genteel voice, Sometimes I just hate the way you see. It was uttered tentatively, without a trace of rhetorical snap, as if she’d only just found the words for the feeling—and even then the words weren’t quite right. Really, I knew, she meant more and more, not sometimes. But I had to wonder, did I see any differently now? Was it a change in attitude, or just a change in medium, that was behind her change of heart?

She’d issued the same reproach many times before with the looks she gave me, even if she’d not been aware of it. There was an ongoing, low-grade panic in her ever since I’d tilted toward this new medium, as if I were now closing in on something that painting alone would never allow me to discover in her. She knew as well as I did that drawing was ruled by the line. It was fundamentally the geometer’s business, a rationalist art, a reconstruction of volumes in space; whereas painting, with its colors and masses and secondary use of line, emphasized the surfaces of things, the dazzle of consciousness, at some expense to structure. This was true even of painters who were great draftsmen, whether Raphael or Rubens or Delacroix. And that was why one would have to say that many of Rubens’ most forceful pieces were actually drawings; the same went for Rembrandt, in fact.

Painting, I came to realize, was almost an apology for the nakedness of drawing, a way of glossing over its conceptual blading of the world. It was a way of seeing blindly, so to speak, or passively, without the critical powers of the mind. Photography only heightened this tendency; that’s why so many painters have been entranced by the lens, optics, the camera obscura, and the photograph. In contrast, drawing was without doubt an analytical art: the mind’s contribution was obvious, and there was no attempt at representing a sensory given—as if such a thing were possible. What one senses is as informed by what one believed as the reverse. Drawing simply owns up to this conceptuality, that is, the mindedness of seeing, rather than vainly questing after pure experience.

Drawing, then, began to feel like the intellectual height of the two-dimensional arts, its essence, its philosophy: not some rough-and-ready starting point toward rendering surfaces, as the pervasive notion of the sketch would suggest, but the ultimate product, fully distilled. This is why, for me, photography poses at least a prima facie problem for painting, in its competition for surfaces, whereas it offers no difficulty at all to drawing, properly understood.

The more I realized that painting shared in some of the empirical poverty of photography, the more tense my images grew. Fault lines glossed over in paint were now unmissable. The trouble in Claire, the mistake in her face I began with, which might not have been an intrinsic quality of hers but a relational one concerning us, her-to-me, started then to appear. My gaze sharpened; it began to penetrate. Even in my early sketches and studies, the problems manifest in the later drawings all seemed to be there, latent. That is the way I would come to think about it. Considering them then—those gesture drawings; the mass studies; the contour pieces made with one continuous stroke of the pen, circling for many minutes; the modular analyses, heir to Alberti’s window; and the tonal studies in the same mold—I could see now, and I felt then, inchoately, the tension in all of them, usually inhering in the face, or the face beneath the face, or in its interaction with her body or with pictorial space itself.

In fact, even when I wasn’t painting Claire, many of her expressions troubled me, so that I had to consider whether something in me may have been chafing at her, ruining her even, inducing those appearances. That was what it meant to think there was a mistake somewhere in her face, or at least a problem, and not simply in the rendering—how could I have got it wrong so many times, with so many chances?—but living in the face itself, protean, resistant to isolation or extraction, constantly requiring a fresh attempt to trace its state but never, never disappearing. Perhaps it was best she was gone.

By the time of this drawing, this incomplete charcoal portrait, I think Claire was already sensing the end, even if she didn’t believe it just yet, and wouldn’t have endorsed the thought if presented to her. And perhaps that distracted look I’d put on her face in the picture, that errant gaze that missed my own, was my way of registering this, too, though the thought, naturally, never entered my head when I’d drawn the picture. Whatever it was, the fact remained that I’d left her transposed body unformed; it was more of a ghost, only hinting at a potential mass, and not, I thought, in a way that created much interest. But I’d refused to work from photographs and finish it, not without her standing just so in front of me. The entire thing had been composed by sight; to rely on facsimiles now, or to advert to memory, would have been to corrupt the work. The solution came to me quickly: I exacto-ed the support at her neck and kept the nearly finished head, leaving enough of the neck to give the face a sense of life, yet excising everything else so as to avoid suggesting that this truncated version wasn’t the original idea, that in fact there had been more, much more, imagined below, visions that never reached completion. Claire’s face, after the severe cropping, was far off to one side of the picture, beyond the natural focal centers of the rectangular field. I could have clipped the space on the other end to shift it toward a more classical spot, but I liked the scale it seemed to add, completely blank, and the tension the imbalance created, which well suited that trepid state of hers, late in our relationship. The proportions of her face were convincingly rendered, not in the mathematized manner of linear perspective—no, it was more convincing, more elastic than that, as experience actually is. Here I had indeed turned to that northern tradition of what is sometimes called optical perspective. In the right hands, such an approach to point of view could admit a trace of the original wildness of sight without losing touch with forms and meanings that lay beyond sense alone, that necessarily engaged the broader capacities of the mind. This was, to go by what others said, one of my primary talents: rendering space in a manner that would satisfy neither a representational nor a formal approach. It was a kind of deep sight, I liked to say, the only kind worth cultivating. It cut through the surface to the objects themselves while remaining drenched in experience. I could mention Kant here. Or you could simply look at a Rembrandt.

Staring into Claire’s charcoal face then, I couldn’t help but think better of the third picture, the pastel one estranged from life only  by the generosity it showed the inanimate. I’d done it months afterward, though the image recalled an even earlier time, in buttery ombré hues, almost impasto in their density, though soft pastel, not paint, was the medium, applied in heavy strokes to a bone-white vellum ground that had been brushed so that it would more easily take pigment. I’d forgotten the fixative; it had been shedding color ever since. Along the way I’d had to shore things up with gooey oil sticks.

The piece was a few months old now, and it dated to a period in which I’d already discarded my photographs of Claire and begun to draw by another instrument: memory. She’d been gone for at least a few months by the time I started. In the weeks after she left, I didn’t paint or draw anything of significance, didn’t really even try to. There were a few sketches I’d attempted without much feeling and soon aborted—mostly in rollerball—while I was occupied with more practical things, essential things, like compiling a list of bills that needed paying, and in what order, now that I wasn’t selling paintings anymore. The drawings would bloom and die before I could ever regret beginning them there in the margin of a piece of recycled spiral notebook paper that bled heavily at the first drop of ink. They were done from phone snaps, which I relied on to bring her back to me, as if, remarkably, I couldn’t quite conjure the woman who’d just been here. These days I could bring her to mind much more easily and richly, like seeing her in the reflection of a frozen pond, with a degree of tranquility that had been out of the question then.

But even in those days, when I couldn’t summon the energy or build the momentum to finish any of the sketches, the photographic cues seem to steer me wrong. I would have done better to imagine a random woman than to try to use any of them as spurs. They seemed almost always to remember the wrong things. And it was only after turning away from the photos that calm finally came to me and I could return to her properly, in reminiscence.

If I were to do this piece again, I’d go for something even less painterly, something fully planar, materially, no impasto, no topography. I’d also expand the space, front to back, through greater contrast, or by depicting some object, it doesn’t really matter what, looming right up close on one side of the picture, forcing the rest of it back. And perhaps, yes, I’d be a little more careful not to let what was in her, or what she was made of, torque her surroundings—even though this curious sense of distortion was, in her best moments, the most remarkable aspect of actually being around her. What am I saying by this? She bent space. Without her presence to exert that pull, life certainly couldn’t be like this anymore. But what about life then? Memory let me hew to the essence of those encounters with her in three dimensions, something at which my photos of her seemed always to fail. And not just photos. The eye itself, I realized, could fail in this. Painting from life, via plumb lines and the like, visually tracking proportions and curves and planes, could blind you to whatever it was that grounded, or better, gathered, all of that. Sight could present too many things indifferently, fracturing the world into near-autonomous shards, leading you toward an inchoate literalness that defeated the prime function of the organ of vision, which was to track the consistency of objects through time and space. There was, in fact, a touch of these problems in the charcoal face, which had after all been drawn from sight. The picture, my lines, failed to find the thingness of Claire—not in the subject-denying, derogatory sense of thing, but in the good sense: what it was that made her something more than a sweep of color upon the retina. My picture failed to see her unity, her integrity, and in turn, since it could locate no object, could hardly find a place for her subjectivity.

In my defense, at the moment I’d composed the charcoal piece, Claire might well have begun to falter subjectively, so that the flaw you saw in the picture was actually just a flaw in her. What made this drawing unsatisfying might then have been precisely whatade her unsatisfying, even aggravating, though I couldn’t name this in any more precise way. The drawing was the flaw’s name, I suppose, or it showed the flaw, the fragmentation, in the manner of a demonstrative. This.

In the pastel face, though, the one I’d built only from memory, I’d fared much better in finding that ground, the unseen presences, the subject in the object, or perhaps more precisely, the subject of the object. Whatever my misgivings about the picture, I reveled in what the pastels had managed to corral, in what memory had managed to see that my eyes could not: the way space had been remade. Yet memory revealed a different flaw in her being: a smoldering intensity that in time would sear the world around her. Tellingly, the memory I’d pulled from for this one predated the charcoal moment by many months, extending back to a time when the problem with her had actually been an excess of inwardness rather than a shortage. That was to be preferred, I thought, at least conceptually, or maybe just romantically—a surfeit of human being, unshaped sense to formed emptiness—even if it was also a terrible portent of what had now already come to pass: the burning of bridges, I mean, and then the disappearance. How metaphysically clingy she had been back then. I’d felt a tremendous responsibility for guarding her being, preserving her feelings, which were so easily bruised, particularly around the matter of our work, the way she was being punished, at least relative to me, for her good behavior, her politesse, everything her childhood had inculcated in her. And I was being rewarded for my truculence.

Both these drawings of her tracked a mutation in Claire’s aspect over time, the changing impression she made, or really anyone makes, if one attends closely enough. This was something traceable through the earlier pictures I’d rendered in paint or graphite or ink, though at those times, whatever it was,