An Evening with Jackson

Today was just what I needed. I woke up and finished preparing some canvases which I will use in the morning. I then went into Richmond and met Jackson and my father for lunch at Kuba Kubas. Jackson and I planned on meeting later to watch La Vie En Rose, and after an afternoon of reading Order of the Phoenix, he came over at 8 and we did. It was a great movie about the French singer Edith Piaf. We both enjoyed it and due to my not having dinner we went to the village.

I don't drink so I was confused when the guy asked for my I.D. and then stamped my hand. We sat down and just started talking first about pornography and how it detaches one from life and how important it is to re-engage with life. I ordered a tuna salad sandwich and the conversation moved into taking about engaging with life through art. I told him that I've learned so much lately about how to paint and draw but have reached a dead end where I can't improve without re-engaging emotionally, something I took for granted as a child and seemed to be the most natural part of making art. I told him how Karol told me my assignment this summer was to keep a sketch book and figure out what I want to say as an artist. I said "I have all the tools I just don't know what to do with them" and at some point after ranting about how much I needed that engagement with life, that passion I said "I just need to feel...." and couldn't think of what to say next. Jackson said "in my mind you just hit on the problem of our generation right there with all the television, and pornography, and other the other forms of disengagement." I told him I knew I liked to paint faces and that I knew what kind of shapes I liked but nothing more. Oh and that I do not care so much for painting landscapes (not to say I do not love them), to which Jackson replied "isn't the female figure a landscape." I agreed and we told him how when your really close to someone you loose a sense of scale because you forget everything else or everything else exist through the immediacy of their being. There is no measure of things just them. I told him how I've looked across Meg's shoulder blades and thought they might as well have been mountains.

On our way out of the Village Jackson asked me what I thought "good" was. It was a spiraling complex conversation. I began talking about it like motion or action or doing in which you can't place your finger on it because you can't create a conceptual model for something that exist in the act. It is not a static thing. I also thought that perhaps being something that we do it is a means of acting in the world not something you can step outside of yourself and look at. Jackson stated that nature was more insane than good or bad and I told him to the best of my ability that we are apart of nature and just because we do not recognize our morality in nature externally doesn't mean that what exist internally is any less apart of it, or any less authentic. He took these ideas and elaborated further until we finally started talking about the transcendent other. He said that to him the good wasn't a process like what I had been describing so much as a discovery. It was something that you experienced and knew when you did that it had been there all along, that you had met before. This great other reminded me of Hegel's dialectic which I told him about and he seemed to like. I soon realized that Jackson was pretty damn smart. We discussed the necessity of the other in order to grow.

He soon left and I began to think about it further. I used to write and talk about this other. These moments that whispered always instead of now. I used to search for them in art, just a little, and somethings they would find there way in without my knowing. I realized wow, Jackson has helped lead me to a piece of the problem I had brought up over dinner. This search for the transcendent. This seeing deeper into the content of the world around me was what was lacking. Jackson made me realize that I can't find content that inspires me not because of the content itself but because of my failure to look at it correctly. The otherness, the good, the transcendent, whatever you want to call it exist in the act of doing as I had proposed and as a discovery as Jackson had proposed. I need to look at the world the right way, and the world would surprise me by showing it to me. Like any healthy relationship it needed to work both ways. And so I know now that this failure to find content that interest me artistically isn't a problem with the world. It's a problem with who I am in relation to the world, and when I start working on that, when I start remembering how to open up, I can open myself up more to the other, the good, and my art will be the child of these experiences.

I'm so passionate and fired up right now. I'm so thankful for Jackson's company. I can't wait to paint in the morning. I will try to see with open eyes, and by this I mean my entire being.