You know something is seriously awry when even the Tory leader claims we should be focusing on GWB as well as GDP. General Well-Being is a catch-all phrase, but in our long-hours culture it can only mean one thing: striking a better work-life balance. As Paul Lafargue — Karl Marx’s son-in-law — pointed out, God seems to have sussed it from the word go: “after six days of work, he rests for all eternity” (The Right to be Lazy, 1883). Although scripture is notoriously open to interpretation, prelapsarian Eden is patently presented as a work-free environment. It is only after the Fall — and, crucially, as a result of it — that men were condemned to earn their dough: “In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread, till thou return unto the ground” (Genesis 3:19). Women, for their pains, would bring forth children “in sorrow”. The word ‘travail’ — French for ‘work’ — also happens to refer to labour pains: it derives from the Latin tripalium which, fittingly enough, was an instrument of torture. As for ‘labour’ itself, it comes from labor meaning ‘trouble’. No wonder work is a four-letter word (to quote the 1968 Cilla Black number famously covered by the Smiths).

In ancient Greece, work was restricted to slaves — a set-up which provided a blueprint for the West until the Industrial Revolution. By the early nineteenth century, however, “the voice of busy common-sense” — as Keats dubbed it — had become deafening (”Ode on Indolence,” 1819). Nietzsche observed how people were beginning to feel guilty of “prolonged reflection”: “Well, formerly, it was the other way around: it was work that was afflicted with the bad conscience. A person of good family used to conceal the fact that he was working if need compelled him to work. Slaves used to work, oppressed by the feeling that they were doing something contemptible” (The Gay Science, 1882). “It is to do nothing that the elect exist,” Oscar Wilde reaffirmed defiantly in the face of a triumphant work ethic. Contemplation, he lamented, had come to be regarded as “the gravest sin of which any citizen can be guilty” rather than “the proper occupation of man”. It is this gradual erosion of the contemplative life — “the life that has for its aim not doing but being” — which writers and dreamers have always tried to resist (”The Critic as Artist,” 1891). Robert Louis Stevenson — who poured scorn on those “who are scarcely conscious of living except in the exercise of some conventional occupation” — argued that idleness “does not consist in doing nothing, but in doing a great deal not recognised in the dogmatic formulations of the ruling class” (”An Apology for Idlers,” 1881). In How to be Idle (2004), Tom Hodgkinson — co-founder of The Idler magazine (1993) — reminds us that “living is an art, not something that you fit in around your job”.

Pockets of collective anti-work resistance appeared at regular intervals throughout the 20th century, from the drop-out beatniks to the unemployed punks. The Sex Pistols’ brazen “I’m a Lazy Sod” contained the classic line: “I don’t work, I just speed; that’s all I need”. Bow Wow Wow’s second single — “W.O.R.K. (N.O. Nah No! No! My Daddy Don’t)” — turned the tables on Thatcherite austerity by celebrating the rise of the idle poor. Many like Morrissey went looking for a job and then found a job and heaven knows were miserable now. 1991 saw the release of Slackers as well as the publication of Generation X whose protagonists relocate to the Californian desert after opting out of the rat race. Douglas Coupland’s downshifting classic was subtitled “Tales for an Accelerated Culture,” mirroring the parallel rise of the Slow movement anticipated by Bertrand Russell (”In Praise of Idleness,” 1932) and chronicled by Carl Honoré (In Praise of Slow: Challenging the Cult of Speed, 2004).

“Our epoch has been called the century of work,” Lafargue wrote, back in the 1880s, “It is in fact the century of pain, misery and corruption.” “Labour is the one thing a man has had too much of,” D. H. Lawrence echoed in the 1920s (”A Sane Revolution”). Unsurprisingly, Dr. Frank Lipman’s current diagnosis is that we are all completely knackered (Spent? End Exhaustion & Feel Great Again, 2009). So what are we to do? One option is to follow the advice of New Rich guru Timothy Ferriss whose best-selling The 4-Hour Work Week (2007) is designed to teach you how to let money make itself by outsourcing your business. Alternatively, we could turn to Melville’s Bartleby who, when asked to do anything, answers: “I would prefer not to” (Bartleby, the Scrivener, 1853). We could also take our cue from Jerome K. Jerome — the forefather of Phone In Sick Day — and get our kicks from the illicit thrill of skiving: “There is no fun in doing nothing when you have nothing to do” (”On Being Idle,” 1889). Following Thierry Paquot (The Art of the Siesta, 1998), Hodgkinson prescribes hitting the snooze button where it hurts: “Edison promoted the idea of ‘more work, less sleep’. The idler’s creed is ‘less work, more sleep’”.

One man who devoted his life and, er, work (8 slim volumes in 65 years) to sleep was Egyptian émigré Albert Cossery. His was a militant form of idleness which he saw as the only way to fully enjoy “the Edenic simplicity of the world”. In an early short story, the inhabitants of an impoverished neighbourhood are prepared to kill off those who interrupt their sacred slumber before noon; in another, an Oblomov-style character refuses to leave his bed for a whole year. Cossery was convinced that those who rejected (or were deprived of) material wealth gained access to a heightened state of consciousness hence the constant association between destitution and nobility. In 1945, he checked in to a poky hotel — on the very same Parisian street where the iconic “Ne travaillez jamais” (”Never work”) graffito would soon appear — and remained there, doing precious little, until he passed away last year. Cossery chose to get a life instead of a job. Perhaps more of us should do the same — the world might be a better place.

This first appeared in the summer 2009 edition of Flux Magazine (issue 69).

The question ‘Did you have a good day at work?’ is another way of asking ‘Was it productive?’ Time spent at work in exchange for money creates the expectation of things done and achieved, and efficiently to boot. A good employee is one who gives more to the company than required, whose productivity is worth his weight in gold. You know the drill: time is money, exceed all expectations, impress the right people with your skills etc. Think about costs per hour, target quotas and service levels to be met. Throw in some sweeteners with bonuses (and overtime if you’re lucky), but also remember that you are expendable and easily replaced in any jobs climate. Companies spend a lot of managerial time and effort stipulating you must be productively busy, or appear to be productive, at all times. They’re careful to calculate the value of lost productivity due to private web surfing, emailing and social networking, or listen to scary reports by consultants who specialize in productive propaganda. But the resultant situation is this: our general idea of  real productivity has been entirely usurped by these raw corporate economics of work.

Consider this situation: when a person becomes suddenly unemployed, downshifted or made redundant, his sense of productivity often stays at the level of expectation as was when regularly employed. And for quite some time. If the unemployed day isn’t full of achievement and tasks fulfilled (applications sent, networks built & maintained, phone calls and queries made), and well-managed for time, then the day hasn’t been productive at all. There’s no satisfactory sense of rest being earned; a latent sense of guilt takes hold, a niggling sense of personal failure. It’s the old ideas and expectations talking. I don’t think depression sets in faster anywhere else than it does with unemployed people.

This is why I’m slightly suspicious of people who live only for work, or feel unconsciously trapped by their careers somehow: they let their jobs determine their personal values and sense of satisfaction. The cubicle-outlook has become their private cubicular outlook.

For which the only prescription is a healthy dose of self-indulged laziness. A complete spell of nothing and no expectation. A certain but significant amount of boredom, faffing about in the shed, walks in the park, beers in the afternoon, swims in the sea. To clear the head and reset the personal sense of productivity. To approach and stretch that moment usually reached on the last days of a holiday, when you actually start getting used to the idea of doing very little — to push through and make that the norm. It’s a key moment you don’t want to wait until retirement to find you can’t change any more — that’s the worst time and place to discover you’re a work-shaped husk of a human. We are not husks, we are so only compared to the full artful life; we can easily unlearn all that work and productivity guff. You might not be earning, but you might also be rescuing your brain.

The key is taking control of time again, and being creative with how you spend your time. Clearing the head is productive. Not thinking sometimes is productive. Walking for an hour is productive. Talking to varied people and changing your perspective is productive. Watching your breathing, or just being gentle with your movements can be very productive. It’s the expectation of immediate benefits and returns and byproducts that mucks us up.

The virtue of Slow is this: take control of your time, take control of your mind, and then create your own sense of expectation and fulfillment. The results might be quietly surprising. Beware of any externally-imposed sense of productivity or duty to things that don’t resonate on a personal level — work has to match up with your personality in some way. If your mind is an instrument, then you’d be careful of what kind of music (and for whom) you’d play it. Cultivate and sculpt and expand your own definition of living, your own life: that’s the only art. Because that’s where true productivity begins.

Neither am I, quipped Peter Cook, when a fellow partygoer boasted that he was working on a novel. There is far more to this bon mot than meets the eye, as George Steiner’s My Unwritten Books illustrates. In fact, the “non genre” lies at the very heart of literary modernity. Blaise Cendrars, for instance, toyed with the idea of a bibliography of unwritten works. Marcel Bénabou went one step further by publishing a provocative volume entitled Why I Have Not Written Any of My Books. In this manifesto of sorts, the anti-author argues that the books he has failed to write are not “pure nothingness”: they actually exist, virtually, in some Borgesian library of phantom fictions. This is precisely what Steiner means when he states that “A book unwritten is more than a void.” But what prompts writers to withhold themselves at the conception?

Some say that everything has already been said (La Bruyère et al); others have spoken of the futility of writing in the shadow of Joyce (Sollers) or in the wake of the Holocaust (Adorno) and 9/11 (McInerney). At a more fundamental level, as Tom McCarthy recently reasserted, literature is “always premised on its own impossibility”. Kafka even went as far as to state that the “essential impossibility of writing” is the “only thing one can write about”. Or not. Taking their cue from Rousseau (”There is nothing beautiful except that which does not exist”) the proponents of the “literature of the No” (or “workless artists” as Jean-Yves Jouannais calls them) prefer to abstain rather than run the risk of compromising their perfect vision. Written books are sweet, but those unwritten are sweeter.

This sense of creative impotence stems in part from a dual historical process which deified authors while defying the very authority of their authorship. In Europe, writers and artists were called upon to fill the spiritual vacuum left by the growing secularisation of society. For a while, the alter deus stood above his handiwork, paring his fingernails, but then “I” — the “onlie begetter” — became another, the signifier dumped the signified, and it all went pear-shaped. To compound matters, the gradual relaxation of censorship laws proved that the unsayable remained as elusive as ever when everything could be said.

The realisation that, at best, writers could only hope to dress old words new and recreate what was already there led to a spate of literary eclipses. Hofmannstahl’s Lord Chandos, who renounces literature because language cannot “penetrate the innermost core of things”, epitomises this mute mutiny instigated (in real life) by Rimbaud. Wittgenstein would later insist that the most important part of his work was the one he had not written, presumably because it lay beyond his coda to the Tractatus: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.”

Keeping stum and tuning in to the roar on the other side of silence was a soft option. Dostoevsky’s Kirilov — who attempts to defeat God by desiring his own humanity and therefore his own mortality and death — heralded a wave of phantom scribes. Forced to recognise that divine ex nihilo creation was beyond their grasp, writers such as Marcel Schwob came to the conclusion that the urge to destroy was also a creative urge — and perhaps the only truly human one.

Authors, of course, have always been tempted to destroy works which failed to meet their impossibly high standards (vide Virgil), but never before had auto-da-fé been so closely related to felo-de-se. The Baron of Teive (one of Pessoa’s numerous heteronyms) destroys himself after destroying most of his manuscripts because of the impossibility of producing “superior art”. In Dadaist circles, suicide even came to be seen as a form of inverted transcendence, a rejection of the reality principle, an antidote to literary mystification as well as a fashion. “You’re just a bunch of poets and I’m on the side of death,” was Jacques Rigaut’s parting shot to the Surrealists. Like him, Arthur Cravan, Jacques Vaché, Danilo Kupus, Boris Poplavsky, Julien Torma and René Crevel all chose to make the ultimate artistic statement. The rest, of course, is silence.

This appeared on the Guardian Books blog on 26 February 2008

The cult author, famous for his indolence and libido, closes his eyes for the last time

Albert Cossery was a lazy old sod, a relic from the past who looked, of late, as if he felt he had outstayed his welcome. Always dressed to the nines, this dandy anarchist could be observed sitting in the legendary Café de Flore, casting an Olympian eye over the aimless crowds outside, biding his time. His militant idleness coupled with a strange mummified existence blurred the boundary between life and death for so long that his passing away, last month, could almost have gone unnoticed — had he not been a living legend.

The cult author moved to Paris from his native Cairo in 1945 and soon became a fixture of the Saint-Germain-des-Prés boho scene. His friends included some of the most influential writers and artists of the last century: Sartre, Genet, Vian, Queneau, Tzara, Giacometti and others. Lawrence Durrell championed his first book — a brilliant collection of short stories entitled Men God Forgot (1940) — and Henry Miller ensured it got published Stateside. He even picked up girls — lots of them — with Albert Camus. According to legend (that word again), Durrell informed the American secret services that Cossery could not possibly be a spy, as they suspected, because he spent most of his time shagging. By the early 90s, he was claiming more than 3,000 female conquests.

Sex aside, Cossery never believed in exerting himself. His very name evokes divine indolence: avoir la cosse is a colloquial expression meaning to be bone idle. True to his moniker, he spent his life resisting any work ethic that prevents people from enjoying “the Edenic simplicity of the world”. He often showed off his delicate hands, explaining, somewhat provocatively, that they had not toiled in 2,000 years. And when a journalist inevitably enquired why he wrote, he answered that he hoped his books would prompt readers to pack in their jobs.

For Cossery, idleness was more than a way of life. It afforded him the greatest luxury of all: the time to contemplate — to think or observe — and therefore the opportunity to be fully alive, “minute by minute”. This accounts for the constant connection he establishes between destitution and nobility, which is reflected, for instance, in the beautiful descriptions of glistening gobbets of spit, or light playing upon puddles of piss. The author claimed that he always felt like the son of a king, even when he was penniless — or rather, especially when he was penniless, just like the university professor in Proud Beggars (1955) who finally feels like a million dollars after electing to become a pauper. The lesson here is that those who reject (or are deprived of) material wealth gain access to a heightened state of consciousness. When Cossery died, the French Culture Minister described him as a “prince”, even though he owned little more than the clogs he had just popped.

All his works (for want of a more congenial word) focus on the members of this aristocratic underclass — the holy hooligans who wear their hashish-smoke halos raffishly askew and jump through the eyes of needles like so many biblical camels. Cossery was not just their poet laureate: he considered himself as a fully unpaid-up member of the idle poor and certainly put his lack of money where his mouth was. Long before downshifting became trendy among trustafarians, he checked into a small hotel room and lived off handouts and publishing rights. Not so much because property is theft but because it can rob you of your soul.

Cossery’s anti-work ethos and all-round laziness only partly account for his limited output (a mere eight books in sixty-five years). He was a typical Platonic author who saw his works as imperfect reflections of an unattainable ideal. As such, he despised hackwork, often only producing a single perfectly-honed sentence a week. No wonder his last novel — a slim volume called Les Couleurs de l’infamie (1999) — was fifteen years in the making.

This unattainable literary ideal is symbolised by his characters’ noble dreams. Cossery’s anti-heroes are for ever lost in sleep or reverie, as if they were hankering after some prelapsarian state of perfect vegetative bliss. In the aptly-titled The Lazy Ones (1948), a character remains bedridden, out of choice, for a whole year; another opts for celibacy in order to preserve his sacred sleep patterns. In an early short story, the inhabitants of an impoverished neighbourhood are prepared to kill off those who have the nerve to disturb their slumber before noon. Some characters are even afraid to move lest they should break the magic spell of their daydreams. The author himself revelled in the out-of-time experience afforded by sleep, which is hardly surprising given that what he called living “minute by minute” meant, in practice, living the same minute over and over again Groudhog Day-style.

Time stood still for Cossery as soon as he settled in Paris. In 1945, he checked in to a small room in a hotel called La Louisiane on Rue de Seine and remained there until his recent demise. Every day, he would get up at noon (like his characters), dress up in his habitual dandified fashion and make his way to the Brasserie Lipp for a spot of lunch. From there, he would usually repair to the Café de Flore or the Deux Magots before going home for his all-important siesta. Repeat ad infinitum. A similar case of arrested development can be found in the books, which are all, without exception, set in the Middle East, although Cossery, of course, spent most of his life in France. His French style even mimicks the Arabic of his youth. One of the most haunting passages in Men God Forgot is the description of a crude fresco representing a motionless sailing boat on the Nile, frozen in time, refusing to move on.

Cossery described sleep as “death’s brother” and one can wonder if this refusal to turn his back on the glory days of Saint-Germain-des-Prés did not hide a desire for the big sleep: the eternal here and now. The author’s later years give a distinct impression of slow exhaustion. In 1998, he fell silent as a result of cancer and the following year he stopped writing, claiming that he no longer had anything to say.

For almost fifteen years (the time it took him to write his last book), I lived just up the road from Cossery. Whenever I got home in the small hours — usually a little worse for wear — my thoughts would turn to the “Voltaire of the Nile” sleeping in his diminutive mausoleum. It was a comforting thought, like a sailing boat that will never sail away.

The next time you walk down Rue de Seine, tread lightly: Albert Cossery sleeps on. Shh!

This originally appeared in Dazed Digital in July 2008.

Derangement of the senses is all fine and dandy as long as it is a prelude to recollection in tranquillity.

‘Here’s a lap-top. Here’s the spell check. Now write a book.’ Don’t get me wrong, I love the Brutalists’ gung-ho approach to fiction as much as the next ageing punk. In fact, my dream is to come up one day with a story as perfect as an early Buzzcocks single. The snag, of course, is that writing — even of the gonzo variety — is ill-equipped to capture the adrenaline rush of music. The Brutalists (Tony O’Neill, Adelle Stripe, and Ben Myers) can pull it off because they are talented, but most people who do the DIY punk lit thing fail dismally. Recollection in tranquillity, not derangement of the senses, is the sine qua non of good writing.

As a result of the accelerating pace of both writing and publishing, much of what passes for fiction these days would have been considered no more than an early draft only a few years ago. In truth, however, the digital age has simply compounded a problem caused by the increasing hegemony of one school of writing (the Ionic) over another (the Platonic).

Platonic writers tend to see their works as imperfect reflections of an unattainable literary ideal. They do not celebrate the birth of a new opus so much as mourn the abortion of all the other versions that could have been. In short (a keyword here), written books are sweet, but those unwritten are sweeter. Authors (and characters) belonging to this lineage have been known to give up writing altogether (Rimbaud) or contemplate destroying their own works (Kafka), although they usually settle for spending an awful lot of time producing precious little (Cossery).

Platonic writers are the antithesis of Grub Street hacks: for them, less is resolutely more. Since publication is, of necessity, an abject compromise with base reality, they agonize over endless revisions (like William H. Gass, whose novel, The Tunnel, was 30 years in the making) or grace the world with a slim volume of acerbic aphorisms whenever they can be arsed (à la Cioran).

In Plato’s famous dialogue, Socrates argues that the eponymous Ion and his fellow rhapsodes (the slam artists of Ancient Greece) are possessed by the gods whenever they tread the boards. According to this tradition, the artist, in the throes of creation, is under the influence — be it of the Muses, drugs, alcohol, a dream vision, or some other variant of divine inspiration. Ionic Man does not speak: he is spoken through (or played upon like Coleridge’s Aeolian harp), hence the cult of ’spontaneous prose’ in its various guises. The work of art comes as easily as leaves to a tree, appearing fully formed in a blinding flash of inspiration or in an accretive, free-associative manner as if under dictation. In both cases, logorrhoea beckons.

The Surrealists’ experiments with automatic writing belong to this school. So do the numerous penis-extension tall tales of binge typing. A driven Kerouac composed On the Road in a three-week, benzedrine-fuelled session after fashioning a scroll manuscript which allowed the all-important free flow of words to go unimpeded. Capote’s famous quip — ‘That isn’t writing; it’s typing’ — unwittingly captured the histrionic quality of Kerouac’s feat. This is action writing that transforms a sedate, sedentary, haemorrhoid-inducing activity into a heroic performance. Legend has it that the author sweated so profusely while typing his masterpiece that he had to change T-shirts several times a day. Perspiration, here, is inspiration made visible, and the connection between the two perfectly illustrates the desire to abolish the distance between literature and life. Ben Myers, whose first novel was also written in record time (six days and nights while facing eviction), explained that ‘There was no heating so I typed quickly’.

Another prime instance of Ionic braggadocio is the legend according to which Georges Simenon once locked himself in a glass cage to toss off a novel in three days and three nights while spectators gawked. This planned publicity stunt never actually occurred, but it may well have inspired Will Self, who, back in 2000, wrote a novella in a London art gallery during a two-week residency: the words were projected live on to a plasma screen behind the desk where he sat. The following year, Robert Olen Butler did something very similar via the internet and three webcams. These experiments, and others like National Novel Writing Month, are all interesting enough, but perhaps the time has come to ditch literary Stakhanovism in favour of the Platonics’ ‘precious little’ aesthetics.

Yes, of course, there is a social angle to all this. The Platonics belong to an aristocratic lineage which is at odds with our egalitarian times (how many authors can afford to be so unproductive?), but that should not blind us to what they have to offer. They write as if their lives (and after-lives) really depended on it. Whereas the Ionics try to merge life and literature into a seamless continuum, the Platonics — spurred on by what Paul Eluard called the ‘difficult desire to endure’ — often sacrifice the present on the altar of posterity. How many works of fiction produced today have any staying power?

Everything comes to those who can wait, so join the Slow Writing Movement — if not now, then when you’re done procrastinating.

This first appeared in the August 2007 edition of Shrug Magazine.

It is a strange task to produce a work that will endure beyond its maker - enduring physically and in infamy. On some level, this is the absurdity in which a painter engages each time he or she approaches the canvas. One dilemma in the face of this metaphysical crisis is pacing the construction of a painting. Since the lifespan of a painting after completion will inevitably outweigh the time of its creation, how long should one spend getting it ready for a life in the big bad world? As an artist, my paintings are little Pinnochios whom I secretly expect to come alive and pay homage to their creator. In truth the paintings are indifferent to me and I am only a small portion of their inanimate lives.
Painting is slow in nature. Fast painting is only relative. There is a critical delay between a thought or sight and its translation into paint. It is in that delay, while the artist’s intention is channeled through the archaic technology of brush, pigment and oil, that interesting inaccuracies occur. There are the deviations from reality that express a personal subjective view. Then there are the deviations from intention that belong solely to the mysteries of paint, creating an aura of otherworldlyness that is so attractive. It is the inefficiency of painting that makes it special and alluring. The inefficiency of the process is thereby sympathetic to slowness and often rewards it. Yet again, where along the spectrum of inefficiency should a painter exist? How slow is too slow?
This summer I saw a retrospective of an extraordinary realist painter, Antonio Lopez Garcia at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Garcia, still actively painting in his 70’s, is renowned for working on his paintings for many years at a time. One painting, “Lucio’s Balcony” took 28 years to complete and during that time the apartment where the balcony was located changed ownership several times. The duration of a painting may be lengthy but in the moment, Garcia is not slow at all. A documentary film by Victor Erice called “Dream of Light”, shows Garcia working tirelessly and swiftly to capture the appearance of a Quince Tree. Sustaining that heroic pace over long periods is what makes his paintings more a meditation on the appearance of time than anything else.
A friend of mine, Alvaro Altamar has been working on a master copy of a painting in the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts collection since we attended a class there together in 2005. The original painting from which Alvaro is copying is John Vanderlyn’s Ariadne— a mythical nude sprawled out in the woods on a crimson drape. He has studied every aspect of the painting, accounting for Vanderlyn’s palette and working methods, visiting other versions of the painting and meticulously scanning the surface of the paint for its secrets. He has analyzed it like a scientist, making obsessive calculations of the inner geometry and painting studies devoted to particular color dynamics. He knows the Ariadne so well that at times it’s hard to separate the painting from an actual embodiment of the sensual maiden when he refers to it— the painting of the goddess has slowly become her.
I am reminded of Borges the more I think of Alvaro and his Ariadne. Jorge Luis Borges wrote many short stories that teased the idea of the infinite. In one story a group of scholars create an Encyclopedic entry for a fictional state with such precision that the place begins to exist in reality. The reader’s comprehension is pushed to exhaustion in a story where a writer attempts an exact recreation of Don Quixote, not by copying the text but by arriving at the same decisions that Cervantes did. Another story describes a book intended by its author to be infinite by including every possible outcome of a narrative as simultaneous interweaving realities. Borges’ metaphysical experiments underscore the wonder and beauty of mankind’s most futile endeavors. He celebrates inefficiency as a sort of liberation from time.
My opinion of Alvaro’s Ariadne repeatedly sways back and forth. At one end I am in awe of his dedication and continued fascination. At the other end I am impatient with his exercise and urge him to move on to new territory, to move on to original works. Alvaro does make other paintings, but the Ariadne has been a consistent draw on his time and energy. A year ago someone wanted to purchase the painting and Alvaro gave him a timeframe for its completion that continued to elongate until our economic recession intervened and the buyer backed away. Now Alvaro has no incentive to wrap up the Ariadne and can continue unhurried. It is a painting that hasn’t lost its initial purpose to copy a masterwork, but other ambitions have certainly been adopted as the piece becomes something far more than a simple copy. We joke at the sincere question of one the Academy’s museum guards who asked, “are you ever going to be done her?” Alvaro pontificates with a revolutionary zeal that his painting reflects his wish for people to slow down and really look at one thing with full attention.
In time all paintings will decay. They will crack and discolor and further deviate from their original intentions. This is not necessarily a bad thing—in fact, there is some satisfaction in seeing the age of a painting. The enduring slowness is revealed underneath the signs of age. The slowness of painting seems to open up an exception to time while still being tied to it. Paintings reflect the desire for a soul that will endure past our physical bodies. A painter’s separation anxiety is understandable because it is as if the soul departs the body when a painting is finished. I look forward to one day seeing Alvaro’s Ariadne long after the hard work is done—cracked and aged, resembling Vanderlyn’s. But then again, it might never be finished.

I made a drawing of a flower today. We all did, sitting down, scattered between bushes and rocks on Europe’s most western point, sea stretching out below us. We were on a Sketchbook Walk.

It was given as a very simple task…

Just look at the flower and don’t make up any ideas about it. Don’t know anything about it. Don’t think about it. Just look at it and know that as your pencil finds its way along the lines you see, the drawing will start making sense. You might get lost, finding your drawing doesn’t match with the way the leaves grow. Just continue, keep insisting on the searching and following of the eye along the flower. The pencil roams slowly, figuring out as it goes. An honest drawing, with no presupposing of knowing it beforehand and with no need to impress anyone.

The brain, addicted to adrenaline, and dull from daily overstimulation, is having a hard time. The eyes skip around the flower, looking for patterns, a system to simplify it by, get it over with.

‘yeah, I get this part, it goes straight, I’ll just skip to the yellow petals, now that’s a challenge”.

“I bet I can use my fancy markmaking and do this texture”…

Do it slower, draw painstakingly slow for a few minutes. Let your eyes move as a small ant would, walking across it. Let your pencil do the same line as your eyes, feel the exact coordination. There is nothing else right now, just this line happening, millimeter by millimeter. Just you and the flower.

Something happens, a shift inside. Like the flower is actually there, before me. No words are going through my mind anymore. It is just an intense following, physically feeling the point of the pencil making my eyes’ path real, pushing against the paper, stronger and weaker as the flower grows from thick stem to delicate petals. There is an intense joy, that I can only describe as related to childhood. It has no purpose and no knowledge attatched to it. It is an appreciation of something filling your sensory horizon, putting you right in the middle of time, where time dissappears.

I look at the drawing and I can’t believe how odd and beautiful it is. I didn’t do this..The flower did.