Art & Perception

Tina now hangs in my bedroom at the foot of my bed.  Tina is a painting done by Paolo, my ex-lover of eight years and the emotional and sentimental favorite among my varied works of art (I suppose I refer both to the painting and Paolo.)  Tina, Paolo’s muse and my competition, is the subject and the meaning of the painting. Tina is the reason the love of my life and I didn’t survive in a relationship.

I surprised Paolo one evening, arriving home a day early from a business trip.  A classic set up.  I was asking for it and I knew it. His drug habit and infidelity were no secret and just something that we worked around. In fact, we had been working to incorporate the infidelity into our sex life.  Tina was another matter and eventually she beat me hands down. I despised Tina: The severe mood swings, the rages, the depressions, the lunacy.  But I was no match for her influence. Like too many artists, Paolo could not find his muse without drugs or alcohol. Part of me was fascinated by this dynamic, and also oftentimes sexually aroused–which pathetically helped enable my lover’s drug habit.  But Paolo’s use of crystal methamphetamine, known as Tina to her closest friends, eventually drove a wedge between us.

So I knew and I knew even more than Paolo realized I knew. However on that particular evening my premature return home delivered  huge surprises for both of us.  Yes, indeed, I did “catch” him, but not in the “anticipated” sense.

I walked through the door, and looked directly down the hall into our living room, our newly remodeled living room, I might add, and remodeled in my absence.  I later learned that most of the furniture had been piled up in the guest room and not, fortunately, carried away by the Salvation Army or an antiques dealer.

Around the perimeter of the living room, Paolo had propped up a  total of nine mirrors including the six bathroom cabinet doors.  If nothing else, Tina was the mistress of industry. In one corner of the room, he had placed the TV and VCR on a cart and was playing porn,  Ken Ryker to be precise. I remember this for a very good reason, as you will discover. Paolo had positioned his easel in the exact center of the room.  He was hard at work on Tina, wearing nothing but a beret (a little affectation of his), a Marlboro Light dangling from his lips, paint smudges wherever he had rubbed or scratched himself and, uh, a significant representative part of porn star Ken Ryker.  Paolo was athletically squatting over a stone pedestal from our garden that had a Ken Ryker Signature Collection 9 1/2 Insertable Inches Dildo stuck to the top.  Mounted on this enormous sex toy, Paolo was riding it slowly up and down while he painted, smoked and listened to the actual Ken Ryker grunting and groaning on the television set off to the side of the room.  The mirrors were of course positioned so that wherever Paolo looked, he would see a reflection of some angle of himself riding Ken Ryker’s plastic penile doppelganger.

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Reflections inspire much of my work, both in my photography and in my writing.  I’m much more intrigued by the subject’s reflection than I am by the subject itself.

Mirrors

My maternal grandmother Luba Abramanova (made Lilly on 1922 Ellis Island) maintained an uncomfortable truce with mirrors  and cameras, anything that would reflect her image.  Mirrors served an occasionally necessary function and were to be barely tolerated.  Shop windows and reflecting pools were easily avoided. Cameras were–in her estimation–nothing more than mirrors that rudely captured a permanent record of the reflection.  We’ve all heard stories about primitive tribes and their superstitious notion that cameras can steal the soul.  And then of course we have legends of vampires and their inability to even cast a reflection.  Jews have no depictions of humans in their art for fear of violating the Ten Commandment’s prohibition against “idolatry”.  Narcissus couldn’t free his own gaze from the reflection in the pool and now he lives in flower pots. Medusa, rendered powerless by her own reflection, was easily slain by Perseus. The mirror defeated the Gorgon.  Lilly was clearly on to something important.

Other than the customary bathroom cabinet mirror, the only other mirror in Lilly’s home was a huge Venetian smoked glass decorative mirror hanging over her living room couch at an angle rather than flat against the wall.  The mirror was unapproachable.  Tilting off the wall as it did, it seemed an odd position for such a big and ominous slab of glass and as a child I often wondered when it would come crashing down on the sofa and some foolish shortsighted victim. For that reason, I never sat on the sofa.  If all the chairs were taken at a family gathering, I would sit on the floor pretending to be an Indian.  Adults would buy that and think it cute.

Occasionally someone would comment on the Venetian mirror’s limited decorative role.  Why not hang a painting instead?  Between the odd angle, the couch that kept you at a distance from the mirror and the muted lighting in the living room, you really couldn’t see your own reflection in any practical sense.  It wasn’t until I was 16 that I realized that the mirror was deliberately angled in that manner so that Lilly could see the dress she was wearing, but not her own face.  She had hung the mirror according to her own height so that her reflection was effectively cut off at the head. more… »

I want to expand my blog Art & Perception as a book. Lisa Hunter, author of The Intrepid Art Collector, gave me some excellent advice. [Note, this post was written before Art & Perception became a group blog]

Karl Zipser: We bloggers write what we want to write and act as our own publishers. When you want to publish a book, how does this affect what you can write about?

Lisa Hunter: Writers don’t like to hear this, but commercial publishers really want evidence that the book will sell. They’ll want to know if the author has a “platform” (i.e. whether he/she gives seminars, has a TV show, writes a syndicated newspaper column, etc.) They’ll also want to know what the readership demographic is, and what opportunities for PR exist. And they’ll want a “competition analysis,” which lists all similar books and explains why this one is different or better. At big commercial publishers, the marketing people can be just as important as editors in deciding what books to publish!

Karl: Are books about art a special case with respect to publishing?

Lisa: A major factor with art books is how expensive they are to produce. Color illustrations raise the printing costs substantially (and this is on top of reproduction rights fees.) Oftentimes, a book proposal is shot down because the book would cost so much that few people would buy it. I know this from personal experience. Recently, I had a great idea for a coffee table book that several editors loved, but no one could see how it would be profitable. Sigh.

Karl: Tell me about the writing process itself. Did you write your book first and then look for a publisher?

Lisa: Non-fiction is unique, in that you don’t have to write the book until you have a contract with a publisher. Acceptance is typically based on a proposal, outline and sample chapter. An agent who believes in your project — and who knows what publishers are looking for — is a HUGE help in getting editors to take the project seriously.

Karl: So you get the agent and editors to believe in you with a great proposal, etc, and then . . .

Lisa: Of course, once you have the contract, you actually have to write the book, and if you’ve never written anything 300+ pages before, that can be intimidating. When I was writing The Intrepid Art Collector, I was lucky because the chapters were all stand-alone. I could work on them one-at-a-time, as if I were writing magazine articles. After a while, I had my 80,000 words. For a more narrative type of book, an outline is critical to stay on track. And when writer’s block and deadlines build up stress, I recommend chocolate.