The Burnt Orange Heresy

Debierue worked four hours a day, he claimed, which meant sitting on this stool staring at an empty canvas from eight until noon, every day, seven days a week, waiting for an idea to come-every single day! At that precise moment I knew, despite all of the published documentary evidence to the contrary that he was not merely suffering a so-called dry period, a temporary inability to paint since moving to Florida. Without any other evidence (my own eyes were witness enough, together with my practiced critical intuition), I knew that Jacques Debierue had never had a plastic idea, nor had he painted a picture of any kind in his entire lifetime!

Debierue was a slave to hope. He had never accepted the fact that he couldn't paint a picture. But each day he faced the slavery of the attempt to paint, and the subsequent daily failure. After each day of failure he was destroyed, only to be reborn on the next day-each new day bringing with it a new chance, a new opportunity. How could he be so strong willed to face this daily death, this vain slavery to hope?' He had dedicated his life to Nothing.

The most primitive nescience in man cannot remain completely negative-or so I had always believed. Forms and the spectrum range of colors, the sounds a man makes with his mouth, the thousands of daily perceptions of sights and sound, invade our senses from moment to moment, consciously and subconsciously. And all of these sights and sounds-and touch, too, of course-demand an artistic interpretation. Knowing this basic natural truth, I knew that Debierue, an intelligent, sentient human being, must have had hundreds, no, literally thousands of ideas for paintings during the innumerable years he sat before an empty canvas. But these ideas were unexpressed, locked inside his head, withheld from graphic presentation because of his fear of releasing them. He was afraid to take a chance, he was unable to risk the possibility-a distinct possibility-of failure. His dread of failure was not a concern with what others might think of his work. It was a fear of what he, Debierue, the Artist, might think of his accomplished work. The moment an artist expresses himself and fails, or commits himself to an act of self-expression by action, and realizes that he did not, that he cannot, succeed, and that he will never be able to capture on canvas that which he sees so vividly in his mind's eye, he wifi know irrevocably that he is a failure as an artist.

So why should he paint?' In fact, how can he paint?'

How many times had Debierue leaned forward, reaching out timidly toward the shining canvas before him with a crumbling piece of charcoal in his trembling fingers?' How many times?'-and with the finished, varnished, luminous masterpiece glowing upon the museum wall of his febrile mind?'-only to stay his hand at the last possible moment, the tip of the black charcoal a fraction of an inch away from the virgin canvas?'

"Nonono! Not yet!"

The fear-crazed neural message would race down the full length of the motor neuron in his extended arm (vaulting synapse junctions), and in time, always in the nick of time, the quavery hand would be jerked back. The virgin canvas, safe for another day, would once again remain unviolated.

Another day, another morning of uncommitted, untested accomplishment had been hurdled, but what difference did it make?' What did anything matter, at high noon, so long as he had delayed, put off until tomorrow, postponed the execution of the feeble idea he had today when there would be a much better idea tomorrow?' If he did not prove to himself today that he could paint the image in his mind, or that he could not paint it, a tendril of comfort remained. And hope.

Faith in his untried skills provided a continuum.

Why not?' Wasn't he trying?' Yes. Was he not a dedicated artist?' Yes. Did he ever fail to put in his scheduled work period every day?' No. Was he not faithful to the sustained effort?'-the devoted, painful, mental concentration?'-the agony of creation?' Yes, yes, and yes again.

And who knew?' Who knows?' The day might arrive soon, perhaps tomorrow! that bright day when an idea for a painting would come to him that was so powerful, so tremendous in scope and conception, that his paint-loaded brush could no longer be withheld from the canvas! He would strike at last, and a pictorial masterpiece would be born, delivered, created, a painting that would live forever in the hearts of men!

All through life we protect ourselves from countless hurtful truths by being a little blind here-by ignoring the something trying to flag our attention on the outer edges of our peripheral vision, by being a little shortsighted there-by being a trifle too quick to accept the easiest answer, and by squinting our eyes against the bright, incoming light all of the time. Emerson wrote once that even a corpse is beautiful if you shine enough light on it.

But that is horseshit.