The Burnt Orange Heresy

By taking the service elevator down and up, I was back in my room in fewer than five minutes. The room was hot and close. I stripped to my underwear, turned the air-conditioner to "Cool," and put the blank canvas against the back of a straight laddered chair. There was a large, fairly flat, green ceramic ashtray on the coffee table. This ashtray served to steady the canvas upright against the back of the chair, and would perform double duty as a palette. I squeezed blobs of blue, yellow, red, and white paint onto the ashtray, opened the cans of turpentine and linseed oil, lined up the brushes on the coffee table, and stared at the canvas. After fifteen minutes, I brought the other straightbacked chair over from the desk, sat down on it, and stared at the blank canvas some more.

Twenty minutes later, still staring at the white canvas, I was shivering. I turned the reverse-cycle air-conditioner to "Heat," and fifteen minutes later I was roasting, with perspiration bursting out of my forehead and clammy streams of sweat rolling down my sides from my damp armpits. I turned off the air-conditioner and tried to raise the window. The huge air-conditioner occupied the bottom half of the window, and the top half of the window was nailed shut, with rusty red paint covering the nailheads. But there was an overhead fan, and the switch still worked. The fan, with wobbly two-foot blades, turned lazily in the high ceiling. The room was still close, so I unlocked the door, and kept it ajar with an old-fashioned brass hook-and-eye attachment that held the door cracked open for approximately four inches. No one could see in from the corridor and within minutes the room was perfectly comfortable with just enough fresh air coming in from the hallway to be gently wafted about by the slow and not unpleasantly creaking overhead fan.

An hour later I was still physically comfortable. I had smoked three Kools. I was still staring at the virgin canvas, and realized, finally, that I was unable to paint an original Debierue painting. Not even if I sat there for four straight hours every day . . .

My eyes, bright and alert, stared at the blank, shining canvas, and my stout heart, stepped up slightly, if inaudibly, from the depressing uppityness of two nugatory bennies, pumped willing blood to my even more willing fingers. I had forgotten, for two wasted hours, the hardlearned lesson of our times. In this, the Age of Specialization, where we can only point to Hugh Hefner or, wilder yet, to the early Marlon Brando as our contemporary "Renaissance Men," I had tackled my problem ass-backwards.

I was a writer confined by choice but still confined to contemporary art-writing about it, not painting it. I could wield a paintbrush, of course, passably. I had learned to paint in college studio courses before going on to my higher calling, in the same way that a man who wants to become a brigadier general and command an Air Force wing must first learn how to fly an airplane. The general does not have to be a superior pilot to command a wing, but he attains his position because, as an ex- or now part-time pilot, he understands the daily flight problems of the pilots under his command. The system doesn't work very well, of course, because the man who wants to fly an Air Force jet, and plans his career accordingly, seldom enters that active occupation with the preconceived plan of ending up some day at a desk where he rarely flies. The "hot" pilot does not make a good paper-shuffling general because the makeup of a man who wants to fly does not include a love of administration, writing letters, and enforcing discipline.

I had learned how to paint because I had to learn the problems confronting painters, and I had taught college students because that was what I had to do to survive as an art historian. But in my secret heart I had intended to become an art critic from the very beginning. And although my major passion was contemporary art, during my year in Europe I had grimly made my rounds in the Louvre, in Florence, in Rome, tramping dutifully through ancient galleries because I knew that I had to examine the art of the past to understand the art of the present.

I was a writer, not a painter, and a writer gets his ideas from a blank piece of paper, not from a blank piece of canvas. I moved my chair to the desk and my typewriter and immediately started to write.