The Burnt Orange Heresy

This is the way it works. The contemporary painter approaches his canvas without an idea (in most cases), fools around with charcoal, experimenting with lines and forms, filling in here, using a shaping thumb, perhaps, to add some depth to a form that is beginning to interest him, and sooner or later he sees something. The painting develops into a composition and he completes it. His subconscious takes over, and the completed painting may turn out well or, more often than not, like most writing, turn out badly. Even when the painter begins with an idea of some kind his subconscious takes over the painting once he starts working on it. The same theory essentially, holds true for the writer. A man paints or writes both consciously and subconsciously beginning with, at most, a few relevant mental notes.

So once I sat at my typewriter, the article began to take shape. One idea led quickly to another. It was an inspired piece of work, because it was morally right to write it. My honor and Debierue's were both at stake. And yet, although it was in some respects easy to write, it was one of the most difficult pieces I had ever written because of the fictional elements it contained.

My creative talents flagged when it came to describing the pictures Debierue had failed to paint, although, once over this block, it was a simple matter to interpret the paintings because I could visualize them perfectly in my mind's eye. I was familiar enough with Debierue's background to summarize the historical details of his earlier accomplishments. It was also simple enough to record a tightly edited version of our conversation, with a few embellishments for clarity, and a few bits of profundity for reader interest. Perhaps there is a little something of the fiction writer inside every professional journalist.

My imaginative powers were strong enough to describe the paintings that I, myself, would have liked to paint if I had had the ability to paint them, but I ran into conceptual difficulties because, at first, I thought I had to describe the paintings that Debierue wanted to paint. But this was a futile path. I could not possibly see the world as Debierue did. And if I was unable to live in his arcane world, I could never verbalize it into visual art.

My predetermined term, "American Harvest," for Debierue's so-called American period, provided me with the correlative link I needed to visualize mental pictures I was capable of describing. I began with red, white, and blue- the colors of France's noble tricolor and our own American flag. Seeing these three colors on three separate panels I began to rearrange the panels in my mind. Side by side, in a row, close together, well separated, overlapping, horizontal and vertical with the floor, and scattered throughout a room on three different walls. But there are four walls to a room. A fourth panel was required-not for symmetry, because that doesn't matter-but for variety, for the sake of an ordered environment. Florida. Sun. Orange. An autumnal sun for Debierue's declining years. Burnt orange. But not a panel of burnt orange in toto-that would be heresy, because Debierue, even at his great age, was still painting, still creating, still growing. So the ragged square of burnt orange required a lustrous border of blue to surround the dying sun and to overflow the edges of the rectangle. Bluebird blue?' Sky blue?' No, not sky nor Dufy blue, because that meant using cobalt oil paint, and cobalt blue, with the passage of years, gradually turns to bluish gray. Prussian blue, with a haughty whisper of zinc white added to make it bitterly bold. Besides, right here in this hotel room, I had a full tube of Prussian blue.

Texture?' Tactile quality?' Little if any. Pure, smooth even colors.

The four paintings, 30" x 24", were the only paintings Debierue had painted since coming to Florida. The paintings were for his personal aesthetic satisfaction, to enjoy during the harvest years of his stay in America, and yet they were in keeping with his traditionally established principles of Nihilistic Surrealism.

Every morning when Debierue arose at six A.M., depending upon his waking mood, he hung one of the red, white, or blue panels next to the permanently centered burnt orange, blue-bordered panel, the painting representing the painter-the painter's "self." For the remainder of the day, when he was not engaged in the planning of another (undisclosed to the writer) work of art, he studied and contemplated the two bilateral paintings which reminded him of America's multiple "manifest destinies," the complexities of American life in general, and his personal artistic commitment to the new world.

Did he ever awaken in a mood buoyant enough to hang two or perhaps three panels at once alongside the burnt orange panel?'

"No," he said.