06.22.07
‘Man that guy could see weird!’
Puma sat on the couch as I had morning coffee and headlines, listening to him talk about his latest work, using scraps of acrylic in a very Mondrian way - his contribution to the green movement, recycling his industrial waste as art.
He was doing my portrait in rectangles when he casually mentioned our old Interpretive figure teacher, Simon Carr.
Bam! I’m thrown back to Foundation year, and my first session with Simon Carr was a a life drawing session with a very ‘earth-mother’ shaped model, who easily topped 300 lbs. We were to see the figure in a completely different way and translate it onto paper. After a few minutes of furious drawing we stepped back as he walked around the room, stopping at my easel to ponder for a second.
He then grabbed my graphite stick and began furiously scribbling on top of what I had just drawn. I wasn’t sure what to do. Laugh? Take a picture? Start swinging?
“There,” he said, stepping back, “doesn’t that have more energy now?”
I stopped: sunuvabitch, he was right.
And that was the kind of effect the man had.
Whether he was showing us examples of ‘outsider art’ (ok, let’s be real here, it was drawings made by crazy people) or going to the Met and seeing figurative works by African, Polynesian and the Maori - he had this way of forcing you to see reality in a completely new way. He’d make you see shapes that were impossible, and look at the figure as a plastic, geometric blob that only a kid, crazy person or hallucinating person could see.
And, obviously - his lessons stick with me to this day.
Funny, I went digging around in some of my old portfolios, looking for some of the work I did under his tutelage, and couldn’t find any. Guess I’ll have to go and find an ‘earth-mother’ and get twisted enough to see those impossible shapes once more.
