Face It

It's hard to think of any human world without the insistent measure of others in it, what and how they've done things—and what that meant. Like it or not, there's finally no one here but us people, or certainly nothing that gives a damn about that fact other than those we have a life with, either as past or present. It's a long time, however, since anyone's had the chutzpah to say, "Lives of great men all remind us, etc., etc." Those "great men" have long since fallen with the revelations of Watergate or else the bleakly persistent appetites of such as brought us the casual nightmare of Love Canal. We despair in trust, so to speak, we no longer believe much. High school kids surveyed as to their contemporary heroes recently came back with not one human being, living or dead. They had literally all gone to the stars, of Star Wars .

So were there nothing else here but this dear human care for what there is and has been, to go by, it would be immensely moving in itself. That someone can still say he wants to "Pay homage to people whose world and/or life has touched and influenced mine—people I think are important human beings . . ." is unexpectedly reassuring because it's so often felt as square, somehow mark of an innocence, a lack of hipness, a simply naive disposition toward the world that hasn't as yet suffered its own comedown. But this painter is no kid nor are the figures of his proposal a comfortable pop topography. So-called public persons here are as real as

anyone else, often as faded and certainly as vulnerable. As one of them, Ed Dorn, once said, my heroes have been men and women  . . . It is a dry, classical specificness, a toughness of human needs—including that something matter—that wants to look and be looked at. Because otherwise it's too much like an eighteen-year-old seen with dog walking down sidewalk a few days ago, here in this small still backwater Maine town, and on the back of his T-shirt was: "It doesn't matter." Terrifying.

Even so there's finally not enough mileage in saying anything, if the art itself can't bring one to sight , to seeing it without any words at all. Therefore all the resources of the painter are on the line, and all the echoes, resources, distractions of the business of the so-called art world are there to blow him away, as and when he falters. Again the strength is the artist's heart, remarkably enough, that in making these complexly personal icons, he can "Attempt to record the sense of the presence of that person as well as simply the image . . ." Impeccably he manages a detail of a photographically determined reality together with a far more subtly actualized experience of the qualities of person inherent. He digs these people, he feels their presence as his own.

Back of all of this is that funny word, face —and here are many faces, all full face, looking at you. Funny that it comes from a Latin word you find also in factory: facere , to make, do. The face was always something you were making, whether it was make-up or simply funny faces. In any case, it's your turn now.

Bristol, Me.
July 21, 1983