Open Letter to Olga Knaus About Art

The Armageddon Wine Bar 2010. Mixed media on telephone table. It’s powered by potatoes! The wines are homemade blackberry, elderberry, blueberry, strawberry, and dandelion.

Dear O,

I write to thank you for your critical note on social media about your preference for my non-political paintings. You caught me at the right time. I am ready to push all politics out the door and come back to the one life I have left to live on this human-dominated planet. I am not influential among my own people—let alone millions of strangers in a wide world. All my creative efforts to date have not set the Doomsday Clock back a trillisecond. I cannot persuade my daughters to recycle properly (if there has ever been a proper way), nor convince Rose to turn out the light when not using a room. I have purchased more stuff in plastic packaging this year than all of humanity discarded as waste in the 5th century. Our cat has a better diet than a medieval king. In a hundred years, Miami and your beautiful city will be flooded and perhaps depopulated.

Nero played the fiddle while Rome burned. The lumpenproletariat today count pairs of shoes while species disappear.

And apparently there is nothing people can do about it, even though the current extinction (ongoing Holocene) is human-made, and human brains pray to believe that what has been done can also be undone—even if all the tree frogs of Costa Rica are dead forever.

So, if your kind criticism was aimed not at aesthetic composition, but at the futility of wasting precious life and energy on that which cannot be undone, I understand. For I have self-criticized this position for the past 10 years, especially my addiction to political thinking. It debilitates the soul, asphyxiates optimism. It makes one a slave to an unknown, yet ever present overseer. Much of my time is spent thinking maneuvers to outsmart it, but it’s a fool’s game to lose, over and over again. Its eyes and ears are everywhere and knows all my hiding places, except for one.

Art.

And what do I do?

Paint politics.

I saw your most recent painting today, “Where Are You Going?”. It is new, bold, and mysterious. What I love most in a work of art. Nurturing child and marriage, self-taught courses in modern art history, perhaps in a big way too, the pandemic, has pulled something very new out of you. Congratulations! I admire your sense of wonder that I once had and miss to distraction. I suspect much of it comes from Alena, as my young daughters gave to me years ago when every day was new (for the girls) and repetition nearly impossible (for me). I pity mature adults who do not have a child in their lives. Boredom at the table, and ennui, the landlord, pounding on the door. Today I would offer several years off my life to help raise my granddaughters to young adulthood. Reading books, discovering nature, baking vegetable shepherd’s pie for eager eyes on an autumn night... Who has time to think on man’s folly when there is a child who must be read to?

“Late middle age” is a euphemism Americans use to bring fleeting psychological comfort during the onset of old age. But in vain. No physical way to avoid it. A great rift has begun, and I have a foot set down in both lands. However, only one beckons the living death. Each sunrise the gulf widens just a little bit. Your painting is a visual push to embolden plans that were forming to take me back to the beginning as I near the end.

I know better sense would have me slow down while the people go rush and run. I could stand very still to find personal freedom while I add my disposable habits to the plastic continent untethered in the Pacific. Any functional universe worth its eternity cannot tell time. Everything in nature is present and reasonable. 12,000 years ago the earth made mountains from glaciers moving immovable rocks. This generation it has created a petroleum island three times the surface area of France. Also, because of human beings, (a universe creation like seagulls and apples), two-fifths of the planet’s biodiversity is poised to go extinct. For brief intervals, I am able to lean on the ancient wisdoms seeking self-fulfillment, but the modern realities are stark and unrelenting. No known universe ever spawned a species capable of annihilating millions of other species in a weekend. To throw my hands up in surrender to annihilation that can only be inevitable if I throw my hands up in surrender, is a living death I am unable to adjust to with sanity. Weak men and women maintain the nuclear age, which just because it exists, does not mean it must. Passenger pigeons once nested in the same living trees I stroll beneath on a nature walk. People too might go extinct while their houses still stand. A sane universe can expect it. However, if unable to carry on its own existence, humanity is poised to take all creation down with it. I have a mortal problem with a thinking species that cannot react undauntingly under the phrase, “the end of all life as we know it”.

If I am an artist, or a philosopher, I had better take alternative paths to enlightenment. And enlightenment ain’t what it used to be. Perfect and unsurpassed awakening has remained a high achievement since the time of the invention of spoons. But today the kind little Buddhas of Lhasa look like selfish brats slurping their broth and checking their texts. My satori will come when I single-handedly rid the earth of nuclear weapons. It is the only way to insure the continuation of life for another 100 years, and perhaps an eternity.

To me, an earth freed of human power in order to protect and prolong life, is worth being political (and unpopular) in my humble image-making process. What good would a Jesus or a Buddha be persuading people to love and let go while the white light came to kill everything? Especially if the threat was human-made, created in darkness by child men, and possibly eliminated with the concentrated will and action of humankind in the present moment? Mass insanity is no excuse for the individual to seek selfish enlightenment in a world to end all worlds. These are weaker men of my lifetime who are in temporary control of the death of ages. Their arrogance is bolstered by a “live and let live” toleration from populations brainwashed from cradle to grave to let the bad people be. The least I can do with my life is creatively condemn those who design, manufacture, and accept the stockpiling of doom. I could look the other way, seek daily to improve my own lot, have everything I need under the sun and expect more… Or I can be a lone voice of protest in a world gone temporarily insane, while living love and life to the best of my ability. Annihilation was invented when my mother was a year old. Homo sapiens, who are 15,000 generations strong, are only a couple generations crazy with their death wish. I have 30 years left to persuade humanity that the old generals with their little boy medals need a hard spanking from their mommies and daddies. And their kill toys must go to the garbage. And their death dreams go back to hell.

Of course I digress and have become preachy. Let me put this into “art speak” to bring me down-to-earth and human.

I believe that art without purpose is self-indulgent like a floating island of garbage that planes fly over taking tourists to Hawaii. It can exist and will continue to exist because present-day comfortable people seek the popular contentment advertised by capitalism. However, I also believe that self-indulgent art should not be elevated to high positions in museums and human memory. Last year I wrote about how the threat of nuclear annihilation affected the art of celebrity artist Roy Lichtenstein. Rembrandt, as you know, did not imagine how anything besides God could exterminate mankind. There was a Hell to punish the evil men. Rembrandt knew about Revelations, but it was God, not man, that blew the whole thing up. Rembrandt couldn’t know about future end times wrought by nuclear warfare. But Picasso did.

So too Roy Lichtenstein.

And neither did a damn thing about it but make more pretty pictures, more comfort, and more waste.

Anyway, here is what I thought last year about celebrity artists confining their brief adult lives to self-indulgence:

As a 16 year old boy, often flabbergasted by the insensitivity and hypocrisy of man, I had no outlet other than a spoken word “why” to react to questions with myself and a world gone wrong. A friend gave me the nickname “Philosopher Ron,” which I didn’t know what to do with other than add more “whys” to a lengthening list on the sins of friends and family. I was working class, poorly educated, and limited to wonder that never took me outside my caste. I had no mentor, no teacher, no guru. So, why did the chef at the restaurant where I worked my first job as dishwasher serve late arrivals spaghetti that he scooped out of the garbage? Was his life that interesting after work to save time on the clock by washing garbage can pasta and reheating it, rather than boiling another pound? That week on my night off I watched “The Day After”, a made for TV nuclear holocaust movie that was all the rage among adults pretending to give a crap about their own government’s trespass on the rights of all life on earth. What was a moral dishwasher with the intellectual capacity of a stone, yet the sensitivity of a butterfly wing, to do with that information?
Naturally, in my station, as inquisitive young dope and novice dishwasher, I just asked “why?”, and then went to bed.
I am sure Roy Lichtenstein either watched or at least heard about the movie, for adults always talk about things the TV wants them to. In 1983 he was rich and well cared for, and although he had the eyes of many thousands of thinking peoples, he thought best to remain humble in his art and let Ronald Reagan be master of the weapons that would melt his loved ones. Roy made one political painting that year, a framed “abstract” entitled Against Apartheid, which was very safe and popular and showed that the millionaire artist cared a great deal about oppression in South Africa. The rest of his output for 1983 is more brushstrokes, more frames, and some apples. And he probably took his wife Dorothy out for spaghetti late one night, at the hour when some chefs get very bitter and angry over their station in life.
Today, Philosopher Ron cannot help but to think that all celebrity visual artists are lazy jerks to the survival needs of mankind. I think the same of popular actors, renown performers and musicians, and writers with best selling books. Each has a huge following, yet uses expression to maintain the means that keep them grounded to the same spot on the spectrum of goodness and badness. They reside where the money comes and popularity is maintained. Popular artists, like infamous presidents (all presidents), gain the world and lose their souls. It’s just a matter of fact.
Fear of insignificance keeps the successfully ambitious producing nothing to slow the race toward extinction. Whether it be pretty Pop paintings or the B83 thermonuclear bomb.

I hope you and family are thriving. We have stocked up on squash, of which there are hundreds of varieties worldwide. Though several might become extinct before Alena enters primary school.

I love your enthusiasm and will tap into it for strength. Thank you for the criticism. It woke me up to what matters most in life.

Your friend from far away and in immediate Internet contact,

Ron