A fragment from WHAT I AM DOING

 

For many years I have been writing this book about JOHN WESLEY who I met through his late wife Hannah Green.  There is a constant sense of futility as the world is little interested---but it has always been such... to ask a person, say an editor or a person of power to be interested in:  a writer, HANNAH GREEN who wrote THE DEAD OF THE HOUSE and LITTLE SAINT and an essay "Mr. Nabokov" about being a student of Vladimir Nabokov  AND then a painter JOHN WESLEY--- who of course is not the founder of Methodism--- who is usually described as being a pop artist with a sense of the comic and who late in life had a major show sponsored by of all companies Prada in Venice but who then lived on for many years in an apartment on Washington Square and who died during the time of the Covid plague but not of Covid.

                         

                    A difficult question

from                         WHAT I AM DOING

                         (visits with the painter John Wesley)

                                      Thomas McGonigle

....and ask Wesley a question I have never asked, is there anything you still want to paint? 

He looks at me (in the silence I realize the impossible nature of the question, but it still had to be asked) saying, is there something still to paint that you look forward to painting?

What do you mean by painting? he says yet, I… he is not a house painter, a wall painter… in these moments: is there something I am thinking you would like to write?... asking T. S. Eliot... James Joyce… however, Wesley says, I can’t think of anything.  It is not said in a despairing tone or even a tone of resignation, it is simply…

On a more cheerful or at least another subject I hand Jack a book about Jo Baer your second wife… and he is saying I know that picture (on the cover) and opens the book ever so carefully rereading the first lines:  There can be no doubt that Jo Baer was and continues to be one of the foremost practitioners of Minimalism.  Not only that her paintings and drawings but also her texts have greatly enriched this movement of modern art.  He closes the book with a finger inserted holding his place.

That says it, Wesley says.  He turns the pages looking at the pictures and is saying, nice, nice, nice.

I ask: what do you mean nice?

Neat.  They are neat paintings.  They are familiar. Neat. Nice.  She was always like that: self, she knew her… she was a self, bossy, she knew. The picture on the cover uses my picture so it is familiar…