WHAT I AM DOING. WHEN AN ARTIST STOPS PAINTING?

 

                           WHAT I AM DOING

               

              WHEN AN ARTIST STOPS PAINTING

But is the reader perhaps opposed to digression? Does he believe in a goal not only for ordinary life, but life as well?  Is he longing for a story with a beginning and end?  This is contrary to the noble purpose of literature, which knows neither beginning nor end, and wants only to give form and shimmer to the continuous present in life.  Let the reader beware and not allow himself to be distracted from the art of strolling.

              From SPEAKING TO CLIO by Alberto Savinio

       AND AGAIN CHANGED: John Wesley

A version in prose.

If only there has/had been the precise sentence describing at the moment: John (Jack) Wesley and indeed this sentence could be describing the person pushing the keys on a computer in a bright sunny room on East First  Street in  Manhattan in the month of December though this man hesitates as he did not write that sentence by Alberto Savinio in 1938 but read it recently  once again ---having read it many years ago--- because he had come to realize he is neither a biographer, nor a memoir writer so why did he type many pages describing visits with John Wesley and attempting to describe a knowing of this man and some of the people Wesley knew since some date in the early 1970s in Manhattan and now being in the summer of 2022... and the artist is dead.

But the last time that the writer who is now writing felt in some way free was back in January 2020 driving about in the desert of southern Arizona with an English woman who had come to the United States for the first time to drive about with me who she had met for the first time in Dublin so many years before and who now lived at Lordington, a great house near Chichester... a tangling of memory of course, you might ask and why when we are here wanting--- to read about John Wesley, an artist who is no longer painting. 

But even this sentence seemingly complex is not complex enough...

OR THEN.  The other day, another year, a Monday in the month of March, in a sunny three window room overlooking Washington Square Park, I asked Jack Wesley why he began to paint.  

I don’t know.

Why did you continue to paint?

I liked doing it.

Why have you stopped painting?

I am not now inclined to paint.

                                                       ***

                                      But why not?   

Already not belonging to life yet not swept up by the void.                           --- Georgi Ivanov

                                                              +++

John Wesley is in the first generation of Pop artists or is it the second?  He is in his 85th year.  [ONCE UPON A TIME] 

Seven months ago [once upon a time] Wesley stopped leaving his apartment to go down for lunch at the North Square restaurant on the corner of MacDougal and Waverly Place which had become over the years a daily activity.  Now, the stairs down into the place were too difficult and the stepping up and down at the curb in order to cross the intersection had proven frightening and dangerous since his step had become unsteady. 

                                                         +++

I had come to talk to him of my recent trip to southern Arizona and New Mexico, along the Mexican border...