An Elegant Line.

My reference to “an elegant line” is about one of my teachers at Parsons, where I studied fine arts — Harvey, whose last name I’ve forgotten — having said in a critique of one of my drawings that I had “an elegant line.” I was deeply insulted, shaken. I took it to mean that I was producing kitsch, not art, and from that moment on I was determined that all my lines would be inelegant. It’s like a phobia, back then and even still, my fear of being good enough at something to fake it. It was like every time I sat down to make art, of any kind, I had to reinvent the wheel. I couldn’t just paint, I had to invent painting first.

These journal entries are from the year after my year at Parsons. I had dropped out of school because I wanted to be an artist not an art student, but I was careening from one idea to the next, one style to another, a different medium every week or two, feeling like I’d figured it out, realizing I hadn’t, and over and over. (If I’d actually made every piece of conceptual art I described in my journal that fall, I’d … have made a lot of pieces of conceptual art.) I spent much of the previous fall sick, culminating in a bout of pneumonia, one shitty low-paying job after another, barely scraping by even in the cheap 80s East Village, and I was exhausted.

I was ideologically opposed to making money with my art. Not just a young idealistic desire to put artistic before commercial considerations, but a moral line in the sand. And yet I complained constantly about having to do other work to pay the bills. I don’t remember seeing the dilemma built into that.

These years were consequential years. I began to get a sense of myself as an artist, what was important, what was not, and I fell deeply in love about 25 times, mostly with men I’d spent one night with and never saw again and then I fell in love for real and it nearly killed me.

(The period of 1982-84, at least as I’m mapping it out now, will be the climax of my book, when all the threads come together: my first serious love and heartbreak, the arrest and trial for child molestation in my hometown of the man with whom I had my first sexual experience at 16, and the active years of the serial killer Larry Eyler in and around that part of Indiana.)

So … I will be 60 on Monday. I have reached that age “when the real anxiety comes, about the passing of time, about age and death and accomplishment, when I can’t say ‘I’m young’ anymore.” I want to go back and tell my 21-year-old self that he’s right to be vigilant about the elegant line. And also, calm the fuck down man.