From Part 1: Personal Encounters with Nature
On Horseneck Beach: First Sight of Drawing Closer to Nature

On a dead cold-day in January a few years back, I walked alone along a broad-backed beach. The sky was a weak yellow, the kind when it's this cold around three in the afternoon. Not a cloud. A low, icy wind blew in from the west. A day or two back, a storm at sea caused the waves to well up way out, break, then in great arcs seethe toward the shore. The water was gray, so was the sky. It was low tide and still receding, creating a great expanse of glassy sand between the last riffle of the sea and the quilted drier sand. I walked into the wind on my way out so that I'd have it at my back returning. As I was walking west, it being late afternoon, the sun, not far above the purple horizon, dazzled the skim coat of water and wet sand before me. Nobody else about. No sea gulls flying—they had nestled in bunches here and there into the sand. Pointing windward, they didn't rise as I passed. The wind froze my face, burnt my cheeks, pained my ears, caused my eyes to tear. My thighs burned with the cold. My scarf, wrapped around my neck and face, turned stiff from my breath and drippy nose.

I needed to go on that walk. I needed to be by myself. I couldn't let these winter conditions turn me back to the car and home. I'd been cold before and a long time and a far distance from warmth. When this happens I do what I imagine other creatures must do: slip into a rhythmic pattern of breathing and moving, much like a meditation. In fact, for me it was a meditation. With the elements as overwhelming as they sometimes can be, the way I endure is to give up resisting what feels like Nature's intentional onslaughts, and slip into an enclosed frame of reference, a retreat from surface engagement with the world. Thus cocooned, I withdrew my attention from what the elements were doing to my body and instead turned my dim lights to some other, less remarkable events around me; the sound of my footsteps in the sand, the tears running down my cheeks and freezing in the corners of my eyes, the changing patterns of light on the receding waters. Ceasing to notice individual things, including myself, I became increasingly aware and fixated on the fading light, the wind roaring across my ears, and the rhythmic crunching of my steps. It was still cold, I was still cold, but it didn't matter as much.

Why I went to the beach in the first place.

I had come to the end of a number of things in my life, not the least of which was a ten-year theme of paintings. I felt as if the map with which I had been steering my life and art rather suddenly and unexpectedly had certain of its main features lifted. It still had the places where I had been, but the places I thought I was heading toward no longer appeared. My maps never prove as predictive as I would have them. I have never studied a topological map that prepared me for the actual terrain underfoot. Whenever I get to wherever it is I finally get to, the way is far steeper, wetter, rockier, more impenetrable, wider, and deeper than the map promised it would be. Ruefully, I have come to trust the dictum "The map is not the territory." The missing elements from the map I had been using at this phase of my life's journey were the distance scale, the compass orientation, and some destinations I thought were permanent features of the territory; not a very useful map. When I did refer to the map for guidance, it frightened the dickens out of me because the absence of these critical features confirmed my own feelings of uncertainty and disorientation.

For more than ten years I had been working on a theme that, as I now realize, had even earlier antecedents. The theme was based upon the complimentary forces of yin/yang. I had become increasingly intrigued by how much of my life experiences could be subsumed by the relationships represented by the forces of yin and yang. It seemed to me, and still does now, that the infinite variety of forces the universe comes in displays the characteristics, in varying proportions, of just two qualities: yin and yang. The universe seems to break down into an infinite number and variety of these binary systems: light/dark, hot/cold, wet/dry, male/female, ascent/descent, subconscious/conscious, earth/ski dream/waking, moonlight/sunshine, and on and on. For more than a decade I explored in graphic language my experiences with these complementarities. At first it was as exhilarating and as challenging as any new love affair that seems endless in its possibilities and delights. I used this dyadic lens to examine the world and explain my relations to it and in it. It provided me with a revealing and comprehensive view of my world, which I naturally took to be the world.

There came a time, however, when I became so satisfied with the apparent repleteness of this way of thinking about the world and expressing those understandings in painterly ways that it was hard to have any ideas or even perceptions that were not made apparent by way of this powerful yin/yang lens. The vessel and its contents became (more or less) one. That was OK, but as I began to realize, only if the fusion were a momentary phase of a much more complex and intermittent system. When the vessel is full and fixed, uniform throughout, there is neither vessel nor contents: nothing to pour in, nothing can pour out. With this degree of fusion, the vessel can no longer serve its function of temporary container, and the contents become unacceptable because of the growing staleness of their permanence. Both vessel and container require that each submit to a temporary relationship. I had raised the best questions I was capable of raising at that time. I explored them with whatever talents I had available. I drew out responses that were commensurate with the direction and degree of my questions, and explored all the territory on the map that I had. I followed this map for more than ten years, traveled many places, saw many things. Now it was over. The map I had been using covered only a small fraction of the actual territory of the world, but it was all the map I had, or more precisely, would allow myself to have. If I had been gifted with greater resources of mind and character, my map would have been proportionately enlarged. But I wasn't, so it wasn't; neither was my art.

The feeling that I had accompanying this ending was one of emptiness and drifting. I viewed the last years as a fascination now run its course, and I began to notice that my studio experiences became more studied performances than unselfconscious "work." The world seemed as interesting and inviting as before, but with no one item or issue any more compelling than the next, my attention wandered everywhere and settled nowhere.

To compound my feelings of dissociation and disorientation, as a consequence of themes run dry, was my growing unease with painting itself. Or at least painting as I had been taught it in the rather classical tradition in which I was schooled. I had been trained in New York City, at Queens College and then Columbia University, during the late fifties and sixties. It was a period of the ascendance of abstract expressionism over figuration, and the majority of my instructors adhered to that abstract canon. I was soon disabused of my own naive notions of personally significant figurative imagery and replacing my own shoddy system with something more up to date, more correct, more within the mainstream of the prevailing discourse of art. Something that would demonstrate the proper respect for the picture plane, the integrity of paint, the optimality of surface. In this way I entered the arena of discourse, and although initially I found its territory studded with features that seemed at first glance rather bland—thickness of paint, problems of corners, the push and pull of certain colors in juxtaposition—I soon found myself engaged in heated conversation with my fellow students about the push and pull of their color systems and the degree of thickness of my paint. I couldn't have known it at the time, but I was going through one of the several rites of passage so characteristic and necessary in everyone's life. I began to die to my maternal tongue and learned the ways of my betters, the Society of Men. At the time I was glad of it.

This is how I came to embrace, with no apparent regrets, the look and attack and philosophic premises of abstract expressionism. Thus equipped and empowered, I made quite a few decent-looking works. I had been painting and drawing in this general frame of reference for more than thirty years, and it is was no longer foreign to me; it suited how I lived my life in general: improvisational, somewhat abstract, gestural. The insufficiency of the yin/yang metaphor for life, the severity of its juxtapositions in a world that I now saw as being multifarious, graded, more subtle and paradoxical, brought me to the conclusion of my yin/yang series. The daunting hole thus left in my cosmology unraveled a thread from my conception of painting itself, and to the question that every artist must be firm and positive in response to, "Why do you paint?" I could now only muster, "I'm no longer sure." With that thread left dangling, the whole fabric of "Why paint at all?" began to unravel. Why paint on canvas? Why apply the paint with brushes? Why use paints to form images? Why a square or rectangular format? Why images without texts? Why work on this scale? Why these galleries and these prices and these clientele? Why these themes? Why these techniques? These strategies? These canons of good form, of craftsmanship?

So deep was my increasing dissatisfaction with what I was painting and how I was painting that I began to approach the bedrock issue of making art itself. Why do it at all? Being a man in the world, and not dwelling solely in the studio, I was keenly aware of how damaged the world was becoming by the way people were treating it, and how damaged people were by the way they were treated by other people. How could art serve to address or redress these wounds? Wouldn't I better serve my time by repositioning myself in the world and differently employing my talents and resources than by what I was currently engaged in doing: painting pictures? I was familiar enough with the literature and activities of other disciplines such as community-development organizations, social activism, ecotactics, art as therapy, et cetera, to have these doubts about the efficacy of my own path put more in question. The route that my brush had to travel between my palette and my canvas was becoming longer and more uncertain.

If I was to reidentify myself as an artist, it would have to be on new terms, ones that I would have to create myself. I needed to proceed in a new direction, perhaps inwardly, off the path I was on. Wherever it was I was going, it now had to be toward a place that had no map, at least none with which I was familiar. Being this uncertain about myself, the net worth of my past and my preferred destination, I felt I needed my equipment to at least be sound and trustworthy, to possess an integrity that I myself lacked. Not being a preplanner by nature, and at this particular moment of my life not having a definitive plan at all, I would have to outfit myself as I went along. Each piece of equipment, each material and strategy needed for this uncertain journey, I would have to test and find true. Each item would have to be come upon singly in turn, leaned on, shaken, its breaking point found, its possibilities measured. I wanted equipment that suited me, the way I happened to think, to move, to be built. Equipment that would keep me honest, force me out of hiding. I hadn't started out wanting to acquire gimmicks, sure-to-please marks and color schemes and all the deceits that artists have in common with conjurers. It just seemed to turn out that way.

There was only one firm spot in my world at that moment, one solid, endurable thought: I did not wish to go on the way I had been going. I did not want to paint pictures, I did not want to use familiar media and employ my conventional techniques, I did not want to compose my work along classical canons of good form and traditional strategies, and I had had enough of yin and yang for the time being. Quickly the whole edifice of beliefs that supported my behaviors as an artist disassembled. The topics, the questions, the vast and glorious traditions of Western art had thoughtful and ready responses, but for me they now seemed weakened by their very source: received news. Earlier on, the fact that these were received truths made me feel that I was on the right track; after all, I was shoulder to shoulder with the worthies of my clan. Now the same fact, conducting my affairs with received instructions, would no longer do. With each connection severed between the tutored me and the original me, who I sensed was still somewhere here within, my slate became ever more clean until the slate itself seemed to disintegrate and I was left walking alone along a broad-backed beach into a weak sun of the new year.

To return to that walk on the beach and what happened next: The beach is about a mile long from where I began to the point where a great tidal river opens onto the ocean, cutting the beach off from the rest of the shoreline. I had been walking for almost an hour and by this time, about three or three-thirty, the sun was an hour away from setting. Although the weakening sun was probably colder still, the slackening wind no longer bit so deeply. I was cold, exhausted physically and emotionally, and glad to be approaching the turnabout point of my walk. I had set out to do a simple thing in a confusing phase of my life: taking a walk to the end of a beach. I felt somewhat satisfied in at least accomplishing that. I stuck the tip of my boot into the sea at the end of the beach to mark the completion of this small but distinct act.

With a final look sunward, as if to a departing friend whose companionship has not been without its difficulties and rewards, I turned around and looked east, where the evening was already well under way. The colors were now reversed; the sky was a deep blue gray, the ocean a fraction lighter, and the sand russet streaked with violet. With the wind now at my back, it would be easier going; still the cold was penetrating, and in front of me lay a long homeward leg. To put an end to one thing and before beginning another, I sat on something facing away from the wind, letting my eyes adjust to what they would be seeing for the next while.