I'm not sure where the notion came from to depict famous authors in this google-eyed fashion--it started with a portrait of Emily Dickinson (still in progress). Maybe it was because Emily was so preternaturally eerie that I thought of painting her with these bugged-out orbits. Which led me to reflect that all writers of a certain quality have a similar "weird" quality: they see. The challenge is to capture a likeness of the individual while giving them all the same bubble-eyes. Actually it isn't much of a challenge; it's simply fun.
On the left is Ezra Pound, whose poetry I always thought I should like, but never really did, no matter how many times I've tried. I feel somewhat justified, however, in not liking it because at the end of his life Pound himself is supposed to have said of his poetry(according to Allen Ginsberg): My own work does not make sense. A mess ... my writing, stupidity and ignorance all the way through ... the intention was bad, anything I’ve done has been an accident, in spite of my spoiled intentions the preoccupation with stupid and irrelevant matters ... but my worst mistake was the stupid suburban anti-Semitic prejudice, all along that spoiled everything .... I found after 70 years that I was not a lunatic but a moron. I should have been able to do better .... It’s all doubletalk ... it’s all tags and patches ... a mess. If this is false modesty, it's about the falsest example I've ever encountered. Although what sensitive person hasn't felt like this about his life from time to time?
On the right is Don DeLillo, whose work I adore. "White Noise" was the first thing I ever read by DeLillo and it is, in my opinion, his best, though critics generally contend his masterpiece to be "Underworld." Well, I find just about anything by DeLillo to be fantastic; some of it a little less fantastic than the rest of it, but all of it on a scale of fantastic. Presently, I've been reading a collection of his short stories, "The Angel Esmerelda." It's in the upper middle range of fantastic.
Reading DeLillo I realize I needn't bother writing another word of fiction; he's lifted from me whatever I might have imagined was the burden and urgency I felt to put my "vision" of the world into words. He's already done it and done it so much better than I ever could. Of course, this isn't entirely true, but it's almost entirely true. Whatever I might still have to say is just marginalia of the most marginal interest, verbal crumbs under the feast-laden table of letters. Thank you Don DeLillo for freeing me of any sense of obligation to literature! Thank you for allowing me to pursue what I'm more suited to doing: baking coconut bread and drawing bug-eyed portraits of you!
"And what do you remember, finally, when everyone has gone home and the streets are empty of devotion and hope, swept by river wind? Is the memory thin and bitter and does it shame you with its fundamental untruth--all nuance and wishful silhouette? Or does the power of transcendence linger, the sense of an event that violates natural forces, something holy that throbs on the hot horizon, the vision you crave because you need a sign to stand against your doubt?" --Don DeLillo, "The Angel Esmerelda"
That, as the saying goes, is fucking writing.
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