The Paris Review - Fall 2016

desire to draw. I would draw everything, all the time. I would even illustrate
my mother’s shopping lists.
After I graduated college, I met a painter who became very important
to me, a guy named Gabriel Laderman. He was miraculously cogent and
knowledgeable—tough, strange, cranky, but brilliant—and he introduced
me to other artists, living and dead, and I was off and running. I never looked
back because he made art so dependable, like belonging to a second family.
He had a molecular model of art. His idea was that we are always forming a
bigger and bigger, accretive molecule of artistic contributions. So instead of
a fragmented, linear model, where you think of artists as being separated by
time and place, you can think of art as an expansive, coherent whole, a world
tradition. That was, and still is, such a beautiful, comforting idea—that you’re
not participating in some “art world,” you’re participating in art. It’s not the
anxiety of influence, it’s the giddy joy of influence.
Until I met Ann, about thirty-two years ago, I wasn’t a big reader of
fiction. I read mostly art history and biographies. History in general—I
wanted to be a history teacher initially. I still do read a lot of history, which
I find horrifying and fascinating, like a train wreck. But I realized I was not
a scholar. When I took an art-history course, I eventually saw that I would
rather try to make the stuff than write about it. Somebody pointed out that
Ann and I both create fiction but don’t trust stories per se. She believes that
people can have a story, that they need to have a story, in order to function in
the world, but that this doesn’t mean the story is true. We don’t have narrative
arcs from day to day. The same is true in my paintings, for example in the four
paintings of the house, collectively called Maine Moment (pages 110–111).
The narrative here is absolutely inconclusive. There’s a guy going down the
stairs and a woman sunbathing, and the paintings are about the interaction,
or the alienation, between them—these two people were breaking up. It’s
not a sequential temporal narrative, it’s an instant in time seen from four
different perspectives.
In general, there are two ways to confront the world in a painting. You
can organize the space so that the major shapes and forms you see or invent
are parallel to the picture plane, or else they can be oblique to it. You can
either have something, à la Clement Greenberg, that affirms the picture
plane, echoing it fairly literally, or you can arrange things at an angle. In
Maine Moment, the two on the left are very planar and the two on the right
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