Any Woman's Blues_ A Novel of Obsession - Erica Jong [26]
I went through a number of lovers—younger, older, the same age—but nothing really stuck. I was seeking ecstasy, skinlessness. When the truth was that marriage to another artist is the greatest ecstasy of all, and I had lost it. I was mourning a death—the death of my sweet little family—and nothing could replace that. I bumped along for a few years, trying to do my work, trying to raise my little ones, with the increasing obstacle of alcohol (which I denied was an obstacle at all)—and I then met Dart.
Dart was not just a great lay; he was a knight on a white charger. He found me when my confidence was at its lowest, and he bucked me up. Fucked me up—or bucked me up: it’s all the same, really, for what he gave me was nothing less than an infusion of life force, and he squirted it both out of his penis and out of his pores.
I loved him. How I loved him! The film stills were born of my love for him—and so were the cowboy canvases. For out of my adoration of this beautiful man I did what Rembrandt did for Saskia, what Wyeth did for Helga, what Leonardo did for Mona Lisa: I painted him (or photographed him) and made him famous as my muse.
The film stills were born of my love and my desire to keep him near. When he was posing, at least he was there. His narcissism demanded it; my art demanded it—and they had found a place where they could fit together, every bit as well as our bodies did.
From the moment I met Dart, I was sketching him. He beguiled me so. I was fascinated with him, in the archaic sense of the word—enchantment—bound to him with magic, with rapture, with invisible ropes of allure.
From the sketches of him, I evolved the cowboy canvases—enormous mixed-media close-ups of Dart as the Lone Ranger, Dart as Roy Rogers, Dart as Gary Cooper in High Noon. I took these cultural icons of my childhood and superimposed this beautiful young man upon them. I hybridized this man born in the fifties with these images from my fifties childhood, and the passion with which I did this was lost on no one.
Of course not everyone loved these paintings. Some people hated them—a proof that they were alive. But the passion was undeniable—and passion is the key to art as it is the key to everything in life. Without it, people, paintings, plants, books, babies, die.
Dart had given me back the gift of life, and so I returned the favor. After the cowboy canvases were exhibited—and sold out almost instantly—I sought other ways to memorialize my lover, which is how I hit upon the film stills.
I had always been fascinated by photography, had not thought of it as a lesser art but as a manipulation of light upon the retina, containing every bit as much of its own integrity as oil painting or the carving of marble.
In art school, I had studied with a disciple of Moholy-Nagy, who had opened my eyes to the possibilities of photographs—silver bromide prints, gold-toned platinum prints, and the entire arsenal of photographic effects available to the artist who would see photography as art. I had tucked these lessons away in my brain for future reference—and now I remembered them in my passion to memorialize Dart.
Providing myself with an old-fashioned camera ca. 1910 (not unlike the one I had experimented with in my Yoko Ono days), I began photographing Dart in various costumes, which were metaphors for his multiple personalities: Arlecchino in motley; the Lone Ranger (again); rock star as heartthrob (with Elvis Presley pelvis thrust at the camera); fifties truckdriver in T-shirt, with beer can in hand; young WASP in black tie; Saint Sebastian pierced by arrows; Hell’s Angel in black leather; Jesus in a loin-cloth on the cross. I photographed him in my studio (where I could perfectly control the light and the background), and I printed in either platinum or silver, depending on the look I sought. The best prints were blown up to the overlifesize C prints, like movie posters. This series, called simply Film Stills of Dart/Trick Donegal,