Waiting for the New Year

I remember, in Hong Kong, at the start of each New Year (albeit on the lunar calendar), on television, there would be fung-shui masters, making predictions based on the numbers and the zodiac signs of the coming year.  The mixture of superstition and science was always very enthralling.  My family, conservative Protestants from one of the many American denominations that were born during the apocalyptic fervor of the early 19th century, looked down on this and any sort of divining (we were told that the first king of Israel, Saul, was disowned by God for seeking the advice of a witch in regards to his future; I was always curious why that was so wrong since she did correctly predict his death).  Anyway, the feng-shui masters on television in 1984 talked about the significance of the fact that we were coming into the year of the rat and thus starting on a brand new cycle of the zodiac, and that this generally was a good sign, but that since the numbers of the New Year was full of death ("4" in Chinese being a near homonym of the verb "to die" or the noun "death"), he could not be committal to predicting that the city would have true prosperity and good luck the coming year . . .

Well, here we are, going into 2014.  The "death" year comes every decade.  As far as I can remember, 1984, 1994, 2004, 2014.  It might be a good exercise to exorcise the fear of this rather terrible recurrence by remembering a significant life event that happened in each of them.

1984:

Why in the world did George Orwell choose this as the date to be representative of the dark future of humanity?  At the start of 1984, we had recently returned to Hong Kong from Los Angeles and I was a pre-adolescent, stuck mentally between the San Gabriel Valley, where I had begun to have a sense of who I might be as an individual, and Hong Kong, the city that I remembered vaguely from early childhood, having lived there for a few years with my family before L.A.  It was the year of the L.A. Summer Olympics.  It was also the year when I began having a big crush on a school jock named Cody.

Towards the Fall of 1984, Los Angeles crossed over the Pacific Ocean into Clear Water Bay, in the person of my friend Al, who I had gone to school with in San Gabriel.  She ended up having the same crush on Cody but she was honest about it and I, both consciously and unconsciously, lied to myself and to everyone else. Al's coming to Hong Kong with her family, saved me literally; having a crush in the given circumstances, if you can imagine, was difficult. With Al,  without knowing it at the time, we created this island of our minds, off between Los Angeles and Hong Kong, where we could dance to Madonna's "Lucky Star" and talk about Cody and wonder about Boy George and Culture Club . . . It was mainly her talking about Cody, and I, well, tried pretending to not show any real interest, but would tell her stupid things like I had ESP and could thus tell her future.  Later on, it was with Al that I began venturing out of the cozy confines of Clear Water Bay to go out into the "city," to a part of Kowloon which was then called "Waterloo"and would later reclaim its Cantonese name of "Yaumatei," to take drawing lessons from a well-known local artist at that time, Simon Wong, the beginning of a conscious engagement in Art.  

1994:

Ten years later, I was in Boston, actually staying with my siblings in Boxborough, for First Night, but would be returning to be a Staff Artist at the Vermont Studio Center.  I remember the time I spent at VSC as a most luminous period -- I had a studio to work in, and I painted and painted, and was waiting to hear back from MFA programs to which I had applied.  There was so much hope and excitement and discovery that time spent in Johnson, there were so many truly wonderful people, and I could listen to French radio from Montreal.  Anyway, I think Al was living in Japan by then.  By the Fall, I had started on an MFA in Bloomington, Indiana.

I have had a difficult time talking about my time in Bloomington.  I spent two spasmodic years there, feeling conflicted and awkward, still in complete denial as to the fact that I was gay, and still hanging on, and deeply so, to the religion that I was brought up in.  An example of how conflicted a person I was at the time is in the fact that since 1992, I had begun writing, drawing and painting and doing everything I could, exclusively with my left hand, though I was prior to that right-handed.  It was such a strange conscious act of revolt against myself it appears now.

An incident that marked the tail end of 1994, my first MFA critique -- we had one each semester.  Mine took place alongside that of a Japanese classmate (strange coincidence?).  The critiques took place in the basement of Morgan Hall, the studio building of the school, and the two students who were to be critiqued, were supposed to bring beer for all.  I felt extremely conflicted about the whole situation, as I was a teetotaler, and felt that it was really against my beliefs, and hypocritical, to bring beer to the critique.  The story of the prophet Daniel and his friends in Babylon was no doubt in my mind a lot then.  So I didn't bring the beer after making it known days beforehand to my classmates.  

It is a strange thing when disasters happen, one doesn't know that it is happening until days later, after the initial shock.  That first critique, I dare say, was one.  Not because of the reproach of classmates for not bringing "social glue" to the critique, but for the simple fact that I was not ready to receive the criticism that was the main reason for a critique in the first place.  It wasn't being criticized as much as the inherent values that were made manifest by the criticism, aesthetic values that appeared so in direct contradiction to what I  had up to then amassed.

I probably was not the only person who was having a hard time in Bloomington though, by the end of that first semester, of the 8 of us who had started that Fall in the MFA program in painting, two had left (including my Japanese classmate, who returned to New York).  If up until then, art had been this really absolutely wondrous thing, full of discoveries and joy, where intellectual thought could go hand in hand with expression of feelings, where thought was just as, if not more, important than the physical manifestations of painting technique, where risk was better than resolution, in 1994, in Bloomington, Indiana, I began to have doubts about it all.  My dissatisfaction with the work I was producing, the sense of an impasse, having a sense of what I wanted to achieve in painting but not knowing how to get there, feeling a very large conflict between the aspirations of being an artist against the practices and demands of the church that I grew up in, coupled with all the denial about my sexuality that I was living in and fighting against, caused a sort of free fall.  The bottom dropped out and I was grasping for anything to not go all the way down.

I  think my professors at IU sensed this, they kindly invited me to their studios to perhaps find a sense of what their practice was.  Bob Barnes had a wonderful bird that flew around in his studio and to this day, I use Bounty (or the French equivalent) paper towels, though Schminke Mussini paints are not easy to find here in Paris for strange reasons.  Bonnie Sklarski showed me her amazing collection of brushes, and her artistic anatomy course was a revelation to me.  Barry Gealt was a most generous man, and no doubt embodied all the traditions of the "Yale" of Bernie Chaet.  He helped me out in all sorts of ways financially.

By the time I finished the MFA, in 1996, with a Bluefront Amazon Parrot in tow, I left for Boston.  I had already decided to go to medical school.  In my paperback copy of Robert Hughes' Nothing if Not Critical, I recently found a small note that I had written back then, a declaration really, in French: 

le 26 décembre '95
Aujourd'hui, j'ai décidé de poursuivre la médecine ainsi que la peinture.  Je les aurai tous les deux en tant que métiers. 

[Today, I have decided to pursue medicine as well as painting.  I will have them both as profession].

It was likely a conscious choice to deny who I was, just as I had decided to become left-handed, I decided again to become something else, to escape perhaps also the disaster that was Bloomington.  I needed to get out of there, I didn't like who I was, so I decided that I would become somebody else.

Rosemarie Beck, "Studio with Lovers," 1965, oil on canvas, 50 x 50"

2004:

I was in the second year of surgery residency.  At the start of the year, I was living in Harlem, and had been since the summer of 2002, in a studio apartment on 132nd St, and painting against the largest wall of a shoe-box studio apartment on the nights and days when I was not working.  I had, having moved to New York two years before, by chance run into Rosemarie Beck at the Met, probably in the Fall of 2002, but had felt so uncomfortable, despite our correspondence of over 10 years since I had met her at VSC, I could not bring myself to even just go and tap her on the shoulder and say "hi." I did write her a letter though, and she promptly replied, she who had said that "the real subject of a life work in painting is the putting together of irreconcilables," confirming that it was indeed her looking at this Renoir:

Pierre Auguste Renoir, "Madame Georges Charpentier and her Children," 1878, Oil on Canvas, 60 1/2 x 74 7/8"

By April of 2004, Rosemarie Beck had passed away, and I had moved out of Harlem into a loft in Bushwick, close by the Morgan stop (strange coincidence?) of the "L" train on Varet Street.  Moving into this loft meant a crazy commute every morning to get to work in Washington Heights on time -- we started at around 5 am in Surgery, but it was a dream come true in every other way, as I had north light, 1000 square feet of open space, high ceilings, and endless white walls.  All American art students dream of it, the artist's loft.  Mine was not in Soho, nor Williamsburg, but it was exactly the loft of my art school dreams.

Strange how the "salvation" that I searched for by trying to be someone else ended up changing me so fundamentally, that the transformation in itself no longer made any sense.  I mean, I had started medical school in a large part with the WILL to be someone different, but the process of becoming a doctor, all the science and rational thinking that was required to succeed in that education (I was really rather good in chemistry, in both courses that one had to take in order to get into medical school, they were so similar to the alchemy of painting really), and then the events and people that I encountered as a physician, changed me.  I no longer believed in the church that I had grown up in and I had lost the last strand of that "faith" that had pushed me into medicine in the first place.  And being a surgery resident, I used my right hand again, to perform surgery, perhaps the first sign of the coming return.   I stay ambidextrous today, but draw and paint with my right hand again, though I still write with both.  It is true that the life of a surgery resident changes one's personality.  In my case, I began slowly to strip off the superfluous layers that I had amassed to hide under and to begin to think honestly and to act honestly.  I don't think they were surprised, but I formally came out to my family and friends during surgery residency.

I think it was also in 2004, or soon after, that I ran into old classmates of mine from Bloomington, on Grand Street, in front of the old location of SoHo Art Materials.  It was a turning point for me as up until then, I had painted all on my own, almost in secret, far away from everything and everyone that I had left behind on leaving Bloomington.

2014:

I am going on my 5th year here in Paris.  I have written about this recently.  My partner tells me that the decision I made to go into medicine was perhaps the biggest mistake of my life.  But hindsight is always 20/20 and I tell him that if I had not done all that, I would probably never have met him. 

What I can say, looking back at these past three decades around the year of "death," is that I had gone to the end of each road that I took, finishing the MFA in Bloomington despite feeling extremely down and not well in my skin (I would call it a clinical depression now), and finishing medical school in Boston and going through all that postgraduate training to be a board eligible plastic surgeon (I finished all the training, passed the written examination for board certification, but have never practiced on my own).  Peering into another start of a "death" decade, I feel strangely upbeat, not awkward, not lost, not asking for approval, either from a God above, or a church below, or some other form of that father figure, aware of the craziness that has been and is my life, and OK with it--its forthright path to oblivion and all.

Happy 2014!