“Costco Portrait (The Mental Body)”

Costco Portrait (The Mental Body), Installed in Abandon School in San Antonio New Mexico

Among the drawings I made at the Costco located along the Nihil route in Albuquerque, were very quick portraits of the many women operating the free-sample booths. Most of them I drew quickly and discreetly to avoid notice. One employee, in particular, however, gave me permission to draw her portrait. I made two sketches while we chatted and then soon entered into a predicament. The first sketch had a certain poignant accuracy to it; it captured too well the pain in her smile. The combination of missing teeth and the hairnet, for me, gave the rather economical sketch its pathos. However, I was forced to guess whether she would be flattered by it or whether she might perceive it as making fun.  I lingered on the portrait until she looked away and turned the page of my sketchbook without her noticing. I then took the opportunity to draw a second portrait, which, more or less, failed to look like anything at all. I was far too nervous for my hand to have any confidence or flourish. I decided, then, that it was better to show her the failed portrait because at least then it would be my deficiency alone.

Costco Portrait (The Mental Body), Detail

Showing her the portrait, then, she gave me a sweet, placating smile which implicitly said, “good try.” This smile only endeared me more to her, and we were both happy.

When I began the painting, I tried to stick close to the successful sketch, but when I saw it on the canvas, it felt nothing like the original drawing. It looked monstrously affectless.  It simply wasn’t her or anyone. What was the point of making it then? That being the case, I began adding and subtracting layers of other sketches I made of the women at Costco that day. I am often waiting for a kind of “uncanny other” to become present on the surface, but nothing did.

To try one last layer, I decided I would reference the quick, bad sketch I made of her.  It still didn’t really work, but now there was indeed something beginning to show up in it. It was worth continuing to improvise with what the process had given me so far.

I often listen to Tibetan singer Tenzin Choegyal in the studio. I consciously visualize myself in the Bardo on a daily basis.  I was listening to the collaborative record “Songs from the Bardo” by Tenzin and Laurie Anderson. In the song “Lotus Born, No Need to Fear,” she narrates:

…But since you're a mental body, you cannot die

And even though your body is cut into pieces

You will recover

You're really the natural form of emptiness

So there is no need to fear

The lords of death are the natural form of emptiness

Your own confused projections

And you are emptiness

A mental body of unconscious tendencies

Emptiness cannot harm emptiness

And external lords of death, gods

Evil spirits, demons and so on

Have no reality apart from your own confused projections

So, recognize this

At this moment, recognize everything as

The bardo

The song in its entirety has had a profound impact on me over the past couple years. I’ve probably listened to it a hundred times.  I’ve probably cried over a dozen times listening to it because, now and then, it feels as if it’s actually happening and Laurie is there narrating as I experience it. So to listen to it while I paint is to experience a kind of bodily takeover, and painting sort of happens by itself, and that’s what happened here.

Costco Portrait (The Mental Body), Installed in Abandon School in San Antonio New Mexico

Even now, though, I don’t know if the painting totally works. I wonder about the task of it, whether it was a feasible challenge. What I didn’t articulate consciously at the time was that I had set out to make a portrait from a bad drawing, from a compensatory drawing in which, out of embarrassment, I barely looked at the woman it was meant to depict. The question is, if it’s not a portrait of any one real existing person, what does it depict?

I think the mental body here might be the form that the gap between us took. That is, it is something that cannot speak, its natural form is emptiness, and it has no reality apart from my own confused projections. The space it fills is, in some sense, the bardo, a space filled with consciousness, but no living thing.  It’s not a neutral emptiness, but an emptiness softened in its own brokenness and surrender. There is the smallest hint of radiance to it, but that there should be any at all is a kind of blessing.

“Blessing” is a religious-sounding word, one which has meaning for me.  Many cashiers at various businesses around here will say “have a blessed day” at the conclusion of our brief encounters. When they say this to me, I take it seriously. To accept their blessing is to reciprocate it. Most of their faces reveal more than they know.  I see the traces of their lives, something of their broken-heartedness, and their genuine desire to love.  I perceive something like the nearness of death, which is where I think the radiance comes from.  All of these thoughts and perceptions, I believe, are what the portrait is ultimately standing in for. If I were a different artist, or if I were younger, as when I had the ability to render faithfully anything I looked at, I’d have liked to paint a straight-forward portrait. It would probably work better. But a portrait of emptiness is a strange undertaking, perhaps one worth trying once at least.

Once installed in the abandoned classroom, it made more sense than before. Now it seemed something like the remains or traces of an older painting, perhaps depicting someone who once attended the school, or a teacher there, or a portrait of a historical figure a teacher might have chosen to display in the classroom. The remaining handwriting on the chalkboard next to it is an echo of the very same presence somehow.  In the classroom, above the heavily worn table, and dingy carpet, the piece appears out of time. It could have been made in any time or place, by anyone, for any reason. We don’t see something as it was intended to be, but as time itself marked it, left without memory of its own, long after anyone might be present to know different. Still, it’s out of place enough to seem significant, not dead but dormant, almost as if waiting.

Costco Portrait (The Mental Body), Installed in Abandon School in San Antonio New Mexico