Adrian: the Sequel to A Taxi Romance, continued...

I sat on the stool in my studio again after laying in bed for an hour. Then I got up and took to the easel with renewed energy. The blank canvas held no fear as I swathed it in blues, blacks and greens… framed by zig-zags of yellows and red energy… another portrait but not angry… more like an agitated distance with a hint of pathos. The conflict was gone and I was no longer suffering. Yes, I don’t suffer addiction. Up to a certain point addiction is the solution to suffering for me. When heroin leaves the body it exits the same path that it entered… only it leaves with a vengeance. Every cell, muscle and nerve-ending cries out as the hunger makes itself known.

            The sad fact is that I needed to paint and heroin helped me do that. Why do I need to paint? It certainly isn’t for fame or the fortune of selling any of my paintings. I do have a dealer in Paris but I don’t think I am doing anything progressive or avant garde by my paintings or by painting at all. Painting on a canvas with oils is more of a fetish than a devotion to art. Is it a fetish for retrieving something of the past, perhaps? They said that painting was obsolete with the first Daguerreotype until Braque and Picasso blasted our perceptions. Then the Dadaists and Surrealists took art out of the studio and onto the public stage making even the idea of ART seem somewhat silly and arcane. When Jackson Pollack came along and splattered his canvasses with action paintings it made the act of painting a self-obsessed hobby for the moronically elite that would be better off if we all went to go get a job in a factory than to toil away trying to find relevant meaning with oil on canvas. Andy Warhol didn’t mistakenly call his loft The Factory and he made it clear that the highest purpose of art in the later half of the twentieth century was to make money. And he made it even clearer if ever it was posited, "My five year old can do as well as that!" He answered, "Oh, that's interesting." Implying, "Can your five-year-old make the kind of money I make with it?"

            And Art Schools! Psshhhaw! Art schools are just places we put kids before they finally make up their minds and go out into the world to sell real estate. These places create in each student the delusion that there is a place to put their scribblings. The big secret is that the “Art World” only opens the window of opportunity to a few selected artists each decade and then slams it shut. These artists are touted as the winners of the lottery and are encouraged to believe that what they do matters somehow. Artists who somehow stumble or get diverted… loose interest or see through the guise… are pushed aside for the next crop out of New York or Los Angeles. Why then should I imagine that painting is any more important than keeping a personal diary? Either my desires, my intuitions, my experiences are universal and have an appeal to other people; or, it is all a vain pursuit and I am just spending my time between birth and death, pretending to be more important than all that.