Destarte
12x16 Oil
Growing up without a father has pretty much left me with only myself to bounce things off of. Dads are — or should be — special companions, wise and firm guides, and unwavering friends. You can ask them stuff and get real answers, not the softer ones, or the spare-my-feelings ones. But since I missed that significant relationship, I’ve had to act as my own dad. So being my own dad, I ask myself yet again: who am I as an artist? Does it match who I am as a person? Does my work reflect my values, what I love about life, what I want to leave behind? Waddaya say about that, self-dad?
Well … uh … can you really put such a thing into words?
Okay. Let me answer that this way … throughout my adult life, whenever I am overwhelmed or challenged or getting beat up by the state of the world, I always dig out my blankie and head for my comfort zone, my teriyaki plate, my cookie jar, my safe place. And here’s a secret confession … that blankie is in the stories of Louis L’Amour. Seriously, when I go there, the mean world goes away. I have been finding solace in his writing for years. I’ve read every one of his books multiple times.
In HONDO, one of L’Amour’s very best novels, Angie Lowe asks Hondo what his late “wife’s” name meant, and it puts Hondo in the same conundrum as I am trying to define who I am as an artist.
“Destarte! How musical! What does it mean?”
“You can’t say it except in Mescalero. It means Morning, but that isn’t what it means, either. Indian words are more than just that. They also mean the feel and the sound of the name. It means like Crack of Dawn, the first bronze light that makes the buttes stand out against the gray desert. It means the first sound you hear of a brook curling over some rocks — some trout jumping and a beaver crooning. It means the sound a stallion makes when he whistles at some mares just as the first puff of wind kicks up at daybreak.
“It means like you get up in the first light and you and her go out of the wickiup, where it smells smoky and private and just you and her, and kind of safe with just the two of you there, and you stand outside and smell the first bite of the wind coming down from the high divide and promising the first snowfall. Well, you just can’t say what it means in English. Anyway, that was her name. Destarte.”
Not bad for an unschooled drifter, huh?
That’s the kind of answer I get from myself when I try to stuff myself into some artistic pigeon hole. It just doesn’t work. Art is not meant to be so categorical, anyway, so I think I will stop asking myself this slippery question altogether. Why does it matter, anyway? I yam what I yam, as Popeye says.
I am Destarte.
