Memoirs of a Moth

If I’m not who I say I am, you’ll forgive me.  Sometimes the best way to view yourself is through a frosted glass, and if I tell this story the way it should have been, it’s not from a desire to deceive, but only from the need to take a step away from the pain.  That means taking two steps away from reality.  With rounded edges and, most of all, the possibility of hope, the essence of the story is the same.  This is my memoir.  I am the Moth.

The tale begins with a painting.  Leo Schultz, tallish, thinnish, broodingly handsome– an obscure painter until Schoolbuses was first shown and sold in a bidding war for twice the original asking price.  Then, everything changed.

I know everything there is to know about Leo– his innermost thoughts, his emotions, how oil paints smell to him when he first squeezes them from the tube, even the way Dara’s silky skin feels against his own.  It’s a secret more than a talent.

 Just back from his obligatory two years in Paris, Leo was living in New York and experimenting with different styles of painting, trying to find one that suited him.  The man could paint, it was just a question of how.  If only the right how would come to him, the what was sure to follow.

Finding what to paint wasn’t a new problem.  Leo never connected to his work.  Though precociously talented, he lost interest in every piece as soon as the paint had dried on the canvas.  The young artist hadn’t yet accomplished a painting that had been extruded from his soul.  Before passion and vision would come, he needed discipline and technique.  So for two years in Paris, while waiting for the passion, he honed his skills of color and shapes and values and perspective and composition.  To save money, he painted over most of the canvases four and five times until the surface was too soft from layers of paint to use again.  Everything was an exercise, nothing worth saving– although in later years, the University auctioned off some of his “early works” that were really just soggy throwaways.

Ambitious, but without prospect, Leo moved back to New York without experiencing Paris in any real sense– and without so much as a beret– and rented a small apartment in the East Village. 

The apartment was perfect for an intense young artist.  Cheap and sunlit, it suited him, even though the neighborhood was decaying rapidly.  The living room had high windows facing south, so there was good light during most of the day, but he painted at all hours and would have used lit matches to illuminate his easel if necessary.

Those early days, the habits and traits he developed as a young man, round out the image of the older Leo who came into my life when I needed him so much.

Manhattan, in the sixties, was bubbling with artists creating Art that ranged from classical motifs to the most avant garde– paintings that were neither paintings, nor necessarily Art.  Leo looked at them all– from hotel lobbies and  bookstore walls to the major galleries and museums– then went back to his studio to try to capture their spirit for his own.  Nothing took hold until his muse stood to attention at an exhibit by Richard Estes.

Photorealism was not considered pure enough for the true artist until the late sixties, and Leo had never tried painting in that style during his schooling.  The exactitude of the form appealed to Leo’s technical side, and was an excellent test of the skills he had hoped to master in Paris.  At least it was an idea, and gave him something new to paint.  Leo bought an old Leica from a pawnshop and walked around the city for weeks taking pictures.

Of all the pictures he took, there were two that stood out.  One was taken from the fourth floor of a building looking down at a swarming crowd of people trying to cross Fifth Avenue and 48th Street at the end of a work day.  The photograph overflowed with energy and the juxtaposition of the geometric streets and buildings offset by the undisciplined, swarming crowd produced a compelling visual image.  The other picture showed an old, empty school bus parked on the side of a rain-swept street in Tribeca.  The colors and textures were  so overpowering that they were almost palpable.

Schoolbuses was born from those two shots.  The painting began as another exercise, but by the third day, became his mission.  Leo worked almost nonstop for two weeks until it was finished.  His life was never the same.  My life was never the same.

Leo tells my story as if it was his own.

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