As Jay DeFeo Paints by Lenore Myers
“Land of Plenty” by Vera Illiatova
Deathrose – The White Rose – The Rose (1958-1966)
1
Did your daily attention to paint
its weight
its hue in changing light
its sculptural bulges
its chasms
make your painting more
like words?
2
I start in the figure
as you never did
although the surface was of immediate concern
you started in the thing
itself
Paintbrush between your teeth
3
What defines the figure
Who says what ground
The art of FUNK
The surface all fucked up
or
The process of fucking up
into revelation
4
You break it the
surface
never lies
right with you
5
By weight, scale, undercuts, nearly no color, centripetal
form and sheer
physical work
To MAKE the surface
(Circles and triangles in flat paint on canvas)
STAND
a visual body
of labor
Like the blind poet
stepping into the Circle
To see
6
But first, the painting
suspended
like a saint on the artist’s apartment wall.
The paint grows heavier and heavier.
The canvas groans.
Morning argument of drill-set and knife.
The wall sighs and sags . . .
The artist scraping down again, down
to the supports.
7
Today the brush
strokes light
along the petals
8
Tomorrow
the knife takes it all
down
to canvas and powder
9
Dust so thick you can’t see
the end of the marriage—
Paintbrush clenched between your teeth.
10
Get it
all
the way down
to the supports
Ground
some kind of spiritual
relief
in 18 spokes
11
Star beacon blade array Deathrose
Oil plywood mica beads copper wire barrettes
Set against the dark matter of the world the Old World
Lay it on thick O my
two-thousand-pound splintered halo
Light screaming in, the painting a terrible radiance,
Manichean annunciation of petal and gouge, black
undercut by white
Like the city where it was made.
Outside, men toss dice on the corner, patrols toss
batons, someone
lies
forgotten under the bridge, children
laugh in the empty lot.
Click lifts the revolver and the Panther crouches.
The paint is lead.
The city clenches its teeth. It is 1964.
12
Eruption! Sudden bloom
like the first hot spill
Confluence of petals
profusion of curlicues
Atop the ladder the artist knife in teeth then
in hand and
cutting
like a surgeon
into the gleam of sclera
The paint pulls back un-folding The White Rose
13
O congealing starry O Big Bang O my stony outcropping
Now stretching more canvas nailing
on more wood it is
threatening
collapsing under its own
weight
Eight-year concatenation of artistic phases the
paint too heavy for
cotton duck canvas and that
unfathomable center
drooping
accelerating
into the origin limpid smack-suck of time
14
Petals sag the figure
that onetime act of suspended
dilation—
15
But the painting is over now.
Ripped down forklifted out
Loaded onto a Ryder truck
16
(i.e., The Rose)
17
Went out the window
Took the wall with it
18
(Jay evicted from her apartment, 1966.)
19
And what that paintbrush carried
rotted her teeth
Then set in a kind of palsy.
20
It’s a question of perspective—
Of seeing
art and its costs
personally I
never get the lines how I want them
21
(Dropped
like wrenches
words
in a clatter of artless)
22
In the wake of eight years bent laddered spattered and broke the studio floor encrusted
Like walking on the back of a whale
The tearing back and down of the thing
Knives sharpened on drillsets
Into the silent apertures
23
As if to fix an ephemeral
image
of presence
24
Or raise a moment
against its passing
25
And the whole thing commenced from a scratch
26
You were broke and wouldn’t let it go
so
for years the gallery bought you those gallons of white paint
That’s ok
words aren’t really free either
27
No one asks
What would you give up for Art?
It’s just a process
of attrition
Of gathering
broken branches and bruised fruit
Of standing day in day out
like Schiller at his desk
huffing rotten apples.
The painting is over now.
Jay long dead and The Rose
in slow decay
flecks of paint and bits of plaster flake fall the etched remains. . .
28
Walking after the first rain
Drifts of blossoms
smudge the concrete
An open window
a little boy’s laughter
Patter of tumbling apples
29
And the artist brushes away the scrapings.
No, and no, and no.
The rent is overdue. The fog over
Pine Street
crumbles at the edges.
Turn
and—
the poem, waiting
like a mother. How I will miss her!
Eight years
in the dustcrowd—
whispering in my ear.
Tap tap the chisel and the marks begin
to bloom—
florid blossoms fill the room—
and smudge under
the word-blade—
Hunker and scrape
a ridge a ray a play of light . . . .
30
Over and done and hauled down—
31
In this room, I put up
pictures
and take them down again.
Putting up.
And taking down.
Again.
Makes me laugh—
and wince. Again.
Sometimes, to amuse
myself, I break
the frames. My son asks
why.
I say, To make
the devils fall.
“As Jay DeFeo Paints” appears in the collection “Regards to Balthus” by Lenore Myers forthcoming from Seven Kitchen’s Press
A graduate of the Warren Wilson MFA Program for Writers, Lenore Myers’ award-winning poems and essays have appeared (or are forthcoming) in The Southern Review, LIT, The American Journal of Poetry, Southern Indiana Review, One, The Massachusetts Review, and elsewhere. Her limited-edition chapbook, Regards to Balthus, is forthcoming this summer from Seven Kitchens Press. She teaches English to recent immigrants in Northern California.
Vera Iliatova received her BA from Brandeis University and an MFA in Painting/Printmaking from Yale University, with further study at the Skowhegan School of Art (2004) and a residency at Marie Walsh Sharpe Foundation (2007/2008). In 2018, Iliatova was awarded a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship in Painting (2018) and Cafe Royal Cultural Foundation Grant (2023). Iliatova’s work has been shown across the US and internationally with recent exhibitions at the Warehouse Dallas (2022), Katonah Museum (2018) and at the Contemporary Jewish Museum in San Francisco (2017). She is represented by Nathalie Karg Gallery, NYC.
