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  • A Primitive Portrait, and: Night Fishing
  • Janice N. Harrington (bio)

A Primitive Portrait

to Horace H. Pippin, 1888-1946

                                Despite distortion—or becauseof distortion—the eye lingers, stayedby his white shirt, by the subject’s demeanor,by the clean attention and spare compositionsuggested by—blue space? Blue air? Or maybe a blue wall?

Austere composition and attention in Self-Portrait, 1941,where a man sits astride a slat-backed chair,before canvas and easel. On his unseen shoulderlies an unseen scar, the shrapnel of an unseen war.In his lap, a cupped hand balances a brush in a cage of fingers.His thighs, propped wide, are heavy and sexual.“Art is dangerous,” Ellington said.

                                “When it ceases to be dangerousyou don’t want it.” This is a portrait of an American Negro,a Negro artist between the Scottsboro Boysand the Detroit Riots, two years after the great contraltoand the very year that Kenny Clarke, Charlie Parker,and Thelonious Monk would jam at Minton’s.This is the “New Negro,” with sleeves rolled and ready.

                                Consider Spring Flowers with Lace Doily.The artist reenacts absence and connection with a doily’s thread,painting time with a doily’s need for narrative and display.But why the doily and why the rose and why their pretty corpses? [End Page 43] Does he say the world was lovely once, and more delicate?In his self-portrait, he triangulates body, chair, and easel,a confident equation: I am, he says, I am, as if every New Negroalters the canvas. Skin as canvas stretched taut overits frame. What do we paint on it now? What did he?

                                Time shift. An mp3 player. Billie Holidayspeaks in a post-postmodern collage, a music shapedfrom the reconstructed patterns of her voice.I was scared to death. . . . I’m always scared. . . .This is a portrait of a woman’s voice, a woman speaking,and the primitive music in any speech, the primitivepatterns that make speech, the music of speech, whichseems primitive. On another disc, Billie Holiday sings “Strange Fruit”in 1939: Blood on the leaves and blood at the root. . . .

                                A Negro “primitive” paints a self-portrait. But how?What new freedom allows him to see, allows the art, allowsthe man seeing himself as art, as artist, as he wantsto see himself, or wants you to see him? Smith writes about theFive Stages of Black Manhood, how they match the stagesof grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance.

                                Look again, at the portrait—heroic,broad-shouldered, handsome, his piercing stare(settling the question: He is a man, has a man’s body,a man’s will, a man’s sex, a man’s gaze; it will not require1,369 lightbulbs to see him)—at the hand that seemstoo small, at the brush as long as his arm and tipped in white.Notice his legs spread like a jazz drummer’s. Though he neverimprovised. He thought everything out. Foreground.Background. His mind walked across the canvas.His heart plied the paint, like a gandy dancer.

                                I paint it. . . . I take my time and examine                                every coat of paint carefully and to be sure that the exact                                color which I have in mind is satisfactory to me. [End Page 44]

                                There it is: satisfaction. To be satisfiedand Black. To choose where and when. To determine the details.Precisions that were not, as they said, primitive but human.On his canvas, he is in process, his brush tipped with might berather than is so, his lips latched by solemnity, words neverthe medium for what he would seal with color.

                                The canvas tilts away from, refuses, our gaze,the crude measure of our eyes. This is a portrait of a dark body,a dark manhood, a dark center. The eye cannot avoid him,cannot make him background or frame. He holds the brush,already sees what he will paint, looks toward what will be,what we do not yet know.

Note

“a music shaped” : Taimur Sullivan and Prism Quartet. “Billie” : Pitch Black: Music for Saxophones by Jacob TV. Innova Records, 2008...

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