"Uncertainty, The Solidarity of the Solitary Artist " by David Teachout

David Teachout

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David Teachout 315 McAmant Dr. Santa Cruz, CA 95060 Tel 831/426-8563 Words 26,421 Copyright ďƒŁ 2013 David Teachout First Serial Rights to Naim Farhat

UNCERTAINTY The Solidarity of the Solitary Artist To begin each day with uncertainty that is the way of the artist, the mystic, the creative person.

To wake up to certainty and spend one's day realizing it is to live in a prison of illusory security and premature death.

David Teachout

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In truth, there is no beginning and, consequently, no end that conveniently mark the conventional notations of birth and death. Did I enter this life on November 16, 1933, in a hospital in Santa Monica, California, or was there something of me already alive in my mother, my father, my grandparents, in all of my ancestors? Where in the complex mix of my hardy predecessors was the defining moment of my actual conception? Was it in the time of Celtic origins in fertile valleys watered by the snow capped Carpathian Mountains, or when my Nordic ancestors floated on driftwood onto the windblown northern Scottish islands? Did my genesis spring from within a tribe of Druids who resisted the Roman invaders, or with the French and Belgians who fled Europe for Ireland and to America because of religious persecution? Perhaps, my elusive non-beginning began with my Spanish ancestors of my great grandmother who had, in turn, inherited from even earlier Spanish settlers her early California land and life in what was then Mexico. Maybe I am Dutch, for I am a descendent of the 17th Century Dutch who populated the east coast of America before migrating westward all the way to my grandfather's California. Teachout: TecHout: Teakwood. The Dutch were hard at their lumber enterprise and colonizing in Indonesia, somewhere in my ancestral memory.

To keep it simple, I need only to return to my Scottish grandfather, son of an Irish woman and a Scottish seaman who became a ship's captain. This talented man, who grew up around the Glasgow ship yards, started out to be a pianist and ended up a doctor.

Part way through medical school in London, and with a young child, my mother, turning five, he decided to emigrate to the US to complete his studies and to live. With ticket in hand and with his best friend, he was off to America. But for some reason my grandfather changed his mind, and sailed on the next ship. His friend sailed off on the historic voyage of the Titanic.

My limited ancestral knowledge indicates that my genetic predecessors occupied the middle ground of whatever society in which they lived. Neither high nor low, neither kings nor paupers. Teachers, judges, farmers, newspapermen, lumbermen, sailors, doctors, nurses, governors, seamstresses, travelers, ministers. Protestantism was a common reference for most of my ancestors. The Catholic presence in Spanish California of my great grandmother, was jettisoned by her daughter, my grandmother, for a middle of the road protestant religion, which satisfied her simple spiritual life. She was the most natural in the family, the one who had knowledge of native plants and of the land of her California birth.

It was over this changing, but still wild Southern California land that my father ran barefoot across wild flower covered hills, swam in year round creeks under wide spreading sycamore trees, and climbed the San Gabriel Mountains in the moonlight. He was an excellent athlete: a natural. Tall and lean, strong and fast, he was considered the finest high school athlete in southern California. Excelling in baseball, football and track, he carried his unbroken winning streak as a pitcher all through college and into the big leagues with the Chicago Cubs. His beautiful natural throwing style was altered forever with one pitch. An injury that could easily be repaired today, was irrevocable in the 1930's and the end to a promising career.

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Official U.S.A photograph Elcentro CA 1957

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Who is to judge what is right or wrong in a life? Fortunately, my father had his college degree. He would not play baseball unless he could excel, be the great athlete that he was. So, in the middle of the great depression, he changed directions, moved away from the joy and celebrity and financial security of being a major league pitcher, obtained his teaching credential and became a coach and teacher at a large high school on the outskirts of Los Angeles.

In his thirty years, he taught and coached thousands of students. Many have testified to his influence in guiding them into good and successful lives. At forty five, he could still outrun the fastest runners on the football team. Into his sixties, he could throw pitch after pitch over the plate in batting practice. At Occidental College, he is one of only eight athletes, in over one hundred years, including Olympians, who have been honored in the college athletic hall of fame. He was a man who loved the earth and always had a garden; an honest man; a man with quiet dignity: a good man.

However, my father was not an artist, that is if one doesn't consider his excellence in athletics as art. He was a bit mystified by his son's drift into the uncertain waters that could float or sink an artist, with his preoccupation with the creative process. The closest relative to my father who was an artist, was his aunt, my great aunt who was a recognized painter and professor of art at UCLA. Anita Delano carried our ancestral name from Europe through her early California Spanish mother and Anglo father, which was given as my middle name. So, perhaps Anita and I shared a common inherited impulse to follow our intuitions to be artists.

My mother was a very intelligent and spirited woman, a master of the English language, a stage actress, and writer and performer of witty and, usually, comedic skits for the stage. Born in London, at the age of six she emigrated to Chicago with her mother, doctor father and his sister. At the end of WWI they traveled back across a war ravaged Europe to Indonesia, where her father doctored for nearly three years. Returning by way of China to America and a permanent home in southern California, she entered high school and graduated at sixteen. Her acting ambitions were stifled by her mother, who would not allow her to attend drama schools in either London or New York. Thus, she developed her craft as an actress in and around Hollywood, Santa Monica and Pasadena. I vaguely recall future film stars visiting our home to read scripts with my mother. By the time of WWII, she was acting at the Pasadena Playhouse, and included me at age eight in a play.

She had an appreciation for the arts; partially genuine and partially to identify with the more 'upper class' in society. (My mother retained the vestige of a British imperialistic view of the world until her death at ninety nine). Her real expertise and love was of the theater and literature. Visual arts, music and architecture she could like or not, and could easily give the impression that she knew what she was talking about, even if she didn't.

She had a strong spirit, was a diligent and good mother and wife, despite her very independent, outspoken nature. She was a woman who spoke up for herself, met her obligations, was honest and fearless in public. She was very conservative in a political sense, prone to generalize about societal issues, yet on a personal level, compassionate,

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spontaneous and open minded. She liked the image of an artist son, who would succeed in the rarefied atmosphere of the 'art world'. She genuinely liked some of his paintings, which she displayed in her homes to the approval of many sophisticated visitors. This association with the imagined world of painting, was coupled with her constant reservation about money, or the lack of it in a painter's life. Periodically, she would suggest ways to 'sell' myself to the amorphous somebody who would ensure my financial success. She provided a small patronage over many years by purchasing a few paintings.

If consolidated, it was two or three years worth of living over thirty years of painting. In sum, visual arts were not emphasized in my home growing up. In the standard curriculum at the junior and high school I attended at the edge of Los Angeles, there were no classes in the visual arts, except for a one semester drafting class.

There are memories, however, of color and form early in my life. Memories that I now see as indicators of an artistic perception. But for the most part, those impulses sank into the underworld of my subconscious like a stream disappearing beneath the earth.

I grew accustomed to being alone, by myself, from an early age. Until I was ten years old I was an only child. My sister was born and grew into a toddler, as I grew into puberty and explored a wider life away from home.

I always had a room of my own, a desk or table on which to do my writing, drawing and model making. From six years old, a small AM radio on the bedside table entertained me with adventure programs on weekday afternoons, comedy and quiz programs on Sunday. I played outside, planted vegetable gardens, attended Saturday afternoon movies, swam in public and college pools, and fully enjoyed long summer days on the beach in Santa Monica, swimming and body surfing and lying in the sun. Long lazy days and warm nights.

David Teachout with his painting at Medar St. Studio S.C. Calif. The year was 1968.

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Ink on paper dated 1985

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I was born in the depth of the great depression in Santa Monica, California, in the same year Hitler came to power in Germany. The depression, Nazism, Japanese aggression and America's reaction in WWII, were strong influences in my young life. Our lives were simple, spare, yet healthy during that time of rationing, shortages and sacrifices. Propaganda ruled. As the war ended, I ended my grammar school days and entered junior high school. Within two years I was driving and soon, I owned a car. I was the archetypal LA kid with wheels, driving on the very first freeway. The efficient, wide ranging and democratic transportation network all over the LA basin, which I experienced as a boy, was rapidly being replaced by the automobile. I was a poster boy for the colonization of Los Angeles by the automobile.

The automobile had a powerful affect upon me. Independent mobility gave me a sense of personal power and an ability to limit engagement at the turn of the ignition key.

I was a good driver, and enjoyed the journey traveling from one place to another. Thus, my social life tended to be limited to my choice of destination, often with the drive the more enjoyable. Other than my mother and father and baby sister, there was little or no social life for me at home. I had to go somewhere else to find it.

I believe this sort of rootless, solitary journeying from one place to another; home to school, school to work, work to a girl friend's house, to a movie or a dance, etc., reinforced my sense of independence, a propensity not to be a joiner. Whatever a small town or village is in a social way, the Los Angeles where I roamed about, was not.

I was a participant/observer. First through the window of my parent's car, then from the open-air window of the electric trolley cars, then through the windshields of a series of old cars and hot rods, I saw from a distance a variety of places and people. They were outside, over there; I was inside, over here in a vehicle that took me away before any words could be spoken.

It wasn't difficult to transfer my aptitude for traveling alone on the roads of LA, to the cockpit of a navy jet fighter plane. There were similarities, as I applied my earthbound skill in driving to flying, and became an accomplished aviator. Except for the more advanced technology of jet flight, because of the strong cinematic influences I experienced during WWII and in the years that followed, I flew the movies of my formative years for reasons I didn't really understand. In hindsight, I have a clearer view of the part I was trained to play in the very large drama of geopolitical power and imperialistic pretension. The error of those times and my part in it, still haunt our lives today.

My life as an artist coincides with a time when unimaginable evils were perpetrated by the most militaristic societies the world has seen. My naive beliefs in a righteous and democratic America was shattered, by atomic bombs, imperialistic adventures, and illegal, unjust and immoral wars based on lies and selfish agendas of a few very rich and powerful elite who served the military/industrial/government complex.

The representative government that I believed in when I was young, had been bought and sold causing it to become untethered from the citizenry, and transformed into the fearsome security state it is today in my old age.

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As I became aware of what was actually occurring, I was angry, felt betrayed. I protested. And, I vowed not to allow my children to become cannon fodder for out-ofcontrol and increasingly unrepentant rulers. Anger turned into sadness, at times, grief. As I plunged into the uncertain domain of painting, most of my earlier constructions of reality no longer held true. I was not conforming to the conventions that those close to me expected. I was a young, white middle class good looking man, a scion of the dominant society that remained racially divided still, one hundred years after the Civil War. The genocide of Native Americans from east to west, from north to south continued, if not in battles with Crazy Horse, then in long, drawn out bureaucratic campaigns designed to lay siege to the vestiges of the Native presence on the occupied and wounded land. The land was being ripped apart and poisoned. Water and the air, polluted. I was not apart from this systematic plundering and destruction of land and life; I was a part of it.

My discovery that I was an artist became clear in my late twenties, during the final two years in my studies leading to a professional five year degree in landscape architecture. My first child, my daughter, was born, soon to be joined by a brother and, then another brother.

There was a decision to be made. I had abandoned my flying career in the military, and rejected commercial flying. I was offered a professorship at North Carolina State University, in my alma mater the School of Design. Or I was invited to join a leading landscape architectural firm in Michigan.

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David Teachout in his studio on 1st ave Sant Cruz Califonia by Ron Starr. May 1984

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I looked into my heart, and saw that, to a degree, I was an imposter as a teacher or professional designer. I didn't fit. The conventions, whether social, dress, etiquette, didn't suit me. I was in foreign territory, insecure, uncertain. My barefoot, surfer, free thinking persona was at odds with a world I didn't really want to enter. In contradiction to the conventional world of my family, wife and the professional imperatives that were tempting me, I chose to follow my heart. That decision established the genetic code which gave form to all that was to follow not only for me, but for my wife and children, our blood relations and our extended relations with friends, colleagues and future companions.

All of a sudden, I was de-institutionalized, no longer lodged within and dependent on the structures of school, military, or profession. Not knowing what I was going to do, what or how I was going to paint, I jumped into the river without a life preserver. And, once again, like the boy by himself in his room, or the teenage driver in his car, or the lone aviator in a cockpit remote from the earth and from others, in the midst of an increasingly complex life, or as Zorba the Greek would say, 'the whole catastrophe', I was on my own: alone.

As you can see, there seems to be no obvious ancestral influences that were catalysts for my movement toward art. In a way, I uncovered my aptitude and interest by a process of elimination. Gradually, as the conditioned responses to conventional expectations played themselves out, leaving the austere product of insight and self awareness revealed, a nascent spirituality emerged that guided me toward my life as an artist. I say spirit not religion, as I had long ago abandoned the stifling and uninspired Episcopal religion I was placed within as a boy. I had a vague sense that there was something spiritually important, there in that mournful church, but I could never find it.

At seventeen, I graduated both from high school and church.

Looking back, I can see that I viewed the painter's life as a spiritual life. In some way, a painter could transcend the limits of ordinary reality, gather the potentials that dwelled in the mystery, and return to shape the transcendent harvest into sublime expressions of color and form. This irreducible encounter with essence, with uncorrupted insight and pure intention, was a powerful motivator to draw me into a covenant with something intangible, yet present, which both energized and sustained me as an artist.

Although I can draw well and can render with some skill realistic pictures and illustrations, I chose not to proceed down that path as my primary direction in visual expression. I have no doubt that I could have carved out a niche in realism and, if not prospered, at least provided for a comfortable life. Instead, I pealed off or set aside realism, whether in the studio or in plein air painting, which did attract me because of the possibility of being in nature to paint. However, I greatly admire and respect many of the artists who work in a realistic manner. I insisted on nurturing an austere mind that would produce paintings which were totally themselves, that did not intentionally reference anything but themselves: to create a painting that was as irreducible as a stone.

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The Circle Series 1966-1968

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The Circle Series 1966-1968

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There are three dimensions to color from a painter's perspective. Light and dark, or light intensity; Hue, or the position of color in relation to other colors; Hue Saturation, or density of pigmentation in a particular hue.

Light and dark dominate the visual experience, making it difficult to see the more subtle distinctions within the field of color. Thus, early on in my painting life I neutralized any light and dark contrast and concentrated on hue and hue saturation contrast. I began to see color as form. The primary subject of my paintings was the colorness of color. Color was not in service to form; it was both the subject and the object.

Flying through vast clear space at supersonic speeds 40,000 feet above the earth, effects one's visual sense. Horizons and ordinary terrestrial visual clues vanish. One flies in a four dimensional world where one location is as good as another, where there are no boundaries, no frames to fly in and out of. Space is everywhere the same, an all-overness without focal points or contrast to delineate or shape a figure/ground relationship. In space, all is space without distinctions. It is unified, undivided and luminous. Not wholly a rational or a clear cause and effect upon the two dimensional canvas, but the visual experience of space certainly had a strong influence upon this artist's painting.

Speed also affects perception. I flew low altitude, high speed missions as low as fifty feet above the ground. At first, objects on the ground appeared as a blur. Gradually, with practice, I was able to clearly see those objects as if I was riding in a car at highway speed, even though I was flying at 600 mph. Rather than speeding up, my mind slowed down, became quiet and settled, open: in a meditative state. It is the same or similar state that describes my painter's mind.

So, in an odd way, my experience flying fighter jets broke the habitual, lockstep march toward an elusive and unknown academic future, which would in turn, lead to an unknown professional life sometime in the constantly redefined future. Required by duty to conform to a completely different social construct, the military, and taken on an adventure flying from an aircraft carrier that sailed across the ocean to Asia, was an astounding experience. My brief time in a wholly different culture in Japan, enlarged and freed up my somewhat provincial LA persona. Because it was exotic and novel, I had an aesthetic appreciation of much of what I encountered in Japan. My habitual California eyes saw qualities in Japan that they were blind to in my familiar surroundings in Southern California. I bought some books on art and aesthetics in Hong Kong, but didn't understand them. But even so, a shift in my consciousness was occurring that would enlarge and clarify in the next few years after I left behind my flying career, the military and the beliefs that had engendered my participation there. Without being conscious of this shift, I returned to college, still uncertain about where I was heading, or what I was going to do in my renewed civilian life.

I reentered Occidental College in Los Angeles as a physics major, with the vague intention of combining my flying experience with a physics degree in order to become an experimental test pilot. However, I began to sense that something was amiss with this

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future that I envisioned, just because I believed that I was supposed to make up my mind to do something.

The rigorous physics course was demanding. I was slow in calculating with a slide rule, which I did not fully understand. The fingers of future engineers, who would undoubtedly do their post graduate work at Cal Tech, were a blur as they manipulated their slide rules to solve problems. Where future engineers speedily applied formulas to achieve solutions, I was more interested in understanding the formulas, their derivations, the process by which they had been created. Thus, I believed, at the time, that I was lacking in ability to become a physicist. Only after two years when I decided to leave the program, was I told how impressed my teachers were of my creativity in solving physics problems. Actually, I had a good mind for theoretical physics.

Simultaneous with physics, I took art courses. This willingness to cross artificial boundaries between disciplines, raised eyebrows among the conventional academics. But, I never felt constrained by these conventions and freely did what I wanted to do.

One day in a watercolor painting class, my teacher, Robert Hansen, took us to a meadow and asked us, what color was the meadow? We replied, green. He then proceeded to show us that within the green that we had generalized as the meadow color, were a wide array of colors mixed within, not one green, but of infinite shades of green.

My eyes had been opened.

Summer work in one's future profession was the conventional thing to do. The engineers went off to engineering firms. I didn't know where to go to work, nor was I motivated to do so. Responding to my truest desire, I strapped my surfboard onto my Ford pickup and headed for the south coast to live and surf all summer. I scavenged bottles for redemption, ate food left by weekend surfers, and fished with a drop line from my board.

I went off for two week flying operations with my navy reserve squadron. Life was free and easy in the long, warm summer days of surf and sand.

I started the fall semester with new classes and a new girl friend, who within the year would become my wife and, eventually, the mother of our children.

My aptitude for architecture and life long influence in landscape architecture and horticulture from my extended family, coupled with a nascent awareness of my artistic nature, was a catalyst that moved me to transfer to Cal Poly Pomona and begin my formal education in landscape architecture.

At twenty five, because of the time in the military, I was behind the curve in my college studies, but was on course to a comfortable niche in the exuberant post war economy. Some savings, the GI Bill, and for three years after discharge from the navy, I flew in the active reserve with a squadron and on individual missions in the US: my finances were covered.

There were aesthetic satisfactions in my landscape architectural studies. Graphic communications to my self and to others, required certain kinds of artfully done sketches, technical drawings and presentations.

Landscape architecture is a very complex endeavor. The inclusion of earth, plants, water, sun and wind within an architectural framework, is the ultimate challenge in designing for human needs. Landscape architecture was leading the way toward

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ecological awareness, that is, the part of the profession that was not just serving the wealthy and the corporate elite. Viewed from the perspective of a newly graduated student with a five year professional degree, in general, it appeared that architects and developers led and landscape architects followed, relegated to the back of the bus.

Oriental Card Games number 9

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The more I learned about the subservience of the profession to developers and business interests, who were in the primary position as form givers in the shaping of environments for human use, and the lack of comprehensive, ecological thinking throughout the design process, the less interested I became to play the game.

The thoroughly developed and sensitive designs I was capable of doing, easily could be overruled in the board room, by accountants, rival acquiescent architects, overbearing or incompetent contractors, the whims of the wealthy and so on. I could put my heart and soul into a project and would most likely see it ravaged. Friends, associates and family might say, but you got paid, isn't that what working is all about? It's a job. No, work for me, is life.

The few times I visited art museums in those days, I was moved by some of the paintings there. A major Modiglianni exhibition impressed me. And, I met a few people who lived within the Bohemian culture in and around LA. I visited a few architectural masterpieces and some fine examples of landscape design. Frank Lloyd Wright came onto my radar. I felt a kinship to California architects such a Schindler, Harwell Harris and John Lautner. Felix Candela's thin shell work in Mexico fascinated me. The landscape architects Garrett Eckbo and Robert Roysten, and of course, the master, Thomas Church, gave me a view of what was possible in the art of landscape design. The Japanese way of making space the subject of architecture, and form a resultant of the organization of space, influenced me, brought into the forefront of my mind a fundamental principle in architectural design that was natural to me, but had lain dormant before this awareness arose. It was easy for me to understand what Wright meant by the word, 'organic', when applied to architecture.

A house designed by a Claremont architect, who I had met while at Cal Poly and whose name I can't recall, was an example of the spatial approach to architectural design that I was becoming aware of. Not only interior spaces, but exterior spaces were delineated by the structure as extensions of the inside. There were subtle variations of the degree of inside to outside space relationships. The wood, glass and white walls, with simple and consistent detailing, reminded me of Japanese building.

Foster Rhodes Jackson gave me a tour of his concrete, rock and glass home and studio compound he had designed and built farther up the alluvial slope of the San Gabriel Mountains. Details of Taliesin West echoed in the buildings. A wonderful play of space and light, and varieties of social to private domains were artfully composed. Both houses integrated structure and site in a sensitive manner. I responded to this wholistic approach to architectural design, which acknowledged the total environment as the context for an integration of building and landscape.

Cal Poly was a good school. The emphasis was evenly weighted on design and technology. The practical side of the profession was thoroughly presented. A degree from Cal Poly would ensure an ambitious designer easy success in the small to medium size projects, which were proliferating across the LA basin. If one developed some

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formalistic, standardized design strategies with repeatable construction details, one would succeed.

Although my initial influences were horticultural, design school fostered my sense of design and opened my mind to concepts of larger scale planning. Site planning became very important to me. The more sophisticated my studies and interests became, the further I was removed from my horticultural beginnings. I would have done well to have stayed closer to plants. There I was at Cal Poly, one of the finest horticultural schools, with a wide range of specimen plants growing all around, and my interests were shifting. There was a sense that I was not receiving the broad education that I seemed to desire.

Something was missing for me at Cal Poly.

Wind Form

The School of Design at North Carolina State University was the school where I truly fit. I prospered there among inspired teachers and famous visiting lecturers who were leaders in their fields. It was there in the spacious, well lit painting studio where I discovered what it is to paint.

There were painting instructors at the School of Design who, each in his own way, was a very accomplished artist. Duncan Stuart, Joe Cox and George Bireline. They said a few right words at the right time as I painted in their almost invisible presence. With oil on canvas, I painted in a manner that is usually described as abstract expressionism.

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At that time, I knew little about contemporary painting, the New York group of artists who were dominating the scene. I was not a magazine reader. I'm sure there were influences, there always are of course, but for me in the sanctuary of the painting studio, which I often had to myself, I was discovering for the first time the reality of paint upon the canvas. I was becoming aware of my sensibilities that were shaping the paint into form there upon the non-judgmental canvas of infinite potential.

One day, I visited George Bireline's downtown studio in the center of Raleigh. It was an old brick building in the center of a block. It could have been a mechanics shop.

Two high, large doors faced the sidewalk. Through those doors was a high ceiling, austere space with no dividers or equipment that hinted at its previous function. There was light, whether from high windows or skylights I don't recall. But I do recall the spaciousness, one chair, back to the entry door, and a single painting twenty feet from the chair that was the current painting being worked on. The rear and side walls were another thirty feet away. Aside from cans and tubes of paint, and perhaps a few canvases, there was nothing else in the spacious studio. I recognized the kind of space where I truly belonged. Simple, uncluttered, austere: a large painting, properly lit and without visual distraction around it, a chair in which I could sit at the proper distance to study the work in progress; and silence, an uninterrupted quietude in which to contemplate, to meditate, to actually see and paint.

In all these years, I have never been able to duplicate or emulate the quality of that studio. In the midst of family life, births and deaths, divorce, poverty, the constant demands of relationships, and the architectural design work required for income, my painting studios have been compromised, made secondary, small and inadequate, difficult spaces that required ingenuity, forbearance and patience in order to settle into the state of mind required to paint.

Red Extended

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There was a moment, there in Raleigh in 1963, when I saw, in that downtown studio, who I was meant to be. I could have stopped right there, picked up my brush, and disappeared into an austere studio of my own. In one way of looking at my life, that would have been the most truthful thing to do. But seldom do we act wholly in truth.

Another truth was the societal truth that surrounded me in North Carolina. Mean spirited racism infused all areas of life. There were no African American students at the Design School, despite the fact of the large population in the state. North Carolina State University received federal funding, yet systematically denied admission to its citizens.

The head of the landscape architectural program and myself participated in an outreach informational gathering, and talked with white and black potential design students. I'm sure that other departments shunned the inquiries of the courageous black high school students who showed up. There was no outreach to the hundreds of black high schools by the University. The one hundred year old white and colored signs were still in place and enforced by the law or outlaws. The lunch counter sit ins were occurring. Civil rights battles were being waged in the deep south. The marches were happening in Raleigh, Chapel Hill, Selma and Washington DC. All the people I knew were white. And, some of the southerners I knew could turn from the friendliest acquaintance to the most mean spirited racist in an instant. I didn't want to be associated with these racists. In the midst of all the demands I faced at the time, and having just enough to get by financially, I didn't see how I could be more active in civil rights activities than the small bit I did within the school. I understood that the racism that permeated the world I was in, did not at all reflect my beliefs.

I had the privilege of knowing and working with Duncan Stuart at the School of Design. Duncan was truly a renaissance man: artist, geometrician, master teacher, comprehensive thinker. We quickly developed a friendship soon after I arrived at the School of Design to complete my studies in landscape architecture.

Duncan had migrated from the University of Oklahoma to the revolutionary Black Mountain College in the Blue Ridge foothills of North Carolina. Black Mountain spawned a generation of the most creative and influential artists, designers and thinkers anywhere in the US. Duncan worked closely with Buckminster Fuller as he developed his ideas for an anticipatory comprehensive design science. At that time, the geometry of Fuller's Geodesic Dome was approximate. Dome structures were overbuilt, somewhat less than elegant, and needed to be adjusted and fine tuned to make their approximate geometry conform to the geodesic concept.

Duncan awoke one night with the solution to the dome's exact geometry: the basis for all geodesic domes since then. I don't believe there was ever any acknowledgement of Duncan's contribution. But as I knew him, the fact that he had solved the problem was of far more importance to him than praise for doing so.

Fuller would arrive at the Design School in a flurry of attention. If he had come as a 'teacher', he would marshal a group of students to do his bidding to construct a geodesic structure, leaving little room for creative thinking by the students, who were hard at work assembling a geodesic dome structure. Fuller was equally a creative designer and a master showman, a consummate public relations man for himself

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In the summer of 1962, I signed on with two other designers, to work with Duncan to create a 28 minute animated film called 'Polyhedra'. Duncan had discovered a way to transform polyhedrons from one to another by maintaining a constant edge length.

Ever since Euclid, the conventional procedure to transform one polyhedron into another, was to truncate vertices, thus diminishing edge, face and, consequently, the size of the polyhedron. Duncan proposed a method of continuous transformation that would maintain constant edge length and face size. The word, elegance, falls short in describing this revolutionary concept and its expression in mathematics, drawings and animation.

We spent the summer in the cool basement of the Design School, carefully drawing with ink on transparent 'cells', pre-punched with registration holes that allowed perfect alignment for the eventual frame by frame filming. Duncan plotted out the series of points that changed slightly from one drawing to the next, (1/8 inch was the maximum interval of change to maintain smooth movement in the animated film), that described the curved paths the vertices would travel, step by step, in the transformation from one polyhedron to another. We drew the hundreds of drawings necessary to create a seamless, smooth action animated film. It was, and remains a small masterpiece of fundamental research, which established a basis, a catalog, for the orderly subdivision and transformations of space. The 3D polyhedral studies were directly related to 2D mosaic transformations of regular and semi-regular polygons. In addition, closest packing strategies were illustrated. We helped Duncan create a reference standard that could be utilized by architects, scientists, mathematicians and others. The school's student publication utilized our drawings to create a beautiful document showing the work. The book was bound into two parts: the left side 1/3 the width, the right side 2/3. The 1/3 section were flip pages on which transforming Polyhedra appeared in animated motion as one flipped through the pages. As far as I know, as yet, Duncan's genius has not found its rightful place in the evolving understanding of basic principles in the transformational geometries of space.

Although, drawing slightly changing ink line drawings of Polyhedra to prepare for animated sequences on film may seem outside a painter's purview, this painter views his work as an animator, as a significant experience in his evolution as an artist.

My second child, Jon, was given the middle name of Duncan, in acknowledgement of the abiding friendship and deep affection his father had with this remarkable man.

In the last weeks of my landscape architectural studies, while working on a presentation of a complex design, one Sunday I left my home in the woods, and my wife and nine month old daughter, and drove to the school to work on my design presentation.

I climbed the stairs to the breezeway bridge that connected design studios to one side and painting studios to the other. At the top of the stairs as I started to turn right toward the design studio, a force, an impulse turned me away from the design studio and toward the painting studio.

Without hesitation I turned left, entered the painting studio and painted all afternoon. I never did finish the design presentation but, it seemed not to matter, for I graduated with honors in landscape architecture, and was hired to teach the following year.

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Only six months before, on the same breezeway bridge, I heard of John Kennedy's assassination.

There is only so much a painter, like myself, can do. The willingness to convert time and one's capital into creative works that have no guaranteed value, that are most likely to be of little importance to the current society, except for a very small group of art enthusiasts, is an act of faith. Faith in one's insight, intuition and self realization: one's calling. One simply proceeds until there is no more support to sustain the painting life. It is not a compromise to pause, to abandon for the moment the impossible continuance of one's real intention. The compromise would be to continue with a false intention dictated by economics or by conditions imposed by others. Without sustenance, without support, the demand to reduce the vision to accord with convention, rules.

My canvases are wide enough and high enough, that when I approach to paint, the edges disappear into my peripheral vision, and the field, unencumbered with edges, is of primary importance. The borderless space of the aviator; the edgeless space of the canvas; similar, not so different for aviators and painters.

The experience of painting freely in the North Carolina studio could, I suppose, be associated with kindergarten easel painting. Curiously, once I left kindergarten, there was no painting whatsoever in school, from first through twelfth grade.

Even in my first abstract expressionist oil paintings, I was focusing on color relationships, and was already reducing light and dark contrast in favor of hue and hue saturation contrast. The texture of the paint, as I proceeded, seemed to dominate the more subtle color relationships. And so, I soon abandoned the more physical gestural painting technique for one that best revealed color relationships. The colorness of color was the subject.

I gained insight into color from Josef Albers, the Munsell Color System and others. Albers' interaction of color theory and examples gave me an entry point into an understanding of color as a visual artist. Early in my work with color, I devised a short hand method of notations that allowed me to navigate the color sphere abstractly, composing and plotting out 3D color relationships in the color sphere as a guide for the painting of a 2D surface. This notational technique was used to varying degrees, in most of my painting series, as a way to think about color in respect to painting. In particular, the color relationships in the earlier paintings were carefully developed with this notational method. The Aura series was the first series in which I employed the notations to think about the color relationships in the paintings. The Aura paintings led naturally to Parabolic and Hyperbolic, paintings with very subtle color contrasts producing the resultant imagery that their titles suggest.

Hyperbolic was chosen to be part of the 1967, 30th Biennial Exhibition of Contemporary American Painting, The Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington DC. The painting was selected for the American Federation of Arts Traveling Exhibition, 19671968. However, the collector who had purchased Hyperbolic, would not let the painting travel. Aura VI, a predecessor to Hyperbolic and now in the Occidental College collection, was featured in the San Francisco Museum's Annual Art Exhibition.

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Ocean 2 intersecting waves

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The Aura Series was painted in an old garage behind the house where my three children ages three, one and soon to be born, and their mother and I lived. I would work on into the night while they slept, carefully mixing colors and painting the very subtle color relationships. I mixed progressions of color. The color intervals were very small, as if in music one inserted 10 or 12 notes between C and D on the piano. There was clear contrast between one end of the spectrum and the other. But, across one interval, there was almost an invisible contrast. I had no reference points. I just proceeded. As before in my life, I felt totally alone.

During those quiet nights as I painted, my concerns about the Vietnam War would rise up in my mind, and by early morning they would overwhelm me with anger and frustration at my impotence to do anything effective to stop the war. Many nights I found myself walking the streets of the seaside town, trading the anger for exhaustion and sleep.

My children were all under four years old, babies still, yet as the nighttime anguish intensified, I vowed not to offer them up as cannon fodder for a country that was betraying humanity with its Vietnam disaster. My sons, who I am so proud of, at eighteen declined to sign up for the draft. Under the threat of prison and fines, they joined millions of other young men who said no, they would not participate in this illegal, unjust and immoral war.

A painter's night is not always filled with color; sometimes the dark eclipses the vulnerable light of color, and the great gray grief of a world out of balance rules the night.

In the early 1960's Santa Cruz was in the first stage of a cultural renaissance. The University of California opened its Santa Cruz campus, suddenly bringing the academic elite and their sophistications into the area, to join the locals, many of whom were gaining notoriety in the arts. Music, literature, painting, sculpture and crafts: a wide range of artistic expressions were emerging to change and enliven the cultural landscape. By 1965, the Cupola Gallery painter's cooperative had formed in the converted ground floor of the writers' Jim and Jeanne Houston's house by the sea. A different member would hang his or her solo show each month. The exhibition openings were major cultural events drawing many visitors to the gallery. By 1966, my work was being included in important competitive shows in San Francisco. Galleries were showing interest.

We moved again into an old Victorian style house on the west side of Santa Cruz.

I closed the door to a well lit former parlor and continued to paint in the midst of family life. Incredibly, I was able to concentrate, keep the focus, and paint among other paintings, Hyperbolic. Within a short time, Hyperbolic was gone to the Corcoran Biennial to be exhibited along with the most famous names in American painting.

The pressures were enormous. Economic, an unspoken cloud of disapproval hovering around me, the Vietnam War. In the midst of the revolutionary and vibrant 60's, there was a feeling that our country was failing, that the government had been hijacked by the worst and not the best of men.

Martin Luther King spoke eloquently for a disaffected populous. He enlarged his voice to condemn the violent actions of the US in Vietnam. A year later he was assassinated. Bobby Kennedy announced King's death, then embraced his calling to be president, to bring into reality his vision of righteous behavior here at home, and to bring

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home the troops and leave behind the great error of Vietnam. Instead, he too was shot dead in my hometown of Los Angeles, and the criminals Nixon, Kissinger and others took over and escalated the war in Indo China.

We painted paintings that were mounted, as a protest, on Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood on a large billboard scale structure. We joined the Peace and Freedom Party in an effort to bypass the Democrats and Republicans who have, to this day, voted for and funded one war after another. Over and over, they ignored their constitutional mandate to declare war, and gave one president after another full authority to make war on anyone, anywhere in the world. What had this willingness to give such absolute power to one person have to do with democracy? Our cries of the dangers of nuclear weapons fell on deaf ears. With all this chaos, warring and brutality, of what importance is art? The absurd activity of closing oneself in a room with canvas and paint and making marks, what possible meaning could this have in a suffering world on fire?

But, isn't the highest human calling to become self aware, to respond to one's conscience, to follow one's heart wherever it might lead? To reference this awareness and not the social chaos, is to create a world, a small personal world to be sure, that does not have as its basis, the fragmentation that is inevitable in a hostile world of power and greed and domination. When the ever present, relentless and conflicted world occupies the mind, is the shape of the mind, then the artist is lost. Then, the avaricious, dark wide winds of desire and power sweep away the subtle insights, the quietude, and wins.

To either embrace or deny the clamorous world takes energy. In either case, the pulling or pushing becomes a counterfeit activity, a replacement of true creativity with the illusion generated because one is engaged, busy, doing something. My artist's mind is not of this conflicted order. It exists without dependence upon the conflict between this and that, upon big or small studios, upon praise or blame. The product of that state of mind is akin to the precipitate that forms when the right chemicals are mixed together: it is a resultant of a process that manifests in what are called paintings, objects of paint upon canvas, which reference themselves, and in a more abstract manner, the organizing mind of the painter.

Thus, the underlying impulse that motivates this artist, is engendered neither with engagement in social chaos nor forced isolation in the fortress studio, but within a wider and deeper awareness that nurtures and trusts original beginnings, which are the source from which the distinctions form to serve the larger vision.

All overness with no focal point was a central attribute in my thinking. Also, chance and randomness were instrumental in my approach to painting. I developed an idea for a series of paintings that incorporated these notions: Oriental Card Game.

I mixed a sequence of 13 colors with small intervals. A 13x13 grid of squares was laid out covering the whole area of a large canvas. The raw canvas was stained. Then, the colors, numbered to correspond to 13 playing cards, (one complete suit), were chosen one at a time by randomly selecting a card from the newly shuffled deck. This process was repeated for all the 169 squares. The placement sequence for the chosen colors was from top to bottom, right to left, as if one were reading Japanese text. The painted edge of the squares was precise but not hard, maintaining a slight softness and painterly feel of the

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staining technique. The resultant all over field of color pulsed with a subtle uncertainty.

This idea was elaborated upon as the series developed.

Staining, rather than painting onto a gesso surface, became important to me. I had the feeling that I wanted the paint to be physically interlocked with the canvas support.

Thus, from that time, except for some works along the way, staining was the primary method I used to apply paint to canvas.

During this phase in my painting life, I rented a long building that had been a part of the Old Sash Mill in downtown Santa Cruz. The mill and its complex of old wooden barns, sheds, offices and auxiliary buildings was no longer in use. For $25/month I rented a 75 foot long structure and its contents, with heat. The dining room table that I fashioned from the large drawing board I found there, is still in use in my former wife's home.

I was alone at the mill. I cleaned up a none-to-clean area and painted. Some days the loneliness of my insistent preoccupation and the vision of my children only a mile away would paralyze me with doubt, substituting a gray uncertainty for my colorful intent.

The painters in town who I came to know were not close friends. We visited occasionally, but mostly, we went our individual ways. The romantic notion of a band of artists energizing one another while suffering the privations that art demanded, did not happen. The painters I knew were comfortably settled in university, community college and high school teaching careers. Although, they were serious about their work, they were living risk free lives with a guaranteed monthly income with benefits, and could look forward to a generous retirement income. I was truly the outsider.

One could say that I self defined myself to be in that position by refusing to fit into the professions for which I was trained and qualified. Partly, I was rejecting the authority of convention, wherever that authority might lie. I had been educating myself, and had found much in the conventions of society to question, and perhaps, rebel against.

Peeling away the layers of conditioning, I had discovered, in self revelatory moments, that my natural aptitude was to create, and in my limited understanding, to create meant to be an artist, and to be an artist meant to paint. What the actuality of this insight was, how it would manifest, how it would fit or not fit inside conventional boundaries, I did not know. The force of intuition, of spirit, was sufficient to push me forward into uncertainty and the unknown.

The process I was experiencing was not negative. It wasn't easy, but it felt true; genuine; mine. I was proceeding as if I, too, had some sort of patronage that allowed me to disappear into the studio each day, where I was safe to abandon worldly cares and dwell freely in a creative state, within which there arose from formlessness the genesis of form.

I trusted these notions and applied myself to shaping them into a painted form. I can't say it was all so spiritual or pure. My mentality is strong, and easily and prematurely can find certainty where it would be best to remain uncertain and let a larger movement mature. As strange and foreign as my behavior seemed to those around me, it was not strange to me. I was touching an irreducible bedrock, a place of authenticity, and I wasn't willing to abandon this truth.

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David Teachout 1st ave S.C. with Ocean Drawing

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I returned to my earlier interest in bands of color that interacted with one another and with the field or ground color. Only, now they were reoriented to the horizontal and reduced to three, as a minimal expression of the relationship of parallel bands of color.

The 10 foot long canvas was three or four times wider than high, implying a correspondence to the horizon. The formerly vertical straight bands, which in their genesis had been cleaved from solid areas of color, until the solids became closely packed vertical bands, now lay horizontal across the canvas. They ended before the edge, so that they appeared to be floating in space. Responding to gravity, the three bands of color curved downward slightly, forming a shallow bowl-like space above them. For me, this space was the real subject of the painting. "Concave" was intended to hang low on the wall, so that the viewer's eye was level with the bowl-like space, not the colored bands that formed it.

I became uneasy with how the bands ended. How should they be painted? In an abrupt hard edge? A softer painted edge? Gradually faded into the ground? The ends were too important visually. The relatively strong contrast of the special condition of 'ending' and the visual association with the painting's edge was distracting. What to do?

I moved my studio a mile in the other direction, into an small old milking barn on a rural road at the very edge of town. Down across the fields and canyons, a mile to the west, the Pacific Ocean swelled and crashed onto the cliff lined shore. To the northwest and northeast, fields and meadows, oaks, madrones and then the redwoods. It was the last retreat of Old Bill who was living his last days in his long term home. He was kind and generous and respectful of this artist and his mysterious preoccupations. As I prepared my new studio for painting, the problem of the unsatisfactory color band ends was solved. I would join the band ends together, in a circle. Now, the bands were never ending. The visual play between them was continuous and no longer affected by the special condition of the ends.

Working with three narrow bands of color on a stained ground, I began the 'Circle' series of paintings. I wanted them big so that the circular space circumscribed by the color bands would have equal importance. 8 feet square was my choice for size. I constructed the first stretcher and was beginning to stretch the canvas on it when, fortunately, I looked at the barn door. There was no way that an 8 foot square canvas would fit through the door. I measured the door and found that 7 feet was the maximum dimension that would pass through it. Thus, the 'Circle' series were all 7 feet square in homage to doors.

The color stain in each band was blended so that there were progressive hue changes around the circle, with maximum change half way around. These were subtle progressions, for example, from blue-violet to red-violet and back to blue-violet. A neighboring band would be painted with another color progression, so that the two bands would interact in a relatively low contrast to a higher contrast around the circle.

I was pleased with the overall visual result. The 'empty' central circular space of the painting, which composed most of the visual field, took on a 3D aspect, more so in some paintings than others. The central space appeared to lift slightly toward the viewer, like the slight curve of a convex dome.

Carl VanderVoort came down from San Francisco to look at the dozen or so 'Circle' series paintings I had painted at our next home at the very edge of town, just

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beyond Old Bill's. The large double garage served as my studio. Fields spread out on all sides, the ocean still a mile away. The children ran free, a little wild.

Galleria Carl VanderVoort was the archetypal modern art gallery, well located at the foot of Telegraph Hill in San Francisco. It was one of a group of galleries to be located in Rome, London and Spain. VanderVoort was very complimentary about the 'Circle' paintings. Upon viewing the paintings at my studio, he immediately offered me a solo show in two months. After the experience of equivocating gallery dealers, this immediate invitation was startling. It was a cause for celebration.

The show was hung and the opening occurred without me. A sky high fever burned away at the toxic accumulation in my body. Wrapped in cool wet sheets, that turned warm within minutes, I knew that this trial by fire was a necessary first step in healing a very good body, which had had enough of improper eating. It was my dramatic initiation to proper nutrition and food as medicine. I was still weak when I was driven to see my paintings on the last day of the exhibition.

The San Francisco art reviewer hadn't bothered to see the show, so that when he did get around to view the paintings, they were stacked in a narrow storage area with many other works. Paintings that were meant to be approached from 20 or 30 feet away, or even farther, were viewed by him at 4 or 5 feet. Colored circles of little regard, according to him.

Other paintings of mine were also handled by the gallery. Magically, since I didn't have to lift a finger, paintings were sent off to be included in other venues. I was being scheduled in for exhibitions in the yet to be established European galleries. Five years into my commitment to painting, some success on the public side of my painting life.

I was hired by California State University Pomona (Cal Poly) to teach design to first and second year architecture and landscape architecture students. We moved into a tract house 100 yards from the San Bernardino Freeway. I began to receive a monthly check. My creativity was transferred to teaching.

One day, a few months later, VanderVoort called from San Francisco. He was on the run from creditors and was packing to escape to his home in Spain. He had borrowed and borrowed and was deeply in debt. The gallery had folded. I had to get my paintings out before the following week, or they would be lost in litigation and attempts at debt recovery. The simple life and free life as an artist was not so simple or free. I had done my part: created out of nothing, something. Take it or leave it, here is what I made. The system that is dependent upon what is created by the artist, failed to do its part. Ambition, greed, conflict, good and bad intentions, bad judgement, all these sophisticated manipulations muddied the waters. I retrieved my work, stored it, and returned to Pomona, to the house by the freeway and to teaching.

The collapse of the VanderVoort Gallery was followed by Nixon's bombing of Cambodia. The war continued, growing more fierce and hopeless as it moved into its final years. The 'body count', as our military would say, was over 2 million people dead.

A large part of Indo China had been devastated.

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As I prepared for the ten minute drive to teach an early morning design class, the radio news announcer reported that the National Guard, our American National Guard, had fired on and killed students at Kent State University in Ohio. I was stunned. As I drove onto campus, I imagined meeting waves of students beginning to protest this unholy act against students just like them. All was quiet, normal.

I faced twenty docile students. I was on fire with anger, indignation, bursting with primal emotions that were raging through me. My passionate report of the events at Kent State brought the class alive. I dismissed them, saying what had happened and how we responded was far more important than anything we could do in the design class.

At first, the faculty carried on as if nothing had happened. Student petitions went unsigned by faculty because of fears of being identified with radicals, anti-war activists, communists, etc. The faculty disappeared behind closed doors, either to deliberate or to be physically protected from the protestors who were gathering in the large campus quad.

I looked around and spotted only one other teacher. All the rest were students.

The impromptu stage supported a series of speakers. All students. Some, more radical, were on the verge of burning down what they deemed as the offensive parts of the school. I waited for an articulate faculty member to step forward and use his or her intelligence and eloquence to give coherence to our passion, a clearly stated proposal that described a way to transform our anger into meaningful action. No one came forth.

I found myself walking onto the stage. This was not my talent, not at all. An informal talk to twenty students in a design studio was my limit. I turned to face a sea of young faces. I had no idea what to say. I think I just wanted them to know at least there was one professor willing to stand with them in their protest.

Just as I stepped to the microphone, a military jet plane appeared and circled our gathering at low altitude. I could read the National Guard markings. It was one of the same kind of aircraft I flew thirteen years before as a naval aviator. The arrival of the circling jet was the cue I needed to begin to speak.

I said, that in the jet was the commander of the local National Guard troops, who undoubtedly, were gathering nearby. The college president in concert with the governor, viewed the student protest as a potential for anarchy. I told the crowd that the commander was assessing the situation: size of crowd, how to approach, contain or disperse it, what weapons to employ. I assumed that, by then, there were agents on the ground, in and around the crowd, reporting to their superiors.

With the facts of Kent State fresh in mind, I realized that the National Guard troops would fire, if ordered, on just such a protest crowd I stood before, if someone in authority deemed that it was 'out of control', 'illegal', 'dangerous to public property', or? I counciled restraint so as not to trigger another Kent State tragedy. Primarily, we needed to state what had happened was wrong, absolutely unacceptable. It was premature to know exactly what the message would be, and how it would be communicated.

I don't know what effect, if any, my brief time on the stage had. It was a big stretch for a slightly introverted artist. But the audience was with me, giving me, as they say, energy.

We settled again in Santa Cruz in a house one block from a beautiful neighborhood beach. Once again, my dream of a large, well lit painting studio was

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thwarted. My architect's mind noted the poor design of the house, the impossibility of any of the outbuildings as a decent studio. Because the remodeling for a better designed house would require substantial finances, in addition to the cost of ongoing maintenance, I just turned off my architect's mind and abandoned any thoughts of making any changes to the house. I realized that I would have to find a way to use what was given.

The main attribute was location. The children had a permanent home in a cool place by the beach. It was a familiar environment for me, the California beach kid. Where I felt out of place in the east, I felt relatively comfortable and able to comprehend with familiarity the place where we had settled.

We rented out the tiny cabin that was built for dwarfs. The room above the rickety garage right in the middle of the site, was the only option for a home based studio. I've forgotten where my paintings were stored at that time. Years later, I used commercial storage nearby.

The room was 10x11 feet with a gabled roof, which fortunately, gave a bit of vertical relief to the small space. A small balcony entry deck facing east, enlarged the upstairs a bit more. I was thinking big. Big canvases, but unstretched. I was thinking of pouring the paint stain rather than using my more conventional technique of brushing on the paint. It was a challenge not to become depressed about how inadequate the little room was for my intention, and how utterly diminished it was from the spacious imaginary studio that I knew was right for me.

At this time in the early 70's, poetic phrases and lines would suddenly appear in my mind. I'd catch a line here or there, and discovered that these fragments were portals into poems, which usually developed quite naturally. This was the beginning of my poetry. I never set out to be a 'poet'. However, my poetic sensibilities are strong, and when I review my life, evident early on in childhood.

When I flew as a naval aviator, I flew as much as a poet as I did as a fighter pilot.

For me, there was great beauty in flight: the majesty of lift across the wings, the freedom of space, the elegance of a flight well done. In recent years, after writing my novel, Burden of Ashes, based on my experience as an aviator, and with the necessity of briefly characterizing the novel to others, I settled on a one line summation: 'it is about the irony of the beauty of flight in the service of war'. So, we get a bit closer to the nature of this artist. It has something to do with revealing the poetry in things.

I had solved the puzzle of how to use the little room on top of the garage. Since I was going to pour pre-mixed paint onto unstretched canvas, I realized that there was a way to shape a large canvas in the small room in order to paint.

I had a vague awareness of painters who had been pouring paint. Morris Louis, Paul Jenkins and others. I may have seen a few of their paintings. But, I didn't study them closely or really understand their painting techniques. I had no intention of mimicking these established painters. There were certain qualities that I liked in the poured paintings.

My painting had evolved naturally into this method over the preceding ten years. Through a meditative and thoughtful process, I developed an approach that seemed very much my own.

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I placed two vertical plywood panels, parallel to one another, about six feet apart.

Many holes were drilled in each panel. I threaded light weight line through the holes, one side to the other. Over and under these lines that spanned the space between the plywood panels, I'd drape and fold a long piece of raw canvas, so that it was higher to the rear and lower to the front. I thought of these folded surfaces as 'topography'.

I mixed the acrylic paint with great care. Not only color, but viscosity and transparency were central concerns. Now, instead of careful application of close intervals of color, I was going to pour the paint, initially, in my imagination in an attempt to foresee the potential result. The minimalist contrasts of earlier paintings, would be replaced by high contrast relationships. Colors would mix, either physically when wet, or visually with transparent overlays, as streams of paint flowed over one another. Also, where the paint was poured and how much was poured mattered. Should I pour wet onto dry, onto damp, onto wet? There was a summoning, a convergence of my attention to simultaneously blend a complex of ideas, materials and process in one brief moment of pouring. Did I want the paint to traverse the full length of the canvas, or stop upon it?

Gravity had replaced my paint brush as the method by which the paint would touch the canvas. With full attention, all parts that would form the painting, combined in the instant the paint was poured. Gravity pulled the liquid color down the canvas slope, and it was done. So began the 'Falling' series that preoccupied me for the next three years. Once again, I turned a liability into an asset, an impossible studio space into one of possibilities. .

I had not abandoned the design profession. During the early years in Santa Cruz, I designed a variety of small projects. A house remodel, gardens, and conceptual proposals.

I worked with an established landscape architect in his one man office in the coastal hills up the coast from Santa Cruz. This relationship was an entree to being a landscape architect in the area, and establishing my own office. It was the obvious thing to do. He was a very likable and kind person, but not a very good designer. I didn't take the bait. I continued as an independent designer, (I couldn't call myself an architect or landscape architect, although I was doing exactly what licensed professionals were doing). It remained clear to me, that it was unlikely that the architectural profession would provide the creative satisfaction that working as an artist, alone in my studio, would render. For the most part, this has proven true.

Architectural design work is hard, however, the difficulties are not necessarily associated with the creative time in the studio, or even the effort to develop drawings and specifications that are, essentially, the instructions for building, and the necessary documents for the client and the bureaucracy. Not all clients, but some, made the design process a harrowing experience. The client's financial power leverage, often makes it difficult to manifest more than a faint echo of the potential inherent in a design project.

And, inevitably, the designer is asked to quantify the unknown, to state costs before there is any substantive information on which to base costs. The limitations upon creativity are usually overwhelming in architectural design. To believe that one can fully realize the full measure of creativity within the narrow and, many times, mean spirited parameters in architectural design, can be for the artist, a prescription for misery. To pander to the wealthy is, in general, the name of the game.

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I continued painting. I realized that the ocean edge was influencing my painting.

The sweep of the ocean waters upon the sand and the overlapping patterns that were left there, had found there way into my poured paintings. However, my interest in the 'Falling' series was waning. Because my wife and children were in New Mexico, I could use the relatively large living room as my studio. In what seemed a spacious studio compared to the little upstairs room, I experimented by pouring on horizontal canvases on the floor.

Successive pours on one spot produced a roughly circular area of layers of paint. I called this short series, 'Ponding'.

My sense of space without horizon, and chance operations as an agent in determining painting actions, coalesced in an idea for a new series of paintings: the 'Cold Mountain' series.

Cold mountain is both the name of a famous Chinese recluse and poet, and the name of his abode in the mountains of China. His was a poetry of austerity and, in a way, a commentary on the confused and overburdened minds of the society from which he escaped. He is associated with Zen and Taoism, but it seems to me, that he maintained an independence from all organized spiritual practices. I felt a kinship to his natural austerity in my own approach to painting.

I returned to stretched canvases of about the same dimensions as my previous larger works. The stretched canvas was placed on the floor. Utilizing the Book of Random Numbers, I devised a matrix of randomly chosen coordinates at which I placed rolls of cloth underneath, in order to distort the canvas surface into a topography of hills and valleys.

Utilizing random numbers I'd determine position, direction of flow and volume of paint. Next, randomly I'd determine the paint colors and which ones to pour at the predetermined position.

The lack of a singular focal point or horizon and the colors spreading and flowing in all directions, usually to the edge, created the impression of space unencumbered by the effects of a singular gravitational pull, as had been the case in the 'Falling' series. I was pleased with the results. It felt right, expressed the importance of space to me, and represented a certain austere spontaneity that I valued.

Late in the year, I was contacted by Connie Perkins, art critic and professor of art at Occidental College in Los Angeles. Somehow she knew about me and wanted to see my work. I showed her a wide range of my paintings from the previous ten years, including the recent 'Cold Mountain' paintings. She was impressed. She said that she always selected the works to be exhibited in solo shows at Occidental College. But she was so impressed that she wanted me to select the paintings for a solo show in January 1975. She would write a critical review that would appear in the LA newspapers and, perhaps, in an art magazine. She was very knowledgeable, intelligent and forthright.

Then she asked, where could she get a drink?

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Titled Oriental Card Games 7

David Teachout, Paintings Solo Exhibition @ Occidental College January 6 through February 21, 1975 January 9, an evening conversation with the artist Critical Review

by Constance M. Perkins Professor of Art History

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For David Teachout, painting is an endless exploration of color. It is the basic element that links together the geometry of the CIRCLES and the ORIENTAL CARD GAMES with the poured free forms of the FALLING series and of COLD MOUNTAIN. It is also probably the most personal factor in his works even though there lies behind it the rationale of color theory that comes from Josef Albers, the one whose influences have most strongly affected Teachout.

One also recognized a genuine empathy for the works of Morris Louis or Ray Parker which for certain exists, but David Teachout came independently to his experimentations with the stained canvas. Excepting PARABOLIC and AURA VI, both from 1966 and both employing a primer, he uses acrylic on raw canvas. Starting with the shaped canvases that let gravity rather than the hand form the image, there has been a tendency more recently to swing toward the topographical devices that are evident in COLD MOUNTAIN. But Teachout will return to the brushed or more common tilted stretched canvas when it is appropriate. For every element is carefully calculated including the probabilities of chance. It all begins with the IDEA. Then there is a long time spent with color. The final painting process is mere technique.

Most of the time the IDEA evolves out of previous ideas. By breaking off the edges, squares become bands; discarding the concept of "ending", bands become circles. Thus it becomes apparent that images evolve from formalistic concerns and not conceptual ones.

(The Circle Series has no compatibility with Jasper John's Target Series.) Direct associational relations do not exist although metaphoric ones can be engaged in. With the CIRCLES, Teachout concentrated his interest on the interplay of color held in constant tension, forcing one color to change only relationally while those juxtaposed have an actual gradation of hue. The only relaxation is in the taped edges that allow for free painting but stop short of hardness. Some of the softened edges are retained in the ORIENTAL CARD GAME works. Here the all overness effect is achieved by grids within which thirteen colors are held in close progression. Variations on random selection occur in the series.

Since 1971 Teachout has been absorbed with the unlimited possibilities of the poured canvas that has resulted in the FALLING pieces and in the COLD MOUNTAIN topographies. The hanging, folding, padding or tilting of the canvas pre-establishes the nature of the image before gravity defines it, making the painting process appear to be of major importance. Nevertheless these more recent pieces grow out of the artist's sustained interest in color and texture to which a sense of organic movement has been added.

Although David Teachout holds a specialized degree of Bachelor of Landscape Architecture from North Carolina State University School of Design, he is also an alumnus of Occidental College (x'59) and recalls his first painting experiences under Mr. Hansen. At that time he was wavering between a major in physics and one in geology.

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The Oriental Card Games

Four years as a Navy aviator had interrupted his education. There were other vacillations before the idea of working with Buckminster Fuller took him to North Carolina, (Please note that this is not correct. I went to complete my degree in landscape architecture. Fuller was of interest but not why I went east. DT) It was even later before he "locked in" on a painting career. Since 1964 he and his family have lived most of the time in Santa Cruz.

He has done several stints at teaching including a year in North Carolina, another at California State Polytechnic College and summer sessions at the University in Santa Cruz. But in the end, for David Teachout, painting has become his way of life--a life and

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an art that generates its own largess. The elite were doing what the elite do at art openings. They were glancing at the paintings, but mostly gossiping with other well groomed attendees, while sipping from the ever present wine or cocktail glass. Over in the corner, like humble peasants at a sophisticate's gathering, my God parents sat like two shy teenagers at a high school dance. I spoke, who knows what. Then the milling about as people commented to me about the paintings.

A very rich woman from a well known and powerful California family, gushed out about how wonderful this painting and that painting was. I looked at her diamonds, and thought about who she was. Well, I said, why don't you buy the painting if you like it so much? Such arrogance from the artist, talking about such mundane and unaesthetic matters as money in regard to his art. She was displeased. I had violated the rules. Her millions of dollars remained secure, evidence of the hypocrisy of a very rich woman who wouldn't put her money where her mouth was.

Later, when my parents came to see the show, and were very pleased with what they saw, my mother offered to purchase the large 'Circle' painting as a gift to Occidental College. It was hung beautifully at the end of a wide passageway in the new administration building. It filled most of the opening when seen from the entry lobby sixty feet away. The three color bands floated in a subtly pulsing space. The painting invited the viewer to walk toward it down the passageway and right up to it. The full experience of seeing a 'Circle' painting was achieved in that sensitive installation. It was a far cry from the San Francisco critic who wrote his mindless critique after seeing the paintings from a few feet away in a poorly lit storage room.

We drove a few miles to Connie Perkin's home a short way from where I grew up.

Her house was a classic Richard Neutra design. Large expanses of glass, clean white walls, flat roof, minimal detailing, a pond that ran from outside to inside. There seemed to be a genuine appreciation of my work by the sophisticated people who had gathered in that archetypal Southern California modern house.

During this time, I was retained to design a country home. Carefully sited on sloping ground on a ten acre parcel, the six level small house seemed much larger because of the spatial organization. The client was pleased with the design and his effort to build the house himself. Where his house was a success his marriage wasn't. Two years later, I was asked to help my client and his new wife decide upon another building site, farther up the same country road, and to begin the concept phase of a design for a new home. These architectural projects were the first in a series that were done in parallel with my painting for the next twenty years. The 'Cold Mountain' period included a hands on approach to small works on paper. Spontaneity was foremost. A sheet of heavy paper was taped to a board, which was laid horizontally on the floor. I prepared from one to three acrylic colors that were very liquid, like ordinary watercolors. I chose from one to three sumi brushes of different sizes. Then, sitting meditation style on a low cushion, I'd allow my mind to settle, grow still and quiet. When I felt fully settled, yet alert, I would pick up a brush and carefully load it with paint. Once again, I'd wait, growing even more silent and still in the mind.

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Ocean Random Waves

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My aim was to paint spontaneously, before thought emerged to take control.

Thought induced demands to paint surfaced, insisting that I paint now. But, by waiting them out, they vanished, leaving my less corrupted awareness in waiting. This process might take a short time or go on for over half an hour. Then, suddenly, without intention, the brush swept across the paper with a fierce, quick energy of a Samurai sword and the painting was done.

I called this form of painting, 'Painting With A Beginner's Mind'. It was a combination of Zen meditation and action painting. Three years later I taught a very successful summer class at UCSC based on this approach.

I have never been able to utilize this very satisfying technique in large works. The combination of a serene studio space, cost of materials and the necessity, in effect, to disappear from the world, (like Cold Mountain, Milarepa, the Chinese hermits, or like my Native friends who isolate themselves on a wilderness hilltop in a vision quest), have precluded this enlargement and satisfying potential there. This notion may well describe my approach to any future painting. I don't know. But unless conditions change from my current situation of relative poverty and lack of the means and place to paint as I imagine is right for me, it won't happen. At eighty years old, I am active and healthy. As an artist, a person who sees no reason not to continue my engagement with the creative process, I believe I have a few years left to paint. Perhaps to create enduring works of art. Who knows?.

Teaching design, as I did at North Carolina State University and at Cal Poly, Pomona, is another way of engaging in the creative process. Instead of being alone in the painting studio, I was with twenty students in the design studio. The greater the trust and intimacy, the richer the educational experience. I required my students to think as designers, to enter in and actually experience the creative process. This was novel for them, as their pre-college education had trained them to get correct answers on tests. In the beginning, they would ask me what they were to do to receive a good grade, as if there was a discrete body of information to be digested, memorized and regurgitated for my approval. Most students were bewildered at first, not being in the authoritarian and competitive domain of right and wrong answers. The winnowing began: a few dropped out or changed majors, the rest struggled on, trying to do their best to abandon old habits and trust their own sensibilities to engage with the creative process. They began, through experience, to catch on. It was an uplifting and energizing experience to nurture the creativity in each student: a power usually long hidden under convention's weighty accumulation.

The previous year, I had been asked to curate and install a major drawing exhibition at the Walnut Creek Museum. My fifteen year old son and I worked together installing the exhibition. We lived out of the Chevy panel truck for a few days. It was good pay for our time there. Now I was free to arrange an exhibition of my visionary architect friend's work to be hung at the same museum. One of the leading visionaries in the world, he was in top form and had prepared a first rate exhibition. And again, the pay was good.

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From The Soquel Series

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I went to Hawaii for a few months in order to sort things out from a dissolving marriage. It was a time of major change for me that required a new approach to living.

When I was on Maui, I received a letter from my client who I had developed the conceptual plans for his new house on the property I had helped him choose. Would I return and begin immediately on the first phase of the design? This was the sign I had been waiting for. Two days later I flew back to the mainland.

Just before I left Maui while I sat in a little park by the ocean in front of the library, I wrote that my deep desire was to paint a painting, a sublime painting. How this was to happen I did not know. Still, this inner urge persisted to realize with color on canvas a form whose origin arose from a pre-rational unconditioned state. To make visible the invisible; to fly without wings.

The word sublime is both an adjective and a verb. The first definition of the verb form catches the spirit of the word. "To cause to pass directly from solid to vapor state and condense back to solid form". All other definitions speak of higher and lower implying hierarchy. I see the word as describing a process which passes from one state to another; one level of energy to another; from the universal to the particular; from the expanded to the contracted; from the relative densities of spacious energy to the condensation of energy into mass. A visual form that evokes an expansive response, opening the viewer to the realm which is its source.

Is this painting a picture of another reality? A reality visited by the painter and then re-membered in ordinary reality. Or, is the painting itself sublime---self referential--a picture only of itself, with no interpretation of either outer or inner landscapes? Perhaps, painting such a painting is less in revealing a vision than, in an analogous way, making a stone.

What is this urge to create? Is it a memory dimly, but constantly felt of this individual's journey into consciousness and form? Is this action an echo of genetic evolution from nothing into something? Is there in the individual creative act a holographic formulation which holds the universe enfolded within it?

These words can only reveal a tendency, a reaching from deep in the well for a sky sensed as much as seen. It is obvious that the intellect must serve this endeavor, it must serve an impulse more fundamental than itself.

This strong, clear vision of my deeper feelings about painting, signaled me that there was more to be done in my painter's life. Obviously, I was a mystic of sorts, with a poetic mind, even though I could bring a strong intellect to bear where rationality was called for. I had no shortage of passionate energy for those creative activities I was moved to engage in. In what to engage with and how to sustain myself was not always clear.

I was reunited with the children. However, I had no home and very little money with which to rent one. I stayed in the six level home I had designed for my client. It was a fine little house. I was pleased with how well it functioned and the quality of space that I had designed. He had built it exactly to my specifications, so I had a good measure of the relationship of plans to product. He was sold on my approach and abilities as an architect.

For twenty five dollars I purchased a tent large enough for me to sleep in and with room to erect a small drawing board at one end. I had to sit or lie down under the low

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canvas ceiling with its silver reflection material on the outside. There was room for some books and supplies, a sleeping bag, blankets and clothes. It was tight. Hopefully, it wouldn't leak.

I placed the tent at the base of the slope of the ridge to the west. Through the east facing door, I looked across a small valley to the eastern ridge. I would live in that humble little tent long enough to watch six full moons rise over the ridge.

It took a while to adjust to my hermetic existence. The land was beautiful. Ridges to the east and west, forest to the north, and a long view down the valley to the Monterey Bay. Not another dwelling in sight. I had 200 acres of hills and valleys to walk about. I would become familiar with wildlife who tolerated this stranger in their midst. Inwardly, I was deeply content. Outwardly, I struggled with coming to terms with my minimal existence.

I had a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to become fully intimate with the site on which a home was to be designed by me. I realized that I was living the quote from a landscape architecture book about a Japanese architect that I had become aware of in school. What he said resonated with my deeper feelings about architectural design. There I was, fully in nature, in harmony with seasonal cycles, the sun, the moon, the infinitude of stars, the rain, the wind, the patient earth I camped upon. It was just like the quote that had impressed me so: from Landscape Architecture, The Shaping of Man's Natural Environment by John Ormsbee Simonds: "In our present power-happy and schedule- conscious era, this vitally important aspect of developing sympatico with the land and of learning to know and understand the land---learning to analyze the total project site---is too often overlooked. And too often our completed work give tragic evidence of our haste and neglect.

"In Japan (as, historically, in the highest planning cultures of all countries) this keen awareness of the site is of great significance in the planning process. All structures seem a natural outgrowth of the site---preserving, accentuating, and extending its best features. Studying in Japan, the author was struck by this consistent quality and once asked an architect how he achieved it in his work. "'Quite simply,' said the architect. 'If designing say, a residence, I go each day to the piece of land on which it is to be constructed. Sometimes for long hours with a mat and tea. Sometimes in the quiet of evening when shadows are long. Sometimes in the busy part of the day when streets are abustle and the sun is clear and bright. Sometimes in the snow and even in the rain, for much can be learned of a piece of ground by watching the rain play across it and the run-off take its course in rivulets along the natural drainage ways.

'I go to the land, and stay, until I have come to know it. I learn to know its bad features---the jangling friction of the passing street, the awkward angles of a wind-blown oak, an unpleasant sector of the mountain view, the lack of moisture in the soil, the nearness of the neighbor's house to an angle of the property.

'I learn to know its good features---a glorious clump of maple trees, a broad ledge perching high in space above a gushing waterfall, which spills into the deep ravine below. I come to know the cool and pleasant summer airs that rise from the falls and move across an open draw of land. I sense, perhaps, the deliciously pungent fragrance of

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the deeply layered cedar fronds as the warm sun plays across them in the morning. This patch I know must be left undisturbed.

I know where the sun will appear in the early morning when its warmth will be most welcome. I have learned which areas will be struck by its harshly blinding light as it burns hot and penetrating in the late afternoon, and from which spots the sunset seems to glow the richest in the dusky peace of late evening. I have marveled at the changing, dappled light and soft fresh colors of the bamboo thicket, and watched for hours the scarlet-crested warblers who nest and feed there.

'I come to sense with great pleasure the subtle relationship of a jutting granite boulder to the jutting granite profile of the mountainside across the way. Little things, one may think, but they tell one, here is the essence of this fragment of land; here is its very spirit. Preserve this spirit and it will pervade your gardens, your homes, and your very life.

'And so I come to understand this bit of land, its moods, its limitations, its possibilities. Only now can I take my ink and brush in hand and start to draw my plans.

But, strangely, in my mind the structure by now is fully planned, planned unconsciously, but complete in every detail. It has taken its form and character from the site and the passing street and the fragment of rock and the wafting breeze and the arching sun and the sound of the falls and the distant view.

Knowing the owner and his family and the things they like and the life they would like best to lead, I have found for them here on this land the pattern of living that brings them into the most ideal relationship with their land and the space around them, with their living environment. This structure, this house that I have planned, is no more than an arrangement of spaces, open and closed, accommodating and expressing in stone, timber, and rice paper a delightful pattern for their life on this land. How else can one plan the best home for this site?'

"There can be no other way! This, in Japan as elsewhere, is in simplest terms the planning process---for the home, the church, the city, the national park, and the superhighway.

"In America, rightly or wrongly, we planners approach our problems in a less contemplative frame of mind. We are 'less sensitive' (of which fact we are proud) and 'more practical' (a pathetic misnomer). We are rushed by pressure of time, economics, and the present public temperament. The planning process is accelerated, sometimes to the point of frenzy. But the principle remains the same---to realize a project on a site effectively, we must fully understand the program, and we must be fully aware of the physical properties of the site and of the total site environs. Our planning then becomes the science and art of arranging the best possible relationships."

Although I was alone and surrounded by building and land development activities that, in general, were mediocre in design and insensitive to the land, I felt a kinship to the anonymous Japanese architect and others like him. If I could accept my situation in the spirit of these kinsmen, rather than construing it as a low value architectural anomaly and myself as a failure in realizing my professional promise, perhaps, I too could render a sensitive, even inspired design, that would evolve out of my engagement with the resident spirit of this beautiful land.

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The Soquel Series

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A fifteen minute walk up over the saddle to the north and down a steep switchback single lane road brought me to the county road in the next valley. It was easy to catch a ride into Santa Cruz five miles down the road. In those days I would always encounter acquaintances in town. Today, I seldom see anyone who I know: a stranger in my home town. With my knapsack full of supplies, I'd catch a ride back up the valley.

Many times it was night. I hiked up the steep road, over the saddle, through a little forest and onto the land, confident in the starlit night of finding my way to the tent.

There were a few times in the first weeks when I had no will to proceed. I would just lie in the blue glow of the tent, content to watch the light change as the sun passed over from ridge to ridge, and then the darkness descending to fill the valley with the night. Occasionally, a poem would come to mind, inspired by my growing intimacy with the natural world I was a part of. I felt vaguely connected to the long line of hermit poets who had populated their own austerities through the ages..

I worked on the first phase of the design in my tent. An innovative site plan evolved from the conceptual work I had done before Hawaii. With a clear view of the overall development of the site, I proceeded to design the various individual components that would comprise a house composed of separate structures around a central grass acropolis. The detailed drawings for the first structure, the barn/workshop, out of which work would be done on the residential structures, developed easily. I began the commons building design. Another new pattern was being created as a result of my design.

Eventually, this innovative project established the standard in Santa Cruz County, by which to grant building permits for houses that were composed of multiple structures.

My time on the land ended and I was back in town. I found a small upstairs apartment over an old residence a block from the beach and a mile from my children's home. This was not at all how I imagined that I'd be living. I had no idea at first how to utilize the space for my life and work there. How was I to do my architectural design, paint, sleep, eat and entertain?

However, coupled with the constant sound of the ocean in the distance, there was a wonderful east light coming through the balcony door windows. This early light sustained itself by mixing with the light passing through two south facing windows as the sun traveled from east to west. All day, the natural light was perfect for painting or to light my drawing board. For me, the quality of light is most important. I believe it was the light that directed me in organizing the little apartment for the next nineteen years of creative work, rekindled social life and love.

Since I had received all the fees owed me for the first phase of the house design, and I didn't have another design project, I went to work with my landscape contractor friend as a landscape laborer. I had done design work for him also, receiving my modest professional fee. There being no design work, I signed on to do hard physical labor. I had no vehicle. I was turning forty five.

From books, I studied Hatha Yoga. Big mistake. I overextended and temporarily injured my lower back. It was a painful effort, by myself, to nurse myself back to health.

It took patience and a willingness to pay very close attention to my body. I realized that I

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knew nothing about Hatha Yoga. I needed a teacher. I soon found her. She had been trained by a world famous master. She was a very good teacher. I was an athlete, I was strong, could run fast and swim well in the ocean. I could do handstands and pushups. I was immediately humbled by my incapacity to properly do some of the simplest poses. I thought I should be in the intermediate class. My teacher gently suggested I attend the beginner's class.

David Teachout Falling Series # 18 acrylic on unprimed canvas 83x58

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From the Falling Series

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I embraced the Hatha Yoga practice. Within a year I was not only attending two classes a week, but was consistently practicing at least one hour a day in my studio.

Sometimes I'd do two sessions. As I approached my fiftieth birthday, I was in the best overall condition of my life.

I acquired a sturdy old Volvo station wagon, Mechanically good, cosmetically bad. But it got me where I needed to go in a dependable fashion. With the Volvo, I realized I had relinquished my attachment to having the right automobile that, in some curious way, had been an aspect of my persona since I was a teenager growing up in the car centered culture of Southern California.

I sketched out notions for new painting directions. Nothing clicked. Not that the ideas didn't hold interesting potentials, I just wasn't moved to enlarge on them.

Then, all of a sudden, my client called. Would I consider designing a seven house development near Santa Cruz that he and his two partners were beginning. Unfortunately, and as usually occurs, they had already laid out the road and lots. The very work that I could have done with an integrated view of site and buildings in mind, had already established conditions that created unnecessary limitations.

I said I would do it if they agreed to make it a solar development and total environmental design that would integrate the structures and landscape. They agreed.

Within a year the building began. The plans were faithfully executed by a custom builder. The dozen people they anticipated for the open house to kick off the sale of the houses, turned into hundreds on Saturday and again on Sunday. There was a four page color spread in the Los Angeles Times Sunday magazine. Awards were given for innovation and outstanding project by the builder's association. The regional newspaper featured the project in an in depth article. For over thirty years, these seven houses have, by design, utilized the direct energy of the sun to maintain comfort without reliance on fossil fuels. They have benefited also, from the productive gardens planted along with the building of the houses. Not perfect by any means, for the developers who didn't fully trust the sun, insisted on expensive and, generally, unnecessary backup systems. I realized as I designed, that even though the project fell well short of my ideal, that it was better to do something in the right direction design and energy wise, than nothing.

It was, in the realm of small suburban develop, a radical design. Much of what was done there is invisible: the careful siting of buildings within very limiting conditions, the subtle modulations of the topography, the light that permeates all the rooms in the homes, the privacy in a tight situation, the quiet warm dignity of the spatial organization and use of materials.

The seven solar house project was followed by another more ambitious one: forty townhouses. I increased my insistence to 100% solar buildings, and a productive organic garden throughout.

A detailed preliminary plan was designed and a model carefully constructed. The county supervisors were mystified but supportive. However, my clients had neglected to fully understand the larger issue of access to and from the proposed project site. With no resolution possible for this planning requirement that should have been dealt with long

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before, they abandoned the project. Thus, I had some income, and a starting place for my next phase in painting.

As I settled into my upstairs studio, I began to see, with more subtlety, the nature of the space I was becoming accustomed to call home. I was beginning to see it with a painter's eye. A window frame was many tones of light and dark, of color. The movement of light through the glass revealed space that was seamless inside to outside. The forms I saw were bands of color, not walls, textures, not shingles, a juxtaposition of many shades of light.

East window 6-84 dated Diptych

A window was a place to begin. Both a physical and metaphoric portal into the next phase in my painter's life. The window was not to be realistically rendered but, instead, would be the visual catalyst for transformation in color and form upon the paper's field of white. My eye had come alive again. This simple catalytic device of window, was infinite in its possibilities. It had been a long journey back to painting.

Primarily with acrylic paint, sometimes with watercolor or pastels, I painted using the windows in my small home as initiators of paintings that became self referential expressions. Early on, some paintings retained an association with the window I was using as a starting point for painting. I purposely painted a few that were clearly meant to be descriptive. However, as I progressed, the paintings lost any real correspondence to their visual source and stood on their own. As it seems always my tendency, I began to think larger. Could I scale up my approach to large size canvases that I liked to work on?

I took time off to draw from the figure at a weekly coop drawing session. Some drawings were developed further back at the studio. I experimented with mono prints

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from paint on glass. I incorporated a few of my poems into paintings for friends. When I was asked to illustrate a chapbook of short short stories, I took out the sumi brush and spontaneously painted oriental looking black and white images.

My father knew nothing about art. Paintings were not his interest. I gave my parents an early abstract oil painting. They hung it the living room across from my father's chair. He never said much about the painting, or my choice to be an artist. A few years later, he told me that he had looked at the painting everyday, and had come to sincerely enjoy it. He talked about what he saw, how he saw it. He had truly seen the painting. I was moved that my father could honor me so sincerely.

Nicaraguan Passion North Window

I view time as wealth. When I have time, I can do nothing or, I can engage deeply in the creative process. The lack of the burden of possessions is liberating. The real work has little to do with property ownership in the contemporary sense.

It is obvious, that with a finite amount of land on our planet, increased demand will drive up so-called value, and progressively limit ownership to fewer and fewer people. Ultimately, we must look at our residency here on earth in an ecological way, in a way that works for everyone, not just the diminishing number of the privileged few. In the broadest sense, we must cooperate if our human experiment is to continue. I don't pretend

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to live in some perfectly ecological manner. Being a painter in a studio is a very individualistic activity. I rent property on which I live. I have little control over most of what happens here. But the quality of the days is good. There is peace and harmony here.

Wholesome food. A good attitude. When the occasional visitor comes, they find a bit of solace here, some kindness, a good spirit. None of these qualities are dependent upon ownership.

My work for my client where I lived in a tent for six months, gave me an introduction to two more clients. An out of state doctor asked me to design a house on the western ridge, just above the earlier project. I designed a spiral solar house. The concept was accepted and I completed the working drawings, including perspective drawings of the house. The client never submitted the plans for building, and died shortly after the plans were completed.

After seeing my earlier project below the forty acre property they had purchased on the wooded ridge to the north, a scientist couple from Southern California retained me to design their retirement home. Utilizing the hexagonal grid, I designed a compound of multiple structures that was almost energy free for climate control. It was a rambling, beautiful home sited with great care. A detailed house and topographical model was crafted to show in 3D the nature of the buildings, and how they fit into the environment.

There were many construction details. The clients were very demanding. They were the elite with large government contracts and high paying professional jobs, with generous retirement; all the benefits. Yet, when they came to the alternative world of Santa Cruz, they expected highly professional work for low wages.

I worked hard over a period of years to design, draw and specify for a home that was 100% custom to meet their requirements. When construction began, they prohibited me from consulting with the builder, who had built my previous projects, unless they authorized each consultation. This silly directive placed an obstruction in the way of a smooth, coordinated building process. In a few instances, I ignored this order, and consulted with the builder for free. After nearly ten years of on and off intense work and lengthy communications with them, they balked at paying a miniscule fee for consultation work that they had authorized. I could not continue in this distrustful manner. I have never seen the completed project.

Part way through the construction process, their imperious behavior caused my builder friend to leave the project. They lost the two most important people involved in the project because of this imperious attitude.

It is the siphoning of one's creative energy that causes one to turn away from architecture as one's primary creative endeavor. Many years of one's precious life can be co-opted by the whims and behavior of clients. Looking back, I find it hard to believe that the quantity and quality of work I did, was for so little pay.

This soliloquy of designer blues is common to many, if not most architects. I present it here, to show why painting in a studio is more likely to allow the artist a less compromised and truer expression of his engagement in the creative process.

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East Window 6.9.84 date

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The window paintings on paper inspired me to think larger. After a false start experimenting with oils, I returned to the acrylic staining technique that allowed the paint to bond more deeply with the canvas support. Amazingly, I was able to configure my small home into a painting studio for large paintings. I built an easel wall four feet from the wall at one end of the twenty foot long room. I could stand back sixteen feet from a painting. It was sufficient. The light was even from top to bottom at the painting wall. My colors were not distorted by warm or cool light. During the whole day, it was possible to see my work without it being compromised by poor lighting. At night, my lights approximated the excellence of the daytime lighting.

I began the 'Santa Cruz' series, which originated in the earlier 'Window' paintings on paper. Within the context of referencing windows as inspiration for paintings, I brought my experience with color into play. It was liberating to be painting large. The paintings quickly transcended visual associations to their generative window forms. As I painted, unexpected visual clues appeared that directed me in the evolution of the series.

The diagonal line appeared in the Santa Cruz paintings early on, sometimes as the limit of an area of color, but just as likely traversing the field of color. Power lines that had a negative connotation to me as visual pollution, had one day, been seen without prejudice. The lines, in my eyes, merged with space, were integral to the spatial color field that they traversed. And, the lines changed color in the changing light of the day.

They were no less important than any other object in view. In the beginning these lines in nature influenced the composition of a painting. But as the series evolved, the lines became pure artifacts whose only reference was to the particular painting they inhabited.

There was never an intention to evoke a spatial illusion with diagonal lines. Yet, for those viewers who associate a diagonal angling through an area of color as creating 'space', let them enjoy their association with optical trickery. In the context of the Santa Cruz series, this may be important for others, but not for the artist.

As the series progressed, the idea arose that the diagonal lines could be the primary form expressed within the overall color field of the painting, and that the rectilinear associations to the shape of the canvas itself could be echoed by the presence of squares defined primarily by their diagonals rather than by their perimeters.

If one allows associative thinking to prevail, then the diagonals could have emotional and symbolic meanings. In the creation of the paintings, such was not the case in the mind of the artist. But, inevitably, there will be a tendency toward association and abstraction by viewers unaware of the self referential nature of the paintings.

The two diagonals that define a square, that form an X, could imply a crossing out, a rejection of the painting, or more generally, a rejection of painting in this manner altogether.

The marking of an X in the appropriate box is characteristic in the paper work of the bureaucratic world that so dominates our lives. There could be the association to the X signature of a person who cannot write but only draw. X marks the spot on treasure maps drawn by pirates.

Associations could be made to the structural integrity of right angled planar forms in building, (or in the structure of the stretcher bars of a painting), which require diagonal members to ensure structural stability.

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From the Santa Cruz Series Acrylic on Canvas, 76-66 Inch, 1984

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Spatial, symbolic and structural associations have little importance to me. I see the Santa Cruz Series paintings that evolved from the Window Series, which utilized the immediate physical landscape for inspiration, as evolved two-dimensional images that, as the series developed, became devoid of references to the landscape that had given them birth.

As the series evolved, there was an increasing preoccupation with the two diagonals of a single square that filled most of the visual field. The process of searching for the definitive diagonals of a particular square, was achieved by a layering of transparent paint and an opposite covering up or painting out in a selective manner.

Thus, the diagonal lines that formed an X, as well as other lines in the painting, were generally resultants of a painterly process rather than simply drawn upon the surface.

Consistent with my interest in exploring color fields without focal points, a desire to create an 'all overness' and the absence of the contrast of figure and ground, or at least the creation of ambiguity, I created then destroyed, or altered, and created again until these repeated applications of paint resulted in a painting that felt 'right' In later Santa Cruz series the crossing diagonals separated, resulting in upper and lower V shaped lines that replaced, or evolved from the X associated with the search for the square. Earth/sky, mountain/cloud, up/down, ascending/descending, yin/yang, etc., could be associated with this form. However, for the painter, there is a more fundamental view.

Beyond the formal structure of the painting, color considerations are primary.

And, more deeply and much more difficult to articulate, is the feeling of being an organic part of an evolutionary creative movement, in which objects we call paintings manifest as resultants of a process that is mostly a mystery.

Coincidentally, as the 'Santa Cruz' series evolved, I began drawing or, as I conceived it, 'constructing water'. I had been fascinated for years with the phenomena of interference waves. I spent many hours observing how ocean waves would angle into one another, add together their wave height amplitudes, and instantly spring up as a higher wave at the moment they were simultaneously in the same place at the same time. I observed the complex texture of the ocean's surface that was the resultant of the interaction of many different waves of various amplitudes and direction. From my sea level view as I swam, I imagined that I could almost see the structure of the constantly changing salt water topography I was immersed in.

On a large rectangle of Arches paper that had been primed with a diluted solution of gesso, I drew a set of parallel lines. I repeated this process at a different angle and with different spacing. I repeated this process once more. The resultant was a three directional grid. I drew a sine wave along each line, varying the length and height of the wave on each of the three directional grid lines. At the grid intersections, I drew a vertical line onto which I plotted the sum of the amplitudes of the three waves at that location. They might add up to a much higher wave, or the negative amplitudes might cancel out any height or depress the intersecting waves into a trough. When all these points had been plotted, I joined them together with a different color line. The implied 'ocean' surface resulted.

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Acrylic on Canvas, 76-66 inch, 1985

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These drawings were done in quiet nights alone in my small studio home. They required constant attention to detail. Line weight was important. It takes a real commitment and narrow focus to develop these complex drawings. There is an interesting play between technical drawing and the resultant expression of an undulating surface, which doesn't feel 'technical'. The point was not to make a representational ocean scene, but to evoke in a literal manner the very structural dynamic that creates the water's surface topography. Since that time thirty years ago, I haven't continued the 'Ocean' drawings. I've made notes, thought about the project, but haven't been willing to commit myself to such a narrow framework in which to create. If I had been drawing architecturally, I'm not willing to spend more time at the drawing board. One gets tired of such close work, and the desire is to move on to more expansive activities.

The 'Santa Cruz' paintings continued to evolve. The focus on the diagonals that has been described above, was becoming more important about this time. There was a growing body of poems that was accumulating from the previous fifteen years of writing.

The idea of publishing a book of poetry entered my mind. During the years that followed, this idea enlarged itself to a commitment to publish a 'real' book of poetry. I had discovered, that deep within me was a long term desire, perhaps even from childhood, to create a book of poems. This deep desire was realized in 2012 by the publication of Ten Thousand Things, Poems by David Teachout. It is a collection of about 120 poems written over a forty year period. My son, Devin, a leading graphic designer in Germany, designed and did the layout of the book, and sent the completed copy to the printer electronically. For years, I had a sense of the imagery for the cover. My attempts at finding just the right one fell short. Devin sent several designs that I wouldn't accept.

Then a family friend offered a photograph he had taken right in the area where most of the poems had been written, an image that corresponded closely to what I had in mind.

For me, publishing the poetry book is a very important milestone in my life. I would be very disappointed, if in my last days, I realized that I was never going to complete this personal task that was of such fundamental importance to me.

I was in excellent condition from my Yoga practice, running and swimming at the beach. I hiked into the Desolation Wilderness in the mountains west of Lake Tahoe. I didn't have much experience in the back country. However, I felt quite content there.

Long hours by myself wandering off the trail to a high Sierra lake where I was alone seemed to suit me. I was a little concerned to come across the only other footprint on the high meadow that I crossed, to be that of a large bear. Coming down the mountain with the pure blue of Lake Tahoe displayed below me, I realized that my singular manner of living, which was relatively acceptable, and at times perfect for me, was no longer necessary. If the right person, the right woman appeared in my life, and she was willing, her companionship would be most welcome.

In 1986 my life was abruptly and forever changed by the sudden entry of my new companion. Twenty seven years later we are together still, the man and woman who declared, in the native way, our marriage to one another.

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David Teachout Santa Cruz #31 copy right 1994 76x72

My companion wife is an Inupiaq Malemuit woman from an ancient arctic village in the Bering Straits region. Her maternal grandfather was the last head man, chief, of the village. He was the shaman son of her great grandfather who came from farther north to resettle his clan in the village that had been decimated by small pox.

Her other grandfather harpooned down the first airplane he ever saw. Her grandmothers were highly competent in traditional food gathering and preparation, fishing and some hunting, garment making from animal products, healing and child care,

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Mary was born on the site of the former Russian fort/trading post, which had become her grandfather's land. Her father built a small house on the plot where she, the fourth child of eleven, was born. Immediately, her grandmother Selma 'adopted' her, and as she grew, taught her the traditional native lore. There was no electricity. The wilderness was a step away. Wild animals visited the village. Her grandparents, and to a degree her parents, were fully capable of sustaining themselves, as had their ancestors for thousands of years, without destructive technologies, goods and beliefs that were being thrust upon them by American colonization. Her parents lived through the years that had seen a self sufficient culture able to sustain itself indefinitely in an arctic environment, crumble into a fragmented, dispirited, wholly dependent appendage of a violent and dominant America. The knowledge gained in the genocidal destruction of American Indian cultures in the Lower 48, was employed to fast forward the colonization of the arctic. Out of this remarkable culture, who missionaries and others described as 'uncivilized', dirty and stupid, came a most beautiful, spirited and intelligent woman.

I'm not here to tell her story, for she has told it most eloquently herself. Enough to say, her excellence in academics, her writing skills and her fearless willingness to enter the belly of the beast far to the south, garnered her a four year Regents Scholarship to the University of California Santa Cruz. For sixteen years we lived in the same coastal town, passing each other like ships in the dark. And, then late one day, overlooking the sea, we were suddenly facing one another in the commencement of a rich, spirited and creative life together.

Her native soul was hurting. Years of trying to figure out and adapt to white ways had been wearing on her. The traditional arctic elders who she might turn to for counseling, for compassionate guidance, were absent in the hard edge modernity that had little regard for this vital native woman, who was trying her best to live in this foreign culture.

One day, she met the native elder who she could trust and council with. He was elderly and the real thing. A consummate traditional spiritual leader, a chief in his home, he was a master healer, ceremonial leader and prophet. He carried his American Indian traditional wisdom and power with an uncommon grace in the midst of the chaotic modern world. He lived two blocks away. She could talk with him whenever she wanted.

And, what a pleasure for him to gain a native woman friend here in foreign territory.

And so, began our immersion in Native American spirituality, ceremony, friendship and state of mind. Since she had grown up fearing Indians who were the ancient enemy of the Inupiaq, like me, she was introduced, or invited in and trusted with indigenous knowledge, old ways in this newly defined land of California.

My small home studio could not accommodate our life together and my painting. I found a large studio across town, not far from where I had lived and painted the large 'Circle' paintings. The sculptor owner worked outside in stone, and didn't need the spacious high ceiling studio. There was a smaller adjacent studio rented out to another artist.

It was a stretch financially, and I was uneasy about commuting to my studio, rather than having my work and home in one place as I preferred and was used to.

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I moved in and began work. I scaled up the 'Santa Cruz' paintings to the maximum size that would fit through doors, and just under the vertical dimension of standard height house walls. I was surrounded. The sculptor chiseled away with power equipment at his precious Carrera marble from Italy. The fellow in the neighboring studio, shuffled and creaked to loud music. I felt like an intruder, very much the outsider in another's domain.

I persisted and accommodated somewhat to the disturbances, which were not always happening when I was there.

While at this studio, I was approached with an invitation to show my work in a solo exhibition at a Bay Area university. The transport truck arrived and took my paintings, primarily the recent 'Santa Cruz' series, for the exhibit.

I was severely disappointed. The show was poorly lit. Warm, uneven lighting destroyed the colors. Translucent blues and greens were turned into grays. The curator friend who I had entrusted my work, was incompetent, and I don't think she realized that she was. The show was poorly received. I was glad to get my work back in the studio undamaged.

David Teachout Santa Cruz # 28 76x72

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By this time, a second major work of mine had been purchased and given to Occidental College. It was part of the 100 year anniversary exhibition at the college, enlarging their collection of my work to two. Over the years, three more major paintings of mine have been added, bringing the total number of paintings in the Occidental College collection to five. I was pleased with the care they took with my paintings.

I completed the detailed working drawings, in the studio, for the large custom solar house based on a hexagonal geometry. Then, I moved again to a small backyard studio a short bike ride around the harbor from our home. Once again, I was in the midst of someone else's home. But their life was focused away from the studio. I detected a rift in the marriage.

I took on a custom house design in the Central Valley. It was a beautiful and radical design on a country site with a large pond. The clients wanted something original; they implied that they wanted architecture not just building. They got it. I'm very happy with the house that I designed for them, that was perfectly sited, fully responsive to client program, maximized the use of solar energy while protecting from the sun and controlling the wind on the exposed site.

I worked hard in my little studio to meet their arbitrary deadline that had been thrown into the mix late in the game. I presented them with a magnificent and wholly original house that met the spirit of their program. The open invitation to design something special was, at the presentation, turned against me. They were very disrespectful to me and, criticized details that hadn't been addressed at this preliminary stage. They generalized the imaginary details into a critique of the larger project, which was midway toward full development. They owed me a sizable fee for my work. I left my statement with them and made the three hour drive home. The encounter was nerve wrenching. Trust, or the impression of trust, turned into enmity was disturbing to me.

There was no justification for such behavior. Then, I realized, as I have realized again since then, that the real issue was my presence as an authority in the domain of a man who was in charge, the authority in his home. He made the money. He made the decisions. This interloper, by invitation, had trespassed into his private controlled domain and challenged his authority. This was the dynamic being played out in the guise of designing a house. I never received payment for my work.

Despite the disturbing experience with the disrespectful client, I continued painting the 'Santa Cruz' series. One day, as I painted, the diagonal lines that formed an X figure filling most of the canvas, separated. It became a V figure above and below. It was as if a cell split into two cells, or two thoughts engendered a new and different thought.

Something had happened. There had been an evolution from the window paintings on paper, which gave rise to the 'Santa Cruz' series, to a focus on the diagonals and the sudden leap into a new form unrecognizable to its ancestors: a mutation.

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If it made sense to rationalize this event, and it doesn't, one would postulate that all that went before was a sequential evolution to achieve this startling result. But this linear analysis doesn't fit the situation. The process is much more opaque and uncertain.

In painting, there is no certainty what will happen. The task is to see whatever is happening and respond or not. There is a resultant, a product, that occurs. The painter decides to paint more or to stop. Much of the success in art is to know when to stop.

I continued my architectural and landscape architectural design work simultaneously with painting the final paintings in the 'Santa Cruz' series. I was not sure if the mutated diagonals signaled the beginning of a new series or the final expression in the evolution of the 'Santa Cruz' series.

A few years before, I had been retained to site plan and design structures for a large organic farm up the coast from Santa Cruz. The unique packing shed/barn had been built right in the field it served. The family company expanded into Baja California where they encouraged a whole region to return to organic growing. There was a need for on site worker housing. I began design of what became independent solar bungalows arrayed just above the terraced hillside of organic crops. It is the finest agricultural housing in the state. Families are able to settle there and raise children, and to simply step out the door and walk a short distance on beautiful country land to their work in the fields and packing shed. A real architectural success story amidst the debris caused by mean spirited clients.

I was interviewed on site by a San Francisco TV station who did a documentary of the farm.

It was a beautiful day in October. Warm, clear, the best time always in Santa Cruz and at the beach. I prepared to go to the beach a block away for my usual before dinner run and swim. I urged my wife to leave her writing table and come with me. Her usual resistance was overcome and she gladly climbed down the low cliff and onto the wide sand beach. We hiked across to the calm ocean edge and stood on the hard wet sand. I looked seaward and noticed a flight of seagulls in an unusual formation: a sort of threedimensional grid or matrix, rather than their usual linear pattern of flight together. Those seagulls know something, I said. Maybe there's an earthquake coming.

A few seconds later, the earth did quake; violently. The roar came at us from the land. Houses wobbled, chimneys toppled, parts of the cliff we had just climbed down, collapsed. The roar ripped through the sand, and ground away beneath our feet, like a giant grinding wheel just beneath the surface of the wet sand. We knew, immediately, that it was a major quake. We didn't know how big or where the epicenter was.

We climbed the cliff and walked toward our home. Most houses had stood their ground. It was important to shut off gas pipes serving houses, to preclude fire.

Surprisingly, not many windows had been broken. It had appeared to me from the beach, that right angled structures had been transformed into trapezoids during the quake. I expected broken glass everywhere.

Our old beach house was still standing. It appeared to be undamaged on the outside. Inside was a different matter. The file cabinet was overturned. The refrigerator door had sprung open, disgorged its contents and closed again. Books littered the floor.

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Teachout moving his paintings from 1st ave studio in Santa Cruz California.

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A powerful aftershock caused our house to buck and sway. We hurried down the stairs and into the relative safety of the front yard, well away from any structures. The ground was alive, trembling. The effect was disorienting. Each time I ventured inside to retrieve a needed item; radio, telephone, jacket, shoes, food and drink, I was driven out by an aftershock.

We took stock. We would need our tent and camping equipment to set up in the front yard until it was safe to return to our house. All this equipment was a mile away in a storage unit. The roads might be impassable, so rather than drive the car, I rode my bike down around the harbor and toward the storage yard. There were dislocations of two feet in the road surface. Steam rose up out of the injured earth below. It was a scene out of 'Blade Runner'. I packed the camping gear onto the bike and made my way home through the damaged roads. We settled in for an undetermined stay in our front yard campground.

Once we regained our orientation, we volunteered our Datsun station wagon for use by the Red Cross. I ferried folks from the main disaster center to the showers at the park.

It took awhile to comprehend the level of destruction that had occurred.

Downtown Santa Cruz was devastated. People were killed. A freeway had collapsed in Oakland. The epicenter was close by at a familiar location. Recently, I read the definitive description of the 1989 Loma Prieta Quake in John McPhee's book, Assembling California. When visitors arrived from out of town, they quickly abandoned us, and hurried to downtown Santa Cruz to see the damage for themselves.

As the personal and environmental dramas unfolded in our local life, the wars and conflicts engendered by US policies raged on. The Vietnam war had ended. However, when over two million people die and their land is devastated by bombs and poisons, the war will not be over in their lifetimes. The right wing armies and militias in the Central American killing fields, continued their US supported atrocities. There seemed no end to state sanctioned terror.

The Iraq Iran war raged on with little interest among the citizenry of the US. The overthrow of the democratic government of Iran by US agents in 1953, and the installation of the Shah and his brutal Savak secret police, had engendered the inevitable reaction and the return of Islamic fundamentalist to power following the Shah's decline. It was all about access to oil and control of production. The post WWII western economic machine was literally fueled and lubricated by oil. The US, along with Saudi Arabia, allied itself with Saddam Hussein against Iran. Negotiations proceeded to acquire Iraq's oil. Saddam was our guy in the Gulf. As the US supplied intelligence for our ally to gas the Iranians many times, he turned the gas on his own citizens. Saddam was just one of the long line of brutal dictators that the US saw fit to deal with for many years.

Kuwait, created by the British as a stepping stone to India as their empire declined, came on the radar. The unbelievably wealthy autocratic rulers of Kuwait called for help, then ran for cover in the palatial hotels of Switzerland, the gambling casinos of Monaco, and painful exile in Paris. Many of their citizens remained to resist the Iraqi aggression. A massive armada led by the US surged into the Gulf and declared war on Iraq in defense of the poor frightened Emir of Kuwait. Saddam was not willing to sell oil

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cheaply or lose control of the immense reserve in Iraq to western corporations. He was instantly re-figured from ally to enemy. The attack was on.

The propaganda mills worked overtime. Smart bombs did dumb things. And then, almost as soon as it started, the Gulf War was over. Kuwait awaited the return of the Emir. Not exactly MacArthur returning to the Philippines. But first, our army builders had to install gold faucets in the Emir's bathrooms, to make it right for him to return from his one-half-million-dollar-a-day exile in a Swiss hotel.

Kuwait was in chaos. The Americans were in charge. There were weapons everywhere. People were being killed. Almost immediately, the Kuwaiti purge of Palestinian residents began. Saddam raged around Iraq like a mad bull, laying waste to large tracts of land and murdering his citizens. What had been achieved in all this warring? Had a real peace occurred? Had a workable and fair trade exchange been instituted? Had human rights improved? Or had the most recent incarnation of imperial power simply established its military presence in the Gulf? Take down the British flag and raise the American, and continue to support autocratic, woman abusing regimes in exchange for oil, military bases and dominance. The goal; to gain access and control of Iraqi oil, and eventually, Iranian oil lost to the Iranian revolution. And of course, to escort the brave Emir of Kuwait back into his gold plated palace.

As the propaganda fueled frenzy justifying another war kept the acquiescent media and congress busy in their cheerleading roles, we along with millions of others in the US and around the world, marched and gathered in our city rising from the earthquake induced ruins. We cried out against a policy of warring that was, ultimately, a policy of grief. The Vietnam vet I stood beside, suddenly was transported to the bloody killing field in Vietnam, the helicopter sounds throbbing in his head. He was the iconic injured soldier who never came home from the war.

The great march against the war filled the streets of San Francisco. In the front rank were the Vietnam Veterans Against the War. And just behind them were my two sons. How proud I was of them. Two young men who braved the consequences of not signing up for the draft. Two young men who traveled the world with only shoulder bags, making friends, not enemies: warriors for peace.

The war ended in Kuwait. Chaos ruled. I had seen an article in the local paper about a local man of Lebanese origins, who was on a campaign to rescue his sister who was injured and trapped in Kuwait. There was considerably more to the story.

Across the parking lot from the destroyed bookshop that had been a central part of our Santa Cruz life, I saw the man from the newspaper article. He was busy collating stacks of informative literature about his sister's plight in Kuwait, to send to people who might help to free her. I introduced myself. Could I help him?

Naim was a dynamo. Since his immigration into the US ten years before to escape the violence in Lebanon, he had evolved his used book business into buying and selling and collecting paintings. He was good at it. His cultural connection to the Middle East, his fearless ability to think on his feet, and fast growing knowledge of his profession, were indicative of an international business in the long run.

As we worked I learned his story. Although his ancient ancestral home was in South Lebanon, in the hills, not far from the current imposed border with Israel, his

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family had also lived in Kuwait where his father worked for the Kuwaiti government.

During the Gulf War, when Iraqi troops invaded Kuwait, his father, two brothers and his sister were active in the underground resistance against the invaders. The wealthy royal families left the country to its fate. Ironically, Naim's Lebanese family stayed to resist in a country to which they had no allegiance.

One week after the Gulf War's end in the midst of the ensuing chaos, as the early morning call to prayer echoed across the house tops, an armed Kuwaiti officer entered the family home. He ordered Naim's sister to tie her father and one brother, who was there, to chairs. Then, he forced her into the next room and raped her twice. As she lay there he drew out his gun and shot her in the head. Miraculously, she was not killed. A moment later she regained consciousness in time to hear the shots that executed her father and her brother. She was paralyzed in one leg but could see and talk. A neighbor came to help.

The assassin had been trained a few months earlier at Fort Dix, New Jersey in the US. The reasons for these brutal acts have never been fully revealed.

Naim's injured sister lay deteriorating in a Kuwaiti hospital. An American reporter happened on her, and she begged him to take a message to her brother in America. She was in danger. It was only a matter of time before she would die from her injuries, or from another assassination attempt.

Day and night, Naim reached out for help. There was a need for a letter describing the events and why help was desperately needed. Naim did not have the skill in his second language, or the time to write a convincing letter. Would I write it on his behalf? I said yes. Three years later, we were still writing letters.

He talked through what he wanted to say and I took notes. I wrote a draft by hand and read it to him. We fine tuned the draft and then I typed it on an electronic typewriter.

He signed the letter and made many copies.

In a few months, his efforts paid off. His sister was taken to Lebanon and then on to the US, where a Doctors Without Borders surgeon volunteered to operate on her in order to save her life. She responded and regained her health, but was left with a partially paralyzed leg. She was given asylum in the US, eventually married and lives in the Southwest.

There was more to do. Mainly, to obtain justice and reparations from Kuwait for its crimes against the family. The loss of a father and a brother to an American trained Kuwaiti assassin, and the rape and attempted murder of his sister, were crimes that must be brought before a proper court of law to obtain justice, and before the court of public opinion, to enshrine these criminal acts against these innocent people in the collective memory.

The letters went everywhere to anyone in power and with influence. The European and Arab press began to print them in translated form. They became a sort of human rights drama in serial form, as readers followed the evolution of the case that the letters addressed. One letter after another was sent to members of congress, governors, presidents, members of parliament, kings, princes, diplomats, academics, editors, artists, the media. Well on into the campaign, we wrote a many paged letter detailing the crimes and call for justice, which was included in thick packets of informational material, which Naim personally delivered to each member of congress in Washington DC. Every letter sent during the more than three year effort, told in detail the terrible story of the assassin's

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crimes and demanded justice and restitution. The minister of information in Kuwait, banned any newspaper from being distributed in Kuwait that printed the letters.

It was a daunting and unrelenting effort by Naim. He was exhausted and deep into debt with astronomical phone bills for long distance calls and faxing all over the world.

Copying and postage costs were increasing as the months turned into years.

His efforts were rewarded, but only to a degree. The assassin was brought before a Kuwaiti court in a show trial. Naim's brave sister stood in court and identified her rapist and assassin, and the killer of her father and brother. Her rape allegations were disallowed, because it was stated that Kuwaiti men don't rape. The assassin was convicted on the other charges and given a light sentence in a comfortable Kuwaiti jail. If he is still alive, he is most likely free as I write this.

Knowing personally these people who had suffered such brutality, which was directly related to American policies and behavior, was very troubling to me. I had no say about what Kuwaiti royalty does, but I did have, in a most naive way, a say in America about what America does. I realized that this say was infinitesimally small. However, a vestigial belief remained from my idealistic childhood, closer to Jimmy Stewart or Gary Cooper, that the ordinary citizen could influence events in a good way. In general, this view is a joke in this age when money rules. The security state is omnipresent, listening in to everyone: 1984 upgraded to 2013. The will to change this undemocratic state of affairs is missing. Our president, is the prime example of what money can buy in a politician, sanctions torture and targeted killings anywhere in the world, continues a policy of warrantless access to citizen's communications and defends an out of control security state, shills for the nuclear power industry, talks about reduction of America's nuclear weapons, while continuing nuclear weapons development, has broken his promise to shut down Guantanamo nearly four years ago, wouldn't even talk about a single payer health plan, so that private insurance corporations would be guaranteed their profits for years to come. My Jimmy Stewart and Gary Cooper youthful simple-minded belief in a good American democracy, had been superceded by the realization that I live in imperialistic times, in an imperial America controlled by the very rich and powerful military/industrial/government complex, which believes that the world and its resources are up for grabs.

Many years ago, I vowed to live a simple life with a minimum of possessions, one where time was wealth and creativity ruled. How I live each day is my contribution to a saner world. As minimally as possible, I try not to tie my economics to the ups and downs of the larger society. I've learned to pay attention to my state of mind and do my best to act, not react. Trust in the creative impulse that has been given me, informs and gives shape to my life as an artist.

Although I didn't make art as a way of influencing my world in a political way, I did realize that there was a power inherent in artful expression that had the potential to affect events. I meditated on this relationship of art to life and decided, about the time of the Gulf War, to write about my experience as a naval aviator. The novel that emerged from that intention can be characterized as the irony of the beauty of flight in the service of war. I wrote both as an artist creating a work of art in written form, and in

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condemnation of atomic warfare. I told a story based on my experience as an atomic bomb pilot, with a mission to bomb China that almost occurred. Through story, I wanted to inform readers of the clear and present danger of the US fundamental policy that backs up its geopolitical dominance in the world with the threat of the use of nuclear weapons.

It is important to me to have the novel appreciated as literature; a work of art. I don't know how anyone who reads it might react, but I do hope that there will be a readership who will be moved to question their personal contribution to the continuation of the nuclear weapons option, as basic US policy in asserting its dominant power in the world.

Upon receiving my wings and officer's commission after 18 months training, I joined an all weather jet fighter squadron in California. At twenty one, I was the youngest pilot in the squadron.

We had four missions: air to air combat; air to ground attack; night intercept, for which we were radar equipped, and special weapons. Special Weapons was a classic military euphemism for atomic bombs. We were designated as Special Weapons Delivery Pilots, with a top secret mission. The bomb that we were trained to 'deliver' was twelve times more powerful than the Hiroshima bomb dropped only ten years before.

It was a time when atomic warfare was openly contemplated by government and military planners. Two atomic bombs had been offered to the French as they made their last stand in Indo China the year before I arrived at the squadron. They had not accepted the offer. My squadron commander came directly from flying in support of the French who insisted in reclaiming their colonial domination in Indo China after the defeat of Japan. The Vietnamese thought otherwise.

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Since that time as a young man, hardly more than a boy, flying in the supersonic skies with the terrible potential of possibly 'delivering' an atomic bomb somewhere in Asia, I became aware that I had been an agent for an aggressive, imperial America, who shamefully allied with dictators, overthrew popular governments, attacked innocent people, laid waste and poisoned 'enemy' lands, and turned loose corporate buccaneers to take natural resources wherever they might be. US military bases and ships were present all around the world. The Monroe Doctrine still held sway as the US continued its dominance of the Western Hemisphere. An expansive Soviet Union, a former ally now enemy, was a big problem. President Truman had set the American geopolitical course, by dropping bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. The fundamental reason for the use of these bombs, was to show the Soviets, and the world, that at base, atomic warfare was the ultimate US policy for dominance in the post WWII world.

In 1956 while flying from an aircraft carrier off the Chinese coast, our squadron was ordered to prepare to bomb China. Our secret clearance was raised to top secret. We were given flight packets that detailed our missions. Before the mission was launched it was aborted and we went back to our ordinary operations. I believe I was the youngest pilot in the world who was trained to 'deliver' an atomic bomb at that time; perhaps ever.

I thought about this unique experience, and as the years passed, developed a larger view of the context of this experience. I was concerned with my relatively unconscious role as an agent for the use of such destructive force. I was just another young man, like millions of other young men, who had been conditioned to believe in the rightness, the infallibility of the United States in world affairs. I was the current incarnation of the warrior who fought the enemies who threatened our free capitalistic democracy or, as it was commonly expressed, our way of life. The Department of War was reassigned the euphemistic name of The Department of Defense. Halfway around the world, we were ordered to defend freedom in America by an atomic bomb attack on China. The defenders had become the aggressors, in this Orwellian reversal of meanings. The true task of a warrior to protect and defend those who cannot protect and defend themselves, was thoroughly corrupted in the redefinition of defense as war. In America, the formerly unthinkable policy of preemptive military action, war, had become, and remains the policy to support the overall goal of 'full spectrum dominance' in world affairs.

Day after day our photo jets flew west from the carrier, to crisscross Vietnam and Laos to map the terrain for the war to come. The Japanese were gone from Indo China, the French colonialists were gone. The indigenous peoples there could not be left to reclaim their cultures in their own land. The first wave of American operatives were already in Vietnam as our photo jets mapped the countryside. America was on the move again, wagging war in the name of peace.

Story is the way into a reader's heart. Could the telling of my particular story evoke a larger understanding. It seemed to me that this history was slipping away. The younger generations who have grown up within our security state, which possesses a nuclear arsenal that can destroy the world, seem to be unaware or unconcerned about this invisible potential for destruction. One man, our president, with no consultation with the

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peoples' representatives, within a few minutes can unleash these terrible weapons upon the world. There is something inherently wrong with so much centralized power in what is supposed to be a democracy.

For years, I wrote to my representatives about nuclear armaments, their development, deployment and use: the US power position in the world based on the willingness to maintain and to use the largest stockpile of nuclear weapons in the world to ensure dominance. Nothing changed. My only power was as an artist. And so, I began to write.

At first I thought I was writing an essay. But, I was actually writing a chapter of a novel. This beginning engendered another chapter and then another. The story that had been coiled in my memory, released its potential and gradually took on a written form: the novel, Burden of Ashes.

I had written the novella, Being President, just before commencing to write Burden of Ashes. The novella's first lines came into my mind spontaneously. I thought the phrase that wouldn't go away might be the beginning of a poem. It wasn't. As I wrote it down another line of prose followed, and I was quickly drawn into the story that seemed familiar, and in a way, I felt vaguely like a scribe putting to paper words that already existed in a more subtle medium. From this mysterious realm came the words that begin the novella: "Being president of a South American country of different geographies and various states of mind had been a constant surprise." I was pleasantly surprised as sentence followed sentence and a story began to reveal itself.

A few years after the completion of Burden of Ashes, I wrote a second novel, Pocotate, a saga of two airmen that spanned most of the 20th century. Some thematic material and two characters from the first novel carried over into the second. I had redirected my thirty year use of creative energy as a painter to writing. There was an aesthetic satisfaction to be found in writing, as there was in painting. And writing required less overhead, space, materials, etc. I could not continue as a painter, working the way I did. I had run out of money. Naim began to purchase my paintings, at very low prices. But, I had to do it to, as we say, pay the rent.

The letter writing for Naim and his family was over. The power of the pen, my pen, had had an effect, had helped to right, in a small way, an enormous wrong. Perhaps, I thought, a young person might read Burden of Ashes and be moved to question authority, to think more deeply before joining up, and going to the other side of the world to kill or to be killed.

All during my years as a painter, teacher, architect, landscape architect and writer, I wrote poems. Most poems have begun spontaneously in my mind with a line or phrase that suggested something about the poem that I would continue on to write. Occasionally, not often, I initiated a poem, finding the words and form to give written meaning to a notion that inspired me. Most of my poems are no more than a page long. There are a few 'epic' poems that cover many pages. Haiku, or more precisely, short poems, populate the interstices of the poetry years. Most poems come close to attaining their final form in the

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first writing. However, as I reread poems with the distance of time, many of them are fine tuned by a more critical eye.

As I have already written, my deep desire to publish a 'real' book of my poems was realized in 2012, by the publication of my book, Ten Thousand Things, Poems by David Teachout. A very deep and long present urge had insisted that I follow through, complete the cycle of inspiration to publication; from personal and private to communal and public. The movement in me for completion was not ambition. It was more organic: more like the maturation of a plant, and the gathering together of its fruits in one collection.

I was asked to write about my life as an artist. I have reviewed the evolution of my artistic life, which has been as a painter, architect, landscape architect, writer and poet. I have briefly included some personal experiences in order to show the experiential dynamics that shaped the context in which I lived. Primarily, I have written from the point of view of my artistic life. There is far more to say about this artist's life than has been said. I am one person, one solitary artist who, with these words, has revealed many things of his solitary life, from which each reader may discern what we have in common: solidarity.

DAVID TEACHOUT

Š Farhat Art Museum 2014

David Teachout in his studio on 1st ave S.C. California