SexArtdeath/"My Idol, My Self"

Years ago I wrote an article for a magazine entitled "My Idol, My Self."  It was about women (myself included) who now and then fall (hopelessly) in love with men who are doing and being what they want to do and be. Traditionally, a man has had a female Muse. Rarely do we hear of women with the same driving passion for a man who causes them to create, pursue power, and reach for success in his chosen field. In my article, I used several examples of women in love with male muses. Among them was my close friend Aleta.

Aleta was on the verge of opening her new business, and fell for a successful, attractive realtor in town who was aloof, charismatic and married. She was drawn to him like a moth to a flame. Charismatically beautiful and sexy herself, and wildly ambitious, I came to realize that she was ecstatically, fatally attracted to him because she wanted to attain the recognition, power and success of the man for whom she seemed willing to throw everything away in a paroxysm of lust and passion. Inevitably, she had a torrid affair with this man, who drove her to distraction with his withholding personality.  However, one year into the affair she opened what would become her own, highly successful art gallery. And a year after being insanely in love, she had all but forgotten him. She would blush bright pink when asked whether she still carried a torch. He had never left his wife. He had seemed to use her and throw her away.

"Oh, God, no - I just want to forget that!" she would blurt out, waving the very idea of him away with a swoop of her arm. He had given her what she needed: the inspiration to create her own vision of success.

While writing the article about women for whom certain men are magnets because they have what we want, it began to dawn on me that I had had a nearly exact experience in my own recent past. My "idol" was also a businessman. However, first and foremost he was an artist.  He had his own gallery. He was well-known, not only in our little coastal fishing and art colony, but worldwide. He was also a genius. I wanted to be one, too, but I didn't know it when I met him.

I had come (like many creative people who were "hiding out" in this beautiful, famous little jewel of a town on the furthest tip of Massachusetts' north shore) to escape some unpleasant people and situations. I'd been going there on weekends for years, to soak up the perfect beach vibe and the sun, to get high sitting in the rocks above the pounding sea, write bad poetry and do some sketching. I knew I had some talent as an artist, but was still not quite "there."  I had written a lot in my twenties, and was emerging into my thirties "curling and dawning with hope" as I wrote in a poem at that time. But "Hope is the thing with feathers," as Emily Dickinson wrote in a (much-better) poem. I was insecure. I didn't know if I had what it took to make a full career of doing art.

One day, I simply pulled up roots and moved to the town I started hating to leave to go back to the city. One night, during an electrical storm, I had had an out of body experience in a little cabin I was staying at that overlooked the sea. It was a spiritual awakening for me. In one moment I became a "born-again" Goddess worshiper, and I knew that I had to be in there to closer to her. So I just left everything I had known for years behind and moved to Rockport. I settled into a big boarding-house with an ocean view, run by one of the artists in town, whose gallery on Main Street, facing the vast sea beyond, I contracted to sit when I wasn't doing my nine-to-five job as a legal secretary in Boston. It was fun getting all dressed up in a sexy dress, high heels, full make-up. All the other gallery sitters in town were frumpy.  I enjoyed showing playing hostess to my landlord's work, charming tourists up from the city on the weekends. I knew he was a "good" artist, but my landlord's art wasn't really my cup of tea. It was war-time "Muralist" - musty and traditional, to my eye.  I'd been pulled toward art from childhood, both in the U.S. and abroad. When I came back from Europe, stuffed with gorging on famous images I'd hitherto seen only seen in books, I wanted to be an art critic. Little did I know that I was not meant to be an art critic, that, in fact, I would come to find art critics annoying and clueless, for the most part, about what artists do, who artists are.

I had only lived in the town a couple of weeks and was passing my landlord's gallery one morning, getting my coffee in preparation for working there, when an arresting new painting in his window caught my attention.  I wasn't yet aware that the male artists in the community often swapped paintings for display as a courtesy to each other, which had created a sort of "old boys'" club atmosphere in the community. The painting that caught my eye was a portrait: a man, perhaps in his 'forties, sat slumped in an armchair. He wore a traditional red coastal windbreaker and held, in his graceful right hand, two long, color-loaded paintbrushes. His face was so soft, it appeared to be melting off the canvas. He had the most sensual mouth I had ever seen on a man, and a slight smile that held the faintest sneer. I was drawn in immediately. As everyone who knows my art will attest, lips are one of my chief obsessions. I pulled by them, and by the gleaming focus in his dark brown eyes, that seemed to bore a hole into my own. A lock of hair fell over one eye. It was obvious that this sensual creature was something of a rogue. My heart began to pound. It was like the first few seconds of an acid trip: you knew something horrible, fantastic and dangerous was coming, but you were powerless to stop it.  I backed away from the painting, thinking, "No! No!" Suddenly, frighteningly unsure of my emotional reaction, I fled to the coffee shop across the street.

When I entered Jimmy's Clambox, directly across from the stretch of sand and rock called Front Beach, I was hoping for a moment's composure before opening the gallery. I remember that the screaming gulls seemed louder that day. It was October, and the beckoning witch's finger of north shore Atlantic winter sent an ominous chill through my body. Everything was extreme suddenly, heightened by a premonition that something momentous was about to occur. And there he was. The momentous "something" hurtling into my life. He was wearing the same red windbreaker and had the same haughty, curling lips and soft nest of gleaming dark hair. He was smaller than his picture, which was huge (all of his self-portraits were like this - towering). Nevertheless, his charisma carried into real life. He looked up, noticed me looking at him with disbelief. His mouth twisted and he stared boldly for a few seconds, pinning me to the door, which Jimmy directed me to "Close, please, honey. It's gettin' colder'n a witch's tit out there." Yes, that was very Massachusetts, and it was getting cold inside of me as well. Or was I so cold I was hot? Was that lava running through my veins? I've heard that the victims of a volcanic rampage feel, first, that the are freezing before they burn.

Then he looked away, and I, relieved, slid into the first captain's chair at the front of the little restaurant that had been there since Jimmy's father, I would learn, left Jimmy and his mother for for the Merchant Marines thirty years earlier.

The man who would become my new obsession for two terrifying and ultimately pivotal years in my own life as an artist, rose and paid his bill, brushing my arm slightly as he moved past me to the door. I was electrified. I was as fried as one of Jimmy's succulent clams.  I was afraid to look up, pretended to fumble through my bag, but there it was: hee had noticed and acknowledged me. I thought, for a split second, of Dracula meeting Lucy Westenra. My hand flew to my throat.

The issue for me at that time was this: he was the most accomplished working male (or female, for that matter) artist I had ever seen, despite my years of studying, writing about and doing (a little) art. Why had I moved, suddenly, to this magical place, so far from my busy life, where I had pursued a writer's career as a journalist? I had owned my own feminist newspaper, living in a big house with a bunch of other women who were growing into our power together, separating ourselves from men as we pursued ambitions long-denied. What had possessed me to throw away everything I had worked for and all my friends, to enter this strange little kingdom-by-the-sea? Ultimately, the artist in the red windbreaker would answer that question for me. I was unprepared for the way in which the information would be delivered, but as all artists know, it's never a straight line from the Muse to the brush.

From the moment I looked into deep brown eyes in the gallery window, I was hypnotized and hooked: on the artist who painted them; on the town, on becoming an artist myself. I wanted what he had: the ability to rivet someone's attention so sharply, so quickly, so deeply, that the viewer fell down a rabbit hole in love with the artist himself.

I located his gallery soon thereafter, a few blocks away, on a wharf with its back to the Atlantic. His window told me everything I needed to know. There was the portrait I had fallen in love with, front and center in the window, surrounded by six smaller, brilliantly touching portraits of beautiful women, a couple of whom I recognized as locals. All of them sat sideways, gazing at him. It hit me hard: I was not alone. He was a collector of admiring women. He came out of his gallery when he saw me, his mock smile and dancing eyes grazing my face. I looked away, afraid to show that a flash of heat was streaking through my body. "How's about letting me paint you?" he asked, bending over me, his lips grazing my hair. Like many sensual people, he had a low, insinuating voice that drew you in. He never actually spoke aloud: he whispered. At that  moment it just popped out of me. I had no idea it would happen. Was it my voice in return? I blurted out "NO!" Then I turned and ran.

From that day on he was my enemy and my tortuous fantasy. My every waking hour was spent both avoiding him and praying that I would see him, even if simply to catch a glimpse of him leaving or entering his gallery.  I had "rejected" the painterly pass he had made, and new that, one way or another, he was out to get me. Sometimes, when I would pass his gallery on my way to work, he was outside, leaning against the door smoking. I tried to smile, but was too scared to make small talk. I suppose it looked as if I was snubbing him, but I am fairly certain he knew the truth. He would make funny little comments as I passed, sometimes whistled very low, commented on whatever I was wearing ("Love the heels...are they new?") He made me seethe with rage. He made me writhe with a sexual longing I didn't want to own. Yes, I was in love, or whatever it was.

He was my Muse, my idol, that's what it was. Just as Aleta had fallen for the powerful businessman whose ambitions she wanted for herself, so had I fallen for an artist with a genius for capturing hearts and minds. This was a self-absorbed, talented s.o.b. who wielded a paintbrush with perfectly luscious results every time. He wasn't creating work I would do myself. I would become more of an abstract expressionist before morphing into a surrealist. But his sensual portraits danced right off the canvas; I dreamed of having that kind of creative energy, energy that would show in my own work.

I ended up painting hundreds of watercolor and mixed media paintings over the next two years. My idol had jumpstarted me on the path to what I consider my "ordained" - my fated - future as an artist who would, in the end, feel that I had surpassed him with the variety and scope of what I created. Just as my friend's sparkling modernist gallery became well-respected and acclaimed, putting her businessman-idol in the shade with her newfound power and financial success, so my new gallery, called "Atlantean Visions," turned people toward a different kind of art in that traditional, boys'-club community.  The day I hung my large Plexiglas panels, with their flowing enamel decals in my window on Main Street, was the day my Muse left town. I had spent two years avoiding and yearning for him. Suddenly, I felt free. I was no longer haunted by him, no longer in lust and in love with him. Today, I feel grateful. Because, after all, men still have the power. They barrel right on with whatever calls to them, without a second guess, with barely a thought for anyone or anything around them. I needed an infusion of that nerve, that raw, naked ambition, and he had given it to  me.

So I've learned, when I "fall" like that, to say "Thank you, darling!" to the Muse who's work turns me on so much, I have to follow. Even if he's an asshole; even if he's a raging lunatic; even if he's an ache in my gut I can't avoid when I fall asleep with him in my dreams at night, he's the one who's leading me into a new adventure. Something major is going to happen for me very soon. And it's all about the art.