THE WORKS OF WARREN CRISWELL (Continued)

Though the Cardinal is gone for now, multiple versions of my own image have continued to appear in my work--but with a subtle difference, I think, if only in my own attitude about it. I used to be concerned about the apparent conflict between the universal and the personal aspects of art, believing the universal to be the important one. This, after all, is the reason for my argument at the beginning of these notes against spouting a lot of personal information. But now I'm thinking that maybe the universal is revealed only through the personal, the self only through myself. Whitman and Montaigne understood this. Maybe essence can be discovered only by embracing existence. And maybe I should just admit to myself that the ubiquitous male figure that just will not get out of my paintings is really me after all. This doesn't mean that anything I can say about my work is as important as what anyone else says about it, positive or negative. In any case, I think I should let the spirit/body dichotomy, which haunted my Cardinal Inquisitor, take care of itself and treat painting only as a fulfillment of desire, free of theory or agenda. Which is what I have always done anyway. A work of art has many levels, but if the surface level fails nobody cares about the other ones.

I'll close as I probably should have begun--and ended--with Balthus' famous reply to John Russell's request for material for his text on the artist's 1968 retrospective at the Tate: "NO BIOGRAPHICAL DETAILS. BEGIN: BALTHUS IS A PAINTER OF WHOM NOTHING IS KNOWN. NOW LET US LOOK AT THE PICTURES."

Warren Criswell, January 1, 2000

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