Growing up in a resort meant working in the hospitality business. Every teenager should do restaurant work because it embodies most of the skills they’ll need in adult life, such as collaboration, presentation, and how to swallow food without anyone knowing. Plus, you get to say “griddle” a lot. I started busing tables in a restaurant called Slug’s Rib at thirteen and was instructed to say that I was the manager’s son when asked my age by shocked tourists. The first girl I kissed worked there. She was sixteen. One busy summer night we snuck out of the kitchen and stood on the bank of a river that flowed behind the restaurant. She yanked me by the ears toward her face and commanded me to “open my mouth.”
I worked in a different restaurant every summer. By nineteen, I was a kitchen assistant in a Japanese restaurant called Nakato, where part of my job involved taking the trash to the Dumpster at the end of that evening’s service. At eleven o’clock, while the last tables were enjoying coffee and butterscotch sheet cake, I’d push a leaking garbage can full of rotting tuna across the gravel parking lot into the thick Carolina night. The dead weight forced me to rest every few feet, when I would utter to myself, “Here I am.” The world was spinning, and things were happening everywhere, but the density of the trash heightened my awareness of being in that place at that moment and, like my mother’s floating camellias, filled me with a rage to live.
Painting is the same. You make a few adjustments, and here you are. Other people look at it, and here they are. I still think of my paintings as bins full of warm, rotting tuna that I must push from one place to another so I can get home and go to bed; it sure makes them a hell of a lot less precious.
A landscape painter must be aware of the viewers’ positions both physically (where they stand) and conceptually (how they will mentally project themselves into the spatial arrangements). Are the viewers included in the composition, or do they bring themselves to it? For example, a landscape by Philips de Koninck and a ceiling fresco by Sebastiano Ricci imply the footprint of the viewer in their compositions; we see the world from a fixed vantage point determined by the artist. Ad Reinhardt’s black paintings and Frank Stella’s protractors do the same thing, but use the tactile certainty of materials instead of pictorial illusion to mark our physical location in the room. The painting becomes a proxy for our eyes as opposed to an experience to which we bring them. Looking at a painting is active. We project our vitality into its world and, like a hologram, that world should be complete regardless of our changing position.