Night Painting by David Pink

Yes, yes? You're here to buy a painting? I should have guessed, by the look in your eyes. Come in. Welcome! Sorry, my friend, I didn't recognize you. We all look different in person. You're early, that's good. Early means eager, eager equals desire, and desire means business. Come, come look!

See here my friend, you could wait all night for the right light. All night long and it might not happen. The day is okay but the sun--that light has been overdone--Vermeer and his over-saturated, buttery light. Realism, my friend, is an illusion.

Now Night, night obscures, night endures. Night is also when most of the action happens in our current wars.

Although half our lifetime is night time, how many really right night paintings do you see? Nearly none. A real good one plays with our senses the way morality does, it's all grey area. Look at this piece. Is that a tree? Yes, yes, it is. But it's also--get this--draped with bodies. That's the beauty of night in Somalia! Or anywhere that's the subject of some good old fashioned American intervention. I can't decide whether or not to begin selling Bosnia. These things sometimes have short courses (we'd be there already if they had some decent natural resources). For sure, for sure, something there is that loves a war.

Of course, it's horrific, my friend. Even more so if the painting is veiled, non-specific, about the human limbs entangled within tree limbs. Abstraction. Synecdoche. How the world goes on despite tragedy. Irony. The car beneath the tree, looking, perhaps, like the burned out husk of a locust! But there are lovey-dove lovers in the car.

In the painting--in your painting, my friend--it will be moaning and rocking and the street will be in Washington--the possible impossible future! Jesus, my friend, can you hear it! "Oh! Oh!" Such a high voice that at first you wonder if someone is dying--or crying. Is this a wedding or funeral? That kind of confusion makes the world go round.

The painting--it's abstract my friend, abstract, abstract,abstract--has as its subtext, its pretext if you will, its pill beneath the sugar, its stick beneath the snow, the figure of someone who has just left his well-lit building for say sushi after staying late at the office, trying to better the world through effective product placement. Most everything is indistinct. But you, you're half in and out of molden golden darkness.

Yes, yes, yes, you're in this. Don't worry! No one will guess! That's part Hopperish, like the midnight cuppa-coffee-at-the-diner bit. Hat pulled down, under a ton of paint, my friend, you could be anyone.

Then it hits the wall! Across semi-dense atomized darkness rocks a car in rhythm and sorrow (like there's no tomorrow). The viewer's mind is on you as subject; stunned, projected into the scene as if the object that the unknown fantasy woman's tourniquet-tight panties are applied to were your sex (but this is all extrapolation, deeply hidden and chic--believe me, no one will link you with world events). Both men and women, instead of being aghast, will respond with a voyeur's laugh (who asked for any of this?)--it's all bittersweet, joyous and absurd! New life being created beneath the shadows of newly created death. What more does anyone want!

You're in your own world, just out and about. Forget about the sushi--say you're out to see about your mother, who maybe hasn't been feeling all that well as only she and you should know, my friend, (I saw her yesterday).

Anyway, in dark grey-greens and oh so subtle magenta are the strange fruit of human limbs dripping blood onto the top of that late model lovers' lodge! Let's make it a Dodge for rhythm's sake and made it that the schmuck in the car's been cheating on his wife, etc. etc. Just like real life!

This idea is a winner, my friend. The significance of the painting is so well hidden that no one will figure out is its meaning. It'll be like surrealism: it could mean anything! The key is in the interpretation. But believe me people will comment. The blood color alone is enough to excite the shark in us. It's a way for you to feel out your clients. Whatever they see you see and Bingo! Bango! You've bagged another account!

Why the long face?

Too much blood?

Listen, last night I had dinner with a very wise American couple (for whom I've done a number of these things). They were over there earlier during this terrible trouble and know the scene and its possibilities quite well. They are the ones who said that if something isn't done soon there will be blood someday in the streets of Washington!

She writes and he takes pictures. They are an attraction.

Believe me, they are both quite well-off from their experiences. My art-on-their-wall, I submit, deserves no credit. Death, my friend, sad to say, is money in the bank. But show me a fear and I'll show you a career. Fear is the opiate of the masses! Capa & Capra! McCarthy! Germaine Greer! People want to know what to fear next. Believe me I'm correct. The beauty of this, my friend, is that you need no expertise to be an expert. Saying art makes nothing happen makes as much sense as saying that beauty is an illusion. But that's the beauty of beauty, will people never tire of interpretation?

This couple, my friend, are very well paid "witnesses of conscience." He shoots the pics and she starts the memoir almost before the bodies hit the ground.

"As long as there's a war," they said at a recent awards ceremony, "we'll be there to see." Talk about job security!

The Governor, the speaker at the dinner, called them the vanguards of "thinking without blinking." They are reality. When not on sabbatical making money at whatever front, they team-teach a course in "International Morality" at a major American university; one course per year, full tenure and full salary. He wears Lauren, she wears Gucci.

Everyone knows their names. They sell. But I'm not selling them, my friend, now I'm selling you. And you, you could do quite well too.

Believe me, my friend, I can paint you from a photo--easily and quite cheaply.

My friend, be clever. The stars in the painting, if anyone sees them, will shine down as if they've been there forever, the sky opened up like one big jewelry store.

So what do you say? Bombs away with night painting?

My friend what is it? You look like you're fainting!