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| Dusk and Construction, Lloyd Brown charcoal, acrylic, collage, plaster and canvas 33 x 47 1/4 inches 1985 |
My photo was alright. The painting my brother Lloyd created from it was the sounds of The Fixx frozen live on canvas: intense, coarse, urban, rock'n, unwinding--a cassette tape unraveled while still playing; images and sound pushed to the limit. Soot, concrete, neon.
It's impossible to state the impact Lloyd has had on me. He opened the world of art to me--not just the visual arts, but also music, and through music, literature.
Words. Texture. Motion.
Grainy, granular film. An image glimpsed and then gone.
Something almost seen.
While other high school students were looking forward to vomiting at the next kegger while so and so's parents were out of town, thanks to Lloyd, I and my friends were out taking in the horizon or standing stunned before a Kandinsky down at the DMA wondering How in the hell does someone get that much color out of pigment? Don't get me wrong, I would have loved to have been at the kegger; I was simply never invited. But, because of my brother, the energy of that isolation was channeled into something meaningful, and so I was never drawn to the druggies--freaks, as they were called in my school. Nor did I become that strange kid drawing tanks and blown up stick-figure men, the loaner dreaming of the day he could take out revenge on society.
Instead, I got high on life. The Fixx was a big part of the non-narcotic psychedelic trip. Many of my early poems are not-so-subtle rip-offs of Cy Curnin's lyrics. It's not that I intentionally plagiarized his work; it's that I felt so connected to what he expressed both through the music and lyrics, that it was natural for me to borrow. That is probably alright. Imitation is the first step towards originality. Here's one example, inspired by the song "Camphor":
Enchanting
Well, it's after midnight
I'm awake like many nights
with my eyes watching the time
My pen playing word games with my mind
Late at night.
Well, I'm neither joyful nor depressed
And though my eyes are tired, my mind won't rest
Because things are so enchanting
High on life.
Well, I really can see the clover,
Turn the rusted leaves over and over.
In my mind, through my eyes
I can see beyond those deep blue skies.
And it's so enchanting
Late at night
And it's so enchanting
High on life.
I'd come home from work late from Braum's Ice Cream. Sometimes Lloyd would be up painting. Sometimes he wouldn't. I'd be wound up, and so I'd go to my drafting table that sat in the corner of the living room. Sometimes I'd work on an architectural drawing. I still believed that's what I wanted to be. Sometimes I'd work on a painting or collage--not a very good one (they never were), and often involving nudes ripped from a Playboy magazine. Most often though, I wrote. Poetry chose me before I chose it. Although I had absolutely no training and had only opened one poetry book (Boris Pasternak, thanks to my ninth grade English teacher, Mrs. Becker), those early poems of mine still had some sort of magic. That spark came from the lyrics and music of bands like the Fixx. The Fixx, like all of the great art I was exposed to early on, came into my life because of Lloyd. I couldn't have had any greater exposure to creativity had my brother been Pablo Picasso or Paul McCartney. The world may not know it yet, but I do. I am the brother of one of the greatest creative geniuses the world has ever seen, or will ever see again. Like Theo van Gogh, I get the privilege of being that interesting footnote. And it is indeed a privilege. Creativity is infectious. It spreads. Being around one who fully takes in the world around him and then goes about the mundane but rewarding task of shaping that into a intense spark reflected back to the universe. Well, there simply is no greater joy.
Thanks Lloyd.
For the Fixx.
For the paintings.
For the drives.
For red skies
at night.
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