Denis Kitchen, somewhat like Alice of the
rabbit hole fame, went down the drain at Kitchen Sink, his own company, a few
years ago, and, like the itsy bitsy spider, exited by the water spout into
another world, whereupon he promptly set up as a publisher again, under the
pretentious monicker Denis Kitchen Publishing Company, which, to-date, has
published several admirable and rare books, one of which is The Sketchbook Adventures of Peter Poplaski
(206 6x9-inch pages, b/w; hardcover, $25).
Poplaski, who I’ve met only once to my knowledge, looks, as Robert Crumb
says in the Introduction to this book, “like the man who reads meters for the
utility company” — tall, short-haired, and clean-shaven except for a
distinguished moustache. But appearances are forever deceptive, as we all know.
Poplaski is scarcely a meter reader. He is, in fact, one of the last of a
probably vanishing breed — a free-spirited freelancer, who, in my imagination
after perusing this slender volume and perhaps even in fact, wanders the world,
living on a pittance earned through occasional commercial illustration
assignments, otherwise pursuing his passion — drawing and looking at every great
masterpiece of art in the original, a task, Pete says, “I am near to
completing” after thirty-four years on the road, much of it in Europe, where he
goes frequently and for longer and longer periods, staying in Sauve, France,
the little village where Crumb and his wife Aline live on nearly nothing if
they so desire.
To an old
Beatnik like me, that is an idyllic life. And Pete is living it, and he has
recorded the scenes he’s seen, and the people, in a series of sketchbooks, five
of them, covering the years from 1994 to 2002. Many of these drawings are
published in this little book, a rare treasure.
The book is
an artist’s anecdotal archive. At first glance, the pictures look like Crumb’s,
copiously cross-hatched. But that first impression evaporates as you linger
over the pages. Cross-hatching, yes, but also cross-hookiing, stipling and
diagonaling, chipping, clotting, and heavy bristly multi-linear outlines,
recording anonymous faces Poplaski has seen in the local bistro, or in the
street, old buildings staggering up ancient cobblestone inclines. Sometimes in
France; sometimes everywhere else. Some, as an exercise, drawn in just three
minutes each. Pictures of friends and dignitaries. Here’s cartoonist Jay Lynch, leaning forward, arms folded
on the table in front of him, a cigarette in one hand, expounding, as Jay is
wont to do, on the intellectual underpinnings of cartooning: “True humor is an
exposure of truth or a revelation of hypocrisy, so,” he begins, “— these two
pollacks are walking into a whorehouse, see ....”
Some faces
take a whole page; some appear in a grid of twelve or so panels, like a kind of
comic strip of strangers’ faces. There are subtle differences in faces, even in
profile (the easiest way to draw a face), and Pete’s caught them.
If you’ve
never sketched, you may not like or appreciate Pete’s great skill. But even if
that evades you, you might, as I did, think, as I thumb through the book, of
Van Gogh and Gauguin in Arles.
I’ve always been fascinated by Van Gogh, the artist as hero, as the actor of
his own life, albeit a failure in all others — the driven personality, living a
“heroic act of will."
Throughout the book, Poplaski has sprinkled quotations that turn a book of sketches into
an artist’s credo, a manifesto of the artist and how he views his art and the
world. “Art,” writes Henry Miller, “like religion, it now seems to me, is only
a preparation, an initiation into the way of life.” For Miller,
the idea is “to live creatively ... to live more and more unselfishly, to live
more and more into the world, identifying oneself with it and thus influencing
it at the core, so to speak.” Robert Hughes: “The basic project of art is
always to make the world whole and comprehensible, to restore it to us in all
its glory.” Not exactly Miller’s formula for living fully, but still, memorable. N.C. Wyeth may be
closer to Miller: “The vitality of artistic expression is essentially
autobiographical.”
But “art”
is not the only lesson Poplaski finds in quoting others. Here’s G.K.
Chesterton: “There are two ways to get enough. One is to accumulate more and
more. The other is to desire less.” Thomas Carlyle in his best suit of clothes.
And then this, near the end of the book, from Anatole, France: “A work
of art is never finished, only abandoned.”
And so, for
the moment, we come to the end of Poplaski’s world. And a gratefully
appreciated sojourn it has been: however brief, it nourishes the soul by making
you think of what might be as well as what is, the world of the artist, never
finished, but not, thanks to this tidy tome, abandoned either.
