Arthur Rimbaud was a visionary and a genius, someone who changed literature by the time they were eighteen years old, and “retired” by age twenty-one. Infamously, Rimbaud was a wonderer, a poet, totally queer, who came upon the great poet Paul Verlaine and came onto him, seeking his mentorship and wanting his sex. This is from one of the amazing photos of him, by Etienne Carjat, a cohort from Vilains Bonshommes, the group of bohemians that Verlaine and he hung out with, taken in 1870 when he was about nineteen years old. This is one of the few images of him, one that always in my mind seems alive, like a Harry Potter painting, with his eyes perpetually looking through the lens of time right at you. In his works, which have moved me since I took a visionary fiction class at Brown, and still move me today in wonderous ways that still make me see new things in my mind’s eye. He is one of those cultural heroes that you can fall in love within high school, that never lose their steam (or their respectability) all through your life. His prose is ingenious, science fiction, fantasy, dark occult, religious, alive. His desire permeates his language—he is a horny lad—but also hungry for adventure. “One must be absolutely modern,” he wrote, which Lee Krasner scrawled on her wall for inspiration.

He was into synesthetics: “I invented colors for the vowels! A black, E white, I red, O blue, U green. I made rules for the form and movement of every consonant, and I boasted of inventing, with rhythms from within me, a kind of poetry that all the senses, sooner or later, would recognize. And I alone would be its translator.” This for me is what in essence I try to do in my painting from ideas, allegories, and language.

From one of his infamous “seer” letters he wrote to his teacher:

“Now, I am degrading myself as much as possible. Why? I want to be a poet, and I am working to make myself a seer: you will not understand this, and I don’t know how to explain it to you. It is a questioning of reaching the unknown by the derangement of all the senses. The sufferings are enormous, but one must be strong, one must be born a poet, and I know I am a poet. This is not at all my fault. It is wrong to say: I think. One ought to say: people think me. Pardon the pun [penser, “to think”; panser “to groom”].”

And:

“I is another. If the brass wakes the trumpet, it’s not its fault. That’s obvious to me: I witness the unfolding of my own thought: I watch it, I hear it: I make a stroke with the bow: the symphony begins in the depths, or springs with a bound onto the stage.”

“The first study for the man who wants to be a poet is knowledge of himself, complete: he searches for his soul, he inspects it, he puts it to the test, he learns it. As soon as he has learned it, he must cultivate it! I say that one must be a seer, make oneself a seer. The poet becomes a seer through a long, immense, and reasoned derangement of all the senses. All shapes of love, suffering, madness. He searches himself, he exhausts all poisons in himself, to keep only the quintessence’s. Ineffable torture where he needs all his faith, all his superhuman strength, where he becomes among all men the great patient, the great criminal, the great accursed one—and the supreme Scholar! For he reaches the unknown! …. So the poet is actually a thief of Fire!”

I can’t write better than Rimbaud, but like the modernists were inspired by him, so too am I. When painting, a third hand starts to paint the picture for you. After way more than 10,000 hours of painting, I’ve found that I’ve learned my tool set well, and that I can provoke my unconscious to take over at some points in both the initial strokes and the end of micromanaging. Actors love to “fly” after rehearsing their lines and roles when they are finally onstage, sutured into the character. For comics, the best cartoonists can suture into the mask of the form that they are creating—and become the avatar. When I paint, I channel, channel my unconscious, my subconscious, the spirits in the air that are part of the ether of what I paint. Painting is close to puppetry, hence my love for painting puppets and cartoons—it is the painter’s job to become the puppeteer, to be able to perform the character and make them come alive. With real-life personas, especially those who have passed, not that I’m a medium, but as I engross myself in the painterly reverie of making my work, I do feel as if I’m talking to them, with them, like I’m the photographer trying to set up the shot, and in the old age of the daguerreotype, perhaps this takes a long time, and as I paint, I channel the entity into my brush and onto the canvas and it speaks to me, with me, getting their hair cut in a barber shop, they speak to me and the painting becomes alive.