John Kochansky died last fall, suddenly and in his grown prime.
John and I were good friends, and daily spoke and sought solace for life’s twistings in our discussions and toyings with art and poetry for a time. Eventually we fell out of touch, but not out of favor with one another. When we met on a sudden moment, we’d share the green cheer of a Heinekin and go off on a tear about this or that moment in the omni-ball of perceptions that is the artist’s life. Some years back, while we were apart, I wrote a remembrance of John, an old-fashioned chant to bring the man before my eyes and recall his qualities, an appreciation. I’m re-printing it below from a chapbook of my “Autobiographies.” Below that is a one-off poem, “The Artist Surprised in His Lair,” a short monolog, which I wrote with John jokingly in mind, hoping for an indulgent chuckle when he read it.
When I first met John, long ago among dusty aisles of books, he drew, rather than wrote, his name and number for me to get in touch with him, saying something to the effect of “Why not play with the boundaries of the known? With a letter you know what to expect. When is a JK, unrecognizable? When does it move from the known to the unknown? What is that boundary?”
John and I collaborated on a cartoon too, Fido Diablo, Devildog. The character’s tag line was “A dog cursed with the head of a man.” Fido’s Joycean adventures combined a dream-text with a set of blazingly varied panels of illustration. The day John stopped by my old home to crank the collaboration into fine-tuned reality, he left behind a totem item, a sunflower-headed Barbie, to connect our toils on a spirit plane and draw down from some hidden realm the good ju-ju into our winsome sport. In all the years that have separated that day from this, she has not failed in her mission.
From Autobiographies:
A sliced strawberry or kiwi fruit halved could provide an hour's worth of conversation for that kind man without pause or fatigue. Unexhausted talk flowed from him as naturally as sleep follows prayer, as the saying has it.
He approached each canvas or projected scheme with a methodical incertitude, a patient abeyance of judgment that, in his case, came I think, from a deep dejection, developed by a too-long brooding over the pathological isolation all the arts in this nation must suffer under as long as it lack a sustaining tradition. His buoyant manner and whirlwind of activities withheld from view some central simplicity, some nexus, some weighted center acting as keel that served as a base for all his actions. He was all for the confusion of the mass and the packed canvas. No meaning could be extracted from the palimpsest. He talked of "paranoid flat spaces" and the obsess ional drawings of the mentally ill. Marginalia, echolalia, glossilalia. Pollack's revolutionary compression of space as an expression of "liberating density." But all of his own graphic work, no matter how fiendishly pressed into the frame, had always a simple clarity, a straight and generous enough character to endow the moodiest Cyclopes with a charmed eye that must laugh in the world's despite. His dogs with reversed heads and Pharaohnic glance, pastel fish suspended on a heavily worked surface of conflicting symbols, his proud women sporting flowered heads, his grave distortions of human form, and all of his linework carried that quality and energy of waking up refreshed after some long night-struggle with the faceless.
He told me once of a textile project of his to impose on a pattern of flowers the recurrent outline of a girl's face, as in Dali's illusionist works. To him it was the simple doubling of positive impulse and positive impulse,--- as he had once half-humorously described the troika of beer, yeast, and women, and told of how that supreme triad had stolen his fate from his own hands and consigned it to their fertile substances. But we can see in that faint flickering between slant petal and female smile on the pillow, as between ant and saint in Dali, a shift in our perceptual paradigm. First the lovely girl, then all is exuberant blossom swirled with shadow. Looking again, petal and face have again exchanged their places. The sovereignty of the imagination to designate its objects is coaxed by a trick of the light, a suavity of line. Caravaggio, in his canvas of the conversion, has the stunned man crawling away amazed from the glossy side of a rioting horse, having seen, in some moment that mixed ecstasy and grace, some portion of God's countenance in that great glistening square of skin rearing in triumph over his lapsed and piteous body. But what besides that fallen saint's imagination had put it there? A shift in his ideas of the universe's central theme allowed him to see some discrete omnipresence in that reality which was before fit for nothing save the carrot or the spur. It is for this reason that my friend, when too full of the world and the world's affairs, clambers at dawn onto a limber trampoline to shake some new mystery down; and it is why, however troubled the life, the consummate artist must, like the straight wake of the turbulent swan, leave no unperfected image after him.
But I must see him, even now, half in the air, and smiling still, squabbling with me over some point of medieval church decoration or peasant folktale, and tossing a squeaking ball back to the madly circling dog.
The Artist Surprised in His Lair
"In this drawing of an apostle's nirvanaI gave a charming native girl christ'sfivefold power hand, a santa rea item.The bone dice of fate are chiseled on her skin,her breasts are docile rounds to those twinned squares,her pubic matt preadolescently slim. Notethe use of black, another power totem,which oil slicks in India ink the right or damnedhand side of the visual field; out of its night soilsburst pumpkins, and watermelons halvedfor the easy licks of the naked girl who lieswith crossed arms at their side. Calabeza biancosays the stylized head joined to the anointedtorso which hovers clubfooted in this dreamwhich I fancy St. Jerome on an off day may have painted." --Gregg Glory [Gregg G. Brown]
