Last week I was eating at Los Bravos with my friend Bob, and during our conversation I had a vision. I knew what needed to be painted now more than anything else, more than yet another nude biblical character or some mythological being ordering a pizza. I looked at Bob while he was speculating about whether Thomas Aquinas would have been a guitarist or a drummer, and I said, "I know what I can paint. This is something so necessary." I explained that we had lots of portraits in the library and in the refectory of luminaries and eminences, theological and spiritual promotories. But we lacked a representation of the thing that lies more at the heart of the seminary than any of these people: more central than the old guy with his crutch or the guy playing the fiddle. There are guys (and one or two women) sitting and standing, wearing robes and suits, but there is no image of our endowment. It is the invisible eminence. The endowment lives among us, unheralded, yet we are often enjoined to think of it. What might the endowment feel if we do this or that. The endowment is almost like a child: it needs to be protected. Yet the endowment has a mind of its own: it's up this year after being down a few years.
What does the endowment look like? Dismiss the obvious entendre out of hand. That's too obvious and obvious doesn't have much aesthetic value. Perhaps a Coke bottle in the rain: is the coke bottle half empty or half full? Again too obvious.
I will have to abstract something. I will have to dig within myself and express the essence of the endowment. How does the endowment feel? We never talk about that. Does the endowment walk the campus at night and ponder the stars? Is it a creature of the day or the night? Has the endowment suffered a lost love? Does it send its mother a Mother's day card?
Perhaps we need a "children's letters to the endowment" program. "Dear endowment, I am a young boy in middle school. Everyday my mom packs peanut butter sandwiches in my lunch. When I grow up I hope to be an astronaut or a rodeo clown. I'm failing math, so I don't know about the rodeo clown. Did you eat peanut butter sandwiches when you were a kid?"
Endowments love heartfelt letters like that. Only children can write that way.
But what does the endowment look like? We know that it's a large endowment and capable of doing anything. It can save and protect us. Is the endowment Super Man or UeberMensch?
I'm struggling with this in my studio.
The top painting is the finished state of the painting on the bottom. Originally I began a painting of The Endowment: Columbia has portraits all around campus of benefactors, faculty, presidents - but not portraits of what matters so much, what needs protection like a child from the dangers of common life, The Endowment. In the process of painting The Endowment, I played with all kinds of oblique symbolism (symbolism can't be obvious or it's just fatuous). I wanted to distill the essence of The Endowment: it's more than money; it's dreams, projections of happiness, projections of success, a sense of belonging, of being in control. The Endowment sits throned in the heavens, who can but sing.
