There’s a de Kooning drawing show up at the museum. I went the first hour members were allowed in. His whipping boomerang paintstrokes have been crucial to me for over forty years. It was like visiting a childhood classroom but unlike that deflating or disorienting experience, de Kooning hasn’t shrunk or otherwise morphed or wasted away. The pictures are still full of motion and mess, graceful and ugly all at once.

What set de Kooning apart from most of his AB-EX brothers and sisters is he could draw. Most of the others were rescued by scale or gimmick, whereas he exploded his European academy training onto the larger, freer canvas of the New World while never losing the rigor and precision.

I loved the clip in Emile de Antonio’s documentary Painters Painting where he talks about how painters don’t have particularly bright ideas. They (we) rarely do. That’s not what painting is about. That’s not an argument in favor of stupidity, only the small point that if ideas were the thing we’d try to be philosophers rather than smearing paint on canvas. De Kooning just knew what the job was and worked away at it.

I remember in art school there were several “advanced” painting students who seemed to take de Kooning and other abstractionists as a jumping off point but all that resulted was a half-baked imitation. The painters in the 40s and 50s were abstracting from something they saw or dreamed or imagined or remembered. Of course students always imitate, but some work is a destination rather than a beginning. To get to where de Kooning ended up was a jagged, personal path. My classmates wanted to skip to the end. I wonder if any of them are still painting.

What the current show makes clear is that de Kooning never went all the way nonobjective. There are faces, limbs, trees, and hills in all his pictures. He never looked away from the seen world.

I don’t know any young painters but wonder whether someone like de Kooning matters to them. I can’t see how if painting matters to you, the kind where gesture and mark-making are up front, that you could be indifferent to him. But I’m not into crawling into anyone else’s head. I just know he has been one of my main guys for a very long time.

The show’s up into September and I already think it’s coming down too soon.

I talked about public domain novels, publishing, and other matters with Kyler Bingham at Salt Lake Dirt.

Framed a couple of the remaining Moby Dick drawings together and wrote about a wrestling play.

This is what the Ornery Cuss book-release sounded like. You should’ve been there.