💉 Preamble: Art Addiction (Excerpted from MUSINGS FROM A SMALL ISLAND)

These Are My Musings. May They Amuse.

Sol Luckman

I’m a relatively small man living with my small family in a small condo in a small corner of a small island. But I often think big thoughts. I even have a fancy word for them: Musings. These are my Musings, both written and painted. May they amuse.

My name is Sol Luckman and I’m an artist. If this sounds like an introduction to a twelve-step program for recovering cultural creatives, maybe it should.

Kicking an art addiction is a heck of a lot harder than going sober. Art—by which I mean anything that’s both uncannily beautiful and practically of no use—usually takes hold much earlier than substance abuse by hijacking one’s porous child’s psyche.

From here, as the sci-fi saying goes, resistance is futile. You can rehab all you
want, but for true creative junkies art only relinquishes control of your life with death—and sometimes not even then considering that ultimate “artification” of life known as posthumous fame.

In my case art set up shop in my heart when I was barely out of diapers. I don’t recall consciously inviting it to do so and I’ve spent the rest of my life dealing with the fallout: poverty, restlessness, dissatisfaction, alienation, obsession.

I was sleeping over at my grandparents’ house when I was literally woken up by the sound of art calling. That’s how I interpret the event in retrospect because of the deep and indelible impression it made on me. Actually, I woke up to the noise of what I initially thought was a baby whimpering.

I assumed it was my newborn sister crying to be fed—until, sleepily coming to my senses, I realized she was at home with our parents. Besides, the noise—an insistent hoo, hoo, hoo that kept repeating at intervals— was coming from outside the slightly open window, I realized as I became aware that I was alone in the bed I usually shared with Grandad.

I found him in his saggy briefs at the sliding door in the living room with Grandma in her silk nightgown. For some reason that had to be momentous, the two had convened there from separate bedrooms in the middle of the night.

The sliding door was open with its semisheer curtains gentlyshifting. It was early spring in Appalachia and the nighttime air still had a late-winter nip.

Hoo, hoo, hoo. The mysterious call came again as I approached shivering despite my pajamas. Grandad must have heard my teeth chattering because, turning, he scooped me up in his arms and held me so I could see out into the backyard illuminated by a lopsided moon above the pines.

I had no idea what time it was. It could have been midnight or just before dawn. Another minute passed and then the sound came again: hoo, hoo, hoo.

Then I saw it: no less alabaster than the moon, sitting on a post of the clothesline beside a little strawberry patch next to which Grandad had been teaching me to throw a knuckleball was a perfectly still, indescribably beautiful great horned owl. An albino.

It seemed to coalesce into focus through a fisheye lens like a super-slow-motion scene in an experimental movie. The time it took me to make visual sense out of what I was witnessing was perhaps a minute. I was—no doubt about it— perceiving the world with an altered state of consciousness.

Beneath its white “horns,” which I later learned were just tufts of groovy feathers, the owl’s dark pupils encircled by bright yellow corneas seemed to stare into me like those of someone who knew me from birth.

Cocking its head searchingly, the owl gave another call. The creature struck my hyper-aware self more as a person than an animal, someone with an important message for me.

The moment was both intensely captivating and extremely odd. I only began to understand this weird dynamic that equally applies to the art I like decades after the fact when I discovered the writings of the Russian modernist philosopher Viktor Shklovsky, who proposed that what characterizes genuine art is “estrangement.”

“The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known,” he wrote in terms most obviously relative to visual art but that apply to any genre. “The technique of art is to make objects ‘unfamiliar,’ to make forms difficult to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged.”

Seeing that huge albino owl under the moon was my first experience of estrangement ... and, I suppose, of genuine art. When my perception finally put the pieces of what I was seeing together, so overwhelmed was I by the otherworldly loveliness of the tableau I uttered a cry.

That cry was like a rock shattering a reflection in a pristine mountain lake. It instantly spooked the owl, which flapped its wide wings and rose up eerily, a feathered ghost sailing across the moon and over the hillside.

The memory of the owl has always stuck with me and, with a little interpretive help from Shklovsky, guided my own efforts at creating artistic works—both literary and painterly—that might be called “strange attractors.”

“When the going gets weird,” wrote Hunter S. Thompson in the supreme prose monument to estrangement, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, “the weird turn pro.” Well, the going’s definitely weird and I turned pro years ago.

If you’re not at least a little weird yourself, there’s a good chance you won’t be attracted to my work. I recommend that you stick to realism and stay lobotomized in your normative existence by inundating yourself with lots of evening news and crime dramas.

But if you’re among the chosen few, meaning you’re a bit strange yourself, we’re at least distantly related. Maybe you’ll experience some meaningful estrangement yourself while reading this text and viewing the accompanying images.

Having been “woken up” to my artistic calling by an owl calling me, I soon began writing and doodling obsessively. By the time I graduated from college, art had become a full-blown addiction. Three decades later, I’m still hooked.

These days, living within the sandy shores of the small island that inspired this work, if I’m recovering from anything, I’m recovering from trying to recover from anything. Having tried my hand at denial, I’ve given myself over to art, writing and painting as much as my real-world responsibilities permit.

I’m a lost cause, I know, but you can help. Do support my art habit by recommending and reviewing this book so that other weirdos who might enjoy it can find it—and please consider investing in one of my paintings. You never know—my work could be worth something someday.

An updated portfolio of my paintings, in addition to a wealth of free and reasonably priced literary content, is accessible via my website: www.CrowRising.com.

Copyright © Sol Luckman. All Rights Reserved.

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ABOUT SOL LUCKMAN …

A confessed beachaholic and obsessive cultural creative, Sol Luckman has thumbed his nose at mainstream values and society ever since he can remember.

Preferring hard play over a so-called honest day’s work, these days in the New Abnormal he spends his time on a new small island mostly bodysurfing, painting, and writing—not necessarily in that order and usually not all at once.

How while on permanent vacation he became a multi-award-winning and international bestselling author and prolific professional artist is anyone’s guess.

Possessed of a wonderful family, he eschews dogs and admits to his own rejection issues where certain other domestic animals are concerned.

Visit his official website at www.CrowRising.com.