STUBS

My dear, dear friend David Schoffman is at a loss. 

Devoid of clever ideas, lacking both purpose and patience, innocent of the tactical conditions for conventional for success, he has taken to wandering the streets of Los Angeles with a folding stool, a miniature sketchbook and a pocketful of pencils and erasures.

He's been preparing for this moment his entire career. While he knows that his best work is behind him, he also knows that his legacy is secure. His magnum opus The Body Is His Book: One-Hundred Paintings is recognized, in the words the New York critic Spark Boon as "... one of the monuments of post-modernist Romantic revisionism." 

Scholars (and even Schoffman himself) have debated for years whether Boon's characterization is a favorable rendering of this complex polyptych but all seem to agree that this legendary work of art includes a lot of different colors. 

The Body Is His Book #79

 

A MAN GROWS OLDER

Having taken stock of over four decades of professional artistic activity, my good friend David Schoffman is feeling the melancholy tremors of mortality.

No longer considered, in the words of critic Spark Boon, the "best of the bohemian bêtes-noires," he has settled, of late, in his vacation home on Fire Island, reading true-crime novels and making small, naked self-portraits.

It's a sad decline but wholly appropriate. David never really had what it took to truly stir the public's imagination. His work was too serious, too hermetic, too intellectual, too metaphysical, too simple, too complex, and too early.