I didn’t mean to diss Samo© yesterday by stating the obvious, that he was a great draftsman, but not a prodigy painter. There is a difference. I think one can argue that no such thing as a painting prodigy exists. There are drawing prodigies a plenty, but when you get down to painting and particularly oil painting, there is no substitute for time spent with the medium. I frankly think that Picasso never really understood the mud, but rather leaned back on his prodigious talent for line drawing… only Ingres and DeKooning had nicer edges. His whole prodigy gimmick is just that… he had a daddy who was good painter of birds, and so he had good tools and he learned to draw and he threw out all the mistakes and kept all the precocious stuff. Simple. I’ve known plenty of kids who could draw like the devil, but show me one who understands the complexities of rendering space with oil paint?
So in the interest of talking about real pordigies, why not turn to a different medium than paint (music?….I’m listening to Glenn Gould again)…no film and theater:
No matter how many times you think about what an achievment Kane was, does it cease to amaze (what a crap sentence… you see how in awe I am?). It boggles the mind. That said, one also has to remember all that he did in the theater and radio before that. He was a fucking kid and he managed to scare America with an H.G. Welles (name accident?) story… He did the Scottish play in Harlem…. and on and on before Kane even!
And for being a genious prodigy what did he get? He got to go up on trial with infinity and daddy hearst and the nine headed cobra of fame. Having fallen in love with his expensive toy train set, he spent the better part of his life outside the theater, taking lunches and begging idiot schmucks for money.
He fell head long into the ignorant, racist, anti-left hulabaloo of WWII and Korea and Vietnam and Citizen Hearst.
And that lovely war brings us to the only other guy who holds a candle… and it’s bright one, but he got to make a lot more films, with a lot more support and he loved Shakespeare too.
2 Hands for Kurosawa Akira, wine and ink on paper, ©ITIN ’01