"Watercolor is an artist's medium. It is capable of brief, spontaneous, expression in the hand of a painter with convictions. The comments can be electric and telegrammatic, saying a great deal in the fewest brush strokes. It is fluid, light, airy, and the impact and message must be resolved in this fluid state. There is no backing up once committed and there are no tolerable watercolors-they are either good or bad." – Ben Shute
My first freelance assignment for the Altoona Star was to cover a dead former citizen, kind of a glorified 450+ word obituary, for Ben Shute. He had been born in Altoona barely a half-decade in the 20th century, and had died in 1986. Why they had decided to write something about him now was beyond me, but the task was weird, for lack of better word. By most accounts, he had barely returned to Wisconsin in the whole 81 years of his life, short of a festival in his name held at the city right next to his birthplace. After high-school, he was gone, off to Chicago, on to Atlanta. He founded a college, he steered a major festival for Southeastern artists for decades, and was so loved by his peers and friends that they still remembered him 22 years after his death. Well enough, at least, to keep my assignment from being impossible. One of them even offered to call me up on his day off from chemotherapy in Paris to talk to me about Shute. A high school art teacher, Richard Milheiser had met his daughter, but other than that, there weren’t many people around who knew anything about him
“Most students recognize former Green Bay Packer Fuzzy Thurston as the most notable alumni.”
I think about the third gray area between mediocrity and genius, with Ben. If he had stayed in Altoona he would’ve been, let’s say, mayor for 40 years. He wasn’t stupid. He was a smart, compassionate man. But he had this thing he loved for some cursed reason, and chased if off somewhere else. Big fish in a puddle or another one of the herd in the Big Game, those were the choices he saw.
My friend’s brothers have a band in Seattle. They’re called Quincunx, and they’re actually pretty good. They’re not going anywhere. You won’t see them at the Rock & Roll hall of fame. But for whatever reason, they still do it. The energy they’re putting over here, if they had corked it and stayed in the rat race, they’d be much farther along. Likewise in the reverse: dropping all social contacts, not getting married like one of them just had, would make them a better band. And I have trouble telling if their story, and Ben’s, and others like it, is a tragedy or a victory. 3 options: Never trying, owning the mountain, or trying, failing, and giving everyone who told you it was stupid to try in the first place the opportunity to tell you they told you so.
I feel like I’m redeeming them when I talk about them. Like I made it just a bit more worth it by letting more people know about Ben Shute. Like his life was less of a waste.
But I also think I’m bullshitting myself. This is a messiah fuck-up I’ve got. Reading over those last paragraphs, I have a massive addiction to pity cases, apparently.
I just know that was what was going through my head when I did the work for this first article. These people should know about this not-terrible artist that was born a few miles from them. Then I wonder if there’s any kind of hero-proxy that would happen, like the old “proud of America” bullshit, that living on some land near where someone else who actually did something original with their life was born. Maybe he’s better off being unknown?
Maybe I should just grant the fact that I’ll never know whether or not he had any regrets following his dream of independence on in to obscurity, and just cover the fucking story. It’s not like I’ll ever get to ask him if he wished he had “dumped this art crap” and done “the responsible thing”.
But the question is still there: what’s the verdict? A life’s blood sweat and tears unto thanklessness. What is that, for better or worse?
The conclusion: Jimi Hendrix is just as dead as Ben Shute.
Most of life is just a process of killing time until you get back to the thing that you’d rather be doing instead of doing all those other things. Even if you get only 10 minutes of it, and it ended up not being as good, or majestic, or graceful, or just as plain goddamn entertaining as any of the other times that you’ve done that thing, you still know you wouldn’t have spent that time doing something else, even if those other things might have gone perfectly. Whoever gets to do their thing the most is the winner. If Ben Shute’s ratio matches any other dead artist’s, everything else—talent, popularity, influence, and certainly front page features in the culture sections in Podunk Wisconsin newspapers—falls by the wayside. The hours you spent in the pursuit and presence of beauty is the only score that counts. And you’re the only who knows that. You’re the only one who knows how happy you were, and how happy you could’ve been, and how big the disparity between those is. And just to adjust my previous statement: who ever has the smallest gap, they win. Headlines, pictures, awards, and disciples just ease the pain. They’re not the real thing.
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