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The painter must go to work. He must get up in the morning and have his coffee, mix his paints and go to work--just as a bulldozer driver, a taxi driver, a house painter. In fact, Stephen Carpenter, a painter in the highest sense of the word, has more in common with the bulldozer driver than with the businessman. He arrives at an Upstate New York diner punctually at 7:10 AM, with his denim sleeves rolled up, jokes easily with people over his scrambled eggs and hash-brown potatoes. In that setting he seems the most ordinary of men. People hear that he’s a painter. They probably think he paints houses. And, in fact, they aren’t wrong: he was probably as impassioned about how he applied paint to the houses he built—several of them!—in southern France as he has always been about the canvases he’s painted.

An artist! Steve is utterly without hauteur. But like all painters I have known, he is a wonderful storyteller. Like all painters worth their knife and fork he loves food, wine. He loves his woman deeply. He’d give his life for his two daughters. He worries himself to sleep like the rest of us. And the next day? Why, he gets up, he mixes his paints. He meditates. Voila! Of course.

I met him in 1998 at Chapin Mill, a retreat center for Zen meditation. He had recently moved to Rochester, NY from Monaco, where he had lived and painted for many years. I think that the spiritual side of Steve, which had argued with his other sides for many years, was finally winning, and that is why he was there. He wanted to live near the Rochester Zen Center, and Chapin Mill, to be able to go there and sit in silence with other people. He’d found similar centers in Europe less disciplined, less serious.

Chapin Mill itself was only a plan on paper then, not in operation like it probably will be by the time anyone reads this. We were both volunteering for a work crew clearing brush from the hillside where the zendo would eventually stand, and we were assigned to work together. We weren’t supposed to be talking; we were supposed to be working. But I found out he was a painter, and he found out I was a poetry publisher and a writer—both of us somehow down on our luck, yet feeling lucky and hopeful. We became instantly fast friends. From him I learned the European custom that when you drink wine with a friend you clink glasses and speak the other’s name, looking directly into his eyes.

Once I went into his studio and inadvertently walked over a giant watercolor that he had spread on the floor. I swear, I thought I was walking on paper that he was using to mop up spills. When I realized my error, I was aghast. “Oh God, Steve!” I said. “I’m sorry.” I’d even made a little tear in it.
He laughed. “It’s all right,” he said. “It’s part of the painting now.”

When he works he is all over the canvas once, like someone with a long past, and yet with no past at all. In fact, I don’t know very much about his past, though we’ve discussed our lives at great length together. To say I know another’s past would be arrogance. But in Steve’s case I think it goes something like this: He came from a broken home in the Pacific Northwest, raised in foster homes. He was probably alternately enamored and distraught with his first attempts at painting and drawing. But somewhere along the line, probably at about puberty, a woman connected to the Portland Museum of Art took an interest in his work. That was what it took—every young artist who develops into an adult working artist has, at some point, been pulled out of the darkness by an older person who recognizes a talent.

Then, with her encouragement, he gave it all his strength. He went to the Chicago Academy of Fine Arts, and the Art Center School of Design in Los Angeles, working his way through while delivering for Chicken Delight. He went to work for Disney back in the sixties. He’s the only man I know who really knew Walt Disney. I had always thought there was no real Walt Disney, but several stand-ins like there were several Lassies for TV. And, in a sense, I was right. Disney was the star collie for God knows how many talented artists like Steve.

But unlike the others, Steve never got it through his thick head that he had a good job. He wanted to be a painter, and to him, that meant Europe. He quit Disney and went to France, traveled, studied the masters, and painted, painted, painted. He must have lived hand to mouth for a long time. Success came slowly; but it did arrive, and with it came the domestic life. He married, and had two lovely daughters; and it was during that period of his life that he built several houses for his family in southern France near the border of Monaco. With wealthy patrons and jet-setters, he partied all over Europe.

But how long can that go on? How far can you go, even in apparently sensible directions before you find yourself wandering away from yourself, and away from your work? We all do it, every jack one of us. Zen Master Hakuin said,

Not two and not three,
Straight ahead runs the way.

The bulldozer driver can tell you that too.

As I’ve said, Steve’s move to Rochester—which must seem as distant from Oregon as Europe—was about integrating himself. As far as I can tell it has worked. He paints here, he has friends here, found new love, and has even become a sought-after teacher. And wonder of wonders, it is still a struggle! How marvelous, said a sage, I chop wood, I carry water.

I’m not about to appraise his paintings here. You can see them for yourself on this website. He’s earned numerous awards and distinctions, and if you’re interested in them, his Artist’s Vita is here somewhere too. What I care about most is that he paints, that he loves, and works, teaches, and eats scrambled eggs. He’s good to his friends.

Once he told me that he’d had a dream, that he and I were sitting together somewhere, talking, and that he said to me, “You know, we are both perfectly whole and complete.” And with that we both cried.

*Steven Huff is a fiction writer and poet living in Rochester, New York. He is publisher and managing editor at BOA Editions, Ltd.

Let me hear from you-Steve Carpenter

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