Ann Beattie:
The University of Virginia Press, you may or may not know, is bringing out next, I believe, November a book called Lincoln Perry Charlottesville that has paintings that he has done, not just at the University, but in the county and for a long period of time over which he has been associated with Charlottesville. We ourselves have moved out independently and collectively many times, always to return, but years do pass by. In any case, it seems a wonderful occurrence that the book is coming out and I was delighted to be asked to write some words for it. So I thought what I would do today is just read very briefly, not even two pages, from something that will appear in the introduction and then Lincoln is going to give you a chance to look at some of his paintings and we are going to try to pull this all together somehow, by talking about not how our work is the same, but rather in a mutual interest in narrativity and what things a fiction writer may think in terms of composing something and how time is used and how sequence is used and similarly what things a painter is looking at in terms of making a multi-panel composition in paint. So I will now read it:

"When the viewer looks at Lincoln’s paintings, he or she may be immediately drawn to them though it takes awhile for things to sort themselves out. On first click glance, the advantage but also the liability of things visual, the viewer usually is able to see in a general sort of way what is there. But more often than not, Lincoln offers a kaleidoscope instead of binoculars to assist in our viewing. Multiple panels have a confusing sometimes static, sometimes overwhelming contradictory complexity that puts the viewer on sensory overload. And then, just when you think your eye is moving quickly enough and that your brain may catch up, the shapes shift and your impression shifts to reveal another mesmerizing shape. You try to look at it in its entirety, yet you can’t. You can’t trust it not to move, especially because it is painted to keep the eye in motion. So perhaps you squint, only an aspect of the painting in front of you or if it is a multi panel painting, the big panel on top or the one that is seen particularly involving on the left. Eventually more is revealed which is not to say that there are not continuing complexities and ambiguities. He is true to his sensibility. He paints not so much out of a sense of defining things, but rather to demonstrate that there are always multiple possibilities. There are the steps seen frontally and there are the steps obscured by a bush. Then of course there is the bird in the bush and the worm in the bird’s beak. His eye has taken different perspectives so you are obliged to do the same. The eye comes in close and receives. Things shift in terms of being foreground or background just as they do everyday of our lives. He creates motion and expresses the mystery of the seemingly ordinary as well. It’s a standing joke in our house that about everything, there are three possibilities. Even when he says there are two possibilities, there ends up being three. It makes things more interesting, at least to him because it’s true to his way of looking at life and though the multiple possibilities game can get a little distracting in terms of what restaurant we go to for dinner, that’s another much more banal matter. It also suggests that possibilities themselves are real exactly because they are multiple and that they need to be given their say. In his paintings, it’s as if he personifies possibilities as figures. There are often mythical underpinnings as well that carry particular emotional connotations. Homage is to other painters sometimes invoked to complicate as well as to clarify even fond jokes. Just what you would expect of someone who has studied the history of art, but who also has humility and a strange sense of humor. What artists don’t often say is that it is the amusement factor that keeps them going in their rough parts. I know from experience that a minor character allowed in one quick clip to damn the other characters I have so painstaking created is so welcome that the autonomous, unmanageable character gives me the courage to trudge on. Your little antagonists have to be in the work whether they’re the balloon that won’t stay still long enough to paint or the characters who have clearly slipped out of your grasp. Whatever is being created, in order not to be hermetically sealed by its own artfulness needs breathing room. The problem is how to suggest that it is there without diverting too much time and energy into invoking it so that it distracts the viewer or reader. In Lincoln’s paintings, I’d say the history of art and his illusions to other painters, his incorporating certain aspects of previous painting that he draws inspiration from expands the paintings. I’d also say that the cumulative effect of viewing his work over time or anyone else’s is that it’s instructional and that when you begin to consider things in their own terms to understand their language, you have taken an important step towards silencing the self- referential chatter in your own head. The story you tell yourself about what’s good, what’s bad, what’s expected and what’s not." So with that as an opening perspective, now you get to see the real thing.

Lincoln Perry (talking about paintings):
These are two paintings that I did when I first got to Charlottesville right about when I met Ann. And I think the bottom line of what Ann is saying and she’ll admit this, is that I am a Gemini and nothing can be simple. There always have to be least two ways at least of seeing everything. This is actually a sequence of two events on the Lawn but its also two moods or two ways of seeing what goes on on the Lawn. There’s a Southern belle drifting like a Queen down the walkway and a professor looking skeptical and amused. And it’s bright daylight. And the other one is obviously dusk and the professor’s back is turned to us so we do not know what he is thinking, if he is involved at all, and these two creatures, who are over here are looking somewhat enviously or wonderingly at the girl, are now either helping her up or causing more trouble.

When I first met Ann we seemed similar in that we perceived the world as filled with possible readings. So this is called “Stories We Can Tell” and she is sitting there somewhat like a Russian icon where the central panel is reserved for the timeless eternal. So a friend called this, as a joke, “Ann in Majesty” because there would be say a saint as if in heaven against a gold ground in one of these Russian icons and in a timeless state and his miracles or her miracles are around the edges and they are in secular, normal time. So these somewhat out of focus images around the edge are stories she could tell. The one on the right shows two panels from a series that I did last year called “A Music of Time”. You basically have gone up a flight of steps and these two people are flirting and in their extension from the ground up to this balcony they’re playing. So obviously as soon as you have more than one panel, you can do a number of things with it.
These are done before I met Ann actually. She thinks the one on the left has a series of subliminal meanings that the people who commissioned the painting may not have realized are there. I don’t go into those things. It’s for Lehman brothers. It was a stock exchange floor and what struck me about the place was that before and after the place was deserted, before all this madness breaks out, before all the stock exchange activity, there is a kind of stillness outside of the office. So there is kind of like a before, during, and after that shows up in the right as well in this triptych. This is the sketch for it. I was living in Tribecca and a kid stole a purse. You can kind of see him being confronted by these workers who were down on the docks. That’s the large version of the triptych and the left panel.

Basically I think another similarity between me and Ann is that we are very curious about narrative and narrativity – that new word, but we’re suspicious about the power, the implied resolution to stories. In other words, the way we perceive life is not that there is a beginning, middle, and end, and that there is a moral and that everything comes together. That doesn’t mean that there is no structure. It means that somehow or another that things are open-ended and that narratives are open-ended so in this case, this is the sort of point of this painting, if there is one is that the kid who is running in the distance with this woman’s purse is surrounded by these shapes that are kind of closing in on him like a shutter. So his possibilities are shutting down and they are kind of rotating and grinding into his location so that subsequently when there is this kind of street courtroom scene, he is being tried. And she tells them, this really happens, to let him go. She figures give him another chance. So when the kid is going off to the right with all these spectators, it was a sort of unresolved narrative where all that happened was there was uncertainty. The men on the dock were furious at the women. Who knows what happened to the kid. It was a sort of depressingly unresolved story. Not depressingly, but probably realistically. And I think that’s what might bring me and Ann together in terms of storytelling. This feeling that there is more there than meets the eye or less. That somehow or another, that our take on things can’t be totally relied on or guaranteed. So that in some cases, they are very open-ended.

This one on the left is a subway scene where a woman with a blue top is sort of descending. It is sort of opposite of the two people flirting in the “Dance of Time” where they are ascending as they flirt. In this one, she is sort of going down in the bowels of the earth and there is kind of a different spatial arrangement in each case. In the right, for those of you who remember Del Colvay who used to teach here, we visited him quite awhile ago - about 1990 – at this wonderful place in Hollywood Hills and his pool actually does look like that. Basically there is a story that unfold that the viewer has to put together. Has to do some work to make sense of. In other words, it’s not a traditionally clear narrative painting.
This is called “Picturing Will”, which is sort of homage to Ann’s book Picturing Will. And it is a single mother who has a child and she shows up in each of these rooms. It’s based on this house in Maine that we spent time in. And from the attic down, you can’t see it at all, but by the time you get to the basement, it’s a bit like the subway painting. It is very dark and the boy is kind of lost in this pile of coal and she is trying to find him. It’s again not a narrative. It’s a series of events; it’s as if her days are occupied with keeping up with this little boy who is always getting into trouble. You can see a panel on the right. He never shows up. His face is never clear. It’s always excluded. And that’s in reference to the fact that in Ann’s book, she wanted the boy to never speak. I think she amended that, but the idea here is that there is an analogy between not ever getting a view of his face.

When I came down to Charlottesville for the first time, I drove down here to teach. And one of the things that struck me were the men cleaning by the side of the road picking up trash. And I thought how nice, how civic-minded of them? I was very naïve. And then I saw the guy with the shotgun and I though, okay. And this is what this was sort of based on. That there is this bucolic nature all around us that is very beautiful, almost immediately as soon as you get of Charlottesville. And it’s wonderful to just drive around and find motifs and each one is populated by these somewhat problematic groupings of figures in prison garb and the detail of one of the panels in the upper right gives you an idea of what is going on there. So it’s basically questioning itself so that in that one, it’s obviously a series of different landscapes. In the one on the left, which is called “Six Degrees”, it’s the same central location viewed from six directions. It’s a guy standing at a sort of pivot point and he is seen from these six different directions. It’s a black guy in a very, very white pool in Key West. And you are seeing him from six directions.

The same thing shows up without any clear narrative in this landscape in Middlebury, Vermont where we were visiting a friend. And it is the same landscape seen from six angles. It seems to me that there is an inability to take everything in in one image. That it promises more than it can deliver. It promises sort of an iconic wholeness. It’s a bit like the Bactin’s business about the dialogic and the monologic. For him, the monologic is the single, well he was reacting against Stalin, for him the arch monologist, if that is word, would be Stalin. That his way is the only way. And he, Bactin, saw the novel and by implication, certain kinds of painting as opening up the possibilities and being able to see things from more than one position. And there is a dialogue, and hence dialogic. So I think for me, it is very hard to have a monologic idea of the world. Whether it is because I am a Gemini or because it just doesn’t seem possible to communicate everything in one coherent view. This is not the only thing I do. I have lots of paintings where there is one image and I leave it at that. But, I am showing ones that make it look like this is all I do.

The one on the left, anecdotally we had brought a house. We had put a down payment on a house that turned out to polluted. And we were in a lawsuit to try to get out of it. And we were staying, during this ridiculous situation, in a fairly horrible little motel. And I thought, well I’ll paint the stairs of this fairly horrible motel and maybe they’ll be some echo of my mental state. I had never been sued before, but I didn’t like it. And this is, on some level, that feeling of being boxed in, of being shunted left and right.

The one on the right is a relief in clay. And it is the story of a woman sculptor with a model. And her husband comes in and he is sort of becoming acubified character on the left in the second panel. And the third is running with the minator and the forth it is deconstructed. And the reason I am showing this is that one of the things that interests me is that you can have a dialogue of conventions. There’s a wonderful Picasso drawing that I don’t have here, that on one side, there’s a vase painted in one way and in the other there’s a sculpture. And they confront each other. They are painted so differently. The vase is linear and the sculpture is volumetric. And just he puts them there as two different conventions and lets them battle it out. And you have to figure out what they have to do with each other, how they are different. It’s almost like those pictures that show up in newspapers you’re used to. What’s the difference in these pictures and it will be five things or ten things that are different and you look at them back and forth. And in a way, that’s the way my mind works anyway. It seems to me that we have an ethical duty to figure out how people are seeing things. Why do people fly into buildings? Why do these things happen? What were they thinking? What are they trying to say? And not just say, “Well they hate freedom. That must be it”. I don’t want to get political her, but it seems to me that there is a human necessity to see things from more than one angle empathetically. And sometimes it’s not giving any sort of clear message.

A wonderful place with again, these up and down metaphoric steps that we were visiting. And I let the viewer worry about that in each of these; sometimes of them are low key. This was a trip, “Our Days”, and “Asleep” and these “Changing Weather Patterns”. It is almost like a diary. I think that is it.

Ann Beattie:
The advantage of the visual over the written word. Nothing exactly that I can project onto the screen will now sound like I am giving vague and wild ramblings I am afraid. But again I think that the analogy at least for me, is that in putting together something, I am sure that what you come up with, that is to say, if you write a novel and you show your friend the novel or you write a novel and the novel is published or whatever, it is considered to be thorough in that people assume you spent as much time with it as you wanted to spend with it. And it is sort of package whether you as the writer want it to be or not because the conventional novel is going to come out with cover on it and it probably is even going to come out with an author’s photo and things that look like a very weird jumble to you after the kind of intimate time you spent with the material will be perfectly acceptable. You know some book that looks like this book that I happened to have here today. No way around that, but again I guess I feel like I am chomping at the bit too sometimes as a writer in that I wouldn’t want people to think that I am writing because I felt I had to find something or even because I thought I had a major story. Probably if you wanted to discuss the plot, it could be made to appear major, but I think what is equally interesting to me is to indicate a kind of secondary level of the text, not just to the plot persay, but to have other aspects in which the reader knows that the writer knows that this is not a sealed vision. And this can be done in a number of ways. And some of my graduate students have made effective and great fun at me about. I’ll read something that they have written that will be extremely well written and as a writer I know they have struggled not only to have it be the perfect word, the acute description, the timing, that everything is absolutely right. But I also know that as a reader and a person who lives on the planet, that is very nice, but it is disembodied but that doesn’t not mean that it pertains to the larger world. So what I am always saying to my students and they always make this gesture when they pass me in the hallway, is that “Does a bird never fly by a window?”. So I think there has to be these little erratic things of real life. The telephone ring at an inappropriate time. You stumbling. You getting off a very good liner and tripping as you cross the room. I think without those things actually incorporated in the text, it is extremely hard for me to feel that I have satisfaction in my own work in a lot of ways.

I think both of us will admit to that it sounds that we have a sensibility and a major plan, but we can spend the entire day to back from a canvas and look at everything written and say wrote this? Or what was the thought here? Or just plain, this was nuts! So with all the good intentions in the world, sometimes the material asserts itself as if it has a life of its own.

In 2002, I published a novel called The Doctor’s House. It wasn’t meant to be a novel. It was at first only the story of a sister who was rather fixated on her misbehaving brother. To give him his due, I let him speak next. That resulted in not much. She said. He said. What they had in common it would seem was their childhood. But because an incident was major to one character, it might have been minor to another. More interesting to me as writer, was not that they agreed to disagree, but that only the narrative could seem to offer objective evidence. Yet of course, it did not. It was a fabrication and I chose what was made up. So there was really three of us in there with the nonexistent facts. The novel was not a mystery persay, yet it was a sort of mystery because in comparing stories and finding contradictions, and listening to what was said in ellipses and between the lines, more stories than any one person could manage began to emerge. The problem is often streamlining a narrative while appearing to do otherwise. Simply letting things unfold. Nothing unfolds unless you unfold it. But it’s no more interesting to be caught doing the laundry in fiction than it is in real life. In any case, my book came to transpire in three sections. Yet the cumulative effect was different once you considered all parts. In the middle, the mother of the children speaks. One might assume that a mother clarify, be generous, understand her children in a way that might explain them better to the reader. Perhaps such mothers exist, but they are not interesting as subjects of fiction. They’re flawed because they are suspiciously uncomplicated. This mother is complicated and she exists in the narrative to complicate things, rather than to clarify. Or rather she exists in her one rite and has center stage for all the time she has it, as all the characters do, except the one character they all have in common which is the father, the doctor as he calls himself. Bring him in for more complexity? No. Truer to my sense of life, if not objectively true is the fact that people often grow larger than life because they are not given their moment on stage. More than we realize, we take in things in our peripheral vision and internalize people. Relatives. Mother’s first beau. We may never have met. Why not have an obviously important character grow large in the reader’s imagination. Why not offer much by paradoxically withholding. There are scenes in which he appears. The reader can read the dialogue. Hear the doctor speak. Arrive at some understanding. It is not a game not to put him forth, but rather an exercise at making the reader do a lot of work to create a character. The other characters have their impressions and they are pretty clear. Yet because they are not quite the same, who to believe.

And then there’s the question of the writer orchestrating while trying to seem to be objective and absent from the text herself. It can’t be true. The writer is always stage center and taking every part and working every light. Creating every sneeze except the accidental ones that either become part of the script or we all tacitly agree not to refer to them. The sneeze is an accident. A little something from outside that tightly controlled a therefore artificial and novel world. A spell breaker or perhaps a welcomed diversion. Whatever it is, the real sneeze as opposed to the orchestrated sneeze gives the writer a moment’s breathing room in which to reconsider whether everything should be otherwise. Since the writer has much invested in tuning out the world for the process of creation, internalizing that world and regurgitating it in a different form, external surprises like a sneeze are not necessarily happy although writers are usually good enough actors not to react if they don’t choose to. Just keep a poker face and keep writing.

I am not particularly superstitious, but a sneeze sounds like a powerful alarm to me. First, it reminds me that the more perfect you make something, the more you risk its becoming artificial. And artifious is not likely to be convincing. Breathing room is needed whether it befalls the writer naturally or whether it is something to remember as though fancy car alarms set during every two hours has reminded you to step out of the car and take a break. This might be perfectly fine at a rest stop, but when writing in a mere second you can look back at the screen or the piece of paper and see that everything is wrong. The words, too many. The number of quotation marks indicating the dialogue is too methodical. You can get a visual perspective that tells you that have to alter things and open them up again. Present the material differently. If no one sneezes, you have to find the equivalent. Locate the palm outside the window. Notice the circle the streetlight casts. Even if your prose has been soaring and you are in mid-masterpiece. You have to find those very subtle things that let the reader know that you know that you are aware that you are creating something. And then you have to trust that enough mystery remains that having seen the false lining of the hat, one begins to wonder about the next mystery in what will be an endless stream of mysteries until the book ends. Doesn’t that rabbit have particularly small feet can be an overpowering question and give more information than either the magic trick or its predictable result. This may sound like a joke, but a writer can grab an asterisk as if it were a falling star and place it is in the text and move through the world of the book differently, just as a person standing and seeing a falling star throws back her head and momentarily loses balance breathing differently.