i.

Serving as trauma consultant after 9/11 was draining me. My monthly missions to work with crisis teams and leaders in New York—developing new strategies for shifting circumstance, advocating for the fallen, supporting injured teachers and rescuers—pulled on everything I had. Then returning home after the assignment to keep up with my own practice and try to support my family was simply too much. Now it was me falling away, drained physically and emotionally. I carried a dark pit inside me, a void populated by ghosts, a growing knowledge of our failings as a people, a foreboding of challenges to come. It was time to turn back to painting and writing, to rebuild what was collapsing within.

ii.

I journaled religiously and painted when I could. I went to my studio before daylight, working madly until time to get my children up and ready for school. I found myself sketching during school staff meetings and painting in what few hours I could steal. The work was dark, and its direction unclear. I exhibited when I could, caught lectures, visited museums. Something vague and troubling I couldn’t see was emerging, even in my paintings. My work was abstract yet something else beyond concrete figures was clearly missing. Itches were going still unscratched, voices unspoken. I sensed a gulf widening between myself and my family. Try as I might I couldn’t find the switch to light the void that still lurked inside.

iii.

While having coffee with an artist friend, himself a veteran of many aesthetic battles against darkness, I told him of my struggles. George leaned closer and shared with me a recent incident of his own. Suffering a sudden heart attack while climbing the stairs of his framing store, George had lost consciousness and collapsed. He told me of floating up to a corner, watching from a distance as the EMTs worked on him and loaded him into the ambulance. Doctors later told him he’d been gone for 10 minutes. For a long while he’d been unable to tell his story. “Go see Father Bill, down the street,” he said now. “He’s a priest, but an artist too. He’s the one that helped me see.”

iv.

I enter the sanctuary of Fr. Bill Moore’s studio. There, the tools of his ministry are laid out on tables and benches in joyful disorder: pots of acrylic paint, scrapers and trowels, rags and canvas. His massive paintings line the walls. When alone, Fr. Bill creates large, luminous, abstractions that celebrate the sacred within the mundane. When visitors pop in, he generously engages in dialogue, interested less in explaining and preaching, more in intent listening. He encourages his viewers’ opinions, focusing on what they have to say about his glowing work. Found bits of industrial detritus—pieces of discarded metal, rusted washers, bent nails—are often found quietly embedded in his work, testaments to a larger redemption.

v.

I kept returning to Fr. Bill’s in the ensuing months, when I was in town. I’d stand before his work, watching him talk with visitors. Never did he proffer explanations of how he got glow in his paintings, or what it all meant. He would tell how his father took him over to the desert, how the colors were transcendent, ethereal vast spaces never empty, how wind carried perfume and song, the transcendence, and endless expanse bursting with change. Father Bill would point to a rock or twig he’d brought home, or bits of urban cast-off he had incorporated into the painting. I thought of the devastation of 9/11 two years before, and the treasures he might have discovered there.

vi.

We sat in his studio. Bill told me about his diagnosis. Despite his spartan lifestyle, he’d developed a virulent cancer that had successfully resisted treatment. He chose not to talk about how long he might, or might not, have left. I noticed that he painted with more fervor now, and pushed himself hard. I’d loved his early work: abstract, hopeful, lean and expressive. Now he was in a new, experimental phase—asymmetry and jarring color juxtapositions. Not sure I liked them, I wondered if the departure in style was caused by inspiration or disease. He shrugged. “The early paintings sold so well, and we needed to feed the missions. Now I need to walk this new path while I can.”

vii.

The last time I visited, Fr. Bill was in his studio. It seemed bare, missing his clutter and equipment. Some supplies had already been moved to the new non-profit center set up in his name to assist young and emerging artists. Small pieces, 5"x5" and reminiscent of his earlier work, were lined up in process. His hope: one hundred, if time allowed. “A fundraiser for the center,” he explained. “The folks in my order were so good at marketing,” he smiled, “the prices got way high and most people couldn’t touch them. I can make these quickly. I’ll sell them to people who need them, or want something to remember me by, but can’t afford the expensive ones.”

I bought three.

Publisher’s Note:

Father Bill Moore (1949-2020), abstract expressionist painter, in his studio in Pomona, California (link retrieved on 18 November 2023):
https://frbillmoore.com/STUDIO_IMAGES.html

Kendall Johnson

grew up in the lemon groves in Southern California, raised by assorted coyotes and bobcats. A former firefighter with military experience, he served as traumatic stress therapist and crisis consultant—often in the field. A nationally certified teacher, he taught art and writing, served as a gallery director, and still serves on the board of the Sasse Museum of Art, for whom he authored the museum books Fragments: An Archeology of Memory (2017), an attempt to use art and writing to retrieve lost memories of combat, and Dear Vincent: A Psychologist Turned Artist Writes Back to Van Gogh (2020). He holds national board certification as an art teacher for adolescents to young adults.

A year ago, Dr. Johnson retired from teaching and clinical work to pursue painting, photography, and writing full time. In that capacity he has written five literary books of artwork and poetry, and one in art history. His memoir collection, Chaos & Ash, was released from Pelekinesis in 2020, his Black Box Poetics from Bamboo Dart Press in 2021, and his The Stardust Mirage from Cholla Needles Press in 2022. His Fireflies series is published by Arroyo Seco Press: Fireflies Against Darkness (2021), More Fireflies (2022), and The Fireflies Around Us (2023).

His shorter work has appeared in Chiron Review, Cultural Weekly, Literary Hub, MacQueen’s Quinterly, Quarks Ediciones Digitales, and Shark Reef; and was translated into Chinese by Poetry Hall: A Chinese and English Bi-Lingual Journal. He serves as contributing editor for the Journal of Radical Wonder.

Author’s website: www.layeredmeaning.com

More on the Web: By, About, and Beyond

⚡ Kendall Johnson’s Black Box Poetics is out today on Bamboo Dart Press, an interview by Dennis Callaci in Shrimper Records blog (10 June 2021)

⚡ Self Portraits: A Review of Kendall Johnson’s Dear Vincent, by Trevor Losh-Johnson in The Ekphrastic Review (6 March 2020)

⚡ On the Ground Fighting a New American Wildfire by Kendall Johnson at Literary Hub (12 August 2020), a selection from his memoir collection Chaos & Ash (Pelekinesis, 2020)

⚡ A review of Chaos & Ash by John Brantingham in Tears in the Fence (2 January 2021)