Excerpt from C.V.J. by Julian Schnabel

FIRST ENTRY INTO PARNASSUS

"SOME I LET DRINK THEIR OWN TEARS, SOME I WOULD NOT ALLOW UNTIL THEY CAME TO MY STUDIO." --DON VAN VLIET, 1985

The artists I met at Max's were generally friendly, but the truth is that nobody, particularly in those days, liked the idea of young artists.  I remember sitting one night talking and drinking heavily with Neil Williams, David Diao, and Brice Marden.

Brice had been using a wax medium to mix with his paint to make a matte surface.  He had been attributed by some as the maker of the last paintings.  I thought that meant that all of the information had been buried under the wax of those paintings.  Thinking about it now, I'd call those paintings a panel of meaning.  They were a tablet, a clean slate, a place to begin to reintroduce language into painting.  At the time they just looked like blank grey paintings to me.  I didn't think about them much until later, when I thought about them a lot.

All of a sudden Brice said, "Who are you?  Why are you sitting here with all of us who have been painting here for ten years?  We're painters.  What do you do?"

"I make paintings."

"Where do you show?"

"I don't."

"Where are your paintings?"

"In my studio."

"Everybody wants me to come to their studio."

"I didn't ask you."

Neil Williams volunteered that he had seen some of my paintings, some pictures of them, and that I was all right.

David Diao said, "The kid's all right."

Then we all got very drunk and it got less tense.

By four A.M., Neil had left and David asked Brice and me to come to his studio to see his new paintings, knowing they weren't done; he was always a bit of a masochist. We went up and looked at them.  I said they weren't finished.  Brice said I didn't have a right to speak, that I was just a student.  I told him that we were all students and I was just being polite up till now.

He took a drunken swing at me.  As I staggered out of the way, he fell into the refrigerator.  Then he lunged back at me and I grabbed his arms.  We both fell to the floor.

"If you stop trying to hit me," I said, "I'll let go."  He got up, walked around David's studio like a cat, and left.

Later I sat in a hammock and cried.

"You come to New York believing in some people's work that you respect and they treat you like a parasite," I said to David.  "What's the point?"

"You couldn't pay for an art lesson like that anywhere," David answered.
He was right.