Bud: The Inferno

Bud. I don't know what to say. The minute he begins to talk, I am lost on a meandering odyssey, wishing I could stay listening to him instead of coaching the others through milquetoast drawing experiments. Bud is taking a class on Dante's Inferno, looking at illustrations of it and thinking of doing some himself. Yesterday, his drawing was more placid than usual - a few trees, a fennel flower, other assorted flora, but wait, under the ground was a whole other strata where a dwarfish bearded man sat, covered in a multitude of droopy breasts. He looked up and apologized for including a figure in his assignment (they were supposed to draw a landscape). I said "You fail!!" and he looked like he believed me for a second. Sad Bud. He asked me to look at some of his paintings and I got an interesting mini-lecture on the relationship of Dante's Inferno to Modernist writers, specfically TS Eliot and Ezra Pound. He said that all real artists had to be horrible or tortured somehow. Except for William Carlos Williams...oh yeah but he had lots of affairs, Bud said. He told me one of his paintings was supposed to be about cocktail parties...and then went on to say that he spent most of his childhood trying to figure out what to do with himself during cocktail hour, his family members are alchoholics. I think they must be very rich, eccentric, and problematic. He mentioned something about having been locked in a basement for a long period of time when he was little, and then was taken away to live with his aunt who had a teepee in the backyard. He would sit in the teepee and she would bring him vegetarian meals to soothe him. His mother is far away now and he never sees her. Bud needs love.