The Artists of Heartside Gallery and Studio-- Neil Kaufman

Our featured artist for November is Neil Kaufman.   

 

Here's a little bit about the artist, in his own words:

 

'My experiences with the Freemasons have literally made it so that I cannot conceive of blasphemy. Here it is, I’ve never heard of them before, I show up at their doorstep after a guy tells me to go over and check them out I met at an open-mic poetry night. I’m mentally ill and unmedicated, which means that I’m basically taking everything in free association, straight in uninhibited, when I do this and I walk into a shrine with an eye looking through a triangle in it referred to as the Grand Architect of the Universe, I’ve just finished a book called The Universe by love and in a freak coincidence, this girl sent me this message a few months back that really sent my brain askew and then I woke up, puking the day after she sent it to me, brain trying to reconcile it for anything, it literally made me sick because I couldn’t understand anything about this message, I’ve really got no clue and the blood vessel on my eye has shifted. It’s not that there’s a new one, I’m not exactly sure of the process but the old blood vessel that was there is gone, that spot is nice, pretty and white, and a little lower down there’s this picturesque blood vessel burst in the shape of a triangle. What’s more, the end of The Universe by love is the most beautiful word anyone has ever uttered to me, told to me by a man who referred to himself as speaking the angel language on a bus that’s part of The Rapid around the City of Grand Rapids, it really is the most beautiful sound that I’ve ever heard, I’d never heard it before and in the context this man used it in, it really was a word that I was led to believe is the name of God. Worst of all, this man was speaking a foreign language and I had this feeling in my mind before I asked him what language it was that he was speaking that he was going to say, “The angel language,” and that’s what he said. You can see how it is impossible for me to know blasphemy. Hi, my name is Neil Kaufman.

A little bit about me: I don’t like genius. Geniuses lead freak lives. Give me the extra-traditional. I want the cheesecake that’s so good, you’ll swear there’s extra cheesecake inside of the cheesecake and the coffee that’s so good, you’ll swear that there’s extra coffee within the coffee. Eccentricity lends itself to ingenuity. Genius lends itself to leaping off a building. You do the math.'

 

Home by home, a poem by Neil Kaufman:

It’s in the normalcy that makes life worth living.

Going home and finding out your sister got an A on her test.

Going home and talking to Mom about her hard day at work

while cutting up onions

for beef stew,

then sitting down at dinner with your loved ones

and making silly jokes about how Laura is eating the beans

like a rabbit.

Cleaning the dishes afterward, not really liking it,

but hey, tarnish is part of life.

Then, sitting down together to watch a cartoon movie

in your living room. The movie ends,

you all talk about how good it was,

your favorite part where the cartoon panda got hit

in the face with a bowl of spaghetti

and looked like an octopus afterward,

my other family members

share their favorite parts.

We all hug,

give Mom a kiss on the cheek goodnight,

sneak in a bowl of ice cream

and it’s off to bed you go to have sweet dreams,

or possibly kind of demented ones

because you ate the bowl of ice cream right before bed.

Either way,

you’re going to wake up safe,

you’ll instantly know that you’re loved when you do,

and you’ve got a lot of food in a nice house with a lot of stuff to do.

You don’t question that when you have it.

It’s your whole world.

Who could ask for anything more than that?

It is the epitome of comfortable living

where you’re your own superstar

among people who know you better than you know yourself.

There’s nothing left to want to trade.

The entire world operates all from within one tiny house like a coral reef

of healthy, propagating psychological intrigue.

--
Neil Kaufman, Creative Morphologist
Eoaura Publishing
http://www.eusir.com

 

The Artists of Heartside Gallery and Studio is a monthly feature to highlight some of the wonderful people of the Heartside neighborhood.  Visit www.heartside.org, Facebook and our Flickr page to keep up with us, to learn about volunteering and other ways to get involved.

Sarah Scott is Arts Coordinator for Heartside Gallery and Studio, and can be reached at [email protected]