Famed for her pencils, Mercedes Helnwein colors her future in oil pastel. Her exhibition, Temptation to Be Good, is now on view at the Merry Karnowsky Gallery in Los Angeles until December 11.

“It’s a title that makes me think of a Midwestern girl being taken advantage of by Jesus and the Devil,” says Mercedes Helnwein of her series, Temptation to Be Good, which finally turns on the on-and-off romance with oil pastels.

Pencils play coconspirators, as they did in last year’s East of Eden, but Mercedes also appoints dominion to each instrument, allowing the pastels to govern the grace of their own pages, and the pencils to remain in office and draft that cryptic comedy of errors. All parties prevail — particularly the artist — who destroys disinterest by adapting.

“I had done one pencil drawing too many, and thankfully found a box of Sennelier oil pastels in a drawer,” the artist recalls. “It was a pretty dramatic day in the studio and thankfully nobody was around for me to physically attack. After I ripped up my drawing and found the box of oil pastels, I pulled out a huge roll of paper an artist friend of mine had given me a couple years ago. I taped it to the wall and started drawing the outlines to a huge face. I had to do something totally different in order for me to survive that day.”

Survival accomplished, the artist continues her overachievement — publishing her first novel, The Potential Hazards of Hester Day (2008) before the age of 30 and architecting art of increasing incredibility. Her shows sell internationally and famously as Damien Hirst purchased her collection, Whistling Past the Graveyard (2008), earlier this year.

Temptation to Be Good inherits qualities of East of Eden (2009) — criminal coteries (“Easy Company”), antipodal emotions (“Jim and Summer”) — but yet is an independent sibling, not erecting the full-bodied postures of East. It may floor the damsel (“Missouri II”), classic in Mercedes’ art, but it is all grown up in personality.

Know their gaze and know the women — not as many sidelong glances as before and not as much anxiety, but more dreaming and more meditation. In The Book of Disquiet (2005), Mercedes used color pencils for finely etched faces, hushed in dark tones of shadow and hair. Temptation tears apart tradition with oil pastels, the palette vibrant and the dimensions titanic at around 45” x 60.” Deem them deities — these women — and in their countenance, read their folklore and cosmic quest, for the grandeur makes this possible.

Chapter 1
THE PHOTOGRAPH

WHETHER BEAUTIFUL OR TERRIBLE, THE PAST IS ALWAYS A RUIN.

When I look back on my childhood, my earliest memories seemlike artifacts from a lost civilization: half-understood fragments behind museum glass. I remember the spherical alcohol lamp that glowed like a tiny ghost, ringed with dancing blue flames, which hung over the dining room table of the house where I grew up. I remember the sweet, oily smell of coal smoke, and the creaking of horse-drawn carriages on the dirt road outside. Most of all I remember
the summer twilight over the mountains and how, on certain evenings, just before the sun sank below the horizon, it cast rays so luminous and golden that they felt like a solid, enveloping close into which a small boy could simply disappear. An intensity no light today seems to match.

These images appear as snapshots of a vanished world— literally vanished, considering how much has changed between those years and the present day. Since then, airplane flights linking the continents have transformed once-in-a-lifetime voyages into matters of a few hours spent in a comfortable seat. Things like telephones and automobiles, once improbable rarities possessed only by the very rich, are now taken for granted by average people. When I was young, the changing of the seasons was the most important punctuation of life: ancient rhythms that have since been replaced by electric lights that turn night into day and fragment each day into electronic-precision intervals measured by the punch-clock instead of the almanac.

Now, watching the young men and women dressed in skintight leotards rollerblade past the bench where I like to watch the sun sink over the Pacific on these warm Los Angeles evenings, I know that my world no longer exists. It has vanished utterly, and would be incomprehensible to these self-satisfi ed, bright-faced youths.

Thanks to the genius of human invention, things have sped up until I can hardly keep track anymore: the new-new internet, the new world order, the next big thing that seems to arrive every day (if the newspapers are to be believed). Carried on the tide of progress, we all seem to be fast-forwarding into a future where our memories become irrelevant relics from a useless and discarded past.

Let me be clear: I don’t mean to glorify the “good old days,” or to condemn the contemporary milieu. Whatever charms the past may have had, I don’t believe those bygone times were any better than the present (at least, apart from my own preferences—and I won’t pretend to speak for anyone other than myself). Instead, what I’m trying to explain is that I am a kind of dinosaur: a member of a near-extinct species, fumbling with arthritic talons on the
typewriter keys as I write these pages.

Several years ago I took a composition course at the local communitycollege. During those sensitivity-laden sessions (where badprose was miraculously transformed into “challenging work,”and cliché into “irony”), the instructor taught us that a story shouldstart by making clear where the narrator stands, establishing thevoice. And that’s what I’m hoping to do here—only, rereadingthese last few paragraphs, I see that it doesn’t seem to be working.And to be honest, clarity in general isn’t one of my strengths thesedays. So maybe it’s best if I begin(again) by simply explaining how it all began.

IT WAS TWO YEARS ago when the little bells above the entrance tothe antiques store tinkled and the door swung open, a sweating delivery man staggering through. I looked up from the book I’dbeen reading and stood.

“Got a shipment for you,” he announced, dropping the packages next to my desk. “Need your signature.”

I wrote my name on the screen that he shoved in my direction. “See you around, boss.” He gave me a thumbs-up gesture before departing into the brightness of the world outside. I looked down at the three large boxes.

It had been almost a decade since I’d opened my antiques store, and by then it was a reasonably successful business, located in a middle-class Los Angeles suburb. I should emphasize that I didn’t start the business because I was ambitious. In fact, I had opened the store for quite opposite reasons: as a refuge, a way of retreating from life. Despite my decades of trying to feel comfortable in the world, I had never really managed to fi t into this place (this sprawling California city with its constant noise, its nirvanas of vitamin juice and self-realization—or this twentieth century in general, for that matter). The store was intended to be a place where I could hide, where I could be alone and let the world forget me.

To my surprise, although I didn’t have much in the way of a gift for salesmanship or knowledge of antiques, the shop provided me with a modest but healthy income, until a larger, more polished antiques store opened a few blocks away. Since then, to compete, I’d been forced to sell less furniture and more historical knickknacks.
For the most part these were old magazines and books that I purchased in bulk, mainly from estate sales in the Midwest: inexpensive curiosities that might attract casual shoppers who wandered in to purchase a fragment of the past.

Through the small windows of the shop, dusty beams of sunlight illuminated the cluttered interior of the space: the worn upholstery of armchairs, an assortment of Edwardian-era dressing tables with age-silvered mirrors, a curio cabinet bearing a row of ormolu clocks (all motionless, since I couldn’t stand the sound of their ticking). Outside, the shapes of palm trees shimmered in the heat.

I slit the packing tape on the first of the boxes and began to inventory its contents. Issues of Time magazine and Life magazine, covers displaying images of celebration and catastrophe. A newspaper clipping and a small black-and-white photograph that had been taped together fell out of one of the magazines and I stooped to pick them up, glancing at the picture. A snapshot of three people sitting at a table in a bar, two men and a woman.

The next thing I remember was the door swinging open, ayoung couple entering the shop. I looked up from the photograph, trying to wipe away my tears with shaking hands. The couple stared at me and I stammered something about the store being closed. They hurried away, and I closed my eyes again.

I told myself that the photograph didn’t make any difference or change anything. But already I understood that, whatever I might want to believe, everything had changed. All my efforts at forgetting and indifference were abruptly meaningless. Like it or not, I would have to go back and unbury everything. Somehow I would have to find a way of telling this story: of salvaging some fragment from the scrap heap of the past.

It has been two years since then, and I’m still struggling to fit the pieces together. At one time I imagined that I could be a good scholar, but if I’m honest with myself I never was—and, at any rate, I’m too old for such efforts now. Despite my hours spent hunched over library books and staring at the glowing hieroglyphics of computer screens, I still can’t prove anything.

More than once, in fact, I told myself that writing this story was a waste of time, a lost cause. But in the end, the cunning of desire always triumphs over the cunning of reason. (Or, as Byron put it, “There is no instinct like that of the heart.”) So that even after I’d decided to give up, at the least expected of times—sitting in my apartment, watching the electric nighttime silhouette of Los Angeles—it would all come crowding back to me…

Well, at least it’s a good story. (Of course I’d have to say that, wouldn’t I? But really: it is.) It’s a story about conspiracies and struggles to reshape the world; about secret wars between men like J. P. Morgan, Thomas Edison, and Nikola Tesla. It is about one of the strangest and least-known mysteries of American history: the
existence and disappearance of the Lost Kingdom of Ohio. It is about science and faith, and the distance between the two. Most of all, it’s a story about a man and a woman, and about love.

In my imagination, it begins with a day in the heart of winter. I can picture it effortlessly: the gray sky and the leafless trees, the solemn profile of a young woman standing near a riverbank. A whisper of cold on my cheek as I look up to see the first flakes of snow beginning to fall—

But that’s not right. That scene comes much later—or, looking at it another way, much earlier. Really, the only place I can honestly begin is in the middle of things, with New York City, in the year 1900. With the construction of the first subway tunnels through the dark bedrock beneath the metropolis, and with a young man so distant from where I sit now that he seems an unrecognizable stranger: a mechanic, an adventurer, and perhaps also a criminal,
named Peter Force.

Nowhere was this more evident than at Jeffery Deitch’s beachfront party at the Raleigh Hotel. Deitch’s annual private bash has become the place to see or be seen on the opening night of the fair, and this year guests were treated to a superb performance by indie darling Santogold. Deitch’s role as the unofficial ringleader of the downtown New York hipster set now has interesting implications for L. A., as he was recently appointed director of the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art. This is the first time a major art dealer will run an American museum, and it remains to be seen whether Deitch’s street/pop/kitsch aesthetic will infiltrate the hallowed halls of one of L.A.’s most respected institutions.

The blurring of boundaries between the traditionally public and private sectors of the art world was a recurring motif at ABMB. One of the city’s major non-profit exhibition spaces, the Bass Museum, debuted “Where Do We Go From Here?” an exhibition of selections from La Colección Jumex—Mexico’s largest private collection of contemporary art. The fair’s festivities also included the debut of the museum-like De La Cruz Collection Contemporary Art Space in Miami’s Design District. Home to the personal collection of Rosa and Carlos De la Cruz, the exquisite three story space outshone any of Miami’s current public exhibition spaces.
Los Angeles artists featured prominently throughout the fair and it’s festivities, from Pae White’s transformation of the Collins Park Oceanfront into a glowing village to Shepard Fairey’s inclusion as a speaker in the “Art Conversations” series. Fairey’s acceptance into the fine art world from his previous categorization as “street” or commercial artist is another indicator of how much the landscape has changed. In his talk at the fair, Fairey stated, “I think that initially, I wasn’t interested in the art world because it’s such a narrow conversation. It’s more the spillover to the rest of culture that I’ve been impressed by.” If the beginning of 2010 is any indication, the spillover has become a deluge.

I wish
that someday
my head on her belly might be like home
like doubt to doubt resuscitation
because time is supposed to mean more than skin
She doesn’t know that I have taught my arms to close around her clocks
so they can withstand the fallout from her Autumn

She is so explosive,
volcanoes watch her and learn
terrorists want to strap her to their chests
because she is a cause worth dying for
Maybe someday
time will teach me to pick up her pieces
put her back together
and remind her to click her heels
but she doesn’t need a wizard to tell her that I was here all along

Lady
let us catch the next tornado home
let us plant cantaloupe trees in our backyard
then maybe together we will realize that we don’t like cantaloupe
and they don’t grow on trees
we can laugh about it
then we can plant things we’ve never heard of

I’ve never heard of a woman
who can make flawed look so beautiful
the way you do

The word smitten is to how I feel about you
what a kiss is to romance
so maybe my lips to yours could be the penance to this confession
because I am the only one preaching your defunct religion
sitting alone at your altar, praising you out of faith

I cannot do this hard-knock life alone
You are all the softness a rock dreams of being
the mistakes the rain makes at picnics
when Mother Nature bears witness in much better places

So yes
I will gladly take on your ocean
just to swim beneath you
so I can kiss the bends of your knees
in appreciation for the work they do
keeping your head above water

A place you can rent for cheap
about five miles out from town,
Game Land boundary
running along the ridge.

Morning or night,
something to conjure by,
like seeds after a burn:
good weed in a glass jar,
a stack of songs on the dusty floor,
a broken-in pair of boots.