A Man Without a Country (8 page)

The full-page, hand-lettered statements scattered throughout this book, “samplers suitable for framing” if you like, are pictures of products of Origami Express, a business partnership between myself and Joe Petro III, with headquarters in Joe’s painting and silk-screening studio in Lexington, Kentucky. I paint or draw pictures, and Joe makes prints of some of them, one by one, color by color, by means of the time-consuming, archaic silk screen process, practiced by almost nobody else any more: squeegeeing inks through cloths and onto paper. This process is so painstaking and tactile, almost balletic, that each print Joe makes is a painting in its own right.

Our partnership’s name, Origami Express, is my tribute to the many-layered packages Joe makes for prints he sends for me to sign and number. The logo for Origami, made by Joe, isn’t his picture of a picture I sent him, but of a picture by me that he found in my novel
Breakfast of Champions
. It is of a bomb in air, on its way down, with these words written on its side:

GOODBYE
BLUE
MONDAY

I have to have been one of the luckiest persons alive, since I have survived for four score and two years now. I can’t begin to count all the times I should have been dead or wished I were. But one of the best things that ever happened to me, a one-in-a-billion opportunity to enjoy myself in perfect innocence, was my meeting Joe.

Here’s the thing: Back in 1993, almost eleven years ago now, I was scheduled to lecture on November 1 at Midway College, a women’s school on the edge of Lexington. Well in advance of my appearance, a Kentucky artist, Joe Petro III, son of the Kentucky artist Joe Petro II, asked me to do a black-and-white self-portrait, which he could then use in silk-screen posters to be used by the school. So I did and he did. Joe was only thirty-seven back then, and I was a mere spring chicken of only seventy-one, not even twice his age.

When I got down there to speak, and was so happy about the posters, I learned from Joe himself that he painted romantic but scientifically precise pictures of wildlife, from which he made silk screen images. He had majored in zoology at the University of Tennessee. Yes, and some of his pictures were so appealing and informative that they had been used as propaganda by Greenpeace, an organization trying, with scant success so far, to prevent the murder of species, even our own, by the way we live now. And Joe, having shown me the poster and his own work and his studio, said to me in effect, “Why don’t we keep on going?”

And so we have, and it seems quite possible in retrospect that Joe Petro III saved my life. I will not explain. I will let it go at that.

We have since collaborated on more than two hundred different images, with Joe making editions, signed and numbered by me, of ten or more of each of them. The “samplers” in this book are not at all representative of our total oeuvre, but are simply very recent
jeux d’esprit
. Most of our stuff has been my knockoffs of Paul Klee and Marcel Duchamp and so on.

And since we first met, Joe has beguiled others into sending him pictures for him to do with what he so much loves to do. Among them are the comedian Jonathan Winters, an art student long ago, and the English artist Ralph Steadman, whose accomplishments include the appropriately harrowing illustrations for Hunter Thompson’s
Fear and Loathing
books. And Steadman and I have come to know and like each other on account of Joe.

Yes, and last July (2004) there was an exhibition of Joe’s and my stuff, arranged by Joe, at the Indianapolis Art Center in the town of my birth. But there was also a painting by my architect and painter grandfather Bernard Vonnegut, and two by my architect and painter father Kurt Vonnegut, and six apiece by my daughter Edith and my son the doctor Mark.

Ralph Steadman heard about this family show from Joe and sent me a note of congratulation. I wrote him back as follows: “Joe Petro III staged a reunion of four generations of my family in Indianapolis, and he had made you and me feel like first cousins. Is it possible that he is God? We could do worse.”

Only kidding, of course.

Are Origami’s pictures any good? Well, I asked the now regrettably dead painter Syd Solomon, a most agreeable neighbor on Long Island for many summertimes, how to tell a good picture from a bad one. He gave me the most satisfactory answer I ever expect to hear. He said, “Look at a million pictures, and you can never be mistaken.”

I passed this on to my daughter Edith, a professional painter, and she too thought it was pretty good. She said she “could rollerskate through the Louvre, saying, ‘Yes, no, no, yes, no, yes,’ and so on.”

Okay?

KURT VONNEGUT
is among the few grandmasters of American letters, one without whom the very term American literature would mean much less than it does. He was born in Indianapolis, Indiana, on November 11, 1922. Vonnegut lives in New York City and Bridgehampton, New York, with his wife, the author and photographer Jill Krementz.

To see more of Kurt Vonnegut’s original art, visit
www.vonnegut.com.