ne achievement of Sam Messer's portraits is this: That we turn from them, look out our windows, and understand that we're seeing people, some of whom believe they've visited intergalactic electronics factories at the center of the moon, people who wear tinfoil hats to shield their brains from demonic messages, people who eat only raw unshucked corn or worship potatoes that resemble Elvis Presley or make pilgrimages to see tortillas that bear the face of Jesus Christ – and that in seeing them we get willing to understand that somebody like that is who we originally and truly are. Each of us, but overlaid by the lash marks of a conventional education.

Red Blanket, 1992

"Time has no meaning, it's just shifting gears."

Sam took me once to visit with Jon Serl at Jon's home. By this time Jon was well into his nineties, and my impression was that of a person whose eccentricity had, after a long life, at last made him impossible. But Jon was real, and hovered just this side of the great chasm – death, or madness, or silence; I don't know what the chasm was. But he hadn't yet gone over. He could be talked with, and watched, and listened to like music, and these things Sam Messer did for some years, visiting Jon regularly and painting these images of him.

When Sam began to concentrate on portraits some years ago, it was clear right away that he was tending the ground within himself, and finding the light to see it within the others he painted – particularly the artists – the ground in which the gifts of talent and strength find their fullest flower. Walt Whitman, in his preface to Leaves of Grass, suggested that the true artist prepares the ground by living generously:

No Straight Lines Out There, 1992

"I used to write poems on the beach. There's another old man here and the words are gone. But I feel things and there are things I remember as landmarks. That's what I paint."

"This is what you shall do: Love the earth and the sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to everyone that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, reexamine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body."

The portraits believe in an inner self who can be rendered as faithfully as the outer one, but bringing this one to light – the nameless one, the crazy person, the one whose experience isn't mediated by concepts – requires a personal closeness to the subject. In Jon's case, the inner person was almost entirely present to anybody who encountered him. Maybe this explains why these portraits include some of the most focused and potent and effortless of Sam's paintings.

"Even my dogs know that", 1993

In Jon Serl, any artist willing to look found the living example of Whitman's commandments. Sam was willing, and now we receive the gift of what he saw.

Denis Johnson is the author of numerous books of fiction and poetry including Jesus' Son, Fiskadoro, Angels, and The Throne of Third Heaven of Nations Millenium General Assembly.

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