Out Of The Box
Notes on my latest painting
March 3, 2024
So I was having lunch with an old friend a while ago — an old foe, really: she had the prosecution gig once upon a time in County X, I had the defense. We clocked in each day like Ralph Wolf and Sam Sheepdog (“Morning Ralph” “Morning Sam”), then set to work trying to Looney Tune one another till the whistle blew and we signed out for the evening (“Night Sam” “Night Ralph”).
Anyway, Pat was asking after my art, as, bless her, she is wont to do, and I mentioned that I’d recently been working more with collage. The next time I saw her, Pat had a box for me. When I went to lift it from the trunk of her car, my back muscles froze in disbelief. What did she have in there, the Encyclopedia Britannica?
“Collage material,” she pronounced.
I poked around in the box after I got home (number of big books, check) but I was caught up in a project at the time so I left it. Fast-forward a few weeks: I’d reached the possessed-but-stuck stage with a new painting, which, trust me, is not a comfortable one, and I had the thought, it was grasping at straws, really: maybe there was something in the box. A found shape, a stealth color. Something that could be used to unify, or disrupt. An amulet that would ward off stuckness.
So I dug into the box. I say this in the most admiring way possible: that shit was weird. Pat told me later she’d picked up most of it at an estate sale. There were books on M.C. Escher and Andrew’s pop, N.C. Wyeth; a sheet music booklet for the vaudeville song “I’m Always Chasing Rainbows” with a picture of Betty Grable on the cover; and — this brought me back — a copy of Alfred’s Basic Guitar Method, Book 2, the program from which I’d been taught as a child, though I never made it past Book 1.
Underneath the sheet music I discovered a copy of “The Warren Report About President Kennedy’s Assassination,” printed on bound newsprint, now yellowed; and the February 2, 1969 edition of The Minneapolis Tribune Sunday Picture Magazine. The entire issue was devoted to Apollo 8, the first crewed spacecraft to 1) leave low Earth orbit and 2) reach the moon (the actual moon landing took place six months later.) It included the first-ever photographs of an Earthrise and the far side of the moon.
The person whose things were now mine had been a photographer. There was a trove of prints: shots of tree roots, iris petals, sunflower cores, pear skins; small-town garages and movie theaters; winding rural roads guiding the eye to a vanishing point; the Foshay Tower back when it still commanded the Minneapolis skyline.
There are worse ways to try to know someone than to learn their enthusiasms. Though I never discovered my person’s name, I felt like I’d been gifted with some inimitable part of them because I’d seen what excited them. It turns out that was my amulet. The random bits of life are life.
This painting is for you, unknown friend.
Masterpiece
The board game, not the PBS program
December 26, 2023
We weren’t an art museum kind of family, growing up. We were a Velveeta and sitcoms and pop-up camper family. My mother brought three kids to the union with my step-father; he brought three. The main thing the six of us had in common was that we were all stuck orbiting a calamitously ill-advised marriage.
(Also, were there even any art museums in Miami when I was young? I know it’s all chichi and Art Basel-y today, but then?)
We were, however, a board game family. Or, more accurately I suppose, we were board game kids. I discovered art by way of Masterpiece, the old Parker Brothers game. The rules, such as they were, were silly. You tried to outbid the other players at an art auction, but a good percentage of the paintings turned out to be forgeries. I can still remember how this rankled — your fortunes in a game should have something to do with your own wits, they shouldn’t be governed solely by dumb luck.
But it didn’t matter. It wasn’t the game I was interested in; it was the set pieces, the paintings. There were two dozen of them, ranging from Bernardo Martorell’s St. George and the Dragon to Picasso’s Sylvette (Portrait of Mlle. D.), a half-millennium of art reproduced on 3 1/2 x 5 1/2 inch note cards.
I found the paintings by turns puzzling, charming, shocking, mysterious, preachy, fantastic, cryptic, soothing, engrossing. I didn’t love them all. Renoir’s On the Terrace was, even then, too pretty for me, El Greco’s The Assumption of the Virgin, too didactic.
My preteen imagination latched on to the paintings in which the action was frozen mid-scene: Winslow Homer’s The Herring Net, Gustave Caillebotte’s Place de l’Europe on a Rainy Day, and that most narrative of narrative paintings, Hopper’s Nighthawks.
Chagall’s The Circus Rider made me think that the soul has a color, and it’s blue.
I remember feeling all angsty about Jackson Pollock’s Greyed Rainbow. Why was this Art? What was wrong with me that I didn’t get it? It felt like an inside joke of some kind, one that I was meant to be the butt of. While, today, I’m completely and happily reconciled to Pollock, I remain familiar with the angsty feeling — it still overtakes me from time to time in the contemporary wing of my local art museum.
One of the Masterpiece paintings is an obvious forebear to the art I make. But, looking back, I’m unable to remember anything I thought about Hans Hoffman’s The Golden Wall. I guess it didn’t make a big impression on me.
A decade later, I was living and studying in Chicago. I wandered into the Art Institute one day and THERE THEY WERE, my Masterpiece paintings, in the pigmented flesh (the Art Institute affiliation is noted on the backs of the game cards, but I hadn’t retained that information). The first one I spotted (I can’t remember now which one it was), I was like, oh my god that’s from Masterpiece, and then, improbably, I spied another. At some point it dawned on me: they were all there. I got as close to each painting as I could, greedy to drink it in with my own eyes: brushstrokes, edges, how paint was lacquered or dabbled on, oh wow signatures. I stood back to allow the effect of each to wash over me, observe how its color vibrated or whispered, absorb the architecture of its values. The next day I went back and did it all again.
It would sound overly theatrical were I to say that that day at the Art Institute was the second-most formative experience of my painting life (Masterpiece being, of course, the first) so instead I’ll say this: on that day, I was newly on my own, a thousand miles removed from other people’s crap decisions, beginning to become comfortable with thinking what I thought and valuing what I valued. The Masterpiece paintings came to represent that for me — as, in truth, they always had.