Letter

I pack up my French easel and gessoed thrift-store canvas and bike to the intersection of Eleanor and Loomis. I’m at this corner nearly every Sunday morning a few minutes before 10:30am waiting for the Duck to open. Sometimes there are a few others—newbies who try the locked door in vain and veterans who chat patiently or just enjoy the scenery.

I know the view almost by heart. It was this past Sunday that it finally occurred to me that I should try to paint it. Just in time for the restaurant’s ten year anniversary too. I’ve been coming here almost since the beginning but became a regular six or seven years ago. A lot of the crew used to visit me when I bartended nearby and still treat me like I’m in the industry.

I’ve made countless drawings of bottles behind the bar from my vantage point at the last stool on the left, nearest the wait station. It’s the best place to chitchat with the staff and eavesdrop on what they say about the clientele. Talking shit about customers is sometimes the only thing that makes a shift bearable. It’s a necessary release valve. Hilarious if it’s not aimed at you and oftentimes even when it is.

I painted the Big Rubber Ducky for them years ago. It hangs at the other end of the bar from my spot, near the door.

I painted a view across the water at Lock Street’s end, where Bubbly Creek meets the Sanitary Canal. There’s a nice new park there now where rowing teams launch and people fish and picnic. I went there when I first moved to this street a couple months into lockdown. I thought then that it would be a regular stop, but in the years since it’s just part of the passing view en route to the Duck and points north.

I set up in the park with the easel one other time and wound up framing that one and giving it to the Duck. It hangs on the brick wall behind one of tables in the barroom. If I turn and look over my left shoulder from my regular spot, I can see it.

Today I set up the easel pointing away from the restaurant. I’m not waiting for bloody marys or the breakfast they made a special button for on the POS so I wouldn’t have to list the ingredients each time there’s a new bartender to break in. I’m here to try to catch a view I know by heart which means something specific to me for what’s not even in the frame.

While I’m painting, a delivery truck pulls up with stuff for the kitchen. The driver pays me no mind, just goes about his business. Then Kevin’s wife arrives with early Christmas decorations. Then Brandon comes by. They’re gearing up for the Thanksgiving take-home-meal rush. It’s a busy time. I hadn’t even thought what I’ll eat that day. Good thing there are so many Chinese restaurants to choose from nearby.

He asks me to knock on the door if I need anything. I thank him and say I’m all set. I’ll be back here Sunday morning, a few minutes early as always, waiting to go in.

It’s been two weeks since I turned off the news. I’m still here, so there’s that. The not knowing is working so far but who knows for how long? I have to leave the house sometimes and there are people out there and they wanna talk about what’s going on. I try not to be rude about it but I shut down most conversations that stray anywhere near the news.

Ignorance may not be bliss but is a coping mechanism.

In the fall of 2016, I spent a couple months organizing a horse-stable-size garage in back of a bar. It was an immersive project that made the outside world disappear while I was in it. But then, the owner decided he wanted to keep being a hoarder and stopped letting me back there. In short order, the space reverted to a chaotic mess. New crap that he found god knows where filling all available space.

I was banished and returned to the horrorshow of the front page. I need to figure out some way for that not to happen again.

I’ve been making drawings of my place. I’ve been here close to five years now but the previous pictures of these rooms never quite came together. Perhaps the renewed need to turn inward is what makes these new ones work.

It will have to be like a prison sentence. Nothing much visible beyond the walls (maybe not literally, but nearly so).

There’s that great scene in Beetlejuice when the dead couple that doesn’t know they’re dead open the door and try to walk out of the home that is now their tomb to discover a hellscape of killer sandworm monsters and are barely able to make it back inside.

It will be something like that.

I’ve written about wordless books before. William Gropper made maybe my favorite, Alay-Oop, in 1930. He tugged at my sleeve again a few weeks ago with his illustrations for a pretty terrible Jewish immigrant novel being published in a new translation from the Yiddish. Aside from the mildly-entertaining Fiddler on the Roof-type beginning, the only thing to recommend the book is Gropper’s twenty drawings.

I went down a rabbithole with his stuff online. The paintings are pretty dreadful. Typical social realist stuff with a caricature edge that’s oddly stillborn in color. There’s one WPA post office mural that’s not bad but it’s mostly because it cribs from Breughel’s The Hunters in the Snow.

The book and newspaper illustrations are great.

He splits the difference between Daumier and Grosz but there’s an economy and coiled spring feel to the line that’s his own.

I found a children’s book he wrote and illustrated in 1955 and got a worn copy on eBay. It’s called The Little Tailor and is what that other book he illustrated for the other guy should’ve been.

I’ve culled most of my library, but exempted wordless novels and children’s books. These are still useful to me in offering paths forward in my own work.

Made another bookstore zine and some bookmarks and updated the bookstore map.

RIP Frank Auerbach. One of the greats.