I was commissioned to make five long and narrow paintings to replace crappy figure drawings done by a former hostess of a restaurant that has since gone out of business. The dimensions were determined by the gaudy frames the restaurateur refused to part with.

I wrote about this at the time but can’t find the newsletter and, thus, don’t even know what year it happened. This is a recurring thing that will only snowball, I know. The past is a looming, out-of-focus slurry. I reach in carefully and hope to pull out the thing I’m looking for, with mixed results more often than not.

The reason I’m recalling that project now is that the one painting that was paid for but never hung—for all I know, it’s gathering cobwebs in a basement to this day—is reproduced in a new print magazine called Tableware in their first issue.

The painting is based on a photo of the open secret door in Punch House, the bar in the basement of Thalia Hall in Pilsen. I think the bar is still going, though the restaurant upstairs, where my paintings hung, is now some seafood joint, I think.

The thing with art is you lose all control of what happens to it upon leaving the studio. It’s best that way so that you’re not married to it and there’s a chance it can lead its own life. But, sometimes, you wish for a better fate than what it winds up with.

In the case of the secret door painting, it was sort of doomed from the start. The guy who paid for it to be created is a really bad guy and his restaurant wasn’t any good. Still, his money was the color of everyone else’s, so I took it.

I’m happy this forgotten painting got remembered, albeit via reproduction. Now it has a chance to live again the way it didn’t the first time out.

Talked about my public domain project with Gil on his Virtual Memories show.

I wrote about Linn Ullmann’s Girl, 1983.