Letter

I bike to Pilsen in the morning Saturday. Avi opens the door as I’m walking up. I follow him upstairs. I’m here to help Sophie with her art school applications. I met her when she was five or so. Time flies.

Her mom, Wendy, and I went to art school together at the beginning of the 90s. Wendy was going to be a painter like me. We were on the same horrible floor of the Herman Crown Center dorm at Roosevelt University reserved for SAIC students. Then we lost touch.

A couple years into the Chicago leg of my cab career, I picked Wendy up randomly. We hadn’t seen one another in twenty years. She was now a flamenco dancer with a small daughter. We hung out a few times. I met Sophie. Wendy asked me to decorate some lunch bags for her.

Some time later, Wendy called up and asked if I’d be willing to give Sophie art lessons. I’d had a few isolated experiences with teaching, but nothing substantial. I hesitated. My feelings about how art is taught are pretty complicated. Depending on the day you catch me, I may say it’s impossible to teach art; then, on another day, I might be more hopeful about it. Wendy somehow talked me into it.

At around ten years old, Sophie already had her own art ego and personality. My job was to suggest some exercises but mostly to stay the fuck out of the way. One of the big hazards of art teaching is imposing one’s own personality with all its flaws on your students. There are many damaged people in classrooms trying to mend their own damage by manufacturing little carbon-copy acolytes. The last thing I wanted was to have Sophie reflect me back to myself as a result of something I’d shown her.

I needn’t have worried. She pushed back and resisted my lessons, just as I had when I was her age. It warmed my heart. Every artist runs their own race. No one can do your work but you, for better and worse.

I think back to an Amtrak trip to Chicago in the late 80s. My first visit to the city I didn’t know then that I’d call home. The sheet of slides of high school artwork I kept taking out as the train went west. I was convinced there was dust on the slides that would prevent the people at SAIC from making out the quality of my work. When that time came, the woman put the sheet up to the light for all of five seconds, then went back to pitching the school to me.

Sitting on the back deck of her family’s apartment in Pilsen, Sophie shows me her half-completed application essay. Over the past decade-plus, I’ve edited many pieces of text for her mother. Grant applications, art statements, you name it. This feels similar. I try my best to talk Sophie out of going to SAIC. Tell her to ignore whatever reputation these institutions purportedly have. To concentrate on finding teachers and facilities that can expand her skills, rather than go for name-recognition or prestige. Tell her how, thirty years on, I’m still not convinced going to art school was worthwile.

I tell her I think she’ll always make art, no matter what degree she gets. She liked hearing that. It’s remarkable to me that a young person today would want to dedicate herself to making marks on paper and canvas, just like I did once.

Maybe I shouldn’t be surprised. It felt like I was about a century late when I started out. What’s a few more added decades matter? We’ve been doing this thing since we lived in caves. Odds are, we’ll still be at it when we’re forced back into caves or whatever survival bunkers are in our near future.

I look at pictures I made even a couple years ago and wonder who made them. This doesn’t happen all the time——some stay all too familiar——but oftentimes these days I catch myself doing a double-take. It’s an odd feeling. I know factually that I’m the author, but it looks like the work of a stranger.

This also happens with some of the recent commission pieces. I have to access dormant processes in order make them. It’s like borrowing someone else’s brushes. I complete one of these and the buyer seems to like it, but I wonder where it even came from.

Journalism too. It’s me forming sentences and paragraphs, describing, opining, etc. but it’s just not the same as what I write not to order. After Old Style was done, I had a notion to put together a collection of journalism. Then I read back through it and changed my mind. It’s not that it’s bad; only that there’s a sell-by date to most of it. There’s no need to kill trees or even revisit most of it.

This all occurred to me the other day when I brought some large framed drawings home from a restaurant that was supposed to put them up but didn’t. Hauling them inside from the Zipcar, I stopped a second and took a look and wondered whose they were. I could probably make a convincing copy, but I doubt I would ever organically choose to do one of these again.

It’s difficult to track how the work changes over time. Usually it’s an inperceptible evolution. Like aging. You think you’re always the same, then you wake up one day and realize you’re old. In the case of my painting though, a radical break came during lockdown, when I no longer had access to bars, coffeeshops, or CTA buses and trains. A huge source was suddenly unavailable. So I pivoted into collage. I don’t know that there’s a way to retrace my steps. I don’t know that I want to anyways.

Aside from the drawings I brought back from the restaurant, there are many many other pieces here that I need to find homes for. Because the longer they stay, the higher the chances they’ll be fodder for the collage meat-grinder.

If you’re in the market for a cityscape, roomscape, or portrait, drop me a line. Unreasonable offers encouraged. They do no one any good being here. Besides, pretty soon I won’t even remember who made them and will take them out to the alley.

[Reviewed my first play in a long, long time. Then talked with Mallory about Raw.]

I bartered a portrait of Katherine Mansfield for an iPhone 7. It will live in my desk drawer, except for times I need to Square-read your credit card. It happened because a reader of this newsletter read about my struggles at Printers Row processing credit card sales. I wish I could fund my whole life through barter. Cut out not only the middlemen, women, and children, but also all currency other than the kind I can make myself. What a world that would be.

I was on the radio the other day and the host asked how I get by off my art. I told him about having to humble myself and accept commissions and other art-adjacent gigs that would have horrified the younger me.

Now I spend a significant chunk of my days painting and drawing people, animals, and places I would have never chosen or even imagined choosing on my own. It’s actually a good thing and probably has an effect on my “real” work.

One of the current jobs is a series of twelve paintings marking the high points of a guy’s relationship with his girlfriend. He plans to give the pictures to her for Christmas. The photos he sends me to use as reference show places I’d never go. A lot of remote nature scenes, alternating with vacation good-time beach/golf/resort spots.

I don’t know that I can pinpoint what I think about as I work on these things. Maybe it’s mostly formal/visual concerns. Solving compositional problems. There’s likely more too it. But it ain’t envy or even curiosity.

I don’t want to go to the beautiful places or have the good times. I don’t know why people go there or do that. But all these years of looking and painting have taught me how to portray beings and locations I have nothing to do with. It’s a strange thing to find out. I used to think I could only make art out of what mattered to me. Not anymore.

And now, if you see me on the street and want to give me virtual money to paint a memorial portrait of your beloved hamster in an exotic locale, I can accept your payment on the spot. Thank Katherine Mansfield——a writer I haven’t even read.