Letter

One of the artists Osna——my high school art teacher——introduced me to was Alice Neel. I count her as the best portrait painter of the 20th century. When I read that the Met was putting up a retrospective, I knew I couldn’t miss it.

When I told people about the show, I was surprised how few had heard of Neel. Not even the fact that Susan Sarandon played her in a movie rang many bells. This was hardly the first time something I hold dear turns out to be unknown or forgotten, but I’m never not surprised. It’s like pointing out the Eiffel Tower and getting blank stares. Then I say she was the best portrait painter of the 20th century and they nod, humoring me, like you do with a crazy person, hoping he gets whayever he’s hung up on out of his system quickly.

I don’t care though. I’ll stick to my guns. Granted, the 20th century wasn’t a banner one for portraiture, but I can think of few painters who came close to Neel. Lucien Freud, maybe, but Neel had more range and her subjects rarely look half-dead from exhaustion. Matisse made some great ones, but it wasn’t his strongsuit. All the true greats were in the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries. Photography likely usurped the importance of the painted portrait. What I love about Neel’s sitters is that they look like photography never existed. They’re not frozen in time. They look like they’re about to get up and walk out into the street.

I wake up super early Sunday morning in New York City, so I decide to go to the Met early. I eat breakfast, then sit on a park bench just north of the museum on 5th Avenue and read a book about skateboarding, sneaking occasional looks at the passing dogs, as well as a few of the humans tethered to them. This is the last full day of my trip east and I can’t imagine a better way to cap it.

Around 9:30, I drift toward the entrance where about a dozen people are milling about. I take a place behind a nervous-seeming older woman and sip the last of my coffee, then put my mask back on, which seems to make her less flitty. The guy behind me insists I move six inches closer to the woman to allow him the precise social distance he requires.

The central part of the staircase is chained off as workers finish hosing down the steps. By 9:45, the line stretches to the northern tip of the building. It’s one of the rare cases where being pathologically early breaks in my favor.

Despite the self-evident nature of queues, which everyone should now be extra-familiar with, many new arrivals approach the guards to ask whether the line is for ticket-holders or for members or, what is it for anyway? There will always be a segment of our species that fervently believes there’s a special entrance designated only for them. That the rest of us are either not here for the same thing as they are, or are less deserving, or just not in the know.

I break into a trot after my ticket is scanned and find the Neel show in minutes. I’m only the second or third one into its galleries aside from the guards. I spend the next hour going back and forth, from start to finish, then back again. I spend a few minutes doodling a couple of her paintings in the one room with a bench. These sketches are just to make myself stop and look closer, rather than an end in themselves.

There are multiple instances during this hour when I’m on the verge of tears. That rarely happens to me looking at art. But most of the art I see isn’t by Alice Neel.

At some point a woman asks to take my picture as I’m sketching. She promises not to include my face, to which I say that she can’t see it anyways, as we’re all masked. She laughs, then takes her picture and leaves. I follow a minute later. I look for her for a few seconds, but she’s indistinguishable from anyone else in what is now a substantial crowd. It is the polar opposite of the people in the paintings on the walls. They seem many more times alive than most of the people looking at them.

As I leave the show, I’m doubly glad to’ve come early, as the line to get in now stretches through several other rooms. I’m sure it will remain at capacity, so I decide not to try to come back after abreak, as I’d intended. I’ve seen plenty enough to know this is one of the best art shows I’ve ever seen. I walk out into the sunshine and drive west.

p.s. Looks like my plans to take over the NYC pet portrait market have hit a snag…but I’ll still be happy to oblige, should you have the need.

I’ve shit on Boston most of my life. The reasons are many and mostly tiresome from having been repeated so often. Suffice it to say that I’m not a fan. Yet, because my parents live there, I keep having to return.

Before leaving for my current drive east, I found these drawings. They date from the mid-90s, when I was first a cab driver. I made them in the Logan Airport taxi lot, while waiting to be dispatched to the terminals. Nearly fifteen years later, I would make a similar, but more extensive series of drawings and paintings at the two airports in Chicago.

I’m sitting in one of my brothers’ old rooms, trying to come up with something nice to say about this town. Tomorrrow I will have coffee with my high school art teacher. I haven’t seen her in nearly thirty years. Another former student contacted me about a scholarship being set up in Osna’s name at my high school. They want a donation. I keep going back and forth about it, because I hated might time at that school so much, yet this one teacher was one of its few saving graces.

I make up my mind to make the donation, but realize that I left my checkbook in Chicago. It’s due in a couple days and is only accepted by mail. I go to the post office for a money order and watch the clerk, who has a tremor, struggle inputting the amount into the form on her screen. She’s new, but not young. The guy in line ahead of me is off to the side, waiting for her more experienced colleague to return, to handle the registration of a certified letter. I make the process even lengthier by also requesting a stamp. She freezes before recovering and asking if she can take my payment for the money order first. I toy with hand-delivering my donation to the school, which is a couple blocks away, but decide I don’t want to revisit the place.

On the drive back to my parents’, the car ahead drifts left before making a sudden right turn into a driveway. No signal or warning of any kind. It was a selfish, mean-spirited maneuver. It brought a flood of related memories, reminding me of where I am.

My teaching adventure has ended. It’s been an instructive 10-11 weeks. Maybe the students learned a couple things as well. It’s hard to tell when you can’t even see their faces. I’m glad I did it, but I don’t know if I’d do it again.

Every Monday night I had trouble falling asleep, knowing I had to get up at 6am to get ready for the ride to school. My mind would run through upcoming class over and over. Then I’d come up with good excuses to skip it, call in sick. I’d read my book, then turn off the light, toss and turn, turn the light back on, read, then repeat, repeat. It would sometimes be 4 or 5am by the time I drifted off, only to be roused by the alarm, seemingly moments after.

I thought up all kinds of lessons during those sleepless hours, but applied very few. Partly, this was because the Tuesday class was all laid out in terms of curriculum. There was little room to maneuver or tweak things into forms that made sense to me. I ended up half-assing the parts I disagreed with, namely, anything with rulers, viewfinders, or one- and two-point perspective. I couldn’t help but blurt out that these were just tools invented by people to make a complex world seem simple and logical. Who knows if my doubts were useful or just served to further confuse a bunch of kids who’d spent very little time making marks to render the world around them.

In the last week, we were all obviously phoning it in, running on fumes. My one problem kid, the one who fought me on everything, did the absolute minimum, and left class whenever he felt like, departed about an hour in, and I was relieved. The kids who stayed, finishing up their final drawing all laughed about him. We agreed a dumb drawing class was the least of his problems. I want to fail him, but that would open a can of worms I have little appetite for. He’ll get a C- (the lowest possible mark, because, apparently D’s are now extinct), and we will never have to deal with one another again.

The Wednesday figure-drawing class was a lot more fun than the Tuesday beginner one. No rulers or cones or spheres or viewfinders; just a nude model and five mostly engaged, interested students. I brought a speaker in my second week, and played music while they worked. It did a lot to break up the quiet and gave a pace and rhythm to the four hours spent weekly in that room.

As the semester wound down, I spent less and less time correcting their drawings and gave more thought to changing up the duration of the poses and compositional assignments. I applied my own experience, that told me, for instance, that doing one or five minute sketches is mostly a waste of time. The longer they had to work on one drawing, the more they got out of it. Eventually, we were doing just one a class.

I had them draw the whole room, then had a model take two poses, but had them put him in the same drawing, as if he was two different people; one standing, the other sitting. The results were weird, but had more personality and feeling than the typical anonymous-looking figure study.

On one of the sleepless nights before a class, I came up with what they’d do on our last day. They started their drawings as usual, but on the first model break, I told them to each move over one easel and work on their neighbor’s drawing. There were a few groans, but then an interesting thing happened. All semester they had basically only been interested in their own work. Two were obviously friendly, but the rest kept to themselves. Now, they were all engaged in every drawing in the room. As they switched spots during the breaks, they gathered as a group and talked about how it was going; what they liked and didn’t like. Freed from the insecurity of their own limitations, they could see the thing they were working on as separate from themselves. If I never teach again, I’ll at least be proud of this one moment.

When I quit grad school after one semester in 1994, it was because I was done with school and didn’t want to be part of the problem going forward. The problem was, and continues to be, how higher education is administered in this country. Tuition has metastasized to the point of keeping students in debt most of their lives, while little of what they are taught is applicable to their actual experience. After a full year of receiving most instruction via screen, even the very young ones in my beginning class were asking what exactly they were paying for.

I’ve waited all this time for the college bubble to pop for nearly thirty years. How much longer can it last? It’s an outmoded technology. Then again, I’ve devoted my whole life to a thing that probably peaked in the 19th century and is nothing more than an unpopular fetish the grand scheme of current society. So what do I know?

If I’m asked back, I’ll probably accept. So long as there are no rulers, protractors, spheres, or viewfinders.