Marc Maron sold another dog portrait for me. He didn’t cold-call Pepper’s owner and suggest he hire me to paint a portrait as a Mother’s Day gift, but by talking about me on his show or on Instagram. This is the second commission I know for sure resulted from Maron. I’m not on Instagram, but the woman who ordered the first one last Christmas sends me a screenshot anytime there’s any Samarov-related chatter or visuals on that feed. Good to have well-places spies in places I don’t want to venture.
I’ll thank him if we ever talk.
After I finish the portrait, I scan it for archiving. Then I put the file through Photoshop to make it presentable. When I go to save it as pepper.jpg, my computer helpfully lets me know that there is already a pepper.jpg, so she becomes pepper2.jpg.
Who is the first Pepper? I open the picture and look at it. Cute dog, but I have no clue whose she is, the circumstances of my painting her portrait. My memory’s for shit. All I know is Marc Maron had nothing to do with her.
For over a month now, my father has sent me poems every day. They usually arrive late at night, as if it took him all day to choose what to send. They are by Pushkin, Mandelstam, Tsvetaeva, Pasternak, and others. The greats of Russian poetry.
I’ve been reading more Russian the last few years and poetry is a good access point. They are short, and, most of the ones I’ve found have meter and rhyme. That means that even if I don’t get all the references or know every word, I can catch the music of the language, and thus the gist of the poem.
For a couple weeks, I saved the poems my father sent in a folder within my email program after reading them. (I’m one of those inbox-zero people; can’t stand leaving even a single message unsorted or otherwise disposed of.) But putting the ever-expanding collection of poems in the folder wasn’t enough. So I pasted them all into a word file. Then I fixed all the different fonts they’d arrived in into a uniform 12-point Helvetica Neue.
Every day there is a new poem. I read and archived each. But it kept eating at me that I wasn’t responding or contributing adequately to my father’s efforts. Because, even though he had not written these words, the choices and order of selection was thematic and likely told a story. He’s trying to tell me something through these poems. I wrote him early on to say that he shouldn’t take the fact I don’t respond each day to mean I don’t read the poems or appreciate his sending them. He replied that he was glad he wasn’t just clogging my inbox.
I love reading them. They connect me to where I’m from and some of the turns of phrase are sublime. Many are about what it means to be an artist, others about loneliness or love. It makes me wonder how or why anyone would try to translate poetry; at best, what you end up with is good new poem, there’s no way of actually transposing such precise expressions from one language into another.
I’m many many moons away from attempting to write in Russian myself. I got a Cyrillic skin for my laptop keyboard and occasionally attempt short emails to my parents. But it’s a laborious, glacial process. I also printed out the word doc of my father’s daily poems and have started typing them out on my Russian typewriter onto graph paper. I don’t know how many poems I’ll do. There are over fifty already. I’ll probably add some illustrations eventually.
I can’t help that. Words without pictures——whatever the language——feel incomplete.
I’ve lived with the third-floor views from my apartment’s windows for the last five years. In two weeks I will be moving away. These paintings are documents of my time in this place.
A year ago, I was about to move to my new place. I’d ordered postcards to advertise/commemorate my old place on Lituanica. There was to be a show at the Rainbo Club that August. It didn’t happen, as so many other things didn’t.
Every place I’ve lived has had an impact on my work, but the little apartment on Lituanica marked one of the major transitions in my life. It was a change from cohabitation back to single life. There is no going back from the decision I made. It determined the course of my life going forward.
I remade my life without the expectation or hope of being with anyone ever again. There were a few slips, but for the most part, I’ve kept to myself these past six years. It’s been a productive time, a time of coming to terms and making peace with my limitations as a person among other people.
Before moving to Lituanica, I’d held on to some expectation of a traditional marriage/relationship situation, but that expectation died after five years of trying to fit myself into a mode I seemed allergic to.
That crummy little apartment allowed me to be myself, for better or worse. I wanted to celebrate it with a show of paintings and drawings done there. But the world had other plans.
When I look at the pictures that were to make up the Rainbo show, I don’t pine to move back——I like my current spot much more——but I recall what that place did for me. It was crucial. It mattered. It pointed a way forward.
p.s. RIP Monte Hellman, one of the true greats of the movies.
