Letter

I’ve finally made it to Michigan Avenue. It ain’t the Art Institute but it’ll do for now. These ads went up a few days ago in the windows of the late, unlamented Artist’s Snackshop on the ground floor of the Fine Arts Building. 

They’re promoting an eight week music series which starts Wednesday in the building’s fourth floor Venetian Courtyard.

I’m scheduled to draw the musicians as they play. The guy who’s putting on the series has a music studio up on the eighth floor. We met after he saw my Chicago writer paintings at the Dial Bookshop on the second floor. He wanted me to design his album cover. He gave me some money and I tried it a bunch of different ways but it didn’t work out. Then we ran into each other when the building reopened at the beginning of July and he asked me to be part of his music series. We’ll see how it goes.

A couple weeks ago I went to my first live concert since the shutdown. It was at Constellation on Western near Belmont, across from where the overpass used to start. Each of the very spread apart seats had a long-stemmed rose on it, the lighting was dim. About fifteen of the fifty seats were taken when Helen Money came out with her cello. 

Ms. Money, whose real name is Alison, thanked us for sharing the special night with her. “We’re in a club!” she repeated a couple times, to underscore how an ordinary thing like that has become a precious rarity. She said she’d play in a mask out of solidarity with us rather than out of fear of infection. Her solemn, sometimes delicate, sometimes hectic sound felt like the right soundtrack for the moment. With the low lighting, flowers, and mostly empty room there was a funereal feel to it all. But I did what I’ve done at shows for decades—I drew to feel closer to the music. About halfway through, it came to me that though concerts are thought of as a communal experience I rarely take them in with anyone else. My communion is a solitary one. I hope to be back to this temple soon to worship again.

—I reviewed Fuckface and Other Stories and wrote about visiting the Art Institute the first day it reopened. 

I hadn’t gotten on a CTA bus or train from the middle of March to the beginning of July. Being stuck inside a public vehicle didn’t seem like a good idea. Fortunately, I do most work at home alone. I can walk or ride a bike almost anywhere I need to go. 

I got used to the new routine easily, though I became a lot more aware of the weather. Biking in a deluge or merciless heat is no picnic. Overall though, it was as if motorized vehicles were no longer part of my reality. But I have a stack of framed drawings which prove that riding buses and trains used to be a big part of my life.

The sixty or seventy marker drawings I did on the CTA a couple years ago have since become a block of pictures which I think of sometimes as a starting point for something. Using markers for the first time since I was a kid has changed the way I paint, but those drawings themselves also hint at other possibilities.

Like cab drawings and music sketches, the CTA pictures seem to want to be a book. So I made this first attempt at it. Drawings and very short stories. It’s a zine in an edition of fourteen. It was supposed to be twenty but I fucked up some pages; getting my brain to keep page sequences consistent is a challenge.

—Read an excerpt from All Hack and about some of the worst Chicago movies I ever saw .

—Marc Orleans took his own life over a month ago but I only found out a couple days ago. Marc was a few years ahead of me in art school. He was always covered in paint and looked perpetually on the verge of meltdown. With his big nose and red hair he bore a resemblance to the most famous tormented painter of all. A few of us called him Van Gogh behind his back. I ran into him in Boston a few years later. He’d quit painting after what he said was a nervous breakdown. He was now concentrating on music. He’d go on to play across many genres and to collaborate with many, many great players. Yet every time I ran into him he’d get an apologetic look, as if I reminded him of his failure to stick with art. 

After I found out about his death I went into a rabbithole of online tributes. I was happy to read how appreciated and admired he was, no matter what he thought of himself. For some of us it’s not so easy to live with ourselves. He hung on as long as he could. From what I read in his loved ones’ accounts the isolation of the current plague must have gotten to him.

We weren’t close but I always thought of Marc as a peer to look up to in his utter commitment to his art. I’ll miss wondering what he’s obsessed with from moment to moment.

Stan called a few weeks ago and said painting and remodeling on his new gallery space was done early. He didn’t want the room to sit empty so we put up my show early. It’s the first show since he was forced to move because of a greedy, unreasonable landlord who wanted to double his rent in the middle of a plague. Starting early will help us gauge what hosting an art show means at this point. 

Drawing a face is one of the first things a child does. They draw their mother, their father, their brothers, their sisters, their friends. Some find a mirror and try to draw themselves.

I’ve been drawing faces a long time. This show gathers drawings and paintings from the last four decades of my life. Whether done from observation, imagination, memory, or photograph, each is a reckoning with a person’s face—the aspect which sets one apart from every other person, yet also reminds the viewer, to a greater or lesser extent, of everyone else they’ve ever seen. It’s the most particular and universal image we have.

—A part of my painting graces the cover of this new cabbie book.