Letter

Erin asked for a painting of her old greyhound, Zooey, in exchange for the copyediting work she did for me. She sent some photos and a couple cellphone clips. I collaged a couple stills from one to use as reference for the painting. I cut up two pieces of cardboard, put the painting between them, taped it up, and put it in the mail. A couple weeks later she still hadn’t received it. Then it showed up back in my mailbox. She’d moved and I didn’t know, so I sent it to her old place. I pedaled up to Andersonville and delivered it in person. She was surprised to see me at her door, though we’d scheduled it a day or two before. There’s a lot of that happening now—people’s sense of time has become a lot more elastic. 

Sophie was turning sixteen, so her mom, Wendy, commissioned a painting of the view out her window for a birthday present. She sent a bunch of photos for me to use and I did my best. It’s always strange to use photographs as a source because they’re so impersonal. It’s also a room I’ve only been in once or twice, so there’s some imagination and muscle memory involved. The low building on the right is the Open Books annex. It helped me that I know that place while I was making this painting. 

I’m finishing up work on the new cab book. I bought an ISBN number, wrote the Library of Congress for a reference number from them, and got in touch with the printers in Michigan. One final read-through and I’ll send it out. I’d thought that it would come out next year, but with this block of time to myself, it turned out to be the perfect project to lose myself in. It was the perfect proportions of clerical and creative. Because I was reshaping and reediting old material. Still, I think I’ve made a new thing. Or, at least a thing that will replace a couple of old things. So, close enough.

Saturday I rode up to Firecat again to talk to Stan about my show there in August. Chicago will start allowing gatherings of up to ten people in a couple weeks, so it should be feasible to put on an exhibition. More than ten people in that room and they’d be in each other’s way anyhow.

Stan has set up his desk in the middle of the gallery to draw. I spent a couple hours with him, shooting the shit and drawing. It was good to spend some time with him, but afterwards I looked forward to being alone again. It’s a feeling I always have around others. Sooner or later it’s time to leave, to get back to my own life, which is mostly solitary. This is why I’ve told friends I have nothing to complain about during this plague. I could vent about the orange-faced gaslighter and his enablers making a bad situation worse at every opportunity, but everyone with a conscience and a working set of eyes and ears already knows that. But when I get home and get into whatever I’m in the middle of working on, I know I’m exactly where I’m supposed to be.

The other day it occurred to me that maybe the painting and writing I do is meant for another time. Maybe someone will discover it one day and get something out of it. I hope so. In the meantime, it’s what keeps me going. 

“Did it ever occur to you that shading is merely the absence of light? You bet that’s what it is!”—Jon Gnagy announces cheerfully while demonstrating how to transform some cubes, cylinders, and cones into a picture of a church. Gnagy was the first TV art teacher, with a hit NBC show from the late 40s into the 60s, and how-to books and painting kits on sale to this day. He was Bob Ross before Bob Ross. 

Stan Klein, who runs Firecat Projects, got to know Gnagy as a child growing up in Cleveland. He was Stan’s friend on TV, who showed him how to draw. Over the years Stan kept wondering about Gnagy. He was curious enough to track down Gnagy’s daughter down in Florida. After years of back and forth she agreed to let him put together a show of her father’s art at Firecat. 

Looking around the gallery on a warm Saturday afternoon I’m struck by how unformulaic Gnagy’s work is for a guy who made his name teaching TV viewers how to form simple shapes into worlds. It definitely looks like work of its time. Think Rockwell Kent and George Bellows and you’ll get the idea. But this is nothing you can guide an amateur to do step-by-step in half an hour. As I look at a lithograph of a cactus, Stan tells me it was made out West when Gnagy was undergoing shock therapy. He’d been diagnosed as bipolar. It’s a world away from the cheerful TV host guiding his viewer/students through their first steps of expressing themselves. 

Flipping through Gnagy’s sketchbooks, Stan points out another interesting thing: the artist rarely portrayed people. His wife, Mary Jo, also a working artist and illustrator, co-authored his how-to books devoted to the human form. Raised Mennonite and self-taught as an artist, Gnagy never quite got the hang of rendering his own species. He had no trouble with other animals though—a beautiful set of silverpoint illustrations of fish done for a book on the subject is a highlight of the show. 

When I got home afterwards I watched a few clips of Gnagy and wondered about his fate. He lived until 1981 but there’s no work in the exhibition past the 60s. What were his last twenty years like? When Stan went to visit his daughter in Florida most of the work was in storage. Stan had to frame most of the pieces to display them. If this is the legacy of an artist who was once famous on TV, what are the chances for those who never had such widespread exposure? The Firecat show will go some way to make a few more people remember Gnagy, while introducing him to many others. Stan says there are plans for the show to travel after it comes down in August. There will be a catalog too. 

I never drew along with Gnagy but was a faithful student of one of his descendants in the TV art instruction racket. I wrote about it in my book. I don’t recall the experience with the joy that Stan talks about his childhood acquaintance with Gnagy, but Stan and I are very different people. The most famous of the TV artists, Bob Ross, is a punchline for most “serious” artists. Stan differentiates Gnagy’s work from Ross’s by pointing out that, though there were certainly worked-out steps to Gnagy’s instruction, there was still room for self-expression. No “magic white” or “happy trees” to be found. A set of rudiments rather than a formula.

One of the few good pieces of news I’ve heard in the past couple months is that my good friend, Frank, got tenure at his job teaching art. I joked that under the current conditions he’ll have to Bob Ross it. Teaching drawing is a hands-on thing, so doing it through a screen is impossible (unless you’re a genius like Lynda Barry.) And yet that’s exactly what Jon Gnagy pioneered over 70 years ago, long before the world became completely reliant on screens for human contact. Lets hope that the current crop of TV art instructors beaming into cellphones, laptops, tablets, and devices I don’t know about the world over take Gnagy as a model over Ross. Nobody should paint like Bob Ross but if you learn to paint like Jon Gnagy you’ll have nothing to be ashamed of. 

Don lived upstairs from the Blue Light. His Brylcreemed grey hair was neatly trimmed, buzz-cut close to the ears, 50s-style. His wife had died recently but he was keeping it together. He worked in manufacturing. Printing plant, tool-and-dye shop, I never found out exactly. Don was a man of few words.

He came in every day after work. He’d order a $1 stein of Old Style and drink it in silence, then order another. Halfway through that one he might stammer out a word or two. Few conversations with Don lasted more than a couple moments. Still, bit by bit, I got a partial picture of his life. He had cats, he missed his wife.

Then he lost his job and everything changed.

He never said why he got laid off. He didn’t talk about it. Started showing up at the bar earlier in the afternoon. I could chart his disintegration from day to day. His hair went first. No more haircuts, scraggly, uncombed. Then his checked flannel shirts weren’t tucked in any more. He developed a limp.

Soon he was drifting off, eyelids drooping, slumped sideways on his barstool. A long skein of drool inching glacially toward the bartop. I hated to jostle him, seeing he was in such a bad way, but I couldn’t have people sleeping at the bar. He’d rouse slowly, his reactions delayed, as if I was in fast-forward and he was at half-speed. My words didn’t reach him right away. He’d slo-mo off his stool and inch toward the door.

The last time I saw Don his pants were soiled. He’d piss himself sitting catatonic over a half-finished Old Style. His speech slurred to the point of rarely completing a phrase. He’d keep trying, then he’d start over, then give up. I didn’t have the heart to kick him out. Luckily, there was rarely anyone but regulars in the place when he was in.

I didn’t see Don for a few days, then started asking around. No one had seen him. Kenny went upstairs and broke down the door. Pizza boxes, newspapers, and unwashed clothes formed hills and towers in his rooms. Don lay dead on the kitchen floor, his face eaten away in places, teeth marks still visible.

The cats hadn’t been fed in a week.