Last year I had a show of CTA drawings at Stan Klein’s Firecat Projects. It was without doubt the best gallery experience I’ve ever had. Not that it had much competition. Most galleries I’ve dealt with have been run by incompetent narcissists in need of a therapeutic hobby. They don’t know much about art, much less how to sell it. I’m often no help either. I figure that if they’re taking a 50% cut, they should actually do some of the work. I’ve been proven wrong almost every time.
Firecat depends on sponsorship and donations to keep the doors open. Meaning that Stan doesn’t take a cut of the sales. It means the artist is largely responsible for making those sales, but that’s a lot easier to accept knowing you’ll make any profit. The place is obviously a labor of love. I doubt very much that Stan’s making much. His mission is to give artists a place to do their thing. It’s a rare situation in a business which is mostly about self-aggrandizement.
I texted Stan a couple months to ask if he had any slots open in 2020 and he told me to come over to talk it out. That night I had trouble going to sleep, thinking of what would be in the show. I got up and started looking through my flatfiles. Without trying very hard, I picked out a hundred portraits. Some were famous people done as illustrations, others portraits of friends. A lot of self-portraits too. I got a vision of Firecat hung floor to ceiling, salon-style with faces.
Stan was into it. We agreed on August 28th for the opening. Now I’ve got a show to put together. I expect to draw on work from as far back as thirty-five to forty years ago, but also hope to crank out a bunch of new ones. The total I have in mind is two hundred pictures. Each will be titled by first name only. That way they’ll all just be people, rather than known and unknown, dead or living. We’ll see how I do. If you wanna help by posing for a portrait, drop me a line.
Yvette wrote to ask about Rachel. Yvette lives in Texas and knows Rachel’s brother. He showed her some of Rachel’s artwork and Yvette was hooked. Now she wants to write something about it. That’s why she reached out to me. It caused me to think about someone I don’t like thinking about.
When her brother wrote me about her death seven years ago, I’d been out of touch with Rachel for a long time. I had to cut her out of my life. She’d caused a lot of damage. My connection to her had contributed to the end of two marriages, dozens of failed friendships, and more hurt feelings, confusion, and drama than I could account for. Now a bright-eyed new person has appeared to dredge up what I thought was dead and buried. And yet, I tried to answer all the questions Yvette asked. In answering I realized how little I know about someone I thought I knew too well.
I met Rachel through her then-boyfriend/ex-husband-to-be, Albert, at Jinx Coffee in 1998. They’d recently moved to Chicago from California and he was concerned that she didn’t have any friends in their new town. He knew I made art so Rachel and I would have something to talk about. She waited tables at Leo’s Lunchroom down the street, but apart from bumming cigarettes off me, she rarely said a word. Soon she was making covert dinner plans with me. I didn’t understand why the fact we were going for pasta at Club Lucky had to be kept secret from Albert, but soon learned that if Rachel wasn’t scheming or setting people in her life against each other, she didn’t feel alive. I played along because I realized it was the price of admission. It was fascinating watching her gears turn. She never stopped spinning fantasies.
She told coworkers at Leo’s she had cancer when she didn’t, told me and others her oldest brother was dead when he wasn’t. Even when caught in a bald-faced lie she rarely acknowledged it. She’d massage and massage her explanation until we either gave up or forgot about it. We knew she couldn’t live without her lies. I took any childhood story she told as a fairy tale, so it was a surprise when I eventually met her parents and one of her brothers; I’d just assumed she’d made them all up. Some of the things she said about them were even true.
Rachel and Albert broke up for a time and she moved in with me. She immediately took up with one of Albert’s coworkers at the coffee shop. Kevin was a blackout drunk. I remember carrying him up the stairs with my next door neighbor Liam after Kevin had passed out on his porch. I had to throw out a loveseat because he’d soaked it with his urine and Rachel had to get rubber sheets for her bed because he pissed himself so regularly. Then Rachel reconciled with Albert and they got married. I wasn’t invited.
We kept in touch though. She was a fascinating character. I watched her invent and reinvent herself so often. She knew she could count on me, but that meant that I inevitably got tangled up in her drama. I got married during this time and my ex-wife-to-be used my relationship with Rachel as one of her reasons for leaving me. Albert hated me. The day I drove a car full of my ex’s belongings down to Texas where she’d moved, Albert chased the car down the street threatening to beat me up. I just laughed and kept driving. When I crossed the Texas border it was raining sideways, so hard the wipers couldn’t keep up and the skies were black. Every rest stop was full of stopped vehicles. I found out the next day I was within a few miles of a tornado.
Back in Chicago, Rachel started cooking for the Archdiocese of Chicago and we resumed our weird friendship. Through the church, she met an old rich man who became fixated on her. He’d eventually moved her into his downtown condo. But she was never happy with just one man’s attention. She posed for me one afternoon and on a break from working we started messing around. If her roommate hadn’t walked in, who knows what might’ve been, but afterwords Rachel got shy and said it had been a mistake. We never finished the painting, but another older man bought it as is for $500 in order to curry favor with her. i was happy to be rid of it and to take his money.
Rachel always drank like a fish. Red wine was her poison and she’d drink bottles, rarely eating much aside from dry toast or popcorn. I’d insist we go out for dinner because that was the only way she’d eat properly. Eventually, her doctors told her she was on the brink of liver failure. Eventually she stopped working, letting the old men take care of her. Then she moved back to California. But by then I’d stopped answering her phone calls. My mother called her an emotional vampire, and maybe that’s what she was.
So, Yvette’s questions stirred up all kinds of thoughts. There was music that I’d reclaimed as my own in the years after my involvement with Rachel ended. I could listen to Cat Power, Smog, and Silver Jews, and not immediately remember her playing them on repeat behind a closed bedroom door. Now when I put one of them on, she’s there again. I tell Yvette that I didn’t care much for Rachel’s art. It was always a sore point for her. She knew I didn’t like her dramatic birds beneath cracking varnish or her tormented self-portraits. I found them as phony as so many of her stories.
But Yvette is convinced Rachel’s art is worth celebrating. She’s coming to Chicago this weekend to try to dig up some research. I’ll meet her and show her some of the places Rachel lived and worked. In a recent email, Yvette tells me Rachel’s brother is no longer cooperating with her. Seems his new fiancée is uncomfortable with their friendship. So Rachel’s legacy of ruining relationships survives her. I doubt Yvette will come up with enough for a substantive biographical document. Most of the people who knew Rachel are long gone, the places she worked are changed or no longer exist.
Maybe Yvette can write a fairy tale about a scary-thin girl with long blond hair who liked to tell tall tales.
A year ago, I went to California for my brother’s wedding. My present to Max and Lauren was a painting of their choosing. A few weeks ago they finally told me what they wanted: a picture of Lauren’s dearly-departed cat, Monet, guarding the gates of Hell. Not my usual line, but a promise is a promise, so I got to work.
An image search for ‘gates of Hell’ yielded an endless crawl of cheesy renderings of crenulated Gothic fencing. It wasn’t until I’d scrolled down for awhile that I spotted a photograph of a barren plain with a chasm glowing from molten fire. I don’t recall where it was, but it looked a lot more like the way to the underworld than all the Victorian Halloween imagery clogging my computer screen. I cut-and-pasted Monet over the crater, printed it out, and taped it to my easel above the canvas.
I scattered some skulls on poles about the tundra and floated a a flock of blood-red birds in the distance and called it a day. When I emailed Max a snapshot for approval, he said the painting would haunt them for years. Mission accomplished.
