I’ve been a fan of my good friend Kelly Hogan’s singing a long, long time so when she invited me to make some paintings as her band, the Flat Five, recorded their record, I jumped at the chance.
The kind of harmony singing the Flat Five traffic in is not normally my cup of tea but for some mysterious reason when they do it, I listen. They’ve even gotten me to appreciate the songs of groups like the Beach Boys, though I usually like their covers better than the originals.
I’ve heard some of this stuff in the past and been completely unmoved. In others’ hands these songs can come off as easy or sentimental but somehow these five voices make the feelings real. How one person can sing the same thing as another and come out with completely opposite reactions in a listener is one of the great magical mysteries of music.
I never spent much time at the Gold Star. When I lived in Wicker Park over a decade ago the Rainbo was my bar. But when my coworker Brian suggested I call up Mary Ann, the Gold Star’s owner, to put up paintings there I didn’t hesitate. To say that neighborhood has changed would be an epic understatement. The Gold Star is one of the few holdouts keeping Division Street from total sports bar/strollerville apocalypse. We talked on the phone a couple months ago and she didn’t give me a firm date, but last Wednesday, a couple days after I’d taken down my show at Rootstock, she called again. So I rented a Zipcar and schlepped a bunch of paintings north. I took only oil paintings knowing that the lighting there isn’t exactly ideal; if people can’t make out color, at least they’d get texture. The oldest one is from my art school days and the newest is from last year. It’s sort of a hodgepodge but it doesn’t look half bad in there. They should be up for a few months so you have plenty of time to check ’em out. Just beware of the yuppies, they’ve completely overrun the surrounding streets.
Friday, after dropping off a price list and postcards at the Gold Star I headed back south to Pilsen for my friend Steve’s art show. Steve owns Bernice’s Tavern, the bar around the corner from my place. He’s been drawing for decades but this was his first proper show. Bar scenes alternate with dreamscapes and nightmares in his drawings. Many were done after long shifts pouring drinks and not being able to sleep. The room in which they hung contributed to the bent nature of some of the imagery; the walls and ceiling narrowed as you moved inward in exaggerated forced perspective. It was a little like being in Alice’s Wonderland. I recognized many of Steve’s regulars from the bar and the whole scene had the kind of welcoming vibe rarely present at art openings.
Afterwards, I went downtown for the 30th anniversary screening of my friend John’s movie Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer at the Chicago Film Festival. I first saw Henry back in Brookline in the late ’80s when it showed at the movie theater I worked at. Back then it seemed like one of the scariest things I’d ever seen on screen, not because of the gore or violence but because of the way it made the viewer feel complicit in Henry’s and Otis’s crimes. By watching we were like accomplices. A year or two later, when I went off to art school, I was given a Henry t-shirt as a going away present from the movie theater. That t-shirt was stolen during a trip to New York. Me and my first girlfriend stayed one night at the Chelsea Hotel and one night at the Y. The shirt disappeared in one of those places.
Waiting in line at the AMC River East to get into the screening, I spotted Rick Paul, who art directed the clips John shot with me for the Chicago Hack TV show. He had worked on Henry as well. Then Michael Rooker showed up and everyone’s smartphones pointed his way. He leaned into the crowd and had them pose for a selfie with him. John was there too, wearing a coat and tie. When I asked him about it he said the last time he wore a tie was at a funeral. During the Q & A after the film John talked about how there was never any laughter during screenings back in the ’80s but that they had all laughed while making the movie. Tonight there was plenty of laughter. Have the times caught up with Henry?
It’s a good thing to see friends’ work celebrated. I’m a lot more comfortable at their openings and galas than at my own. Maybe that’s why I like putting up paintings in bars. There the focus is not on my artwork but on drinking and talking. Every once in a while someone will look up from their glass or their date and look at one of the pictures. If it sticks with them, they might even call about buying it. When that happens that’s all the celebrating I need to keep going.
I moved to a studio apartment at 5200 North Sheridan Road in the Edgewater neighborhood of Chicago in the fall of 1990, just ahead of my sophomore year at the School of the Art Institute. I’d lived with a crazy Russian pensioner for a roommate in Brooklyn and a whole floor of art kids in a dorm in downtown Chicago, but this was the first place I’d have all to myself.
The building was old and fraying at the edges. It had likely been a residential hotel early in the century, judging by the small apartments and the ornate Orientalist décor in the lobby. But in the last decade of the twentieth century its carpeting was matted and worn and some of the hall light fixtures flickered ominously. David Lynch could’ve used the place in Blue Velvet, it had that kind of vibe. But perhaps I only saw the place this way because I’d watched that movie so many times that its look was imprinted on my psyche. Art can have that kind of all encompassing effect, especially on a young man’s mind.
I set about filling the place with thrift-store and alley furniture. The only thing I had was a futon mattress which I just put on the floor. On Lincoln Avenue near Roscoe Village there was a sprawling used furniture place presided over by two ever-bickering sisters. Their domain stretched over two storefronts with a lot glutted with merchandise in between. The place was more junkyard than Marshall Field’s but if you put in the time you could find some treasures and not pay an arm and a leg. I scored a kitchen table there, as well as a ceramic Abraham Lincoln lamp which I read by in bed. A few blocks away on Belmont Avenue there was a bunch of antique and resale shops. Among them was one store which had no sign but furniture and flotsam piled to the ceiling visible through the window. Out of the chaos inside I was able to extract a set of four old wooden chairs. An octagonal Art Deco design was hand-stenciled on to their backs and a zigzag cross-brace supported their legs. They were solid wood and barely all fit in the taxi I’d flagged to get them home.
That year was my first using oil paints on a regular basis. I had made some tentative tries in high school but had mostly stuck with gouache, acrylic, ink, and charcoal. Oils were intimidating not only for their technical peculiarity but also for the nearly five hundred years of others using them better than any art student could ever hope to. Nevertheless, after full days of making mud on canvases in school, I’d come back to my studio apartment on Sheridan and do it all over again. After dabbling in the usual teenage-angst-inspired expressionism for the requisite amount of time, at twenty, I was starting to settle into the subject-matter which continues to draw me to this day. What I wanted to paint was what I could see with my own eyes.
Caroline and I got together a couple days before I left Brookline, where we’d worked together at the movie theater all summer, to go back to school and move to this studio apartment on Sheridan. She came to visit in September for my birthday, then moved in the following January, but that fall I lived there alone, pining for her. The painting of the two chairs in front of the futon on the floor is undoubtedly about that longing. It was the first oil painting outside of school which I didn’t throw away. After I graduated and moved back east I gave the painting to my parents and it’s been hanging over their fireplace ever since.
I’ve lugged the chairs with me to Boston, Indiana, and back to Chicago. They’ve made appearances in countless paintings and drawings. Sometimes in the foreground, other times in the back, stand-ins for people in one picture, nothing but furniture in another. Twenty-six years on, I’m in another little apartment by myself. I’ve graduated to separate living- and bedrooms and the rent is more than double what I paid on Sheridan, but much is essentially unchanged. The carpet could use vacuuming, most available surfaces are cluttered with books, papers, napkins, and things which should’ve been thrown away weeks or months ago. The walls serve as an ever-shifting display of work in progress. I keep trying to paint what I can see nearby. But it’s entirely different too. I’m not looking forward to anyone moving in here with me. After trying to live with women and failing each time, I have to believe we’re all better off with me in my own place with these old chairs. I didn’t arrive at this conclusion through self-pity or despair, though getting to know yourself better is certainly an unpleasant slog more often than not.
Could I have predicted when I found them in that Belmont Ave junk shop that the chairs would still be with me? I never thought much about the future. I still don’t. Nor do I ascribe any magical meaning to objects, no matter how long they’ve been in my life. The Lincoln lamp and the rotary phone and the futon are long gone, but the chairs are still here. When I look at them now they don’t always send me down this or that memory spiral but they always have the potential to. One minute they’re just hunks of wood, the next they’re portals to the past.
