Letter

A while back, Aaron from the Dial Bookshop asked me to do some more Chicago author portraits for the store. I had done one for each month last year, but the wall they hang on had some room near the ceiling, so, out of horror vacui or completism, Aaron thought we should fill the rest of it. The six subjects I came up with are a mix of dead and living writers. Some I know well; others, hardly at all. Ben Hecht is probably closest to my heart for his 1001 Afternoons in Chicago and for The Front Page (even more so for the film His Girl Friday, which was inspired by that play.) Hecht is an outsized Chicago personality and a fun subject for a painting. 

On the opposite end of the spectrum is Leon Forrest, a writer I’ve always meant to read but haven’t gotten around to. Searching around for reference photos, I could only find two or three of the man. It made him that much more inscrutable. I took his epic, Divine Days, out of the library after finishing the painting, but have been a little intimidated to crack it open. 

Congress Parkway, which runs south of the Fine Arts Building (where the bookstore is), was recently renamed after civil rights activist and journalist Ida B. Wells. Aside from that link, the first thing that comes to mind when I think of Wells is a dim memory of picking up cab passengers in the remnants of the housing project named in her honor. They’re all gone now. 

All I know about Sara Paretsky is that she’s a famous and successful detective/mystery writer and that she’s a snappy dresser. I know there was a Kathleen Turner flick based on the heroine of her books, but I can’t recall a thing about it.

Alex Kotlowitz is a writer I admire very much. I loved his last book. It’s a little weird to switch gears from rendering someone like Paretsky—whom I never met and probably never will—to Kotlowitz, who I’ve talked to a few times and who may actually read this letter. But he’s one of the best writers this city’s got, so I couldn’t leave him. 

Stuart Dybek is another complicated one. I count him among my favorite writers from anywhere and I had the privilege to illustrate one of his stories awhile back. We’ve corresponded a bit too. But I couldn’t or wouldn’t call him a friend. He exists in a hazy in-between region—drifting from unapproachable master to humble and witty penpal. I don’t know how to think of him but think everybody should read his stories. Few have evoked Chicago more poetically or precisely.

I finished a painting the other day and kept thinking it looked so familiar. And not in the usual way. By now, thirty-plus years in, there are several recurring motifs. Books, window views, rooms, coffee shops, public transportation—these and a few others are what I do. Variations on a theme. Repeat repeat repeat.

The new painting is a doorway view from the mud room to the living room to the kitchen to the bathroom. A few years back I drew its opposite from the kitchen. But it was more than this current setting which was causing the déjà vous. It was the doorways.

Here’s one from twenty-seven or -eight years ago. The apartment was in Logan Square and I was still in art school. As a symbol or a metaphor, a doorway is pretty fucking obvious. But I’ve never imagined that my work plumbs depths, so I don’t mind whatever meaning there might be being right there on the surface.

Here’s the opposite view of the previous one. That apartment was a lot bigger than my current one. I was living with other people, which required more doors, hallways, rooms. The funny thing about this one is that soon after I learned how to use a computer, I decorated my MySpace page with it (among many other paintings) and a few months later a guy from the other end of the world—Australia maybe? Don’t remember—sent me a snapshot of his forearm with a crude rendition of this doorway covering shoulder to elbow. You start walking up and down halls, no telling where you’ll end up.

Back in high school, I mostly stayed in my room when I was home, so all I could see out the door was the door to the hallway closet. Still, that need to look past, to what’s beyond, has always been there. As I said before, there’s nothing profound about it. It’s natural. It’s what I imagine we all do.

These pictures of portals are also a way to look back. To ask why thirtysomething years ago I was trying to depict the same damn thing as just the other day. It’ll take someone a lot smarter and with a lot more critical distance than I can muster. Looking at these ancient images doesn’t fill me with nostalgia. I don’t have the slightest impulse to wanna become who I used to be. I don’t have a big enough shovel to dig up what I was thinking and feeling sitting on my bed in my parents’ Babcock Street apartment drawing with charcoals on newsprint. 

This is the oldest one I could find. A homework assignment from my art teacher, Sasha Okun. He drew in that lightbulb. He was (and still is, I think) a theater set designer, so he had a tendency for the illustrational and dramatic, which I never did. Still, the framework is already there: walls, floor, doorway, doors, and on, and on.

If I’m still writing this newsletter in ten or twenty years, you’ll probably read about how I just finished a picture of a doorway and how it ate at me. How it reminded me of something. Some close reader will dig up this letter and helpfully send it back to me, maybe hoping to help me break a pattern.

But what would be left if I didn’t have my patterns?

A text woke me at 8am. It was a friend asking if I knew anyone who wanted to make some money loading boxes of photographs from a storage space onto a truck. I went back to sleep for a couple hours. When I got up, there was another text, as well as an email. I answered that I didn’t know anyone and went about getting the day started. But it kept eating at me, so, an hour later, I texted him that if he was still there in an hour, I’d swing by.

My friend travels around collecting photographs and art. He’s a treasure seeker. There’s TV shows about people like him. Every so often he rolls through town and tells me about his adventures, always careful to leave out names and telling details. His business is all about secrecy. I don’t have even a trace of this discoverer’s instinct, but I’m fascinated by people who do. It’s often a consuming obsession which no prize, however precious, can ever sate. The best pop-culture evocation of it is the great BBC show Detectorists. The two guys’ lives on that show are so totally guided by their quest that personal relationships suffer or are subsumed to it. I don’t know that my friend suffers like that because of his avocation. I like to think he doesn’t. He always makes it sounds like fun.

When I arrive at the storage facility, he’s at the loading dock with another friend, making calls, as this is the only area of the facility where he can get a signal. Apparently he’s bought a locker in an auction and wants to unload a bunch of boxes into his truck to haul away. But before we can do that, we go across the parking lot to another building so he can look at another storage space. He says some other collectors have found out he’s storing things here and is afraid they might break in. There’s been a rash of thefts lately. The area he’s looking at doesn’t even have walls. He will have to hire the guy showing us the place to build them. As we walk back, power tool sounds can be heard from behind sheetrock and plywood walls which don’t reach the ceiling of the warehouse. The guy tells us there are a lot of interesting people here.

Back by the loading dock, we take two carts up to the fourth floor. Three guys who were evidently at the auction come with us to check out my friend’s haul. We go through a labyrinth of lockers before locating the right one. We pull out 1’x5’s and furniture to get at the shelves which line the left side of the space. We pull out one long cardboard box after another. Each is filled with dozens of cardboarded and sleeved comic books. My friend keeps pulling random ones out, showing us and guessing at their worth. I tell him I have no clue what any of them are worth. He seems to be having a debate with himself whether it’s a fortune or just a pain in the ass. Part of it is that he doesn’t want to tip his hand in front of the other guys too much. Everyone’s here to make a buck and getting over on a competitor is a big part of it.

We make three or four trips down to the truck until all the boxes are loaded. We’re covered in sweat. My friend is trying to work out a deal with the guys for the tools and furniture in the locker. They’re not his thing; he’s only into art and photos. I drink some water and wonder whether this line of work would suit me better than pouring beer. I decide it wouldn’t. I have no enterprising spirit. In fact, I probably have the opposite. Where my friend is here trying to turn trash into treasure, I’m trying to sell off all I’ve made at thrift store prices. 

Before I leave, he asks me about the self-portrait he asked me to paint. I tell him it’s almost done and pedal out into the rain.