Aaron and Mary, who run Pilsen Community Books and the Dial Bookshop, are having a book fair. I won’t be there because my brother is getting married in California that weekend, but you should go. Over 7000 books priced to go, a bunch of bands, and a few book-themed prints specially created for the event.

Each artist was asked to choose a particular book to make their print about. I chose Oleg Kashin’s Fardwor, Russia!—a book I wrote about a few years ago and which seems pretty relevant today. Kashin was beaten to within inches of death for writing it. We’re not there yet in this country but the creeps at the controls would be happy if we got there. I don’t have the knack or inclination for directIy political art, but that doesn’t mean the events of the day don’t inform what I do as subtext. It’s impossible not to be swayed one way or another by the larger world; not even the staunchest art-for-art’s sake purist is immune.

I haven’t made a screen print since high school, so when I was asked to make something for the fair I had to ask around. The way color is applied in printmaking is totally alien to what I do. In my paintings color is applied all the way from start to finish in ever-changing combinations and proportions, whereas in printmaking you have to decide on colors beforehand and apply them in layers, in a particular order. Luckily, my good pal, John Forbes, was willing to work with me.

He told me to draw out each color section on tracing paper with indelible ink; I painted them on semi-see-through vellum. He made it work anyway. A couple days after I dropped the sheets off at his studio, he showed up with 29 prints at Firecat Projects, while I was there for gallery hours. He told me working on this print he felt like he was inside my head. I apologized the best I could and thanked him for his work. The print looked like it could’ve fit in with the CTA drawings up on the walls.

So much so, in fact, that when a coworker of gallery proprietor, Stan Klein’s, showed up wanting to buy art, he bought a print instead of one of the drawings. It helped, of course, that it cost $20 rather than $200. He did try to haggle down the price of one of the drawings, dragging Stan into it to no avail. Art collectors are bizarre human beings sometimes. I was planning to wait till the fair to sell these prints, but since this guy ruined that idea, I figure I’d offer them to you as well. Fifteen will be available at the fair next weekend and I hope you go and buy one there, along with a bunch of books, but if you can’t be there, I have thirteen at home. Drop me a line if you’d like one.

David Schalliol was in town to present his amazing documentary about the battle between Englewood residents and the railroad trying to turn their neighborhood into a parking lot. It’s one of the best movies about Chicago I’ve ever seen.

Thalia Zedek used a sketch I did of her band as inner sleeve art for her new record. I was very happy to see that. She’s been a favorite for a long, long time. Order the record here.

Tuesday morning I took two buses to 46th & Western and picked up a car from Enterprise. Back at my place I shlepped five boxes containing ten framed 16″x20″ drawings down three flights of stairs, filling all available space in the little vehicle, then drove north.

Stan Klein and his dog Ella met me at Firecat Projects a few minutes after I got there. We laid out the drawings along the walls, then Stan put on some jazz and set about measuring and estimating where everything would go. He asked whether I’d prefer to hang them myself but I was more than happy to have someone else do it. I left him to his task and went to the art supply store.

I was hoping to find numbers to stick on the walls but they didn’t have any; I got stencils and a hard pencil instead, after calling to make sure Stan was ok with me writing on his walls. Then I stopped at Mariano’s to order a couple of meat and cheese trays for the opening and headed back to the gallery.

Stan had one wall done, so I set about tracing out 1 through 10 just below each frame. It went fast and easy. Emboldened, I tried to jump ahead and do the opposite wall of the room, which would end with the last piece, number 49, as Stan was done with that side now. I counted and recounted backwards several times over and still wound up making mistakes. Good thing all it to correct them was an eraser. It got worse as I went along—on the back wall I had to redo a sequence of five numbers. But the show looked pretty good anyway.

Several times throughout the afternoon people would pop in to look at the flatfiles Stan was selling out of the back room. A couple were sold and I helped empty them and carry them out to the buyer’s car. They were full of Tony Fitzpatrick’s postcards and show catalogues, left over from when this place had been his studio. 

Wednesday morning Frank Spidale pulled up to my place in a Dominican University short bus. We loaded up about forty paintings and drawings onto the seats and drove downtown. There, my brother Boris, who’d flown in for the occasion, met us at Flax Frame to pick up the rest of my work. We got on the Eisenhower and headed west to River Forest.

There was no loading dock available, so we walked the pieces to the elevator a few at a time. Upstairs in the gallery we laid out roughly what would go where and went to lunch. Frank and Boris hadn’t seen each other in many years but seemed to get along. This boded well for the hours of work ahead.

Back at the gallery, I left them to measure the walls to hang framed pieces while I worked on the opposite side of the room to lay out a wall of unframed charcoal figure drawings. A former student of Frank’s worked on designing the vinyl lettering for the show title, running in and out of the room several times with letters that were first too small, then too big, then, just about right. After that, Boris enlisted her to put the numbered map tacks under the pieces that were already hung. Not the most challenging work but hopefully she got something out of it.

Boris had worked as a gallery installer so Frank and I left him to take the lead on hanging much of the work. He was very thorough measuring and re-measuring each wall as he went. I’ve always just eyeballed every show hang so it was interesting to watch two people who had done this work professionally do their thing on successive days. Stan had it much easier, as every piece was the same size in the Firecat show and the room didn’t have any unusual angles or nooks. The O’Connor Gallery at Dominican is full of alcoves and irregular spaces and the work in the show was different sizes and mediums, some framed, some not. So Boris’s and Frank’s task was much more difficult.

They did it all with good humor and I felt fortunate for their help. Any help hanging a show feels like a great luxury and a weight off my shoulders. Now both shows are up and I’m relieved that the months of preparation and stressing over it are over. I hope a few people see these shows but I’m mostly looking forward to doing the next thing. Whatever that may be. —Here is the painting I did of the Dana Hall Trio performing Pat Metheny’s “Rejoicing” at the Jazz Art Collective a couple weeks back. 

—I illustrated an excerpt from a Marine’s book about his time in the Iraq War for The Rumpus. I used one of my friend Noah Vaughn‘s photos as a reference—not the one below—and he totally busted me. 

Dmitry Samarov—CTA Drawings

Firecat Projects, 2124 N. Damen, Chicago, IL 60647 8/24/2018—9/20/2018 Opening Reception: Friday, August 24th, 7-10pm

Every time I get on a CTA bus or train is like the curtain parting on a brand-new play. I never know who will be the star or just a bit player. Every passenger who gets on and sits down or stands in the aisle can be the subject of a drawing.

I’ve been drawing on subways and buses in my sketchbooks for as long as I can remember but always wanted to figure out some way to use color and make them more finished pictures. I hate working from drawings and prefer to work on site and directly whenever possible, so taking the sketches back home and using them as a jumping off point never held much appeal. There was no way I could lug my paints on the bus, that’s for sure.

Then, sometime early last year I watched some kids using crayons to draw outside and had a eureka moment. It was a way to have color and drawing all at once. But crayons weren’t quite right for what I had in mind. I hadn’t used colored markers to draw since I was a teenager but thought they might do the trick. I went to the art store and bought a few colored Sharpies and tried them out on the Halsted bus. I kept going back and getting more and more colors. I’m used to mixing primaries to make color so markers are a totally different way of working for me. It’s been both exciting and odd. Like opening a guitar case and noticing that the instrument suddenly has forty strings instead of the six I’ve known for so long.

I feel a little bit like a crazy person riding from end to end of a bus or train line with a thrift store purse full of markers around my neck, but the few people who bother to look up from their cellphones usually like what I’m doing. It’s a way to capture fleeting moments of city life in a novel way. It’s also a great way to get some relief from the heat and humidity of Chicago summers.

I’ve taken the Green Line west to Oak Park and south to Cottage Grove, the Orange Line to Midway and back to the Loop, the Halsted bus south to 79th Street, then back north to Broadway, among many dozen rides over the past couple years. My aim isn’t to ride every single bus and train route in Chicago; that would take too long and would be more of an endurance challenge rather than an attempt to paint a portrait of the city. I expect to keep taking my purse of markers on the CTA for decades to come.

FLIGHT OF THE PIGASUS

Thursday, August 23, 2018 7:00 PM 9:00 PM

This event is HOSTED by Co-Prosperity Sphere at:

Maria’s Packaged Goods and Community Bar

960 W. 31st St., Chicago, IL 60608

coprosperity.org

A re-staging of the infamous “Pigasus” press conference held at what is now Daley Plaza on August 23, 1968, in which the Yippies nominated a pig for the president of United States. This moment of political theater set off almost a week of political unrest and remains a key memory of the counterculture. Fifty years later, “Pigasus” flies again in a live theatrical event that uses the 1969 Chicago Eight trial as a frame for re-examining this story and the benefits and limits of using theater, performance, and disruption to effect political change. With musician Bill MacKay as musician and Yippie Phil Ochs; City of Chicago historian Tim Samuelson as Judge Julius Hoffman; National Lawyers Guild lawyer Jerry Boyle as defense attorney William Kunstler; author Pat Thomas as Tom Foran; artist Dmitry Samarov as magazine artist Franklin McMahon; Petunia the Pig as Pigasus; and Judy Gumbo and other witnesses of 1968 as themselves.

—I wrote a profile of Chicago painter Brian Wells for the Reader. 

—I designed a t-shirt to go with my CTA show. You can get yours here.