Letter

Finally made the cover of the Reader after eight or nine years of contributing. It was a nice surprise. A few people texted and emailed congratulations. Good to know the print version still matters a little—the cover, at least. 

I went to see Brokeback play at the Bottle a couple weeks ago and had a nice conversation with Doug McCombs. I’ve drawn Doug dozens of times because he’s played in so many great bands in Chicago but we’ve rarely talked until the last few years. My enduring memory of him is from sometime in the late ’90s at Leo’s Lunchroom: the two of us the only customers in the place not even acknowledging one another’s presence. There was never any hostility or anything like that; just two shy, taciturn guys keeping to themselves. So it was nice to just shoot the shit with him the other night. Brokeback is a great band too, go check ’em out.

I don’t know Marc Ribot but I’ve loved his guitar-playing since at least Tom Waits’ Raindogs. One of my favorite times seeing him was at Constellation a couple years back. He played solo soundtracks to a bunch of short films projected over his head. Last Tuesday he was at the Old Town School of Folk Music to play in a duo with David Hidalgo from Los Lobos. In between one of the numbers he casually mentioned being so down lately that he was barely leaving his house. He didn’t say why but it could’ve been brought on by reading a newspaper any day over the last couple years. It’s a struggle for a lot of us and it made me worry for Ribot. It bothered me enough that I emailed someone I thought might know him to see if he was truly in a bad way.

I’ve been reading Denis Johnson’s Tree of Smoke off and on for over a year. I picked it up shortly after his passing when it occurred to me I’d only read Jesus’ Son up to that point. Tree of Smoke is a very good book but so heavy and so like the news these days that a couple days ago I finally just threw in the towel and left it at the coffee shop for someone else to wrestle with. It was like having a boulder lifted from my neck. That night I picked up my friend John Hodgman’s Vacationland. I read it over the next two days with great pleasure. I think it’s the best thing he’s done so far. 

Paintings shouldn’t have names. Words shape how people look at pictures, telling them how to think and feel about what they’re seeing, sometimes making them doubt their own eyes. And yet, there’s no way around it. You can just number them, but numbers are a lot harder to remember than words, so an archive of numbered pictures would be a nightmare to use (at least for me.) So I call them things.

With the book paintings, titles are practically screaming over one another to be chosen. Every spine, cover, and back of a book is a candidate. I named this one Pandemonium after a zine published in Boston in 80s. A portion of its black-and-white cover is visible about three-quarter way’s down in the middle of the painting. It was a magazine about underground culture put out by Jack Stevenson, who used to also present evenings of driver-safety and anti-drug propaganda films at places like the Primal Plunge. Seeing stuff like that was a badly-needed antidote for living in Ronald Reagan’s America. I read about Charles Bukowski, John Waters, the Kuchar brothers, and William Burroughs in Jack’s magazine. So sometimes I get to pay tribute to something from the past with my titles. 

This one’s called Fardwor, Russia after Oleg Kashin’s wicked satire for which he was nearly beaten to death. It’s the hot pink one with yellow lettering. I reviewed the English translation back when I wrote reviews for the Trib.

Most of my cityscapes are boringly just named after the places they portray. Thus there are now about fifteen Lituanicas, dozens of Jackalopes, and countless Skylarks. With room pictures I’ve occasionally gotten a little more fanciful. In A Lonely Place is named after my favorite Bogart flick; Night Studio after Musa Mayer’s memoir about growing up with Philip Guston as her father; The Mess I’ve Made, a comment on relationship problems. Sometimes I get to have ones with multiple meanings. A series of paintings and drawings of a garage behind a Bridgeport bar is called Excavation, to reference the work of digging through the piles crap which I’d undertaken, but also as a tribute to the great de Kooning I’d looked at a million times over the last twenty-eight years at the Art Institute.

It’s a no-win situation. If I explain where the names come from, it further directs a viewer’s reaction; whether the name itself is obtuse or evocative. If I say nothing and use nondescript titles, perhaps people will wonder if I’m hiding something, that there’s something to get that they’re not getting, or that there’s no meaning at all. I love words, sentences, and even paragraphs now and then. But that love is at odds with a lot of what my paintings are about.

Maybe I’ll just use symbols or sounds to name them. Probably not. That would be even more pretentious than naming one Can’t and Won’t after the great story collection by Lydia Davis. This is just a longwinded way to say that you should take my titles with a bucket of salt.

When Megan Williamson invited me to visit her studio, I was flattered but a little confused. I’ve been making art a long time but have rarely felt part of any art community. I don’t deal with galleries much or have a studio in one of those rabbit-warren warehouse buildings so many artists are banished to. I don’t ask for other artists’ input or approval, so talking shop rarely occurs to me. After accepting her invitation, I emailed Megan back to ask what she expected of my visit.

A few months ago I reviewed a show Megan curated. That’s likely what put me on her radar, though we’d met years earlier. She and her husband have lived in Wicker Park since the late ’80s. They’ve watched their street morph from gang-ridden and run down to its current multimillion-dollar-home besotted yuppieville paradise incarnation. Megan proudly points out she’s one of only two artists left on the block. 

Her studio is a remodeled garage in which she obviously spends a lot of her time. It feels lived-in in a way which can only be achieved by putting in the years. Zeus, her very inquisitive poodle mix, wanders in and out throughout my visit. My presence here is an unexpected treat to him and he does all he can to distract me from the art. Nevertheless, Megan shows me the circus-themed paintings she’s been working on, as well as a bunch of older cityscapes done around town.

I’d been reading Jed Perl’s Alexander Calder biography. In the book, Calder had just met the painter Jean Hélion in Paris in the ’20s and here, in 2018, in an art studio in Chicago, was an art book opened to show a couple of Hélion’s thorny, overthought canvases. Others’ art is all over Williamson’s workspace. She’s devoted to the long history of painting as much as she is to making her own. 

I first met Megan sometime in the late ’90s through Don Southard and Mary McCarthy. Don had been a teacher of mine at SAIC. After leaving her studio, Megan led me to the front of her house and unlocked a door below street level. It opened on a low-ceilinged finished basement she uses as a gallery/event space. Don and Mary’s recent work is on the walls. This is not a commercial venture but Megan’s way of giving back. She offers it to me if I need a place for a show in the future. Her idea is to just let artists do what they want with it. 

The day after my visit I give a slide talk in Frank Spidale’s class at Dominican University. Frank and I were in school together and he knows Megan, Don, and Mary as well. He’s been inviting me to visit his art classes for years now. Just as I was confused by Megan’s invitation, I was initially reticent about visiting college art classes. Because I dropped out of grad school and have never taught art in a school environment I often feel out of place in these classes, like an impostor or double agent. But after doing my spiel over and over and sometimes even getting positive feedback from the kids, I’ve cautiously accepted that perhaps there is some place for me in their world.

No matter how hard I’ve tried to stand apart from any institutional idea of painting, the ties and connections are unavoidable. Anyone involved in this racket for any length of time will meet everyone else involved in it because there just aren’t that many of us who keep going. I’m grateful to Megan and Frank and all the others who make me part of their world, even if I don’t always know how to show it.

After leaving Megan’s house, I round the corner onto Damen and cross Division to go to the Rainbo Club. I’ll have a show of book paintings there in April and gave Megan a postcard as an invite. Maybe she’ll go see it. After all, it’s just around the corner.