Letter

There’s no one to talk to while I work on paintings at home but there’s also rarely silence. To the left of this bookshelf is a record player which is on at least an hour or two each day. Then there are the voices coming from the laptop. Usually podcasts. Writers, filmmakers, actors, and comedians talking about what they do keep me company all day.

When I first lived on my own—in Brooklyn in 1989 with a crazy old retiree in the other room who’d invite his cronies over to talk about UFOs—I used to talk to the walls from loneliness. But with thirty years’ experience and with the help of the aforementioned technologies, the solitude’s not only bearable but is often a solace and safe harbor from the chaos beyond my door.

I wonder whether all those recorded voices, saying or singing words, inform these pictures of books. They have to, don’t they?

I go to figure drawing almost every Wednesday now. I meet different people there every time. While drawing Carly, I talked to Angie. She works at Argonne Lab and is planning to go back to school to become an astronomer. She’s bored living in Lamont so she comes to the city in the evenings sometimes to be around people.

Carly, the model, turns out to be an astrologer. These women and their stars. I never think about the sky at all, rarely even look up at it. She takes a cellphone picture of one of my drawings. Says she’s started posting them on Instagram to get over being self-conscious about posing.

Stacy went to the Art Institute for a bit, then dropped out after getting a job at a hair salon. She’s been there twenty-six years now. She wants to do something else but is afraid her resume doesn’t qualify her for any other line of work. Her son just started school at the University of Iowa. She’s going to visit him over the weekend. I tell her to go to George’s Buffet. It’s my favorite bar in Iowa City. It’s a neighborhood place which serves cheeseburgers from a grill going just to the side of the bar. The bartenders there have to keep an eye on the patties while pouring drinks. There’s also a Nut Hut and a Hamm’s Beer waterfall clock. It’s a classy joint. I can’t picture Stacy ever going in there. 

A young woman came over and said something nice about my drawing. I didn’t catch her name. She asked if I did art outside of this or if it was a hobby. Then she recommended some art show she’d just seen in Austin, Texas. I saw her talking to the guy who runs the drawing sessions. I think she’s planning to model.

I see a lot of the same guys week in, week out, but the women change all the time. I hear the men’s voices while I draw. Some spend half the time there drinking and gabbing rather than drawing. There are always cans of PBR and a bottle of Bulliet shared in plastic cups. I nod to them when I arrive and wave goodbye when I leave but never join in the conversation or the drinking.

Hannah, the model, liked the shading on this drawing. It was the last pose. About thirty-five minutes.

I get home and pin up that night’s drawings on the living room wall to look at for the week. They hang behind and just to the left of the easel set up in the middle of the room for the book painting. Changing them from week to week keeps the room from becoming too familiar. I think back to who I talked to, who was drawing next to me, what the model said.

Between that and the records and podcasts there’s hardly a moment of peace around here.

—I wrote about Duk Ju L. Kim’s paintings on show at the Chicago Cultural Center. 

Young, idealistic people opening up a coffeeshop in a “bad” neighborhood is an evergreen human interest story. I’d been meaning to check out the new one in Back of the Yards for a while but the article in the Reader sealed it. I took the Halsted bus south to 47th Street, then stood waiting among the dirty snow mounds with a few others for the bus west.

I’d barely settled into my seat when the driver punched the gas and we hurtled forward. A few blocks west past Halsted, 47th becomes industrial, rows of train containers stacked imposingly on either side of the road. From spending so much time on CTA buses, I can gauge when they’re going too fast without even looking up and this one was flying. I made eye-contact with an older man across the aisle just as he was shaking his head in disapproval. “This driver’s in a bigger hurry than any of us,” I said. Just then, the driver squeezed to the right of a long line of backed-up traffic and gunned it along the curb. Approaching Ashland, we heard a loud thud and saw the right-side rearview mirror fly off after it clipped a light pole. That slowed him down a bit. He announced it would be his last stop a few seconds later. Everyone on that bus was grateful to walk the rest of the way.

It was bumper to bumper the last five blocks so I was doubly glad to get away from that death-wish bus. My main point of reference for this neighborhood was the time I drove mentally-impaired young adults from St. Rose’s on Hoyne as part of the Mobility Direct program. Cabbies were hired to pick up the slack from handicap vans. I lived on 24th Street, a couple miles north, so I often started my shift with a ride from St. Rose’s. If I was early, I’d sit a block north of the center and draw the view out the window.

The fares were flat rates which started at $10.40 for rides ranging from a couple blocks to a couple miles. In the best case scenario, I’d get a short one first, then speed back to pick another kid a few minutes later. Several lived in Back of the Yards. In the early aughts the neighborhood was not one which would appear on any tourist map. While dropping passengers off, I had to be mindful of idling double-parked cars and young men scanning their blocks for customers and enemies. Because the people I was driving were mentally and often physically impaired, I had to make sure they made it into their houses, sometimes walking them to their doors. I never had any problems but often felt eyes on me.

Walking west up 47th now, thinking back to ten, fifteen years before, I wouldn’t’ve guessed I’d be coming here to try out a fancy coffee joint. The sidewalks were full of people shopping or coming home from work. Many signs were in Spanish, as were many of the voices I overheard. I turned south on Hoyne and saw the shop. There was a brand-new looking school and library across the street. None of this was imaginable in the years I drove here. Inside the shop, Edison bulbs and repurposed wood made it look like a place which could be in Logan Square or the West Loop or Portlandia, for that matter. I ordered a pour-over and a ham-and-cheese sandwich called Decima Musa. I wanted to ask if it was a tribute to the shuttered bar in Pilsen or just the 17th Century nun and poet, but doubted the young girl behind the girl would know so I didn’t ask.

I sat down at a little round table and took out my book but ended up just eavesdropping on the counter girl and her coworker, a high-school-age boy. I didn’t catch much of their banter but they were definitely flirting and it sounded like a thing which had been going on for awhile. I wanted to ask how long the school across the street had been open, whether St. Rose’s was still open up the street, how the neighborhood was these days, but just watched night fall out the window instead. “What time do we close?” the girl asked the boy. I bought a bag of coffee beans and walked out.

Neither the 47th Street nor the Halsted bus drivers tried to kill me or anyone or thing else on my way home. The route skirted the former stockyards. I guess Bridgeport, where I live, could be thought of as Front of the Yards. They’ve been gone a long time but retain some magnetic force. Passing them is not unlike passing a cemetery. The absence is palpable.

I hope the next time I return to Back of the Yards Coffee I won’t just sit there and think about the past. Nearly six years have passed since I drove a cab and almost a decade since I last picked a passenger up at St. Rose’s. It’s time to make some new memories about this part of the city. I hope I’m not too old to do so.

—I wrote about Gertrude Abercrombie’s sad, creepy paintings and interviewed the show’s coordinator for the Reader.

The experience of reading Chris Ware’s Monograph is inextricably tied to what it’s about. Its inordinate size transforms a grownup into a child. One can set the book down on a table or on one’s lap, but it will take up all available space and make it impossible to do anything else but turn its pages, often having to stick one’s face within inches to catch some of the infinitesimal detail or tiny text. It’s a rare accomplishment these days to make a work of art which demands complete physical and mental attention to be appreciated but Ware has done that with this volume. There’s no casually flipping through while checking Twitter and watching a TV show; one reads this book or sets it down and does something else.

Going all the way to back his college days at the University of Texas and the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Ware was always wrestling with the language of comics. One of his first widely-circulated strips, “I Guess” was published in Art Spiegelman’s Raw in 1991 while he was still in school. In it, the panels show a superhero’s adventures while the word balloons and captions tell a childhood story about a boy’s fraught relationship with his stepfather. His experimentation would evolve and grow as he moved on to longer narratives about Quimby Mouse, Jimmy Corrigan, Rusty Brown, and scores of other recurring characters.

Ware’s book-length essay serves several functions. It is an introduction to the finished strips, sketches, process drawings, cardboard models, wooden sculptures, and family photographs which fill the lion’s share of page space. It is also a revealing rumination on his childhood, artistic development, and aesthetic philosophy. It is also, at times, a witheringly funny critique of secondary arts education, the art world, and American society as a whole.

One of the more fascinating insights Ware shares into his process is that he works improvisationally, allowing what he draws to suggest the developing narrative rather than planning out the story, then illustrating it. For someone who, as Ira Glass hilariously puts it in his introduction, is a “control enthusiast”, this intuitive method may seem surprising. But since so many of Ware’s stories concern the perils of memory this approach makes sense the more one thinks about it. Scripting the leaps in time and space traversed from panel to gutter, along dotted lines, riding shooting arrows all over any given page of a Ware comic might be too tall an order even for the master himself.

In another revealing passage he talks about comics being a linguistic rather than illustrative art; that rather than just enhancing accompanying words, the drawings themselves must be read to be understood. This is why he works so hard to make them as clean and clear as he possibly can. He doesn’t want the reader to linger over how this or that detail is rendered but rather to register both words and images as parts of the flowing narrative.

Monograph is a rare joy for Ware fans, as it revisits so many of his career highlights while also sharing lesser known work and personal anecdotes. The large reproductions of the automatons, toys, and model houses he builds as a respite from the long hours at the drawing table are a delight to peruse as well.

In all it’s a fitting testament to one of the best artist/writers we have. Read my interview with Ware here.