Letter

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.

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.