Letter

I was waiting in the lobby of the Art Institute for Mark to walk me through the new Saul Steinberg show when a man giving directions to some visitors caught my eye. I’d been spacing out for about fifteen minutes, just watching groups of out-of-towners bicker with each other before the ticket-takers when I saw him. He had a buzz cut, glasses, and wore a blazer and tie. He also had a tremor, most pronounced as he pointed out various rooms on the wall map of the museum. I knew him from a long time ago.

In 1997 I moved back to Chicago from Boston. I moved in with my old classmate Frank and another guy into an apartment on the edges of Wicker Park. At that time the neighborhood was only on the cusp of the bro-and-boutique shitshow it’s been for the last decade and there were still some remnants of bohemian life to be found. The epicenter of that dying community was the sprawling coffeeshop Urbus Orbis. It would close by year’s end and eventually be replaced by a gym for yuppies, but during its last year I got a lot of idling in on its worn armchairs and couches. I even got to put some art up on the walls before the place shuttered for good. It was but the first of a succession of coffeeshops I haunted which flamed out in quick succession.

I’d never been particularly good at chess, but the group of enthusiasts at Urbus inspired me to pick up the habit. I would play—and usually get beaten—by the same few guys over and over. Watching them play each other was usually a better time for everyone involved. One of them was John, who I got to know gradually as my chessboard losses to him mounted. He was hardly an artsy type, dressed in polo shirts, and possessed of a stiff, formal manner of speaking. He had an aristocratic aura about him. Like one of those dissipated nobles in books, whose family had lost its fortune tragically and who must now mix with the hoi polloi.

He had a place nearby on a quiet side street lined with mansions. He also had his own coffeeshop on Broadway, just past Boystown, but spent all his free time at Urbus. I would end up having an art show at Cafe La Piazza too, just a year or two before it became the Starbucks it still is today. When my stuff was up on the walls, I’d occasionally journey to that faraway neighborhood and if John was there we’d play a game or two.

I can’t recall when he and I lost touch. Some of the Urbus regulars made the move to Jinx and then to Atomix and to Filter. But others, like John, stopped coming around. I didn’t have a cellphone or email back then, and I never liked talking on the phone, so if I didn’t see people during my rounds in the neighborhood, they might as well have moved to the other side of the moon. In the lobby of the museum I kept trying to make eye contact with him but to no avail. I considered just walking up and reintroducing myself, but then Mark arrived and we went in to see the Steinbergs, leaving John by the stairwell, looking about for visitors to assist. Aside from the tremor, he looked much as I remembered him.

Would he have remembered me and would we have anything to talk about? Maybe I’ll hang around that lobby some other afternoon and find out, but odds are John will just remain a memory.

Marty asked me to make a painting to remember a friend by. He sent me photographs of a desk covered with pens, pencils, papers, and various electronics, presided over by an imposingly darkened computer monitor. He told me he thought of me instantly because I often paint mess and clutter.

Apart from the challenges of working from a photograph, this painting presented questions about meaning and connections. It’s one thing to immortalize the things which make up my own life, but what does it mean to do the same for a bunch of objects I’ve never even seen with my own eyes?

Of course, I’ve never been the kind of painter who starts out from meaning or ideas. Whatever significance any of my work ends up with is gained through the process of its making. So, in theory, it shouldn’t matter what I start from. Still, it was an odd feeling to be looking over the belongings of someone I never met and would never meet and attempting to turn them into a picture. The fact that they were dead added another layer of complexity. Though it reminded me of many of the pet portraits I’ve done, which were made after their subjects’ passing.

When it came to doing the actual work, all these thoughts went out the window. All there was was an empty space which had to be organized into a picture. The reference photo was quickly eclipsed as primary inspiration by the evolving painting itself. This is often the case. The ones which work dictate their own terms after a time.

Then it was done. I took a photo of it and sent it to Marty and he seemed to approve, so I packed the painting up and sent it off to Texas. In my studio, after I returned from the post office, I cast about for some trace of that dead man’s desk picture, but there was none. Only the table, easel, art supplies, and bookshelf which were there before Marty wrote me. That picture was gone as if it had never been in the room but hundreds of others suggested themselves in every direction I glanced. Most of them would never get painted, but I set up the easel and took out ink and paper for the off chance I could rescue at least one more from the void.

Last week in San Francisco, I went to see the Matisse/Diebenkorn show. It’s a beautifully put together exhibition which would’ve been perfect if not for the Saturday throngs which sardined their way through its galleries. I would’ve loved to’ve wandered through and lingered at this or that picture without phalanxes of audio-tour zombies blocking my view. But those are perfect world type gripes. I feel lucky that I got to see these paintings and to be reminded of some of my own painting roots, in which these two artists have played a not-insignificant part.

Throughout the show, examples of Matisse’s and Diebenkorn’s work are paired on the same wall. Sometimes it’s the color palette, other times a pattern or compositional similarity, but in all cases the curators have found great resonances between the two artists.

The pictures which spoke to me the most were ones where studio walls were depicted with paintings or drawings on them. Ever since art school I’ve had a wall of my studio devoted to reproductions of art I like. Twenty years ago I did a series of paintings which referred to these clippings as a wall of fame. 

In the first painting of the series, there is a Diebenkorn studio sink painting right in the middle. There have been many other pictures which have incorporated works in progress or the work of others hung on apartment walls. Painting paintings of paintings adds a layer of complexity to depicting one’s reality. Like quoting a favorite writer, sampling, or riffing on a standard, it is a way to pay tribute, to acknowledge one’s own past, or to note the continuity in which the work exists.

As years pass I’ve forgotten about how much guys like Diebenkorn and Matisse influenced me. Seeing how one influenced the other brought it all back home. How almost nothing is made in a vacuum. That painting is an established language which, however much it mutates, remains readable through the ages. Late in the show—mostly devoted to Diebenkorn’s Ocean Park series—we see where he went to a level of abstraction which Matisse didn’t quite reach. But the older artist’s spare late paintings come pretty damn close to becoming completely untethered from the material plane as well. 

Whether painting paintings into their paintings or teetering on abstraction, these guys have been two of my most trusted guides and it was great to be reminded of that by this show. I sometimes forget that I don’t come from nowhere but it isn’t true, no matter how much it sometimes feels that way. Between the two, there were canvases which accounted for most of the twentieth century. I overlap with Diebenkorn for my first seventeen years and his last. There many others who took some part of what he did and ran their own way with it. Perhaps someday, some museum even half as grand as the newly refurbished San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, there will be a show devoted to us as well.