Letter

‌A couple weeks ago my friend Don invited me to his office at Columbia College to take a look at the wall across from his desk. He’s been teaching writing there for twenty years and decided his workspace needed a bit of a facelift. His room is in a rabbit warren of similar little rooms for other writing professors. Not much light gets in beyond the slats of the shades and Don assures me the view consists of the never-ending brick of the neighboring building. ‌
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‌The wall in question is currently decorated with a slightly tattered print of Peter Blume’s The Rock; a painting Don claims he doesn’t even like. His initial idea is for me to “go nuts” on the wall itself. But then it occurs to him that he might not be in this office forever and that Columbia would likely whitewash my masterpiece once he’s vacated the premises. So we settle on a more traditional decoration, to wit: a charcoal drawing on a very large piece of paper.‌
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‌After a few hours of inching back and forth around the Columbia campus via Google Street View, I settle on the intersection of Wabash and Harrison. I print out a few photos for reference, tape a 3’x4′ sheet of paper to my studio wall and get to work. My usual thing when not doing illustration is to work directly from the source, so this project takes a bit of self-deception and trickery to really get rolling. I do best with an empty head when drawing. I want as much of my attention to be on what I’m looking at as possible and thinking just gets in the way. But that is a difficult thing to do when what I’m looking at is a couple of shitty printout photos.‌
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‌What makes it ultimately come together is that the drawing is big enough that in its various unfinished states, the parts which needed clarification, augmentation, or erasure almost call out loud to me every time I step back from the thing to see what I’m doing. The drawing dictated what it needed and I did my best to accommodate.‌
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‌I don’t know whether what I’ve made is a masterpiece but it’ll sure beat the hell out of a poster of The Rock. I’ll see how I’ve done when I install it later this week.‌
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‌ p.s. I wrote about a great drawing exhibit at the Art Institute.‌
‌ p.p.s. RIP Bernice Badauskas. Who’ll call me Mr. Coffee now?‌
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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.