Letter

It is probably a five or ten minute pose, early in the two-hour evening class. Not much time to correct or refine, just get some marks down to imply shape, volume, presence, then flip the paper over and get ready to do it again with a new pose. Fall 1986 or spring 1987. My first experience with a nude model. Everyone else in the class is a college student or older so there is no one else to talk with about the awkwardness of being in a room with a naked person. They all take it as a given so I have to as well. Although the aim of a life drawing class is to study form, there’s no way of entirely distancing yourself from the reality of an unclothed person in a room full of clothed ones. She’s vulnerable and has to trust the rest of us to behave, but she also has a certain power because she is the center of attention, the reason we’re all there. For a sixteen-year-old few of these issues are anywhere near formulated much less verbalized but making art out of being in this room with this woman is nothing like setting up a still-life or illustrating some half-baked fantasy. Looking at her and trying to draw is the most intense, immediate thing I’d ever done up to that point.

The student union at MIT is just off Mass Ave, next to the athletic center where I’d sometimes go to play squash with my dad. He signed me up for the drawing class. The months of evenings that I go there crystalize the fact that there would be no escape from art for me. It took what I had been doing in sketchbooks and on the margins of school books and inside my head and brings it directly out into lived experience. The instructor, Dick Stroud, doesn’t teach so much as creates an atmosphere without resistance in which all we have to do is find the marks to note the model’s gesture. There’s no talk of meaning or content, just a seemingly physical reckoning with human form. The space he leaves open for us to wonder about what it is we are actually doing makes it possible to overcome inhibitions and insecurities which are natural to beginners. The feeling in the room isn’t unlike a yoga class (which I wouldn’t experience until more than a decade later) where every individual is stretching to the limit or just past the limit of their own abilities but no one is in competition with anyone else. It is also implicit that there’s no perfect solution or winning at what we are working at.

The way I drew her right foot has always bothered me. It looks like a flipper. It looks like I couldn’t decide which way the foot should be pointed. I should’ve erased it and tried again but either didn’t have the time or didn’t see how off it was at the time. Mangled foot and all, she became part of my very first “solo” show. It was held in the upstairs lobby of the Coolidge Corner Theatre in Brookline, where I worked. A year or two later, my parents had her framed and hung her in their bedroom and she’s been there ever since.

Now when I visit their home and see her, she reminds me of that classroom in the student union at MIT, where I found out beyond a doubt what I’d do the rest of my life. But the things a sixteen-year-old knows are not the same as what a forty-six-year-old does. There was no way I could guess that thirty years after that first life-drawing class, I’d still be doing essentially the same thing. It’s not a bad drawing—misshapen foot and all—just a few easy charcoal marks. It’s confident in a way which is difficult to replicate these decades later. Not knowing what you don’t know can often be a help that way. I see a lot more than I did back then but when faced with a clean sheet of paper all that experience can hobble you. And yet, I have no yearning to be that sixteen-year-old again. He could draw a little but he didn’t have much else figured out. Today, if I were to go to a life-drawing class and spend a few hours looking at naked woman posing, I’d have a million associations to reckon with beyond the problem of rendering some version of what was before my eyes.

p.s. I’ve been drawing at Wendy Clinard’s dance studio in Pilsen lately. Some of these drawings will grace her studio wall (along with other non-dance-related artwork) on December 9th and provide a backdrop for her performance with violinist Steve Gibons that night. Below is a collage of sketches of them rehearsing. I’ve also made a page on my site to collect all the drawings.

I sketched out these stumblers from Breughel’s great painting to use as a tattoo almost twenty years ago. A couple years later the Bush Years dawned and a look down at my left arm served as an instant reminder of where we were at as a country. For those eight years I never accepted that the entitled idiot represented me in any way. After last Tuesday, W seems like King Solomon. W did his level best to flush this country down the toilet, now we’ve recruited the guy to give the handle a final jiggle.

Election Day morning I woke up about two hours before I needed to. I was anxious and didn’t know what to do so I made a cup of coffee and started re-watching “Horace and Pete”. “Horace and Pete” is neither a movie nor a traditional TV show. The episodes aren’t of uniform length and the story proceeds erratically, with few of the tropes of either form. The set and characters reminds me of classic American plays. Something by Eugene O’Neill, or Arthur Miller, or Tennessee Williams maybe, but the way it’s edited and composed could only have been done with cameras. The story takes place in an old bar in Brooklyn. It’s about a world which is disappearing but it is told in a way which could only be possible now. Louis C.K. financed, wrote, shot, acted in, and distributed it by himself outside the studio system or any other established entertainment portal. The same way any amateur can now upload a song he wrote 30 seconds ago to YouTube, C.K. has made his work available directly to us. Except that C.K.’s song has Alan Alda, Jessica Lange, Edie Falco, Steve Buscemi, and a dozen other heavy hitters in it. Several of the best actors around do some of their best work in this weird, uncategorizable thing.

The specter of Donald Trump haunts “Horace and Pete”. The barflies debate his candidacy just as so many of us have over this last year. Many of the people at the bar long for a past that never was, just like the catastrophic fantasy which Trump has sold as if it’s anything but a fairytale. Now that the worst has come to pass, many people will search for means of escape or oblivion. How can it be possible that this country willingly elected the Cheeto-faced carnival barker to be its standard-bearer?

There isn’t enough sand in the Sahara for me to bury my head in to forget what happened last Tuesday, but I’m sure as hell gonna try. If you want to join me, throw Louis C.K. a few bucks here. This thing he made is the best thing I saw or read all year. Small comfort, I know, but we have to find some glimmer of good in order not to be sucked under by the horror we’ve wreaked. Art is the only way I know to fight back against the ugliness of this world.

I really don’t wanna know about the next shoe to drop but there’s no doubt bad times are ahead.

Twenty-three years ago I was twenty-three years old. I’d just graduated from the Art Institute and moved back to Boston. I started driving a cab after a few months of not doing much of anything. I knew that my BFA qualified me for a job in the service industry and driving a cab seemed like as good a way to make a living as any. I knew I was a couple hundred years late to have any real impact on the culture if I was to continue making paintings of the people and things I saw around me. Painting of any kind had stopped being at the center of the national conversation decades before but it was the only way I knew to talk to the world, so what was I to do?

Two years later, after an abortive attempt at grad school and many, many cab miles, I had a show of paintings at a cafe in the South End neighborhood of Boston. It was by far the biggest success I’d had up to that point (or since). Buoyed by the couple thousand bucks in my pocket, I quit driving, figuring foolishly that I’d make a living from art from that point on. Broke a couple months later, I slunk back behind the wheel. Without an agent or gallery there was no way to sustain the art sales or public enthusiasm needed to keep collectors interested in what I was doing. So I drove the cab and painted and sometimes put the paintings up in coffeeshops and bars around town. Every now and again something would sell, but never nearly enough for me to entertain the fantasy of leaving the day job again.

Cut to 2012, when I finally walk away from the cab for good. I’m finishing up my second book (which will be published two years later) and I’m ready to try to get by on freelance art and writing gigs and art sales. Every day I open the laptop screen and try to shake a few bucks loose from an editor or art collector who’s never heard of me and is inundated by other cold-callers just like me, all of us trying to squeeze through an ever-shrinking door. Still, I do enough pet portraits, book reviews, and other miscellany to almost get by. It’s a grind and it’s often demeaning but I figure it beats driving a cab.

Then, this summer comes. Suddenly the book review editor who had been publishing a piece or two of mine almost every month is not returning email anymore. The newspaper’s book section is being eliminated. There is no longer any budget for freelancers at the other paper I write for either. So I’m left writing a few film capsule reviews a month, or rather, I write them and then have them mangled until I don’t recognize more than a couple words. There’s always a price to pay when you use creative energy just to pay the bills. It isn’t worth the humiliation in this case, so I decide to walk away. I take on a bartending shift at the bar at which I’d only been working door and start looking around for jobs which don’t involve art or writing.

I won’t give up trying to get my stuff out there. I’ll keep sending out the manuscript for my third book—finished a year ago and gathering dust in dozens of publishers’ and agents’ inboxes—and of course I’ll keep painting. It’s too late for me to try anything else, but I’m forced to conclude that at this point I can pay my bills better by serving drinks, checking IDs, stocking beer, and mopping barroom floors. I’m not the only one out there struggling to get acknowledgement for what I do, of course. 

A couple weeks ago I went to the Hideout to see Dexter Romweber play. Granted he was up against a Cubs World Series game, but still, a city of several million could barely muster an audience of twenty for one of the true originals of rock music. The man’s always seemed tormented but that night he looked on the verge of tears. It hurts to keep banging your head against a wall that will likely never give. Still, what else is there to do?

I’ve been mopping floors at Bernice’s Tavern a week or two now. There’s a simple satisfaction to this kind of manual labor which you rarely get from making art. The floor was dirty but then from your effort it becomes clean. And you’re given money after you’re done and don’t have to wonder whether someone who doesn’t know you and doesn’t have any reason to care will see what you’ve done and find value in it. If you do this job correctly, you’re paid for it and there’s nothing else to think about. This is what I’ve always liked about service industry work. It leaves the mind free. I knew this same thing twenty-three years ago instinctively. Now, all these years later it’s as if I’m back where I started. Has what I’ve spent all my time on been worthwhile? It’s not for me to judge. I’ll just keep stumbling on.