A lot of what I’m concerned with lately has to do with the sea. I’m illustrating a very famous novel about a hopeless voyage and preparing to paint a mural full of fish and other flora and fauna on the side of a house in Lawndale, California.
The thing is, I don’t even eat seafood.
I’ll talk about the book at a later date but the aquarium on the wall isn’t my idea. It’s for a baby girl whose mother works with sea creatures. The house belongs to the girl’s grandparents and she lives nearby.
Strangely enough, the only mural I’ve painted was an underwater scene on the wall of a daycare center in an elementary school in Brookline, Massachusetts over thirty years ago. I’m sure it’s long gone. I don’t even have a photo. In my memory, it’s not very good.
I’ve been making sketches with markers and doing research about what paint to use. I sent a few of the sketches to the grandparents and there was concern that they were too bright. I assured them that in paint they’d likely be more muted and would fade and become sunbleached in no time in southern California.
It’s not my custom to prep or plan too much before making a picture. I like to react to the situation at hand in real time. I may use some of these scribbles for reference and then again I may not. I’m using video and stills from the Cabrillo Marine Aquarium to draw from. That’s where the girl’s mother works. I’m hoping that what I come up with will connect with the girl in some personal way.
There’s no guarantee that will happen. That’s not usually how art works. It’s an oblique communication rather than an if/then action/consequence. I don’t even truly know what the thing will look like till I’ve made it.
I’ve gone to thrift stores regularly since I was a teenager. Back then it was mainly for clothes. I worked at a movie theater with recent art school grads and took cues from them re fashion. Kathy introduced me to a place called Dollar-A-Pound in Cambridge. You had to get there real early on a Saturday, then run in and fight it out with other bargain hunters digging through mountains of shirts, pants, jackets, and dresses. It was a thing to do as much as anything. For someone who felt out of place in the high school ecosystem, it was a chance to belong to a different way of life.
In art school and thereafter, I furnished my apartments with furniture, kitchenware, et al from The Ark, Village Thrift, Unique, and long-gone junk stores along Belmont Avenue and around Uptown and Rogers Park. I still have four Art Deco wooden chairs I got from a store piled to the ceiling with flotsam and jetsam in the fall of 1990. They show up in dozens of paintings and drawings.
I’ve worn dead men’s shoes for decades. One favorite pair of black wingtips got resoled three times from wear. The history embedded within these and other finds have always made them feel more valuable than something costing ten times more, fresh from the factory, in a regular store.
I’ve used thrift store frames almost exclusively over the past decade to display my work on paper. Since slashing prices to $200 for nearly anything I make, spending hundreds for some moldings and glass seems nonsensical. I assume that buyers who don’t like these frames can always find new ones for the money they saved on the purchase price.
Since starting at the bookstore a couple years ago, I’ve become more attuned the worth and value of used books. Working at Tangible has allowed me to let go of a personal library gathered over decades. Digging through boxes and boxes of donations has sharpened my eye for the unusual or anomalous. I can scan a couple dozen mysteries or romances in a second and know that Joe will pencil in between $3.50 and $4.20 on the first white interior page.
The paperbacks and hardcovers that don’t fit the pattern fairly scream out from these piles. I look for distinctive typography and unusual subject-matter. Generally, books that are over thirty years old. Spending my whole life looking has made my eyes automatically search out any break in a pattern.
A couple months ago on a visit to the Unique down the street, I went over to the book section. Typically I only look for frames and shoes here but between the bookstore and the eBay library sell-off, books are on my brain. I found four things worth taking a chance on. None cost over $3.99. Most closer to $2. I bought them, then sat at home looking up titles and ISBNs. I took pictures of the covers, a couple inside pages, author signatures on a couple, and detail shots of scuffs and scratches. I listed them for between $10 and $80.
One sold for over $20 within a day and the bug bit me. I got on the bike and hit four Village Thrifts, starting in Little Village, onto Brighton Park, Chicago Lawn, then back to Back of the Yards. My haul was nothing special by I was getting the lay of the land.
It’s not entirely a money-making scheme. It’s more like training for a job I may or may not end up taking. Or, maybe it’s like trolling for mushrooms. When I was little I used to love finding them even though I would never eat one.
Finding books and passing them on feels better than hoarding them for myself. I read all the time but keeping the objects, no matter how beautiful, is no longer a thing for me.
Anyhow, if you wanna see some more of what I’ve found, here’s the place.
Wang Bing’s Youth trilogy took up a chunk of my watching/thinking time last week. I streamed Spring at home, then saw Hard Times and Homecoming at the Siskel on a Friday. Ten hours in all. Could’ve easily been longer.
Wang shot young people migrating from far-flung villages to Zhili for work in private garment shops from 2014 to 2019. They assemble, cut, and sew thousands of jackets, pants, and jackets over months laboring morning to night, six or seven days a week. The pay is paltry and seems to be less and less year over year. Sometimes the boss disappears without paying anything; other times there are fist fights over money that end with nights in jail.
The workrooms are hot and littered with cuttings and trash. The outside passageways that lead to the upstairs dormitories are piled with food wrappers, newspaper, and refuse. They’re like ants in an anthill. But they make the things that make our entire world go.
Despite the horrific conditions, there’s a strange beauty to the way Wang presents these lives. They flirt, fight, fall in love. It’s remarkable how people just do people things, no matter the circumstances.
Spring doesn’t have too much of a narrative. It’s an immersive plunge into the day-to-day. In Hard Times and Homecoming, there’s more time spent on individual stories. The footage of the workers’ home villages makes the portrait of their lives three-dimensional.
The cumulative effect is kind of literary. It feels like an epic novel but done entirely with visual means. This isn’t a documentary in the traditional sense. No voice-over or talking heads or infographics or dramatic reenactments.
Wang does a Q & A after Homecoming that adds nothing to my appreciation of his achievement. I love interviews on their own but they mostly feel unnecessary directly after experiencing the thing itself. He seems like a pretty patient guy from the way he handles the moderator’s and audience’s dumb questions but looks like he’d rather be taking a nap.
I don’t know how many people will see Youth. It’s completely foreign to the fantasy/reality fast-food that’s most popular in filmed entertainment now. But if you care for art about how we live now, you’ll seek it out.
Don’t feel daunted by the ten-hour running time. It’s only half as long as the garbage most people binge off the streamers every weekend.
