Letter

There are eleven students in my class. A couple of them have definitely taken art classes before but most have rarely picked up a pencil for anything that wasn’t homework since they were little. I wrestle each week with how much or how little to tell them about this thing I’ve been doing almost all my life.

I bring in a Bluetooth speaker and play music to cut through the studious silence of the room. I’m impressed how seriously these kids take what they’re doing even when they barely have a clue. I see them sneaking a look at their phones now and then but for the most part they look from the model to their paper and back again and do all they can to render what they see.

There’s a syllabus for this class that lists many drawing materials and exercises like drawing from the skeleton and various anatomical measurement schemes. I haven’t had my students do any of that. I just want them to look at a seated person and try to draw them. I’m hoping they can come away from the class with some inkling of a different way of reckoning with the world than they’re used to. I don’t want to burden them with a bunch of theories and formulas which will likely kill any joy they might derive from this thing that humans have been doing since we lived in caves.

A couple weeks ago their homework was to draw their left hand with their right and their right with their left. When they put their drawings in the hallway for the end-of-day crit it was hard to tell which one was made with the dominant hand. The thing about drawing is that it uses a totally different part of the mind than writing so the little they know about technique etc is often an impediment. I told them about how the first time I tried to do an opposite hand drawing I found out I was probably born a lefty.

They have to do self-portraits this week. Next week I’ll probably make them do them with the other hand. Or maybe not. I’m making this up as I go. I want to keep their attention and present a bit of a challenge but not so much that they want to give up.

I sit in the corner week after week listening to whatever music I brought in and watch them draw. Talking to them sort of breaks the spell. I think my job is just to set up the room and create an atmosphere that allows them to work.

I wonder how many of them will ever draw again when the class ends. It’s not any tragedy if they don’t. It’s a thing I can’t imagine living without but that’s not the most common feeling.

I wrote about a new production of Mother Courage and Her Children and a great essay film about a Brazilian director’s beginnings, making his childhood home into a movie studio.

I read the first few pages from George V. Higgins’ The Friends of Eddie Coyle and John Fante’s Wait Until Spring, Bandini into a microphone.

Somebody else should be writing this. When you want to survey several decades of a painter’s work, you don’t want the subject to be in charge of the narrative. Yet that’s where we are. No one else wants or needs to do this so it falls to me.

The reasons why no writer wants to write about my art aren’t mine to know but I can make a few guesses. The work doesn’t fit well into any trend, fad, or movement of the past thirty-plus years. I’m not associated with an institution such as an art gallery, college, or museum. I’ve not done myself few favors in the ways I’ve interacted with the representatives of the art world. These are some of the factors that spring to mind to explain why this work has been virtually ignored by the press and arts establishment. But this will be the first and last place to mention the critical indifference under which I’ve conducted my varied creative pursuits these many years. I’m at least as bitter as the next guy but wallowing is neither a good look nor very entertaining.

Instead, I’ll try to describe the best I can what I was going for in the selected work. I won’t linger overlong on meaning or significance as I believe those are terrains reserved for the viewer rather than the painter. That’s not to say the paintings and drawings I’ve made mean nothing to me but rather that if I say what I think they’re about, it will influence those seeing them for the first time in possibly unhelpful or limiting ways. The thing about a picture is that it must read simultaneously through the eyes and the mind without the guidance of language. When I go to a museum, for instance, I hardly ever read the wall text. When I do it’s on a second or third go-around. What I want is an immediate experience. That’s what I wish for anyone that looks at my pictures too.

So I’m starting this book with two strikes against me: the wrong writer of a thing that maybe shouldn’t be written. But I’m doing it anyway. The reason is simple: I absolutely believe I’ve done enough good work to merit a book-length survey. Most of these pictures a long gone, sold or given away years ago. So the only way to experience so many of them together is via the internet. A screen is probably the worst way to look at a painting. The scale is lost, the colors are never accurate, there’s no context of any kind that survives the translation from canvas to pixel. An art book is hardly an ideal vessel for pictures but it has many advantages over the screen, chief among them being tangibility. The reproduction on the page can’t be shrunk or expanded or combined with a million other images. It may not be a perfect representation of the object it illustrates but it is an attempt to capture just that one discreet thing.

So, within the restrictions of the form, short of traveling to all the private homes that house the originals, I think a book is the best way to look through a representative sample of what I’ve been up to since the 1980s.

I designed a pin for Cine-FILE. Not sure whether they’re selling or giving them away but I’d bug Kat and/or Ben at the site if you’d like one.

Reviewed a crappy flick. Talked with Mallory about What We Do in the Shadows.

My website turns twenty this month. It’s been the old car on blocks in the yard that I’ve been tinkering with the whole time. A hobby and distraction from “real” work but also, often, a completely consuming obsession.

It long ago stopped working well with current technology. I never learned how to mobile-optimize so it’s sort of a mess when viewed on a phone, the way the vast majority of people take in the internet the past near decade. It’s much too late and way above my technical capabilities to fix this. Reminds me of my first car, a 1972 Buick Skylark, that I needed to feed a lead additive to help run right with that new-fangled unleaded gasoline.

I have changed many many things on the site over the years. There’s a folder in my files called Retired Site Pages filled with failed or short-lived ideas. Like the one above when I scanned a dollar bill in for some reason to illustrate the Commissions page. I spend hours, sometimes days updating some small design thing like a background color because with hundreds and hundreds of distinct pages there’s just no way I know to automate the process. What this tedious repetitive coding provides—asides from the nominal improvement to the aesthetic of my dusty little corner of the internet—is a way of checking out of the day-to-day. When I’m changing the layout of a section it may as well be nuclear war outside for all I notice.

The Saturday before last I was at the Siskel for nearly eight hours watching a 1923 silent movie about a railroad engineer’s unseemly lust for the adopted daughter he rescued from a wreck. It’s one of the greatest movie experiences I’ve ever had and made me wish the silent era had gone on a couple decades longer.

I spent most of Thursday and Friday in the basement of the bookstore. First I culled all the doubles in Suspense. Joe decided there’s no need to keep hardcovers of endless series when we have paperbacks. That freed up a whole case for what I came to think of as “cozy crime” books. Clearly marketed at women of an advanced age, these feature homely covers and groaner pun titles about food, knitting, or crossword puzzles. Another shelf was free for boxes and boxes of literary criticism that Joe had hidden behind the bookcases.

I wanted to make a painting of the basement but I ran out of time. When I was done shelving the last of the poetry analyses and Shakespeare explainers I was running late to catch the new four hour Holocaust travelogue essay film running at the Siskel.

The painting will have to wait.