I saw a girl who used to work at the coffeeshop in my neighborhood. I looked back after passing her on my bike and she turned, hesitated a moment, then smiled and waved.
I used to sit inside but now mostly sit outside. Probably plague thinking. I used to be able to get a lot of work done here but now I’m often distracted by passersby or their dogs. Or a woman sitting at a neighboring table. I make aimless drawings and drink my coffee then leave.
I don’t know the people who work at the shop like I used to. They were at least acquaintances before but only bring me coffee and breakfast sandwiches now. I’m just another customer to them. Lockdown made people more wary. The new counter people aren’t as open as the ones from before. Maybe I’m not either. I spend much fewer hours here now and I spend most of them out on the sidewalk in the cul-de-sac rather than inside like I used to. Why would they remember me? They only see me long enough to take my order.
I used to paint inside the coffeeshop. Now I only draw sometimes. Haven’t brought the gouaches here since before lockdown. Now when there’s color in my pictures it’s from bits of old paper or markers rather than paint. The subject-matter is the tension between past and present rather than the view in front of my face.
Used to be different. Maybe there’s a way back but do I want to go there?
If you’re an artist who works on paper you dread frames. I’ve paid hundreds of dollars for a few simple wood mouldings, cut glass, a window mat, and some foam core more times than I can recall. In many of those instances, I sold the artwork for just enough to pay off that expense; sometimes, not even that.
You can save perhaps 20% of a typical custom job by going to a u-frame-it place. There, a tired, often sarcastic framer will give you materials, maybe pound in a nail or two, then leave you to it. I once spent a full three days at the Great Frame Up assembling twenty or so pieces for a show. It was exhausting and a little crazy making and at the end of it I was still out a couple thousand dollars.
I’ve always been a frustrated perfectionist in matters of craft. Tasks like picture-framing bring out some very negative personal qualities. All I see in my efforts is the flaws and mistakes. In my mind I should be a master even though I haven’t put in enough time, nor possess the natural coordination, to even be a competent journeyman. The gap between expectation and skill is a gaping maw. I can see myself chainsmoking on the Broadway sidewalk, trying to calm down enough not to go back into the shop, aiming the framers point gun at my forehead rather than some cursed piece of wood.
There’s a domino effect too with how I price my pictures. Obviously, a drawing in a $400 frame has to be what? $600? $800? Now a thing that seemingly has nothing to do with drawing or painting is having a significant influence on the very important process of getting artwork out of my life. It’s hard enough without extraneous hurdles.
I’ve gone to thrift stores, yard sales, resale and junk shops for as long as I can remember. I like looking through dead people’s things. They have a patina or aura that a new thing never does. Scuff marks, rips, and yellowing would be a flaw in most stores but are selling points here.
At some point in the past decade I decided to ask much less for my pictures than I used to. The time left has become more and more of a factor in my thinking. The idea of an apartment full of art destined for thrift store or dumpster is not an appealing one. I’m very aware while flipping threw the rack of frames and canvases at Unique on Halsted that each of these pictures was made by someone and likely hung in someone else’s home. It had pride of a place. Was chosen with a particular person in mind. Now it’s worked itself through its lifecycle and gotten spit out the other end a little worse for the wear.
Now I never spend more than $20 on a frame. Usually, it’s under $10. I trim down the painting or collage to suit the frames I have on hand rather than building or buying one to fit the picture. Oftentimes, especially if I’m working on a commission, I’ll measure the paper to fit before making a single mark. Unique has become an art supply store as much as Blick. When I find a good one, I start thinking of what I can put in it. The dread of the frame shop is gone, replaced by the creative possibilities of the thrift store.
On my last visit, I found a large wooden frame with metallic trim and a beige mat. Inside was a hideous drawing of an 80s woman done in pink and rose pastel. She was rendered head-on and in profile. The orange price-tag on the back said $19.99 but the cashier rang it up for half-price. I wonder how much the original owner paid? Balancing it carefully on the back rack of my bike, I rode home slowly, thinking what picture I could use it for. I found a collage called Dream from a couple years ago that was the right height but the wrong width. I looked at it awhile, then trimmed it to suit the new frame. I think it’s a better composition now. I wouldn’t have revised it without the trip to Unique. I never felt that way in the old days after running up a credit card to make pictures ready to hang. There was never any creativity involved, only debt and bad feelings.
I look up the schedule and pick a day when the little movie theater has a screening. Then I write to Steve at Quimby’s NYC to see if he needs a restock of my books and write Gil to see if he wants to meet up. MOMA has a little show centering around Matisse’s Red Studio painting.
New York doesn’t hold any huge significance for me anymore. It did when I was young because it might still have been the center of art and culture then. But that moment—when New York, or any other city—was a center of anything is long gone. Now it’s a place with some good museums, stores, and restaurants that I can be ready to leave within a day or two. It would be different if I’d logged more than six months as a resident, but I’m just a tourist there, and that’s a state that gets old fast.
The flight from Chicago is entirely unremarkable. I don’t miss being on a plane. Same wedged-in feeling as I remember from before the plague. LaGuardia’s fancied-up though. Looks like a contemporary shopping mall rather than a crappy construction site now. Bonkers to me that there’s still no train line to get there. But if there were, I’d miss one of my favorite parts of the commute, which is arriving at the Jackson Heights train station. Here is one of the few places where New York still feels like a real city rather than gourmet Disneyworld. Some day I’ll come here and just wander around. Skip Manhattan and Brooklyn altogether. But not this time. I have an itinerary.
The surprise of the Matisse show is that one of my all-time favorite paintings is there. I’ve probably spent as much time trying to make my pictures have illusionistic space and acknowledge their flatness at the same time, the way he does, as any other technical/compositional problem. But it’s not just the formal thing that attracts me. It may be corny or gauche now, but to be a guy sharing a small room with an unclothed woman, a large window overlooking the city, is as close to an ideal as I can come up with.
It’s sweltering when I reach the little video store on a residential corner in Greenpoint. There are no other customers but the guy behind the counter does little but grunt a greeting when I come in. I browse through his collection of obscure foreign cinema and extreme horror. When I ask about the movie screening at seven, he says, in as few words as possible, that he knows nothing about it. He’s rented out the theater to some kids. Ask them. I buy a box set of Penelope Spheeris’s Decline and Fall of Western Civilization and wait.
A couple sweaty randomly dressed people come in carrying boxes. They sell me a ticket, then nothing happens for a while. Eventually more young people filter in. They all know each other. It’s a celebration to premiere their movie. Bad Summer is a grubby low-budget story of aimless friends back in their home town for the summer, working shitty jobs and doing a bunch of drugs. One of them may or may not be a murderer. I loved it. Afterwards, I bought a cassette of the soundtrack and wandered out into the soupy night.
I spend Thursday morning at the Whitney. I sit in the café and check email, then spend some time drawing Hopper’s Early Sunday Morning—another all-time favorite. This one for the way it conveys both stillness and motion. An old man sits down next to me. He says something nice about my sketch but I tell him the point of it is just to slow me down, to stay and really look, rather than scanning and saving while walking by, as people mostly do in museums (and everywhere else).
I meet Mick at his record store and we go to Union Square on his lunch break. We talk about maybe collaborating on something: his writing, my drawing. I hope that happens. My afternoon flight has been canceled so I still have hours to kill. I walk downtown to the Angelika and see an interminable artsy dystopian fantasy, then go to Katz’s for a pastrami sandwich. I keep getting texts from the airline about delays.
By the time I get to LaGuarda around 9pm, the departure time is past 1am. We don’t take off till 2:30. I had no idea a flight could leave at that hour. The gate agent says they got a special dispensation from the Port Authority. I read the back half of a book I’m reviewing while I wait to get home. The cabbie at Midway pretends not to know where Archer Avenue is. I enlighten him.
Might be another three years till I get on a plane again. Might be never.
