They say those who don’t study history are doomed to repeat it. But what if you’re asked to? Even offered money to?
In a near repeat of a call from a few years ago, my father asks for a copy of an old painting. This time it isn’t for him but as a gift. The original watercolor hangs in my parents’ vestibule. A close friend wants it for her new home but they don’t want to part with it. So my father hits upon this solution.
Does any artist want to copy themselves? It’s a bizarre experience. I have no time machine. There’s no going back. I skip so many steps trying to approximate old marks. The thing that animates the original is a view I have no access to. It’s nearly twenty years ago. I can tell it was winter and sunny. Fresh snow covers cars. Within hours it will melt or grey from passing exhaust pipes and salt trucks. I had to work fast to catch these pristine moments. It’s late June as I make my copy. I’m three homes removed from this view. How can I even pretend to inhabit this picture again?
But will the woman care about any of this when the painting hangs in her new home? How closely will she compare her painting with the one at my parents’ place? Is it because they have it that she wanted it? Will having a different but similar one suffice?
I finish it and put it in a frame. In a few weeks I’ll pack it into a rented car and drive east to celebrate my parents’ combined 150th birthday. They will take it and give it to their friend.
Chances are, I’ll never hear anything about it again.
The book’s off to the printers. I always look forward to this part, when it’s out of my hands. A couple days later I start getting impatient for it to be printed already. It’s like ordering delivery when you’re already hungry. Seems to take forever even though it’s only been 45 minutes.
I don’t know what to expect with this one. I guess I never do, but more so with this one. It’s a more opaque or maybe obscure subject than my other ones. Everybody’s taken a cab, listened to music, and been to a bar at least once. But the average person doesn’t give a flying fuck about the art world. Nor should they. By whatever accident of fate or roll of the dice, I’ve spent my life drawing and painting, so I have to at least pay lip service to the industry, gatekeepers, and self-appointed geniuses of this sphere.
Every kind of endeavor has its share of assholes and blowhards, but few have a higher percentage—against any actual accomplishment or skill—than the art world. It’s a place where all you have to do is announce your ambitions and dreams and a chunk of the audience will accept them as gospel without your having to lift a finger.
So I’ve tried to put together an indirect, somewhat fictionalized but very fractured narrative about some people I had dealings with over the past couple decades in that racket. It’s not a pretty picture and I don’t come out smelling like a rose. I’ve engaged in my share of the horseshit. I feel bad about it sometimes. Other times I decide it’s inevitable. The price of playing the game. A small part of me still has impossible ideals connected to art. I want it to be beautiful and pure. But then people get their grubby paws on it and smudge and grease it up so it’s ugly.
Anyways, if you’re curious about any of this, please preorder my book, buy its cover art, some of the collages within, or a cassette of some excerpts. That’s a lot of goddamn shilling, but that’s what the art world’s all about. It’s a sales job. You could do a lot worse and spend a lot more of your hard-earned money elsewhere.
—Wednesday, my interview with the great writer Lindsay Hunter goes up. In the meantime, listen to the one with guitarist Jonathan van Herik and catch up with some other talks. Many more good ones coming—queued up all the way through September as of right now.
I’m not an anxious person. The future doesn’t torment me much. But I obsess over dumb shit like unresponded-to email and USPS tracking that doesn’t update correctly. Then, once a thing is done—no matter how big or little—it disappears from my consciousness.
The last couple months, the most important upcoming thing was my collage show at the Rainbo Club. I dug through my stash of thrift-store frames, laid out dozens of pictures all over the floor and walls of my studio, and pictured the walls and display cases in my mind’s eye, swapping, rotating, and rearranging the show over and over. Because I’ve hung art there for twenty-five years, I can pretty much curate an exhibit virtually, in advance.
The morning of the hang, I wake early. It’s hours till I can even go get brunch, so I do something I haven’t done in awhile: I start a painting. I’ve made a bunch of sketches of the crap on my studio table. It sits between my armchair and the studio wall, where work-in-progress hangs, so I look at the bottles, jars, brushes, tape rolls, and assorted detritus, a million times a day. More accurately, it’s not that I look at it, but past it or through it. This is exactly how I get the vast majority of my subject-matter. It has to be around and unremarkable a long time before I actually notice and think to maybe draw it.
The painting goes okay. The main thing it does is get my mind off the task ahead. By the time I’m out the door to go eat, I’ve forgotten I’m hanging a show in a couple hours.
The Zipcar I pick up in Pilsen is all smoked out. Whoever had it before must’ve invited a bunch of their friends to ride all night blowing blunts. They were murder on the Subaru’s brakes too. The poor thing screeches and howls anytime I touch the pedal. But the thirty collages fit no problem once I put the backseats down and that’s all that really matters. The hang itself goes off without a hitch. I’m done in under two hours. Then I return the bruised and battered SUV to Pilsen and pedal back to the bar in Wicker Park.
A bunch of friends show up for the opening and I even sell a couple pieces. It’s all I could’ve hoped for. Now the show can live its own life the next five weeks. I’ll visit from time to time but my part in it is over. It’s good not to have all that work here. Makes me feel lighter. I’m hoping I don’t have to bring much of it back. Every time I bring artwork home after a show feels like failure. Like it didn’t do what it was made to do.
I finish the painting of the studio clutter over the next couple days. It’s hanging on the studio wall now, just beyond the space and objects depicted in it. I’m thinking about the book that will come out soon, about maybe illustrating a friend’s poem, about the books I have to read and review. Not exactly worried about any of it, just preoccupied. I should be happy about the Rainbo show but I don’t know how to do that. The fact it came off the way I’d designed it to should be more satisfying than it is. But I just go on to the next thing.
Is that normal? Is it okay? I don’t know any other way to be.
