Letter

December 25-26th

The first leg of the flight, terminating in Madrid, Spain, is uneventful. Three of its eight hours are killed by two dreadful Hollywood offerings: The Rocker starring Rainn Wilson as a middle-aged loser who lives out his dream by playing in his nephew’s rock band, followed by The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants 2, in which young girls solve their problems with the aid of a pair of jeans bearing sparkling stars on the ass.

Madrid to Tel Aviv is more arduous. Being neighbored on three sides by yowling, slobbering, and spitting infants and their keepers doesn’t help my sleep-deprivation any. The keepers suspend their little droolers over my airspace and exchange precious memories and parenting lore as strings of saliva settle in my hair and on my clothes. I blast my iPod to diminish the assault. The horror is exacerbated as I finish reading 7 Days in the Art World, Sarah Thornton’s chilling ethnographic safari through the key outposts of an industry to which I nominally belong.

I spend the rest of the flight sketching neighboring slumberers and willing the minutes to bloom into hours.

Passport Security takes pleasure in the detailed account of my life story, including the reason why, having been born there, I do not carry Russian citizenship. Then we have to wait as my brother Boris and his girlfriend Blakeney inquire about their luggage, which was left behind by striking Alitalia workers in Rome. At their place, my mother has already laid out a feast and grandparents and other relations soon follow. My brother Max is there too, but is a shadowy presence due to a severe bout of food poisoning. He shuttles between bed and toilet mostly, then leaves to welcome the New Year with friends in Boston.

December 27th

Morning cigarettes on the balcony next to the washer, ashing over the clothes line, taking in the steep, tree-filled corner on view. Next, an excursion to King Herod’s fortress——now a collection of passageways and scattered stones on a hilltop. Visits to ruins like this are probably a pretext to conversation or bonding with one’s fellow travelers, but the climb and descent are what sticks in my memory. Also, the rolling desert landscape dotted intermittently with structures and flora like a sea of bald men’s heads with comb-overs or disintegrating toupees.

We’re told that the bombing of Gaza by the Israeli army has begun. The only immediate effect for us is that the planned excursion to Petra in Jordan is canceled. The endless bloodletting over this godforsaken strip of land has always been a mystery to me. More intelligent tribes long ago moved to territories more conducive to habitation. Yet the pull of ancient mythology and perceived ancestry keeps fanning the flames here. Having been to this country six or seven times now, there’s no sense in which this feels like home to me.  But I know many others feel differently.

A walk through the Old City with my father, Boris, and Blakeney includes the Wailing Wall and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, built on the spot where Jesus was crucified and monks of competing denominations now enjoy punching each other in the face. It is a rabbit warren of alcoves containing icons, crosses, and other Christian bric-a-brac, fawned over by packs of tourists and desecrated by the graffiti of true believers. Boris and Blakeney document this and other sites on various digital devices, while my father runs ahead and I try to keep them all within sight.

December 28th

Boris and Blakeney leave for a restorative trip to a Dead Sea spa. I turn down proposals of sightseeing and work on a watercolor on the back porch. Tracking the path of the sun in this quiet corner is probably perverse while the bombs fall a few miles way, as strangely remote as the Iraq war back home, but present as an undercurrent nonetheless. Painting does bring me back to what passes for normalcy, removing the dislocating sensation of travel.

A mad search for a certain bakery located in an industrial block——the rolling racks of fresh-baked loaves the only clue among poured concrete structures, dumpsters, and loading docks. Then to my grandparents house in the evening to celebrate their 64th wedding anniversary. An hour perusing old photo albums is followed by the setting of silverware, plates, and food. Then toasts to health and future and family and past, then home.

December 29th

We head south, picking up the mud bathers on the way, en route to Eilat. The ever-shrinking Dead Sea accompanies us for half the trip, visible to the left of the road, then tapers to nothing. The two-lane highway through the rolling desert makes for sometimes hairy moments as over-enthusiastic motorists pass within feet of oncoming traffic. Hairpin turns and undulating hills make visibility short-lived and sporadic.

Our destination is a resort town on the Red Sea, in the southern tip of the country, bordered by Egypt and Jordan. Having made dinner plans with a distant relative also staying in town, we circle about the hotels, restaurants, parking lots, and bridges to nowhere until a helpful cabbie finally sets us straight. At the table, Russian, English, and French mixes to sometimes jell into conversation. I opt out and doodle in my sketchbook instead. The stroll along the boardwalk brings a bombardment of neon, cheap tchotchkes, and signage in Hebrew, English, Arabic, and Russian. Promenading families, couples, and packs of teens compete for purchase on the path with hucksters and street musicians. The most notable is a fat Russian emigré in a white suit who enthusiastically puts his whole body into renditions of smooth jazz standards on saxophone and clarinet backed by a karaoke machine. The overall effect of the place is a sad mix of Coney Island and Atlantic City with clashing cultures as seasoning. Seedy, yet redolent of elusive thrills and forgotten joy.

Thrifty, as always, we sleep five in one room. I’m on the kiddie cot with the lights out, not ready to sleep or listen to my brother fart in his slumbers.  Blakeney proactively purchased earplugs against my own operatic snoring. I wander out into the night instead. A cinderblock box building covered in neon liquor ads wheezes out disco beats to the expectant line of teens waiting to enter, while a strip club, Irish bar, and fast-food shack lonesomely await patronage. I think about coffee but return to the hotel and sit in the lobby reading for a while before going back to the room.

December 30th

The breakfast buffet, included in the price of the room, ends at 10:30 am so we hurry to shovel in eggs, potatoes, coffee, and cereal among our fellow vacationists. The hotel is made up of three buildings in the shape of ocean liners with swimming pools in between, decorated with faux rock formations, palm trees, and paper maché birds and lizards worthy of Rainforest Cafe. A mini soccer field attracts little boys and their fathers in sweatpants, who occasionally play for real, but are for the most part content to knock the ball back lazily to their offspring.

Enthralled by this grandeur, I beg off the planned excursion to an ancient Egyptian site and stay on the balcony, attempting to capture some tiny sliver of the majesty before me.

I wait for my family in the lobby among the lingerers, web surfers, and wailing children. They return bearing shawarma sandwiches and we commiserate about what to eat next, between mouthfuls of lamb and tahini.

Dinner is at a place away from the main drag, past the harbor housing miles of recently delivered cars, across the street from a Club Med, on the last bit Israeli land before the border with Egypt. Then, a meeting with our elderly relative in the lobby of the Hilton, which also houses loungers, but of a decidedly more calcified vintage.

December 31st

We head back to Jerusalem in the morning, with a detour to a historic site set high in the mountains, right next to nowhere. A harsh corkscrew of a climb leads to a plateau, past barbed-wire-fenced military installations and an oddly solitary factory, to a pile of rocks beyond a guard booth where our wallets are lightened slightly for the privilege of entry. A town once stood here, now partially reconstructed, but mostly a pile of once-used boulders. Some bits of mosaic have survived, but the rest is quite obviously recreated, leading me to wonder whether this is a view of history in any way different than a Civil War reenactment. What certainly is history is the adjoining cafe. A distant memory, judging by the view through its dusty windows.

After a forty minute wait approaching a checkpoint, we’re back in Jerusalem to greet the coming of the new year. The apartment fills with family arriving to eat and drink together. I drowsily and reluctantly joined in. My lifelong inability to engage in group revelry is probably exacerbated by being half awake. But soon another celebration has passed and it is time to clear dishes again. This is my favorite part of any gathering.

January 1st

My flight leaves at 6 am but both mother and father insist on seeing me off, so we set out for Tel Aviv at 3:30. The check-in is going smoothly until I get to the Iberia counter, where I’m told that in the five days since the trip in, the airplanes have apparently shrunk. Now my carry-on bag, which hadn’t rated a second look in Chicago or Madrid, is judged oversized and has to be checked.

The return trip is mercifully uneventful. Besides the bandy-legged little man next to me, who insists on invading my leg room with his thighs, even the in-flight movies are better——Appaloosa with Ed Harris and Ghost Town with Ricky Gervais, which is sappy but still preferable to attempting sleep in coach. The best part of air travel has always been getting off, which can also be said of travel in general.

Coming back is the only thing that makes vacations bearable.

I’ve been plundering how-to-draw books for phrases and diagrams to collage. It feels right because it fits with the book I’ve been working on and also because it’s a thing I’ve thought about forever and ever: can art be taught?

I believe you can train a chimp to render a “realistic” likeness, but is that art? In the times before radio, TV, and smartphones, many people who made enough money to spare the time sketched and painted. It was a common hobby of the educated classes. Did any of those people consider themselves artists? Probably only the ones with bruised egos and other insecurities. It would be like a kid in a park shooting baskets believing himself ready for the NBA.

But for drawing, those times are long gone. People take up running or cosplay or polyamory in their free time. They don’t pick up a pencil or brush.

I had several art teachers growing up, but none of them taught me to render in the methodical step-by-step manner of the how-to book or TV show. Some would occasionally reveal tips or tricks or shortcuts, but these inevitably failed to work for me, either because of my ineptitude or my contrary nature. I had to stupidly learn things by constantly failing. In contrast, the books I’ve been cutting up always have an upbeat, cheerful tone. I know in my bones that has nothing to do with art.

The last time I tried to quit art was in high school. I hung out in the gym playing hoops for weeks but rarely got picked for teams and made no new friends. Soon after, I gave in and got the sketchbook back out. It wasn’t a choice made for happiness or even enjoyment, but for a kind of survival. I knew instinctively that if I didn’t go back to drawing there’d be no reason to keep living.

This may all sound melodramatic and extreme, I know. Art is supposed to bring pleasure and ease and I hope very much that now and then something I’ve made does that for someone else. But as I cut up diagrams and chapter headings from the drawing books, I’m struck by how little any of what is described has to do with my experiences. The goals of these exercises is not to justify one’s reason to live. A drawing how-to book like that would sell very few copies.

Last year, when I taught a couple college drawing classes, I found myself holding my tongue a lot. I could sense that almost none of my students would make a life of art after watching them half-ass drawings of cubes, cones, and bodies. If any of them had asked, I would have told them that the way I knew I had to give my life to this is I was cornered and felt there was no other way out. Not what most kids want to hear in an elective taken most likely for an easy A.

I haven’t done the research to find out whether anyone buys how-to-draw books these days. There are several companies that still market paint-by-numbers kits and you can watch days of Bob Ross shows on YouTube. Prior to the plague, paint-and-drink emporia dotted the city’s storefronts. But aside from kitsch value or unusual mating rituals, does anyone believe any of these methods could make them artists?

With NFTs and record-setting auction prices, perhaps kids will see becoming an artist as a way to get rich quick. Maybe I’ll write a how-to book just for them.

[You Are My Closest Friend]

[Was reminded of this piece I’d illustrated a couple years back, written by an ex-Marine living in Kyiv, for obvious reasons. I have no original thoughts or insights into the daily horror my birth-country is inflicting on their neighbor, aside from the hope that the next person who finds out where I’m from isn’t surprised——as most are——when I tell them I’ve never been back or ever had the desire to.]

The puzzle is on a high shelf of a dead artist’s studio. I’m in her apartment with a friend, picking over unused art supplies. Her nephew invited us to take whatever we want. I have a pile of watercolor paper, brushes, a Pelikan watercolor set, an ancient mat cutter. Faced with so much stuff, it’s hard to know what to take and what to leave. There’s something obscene about scavenging this way, but it beats the scrap heep. To the nephew, this room full of things is just an obstacle to getting the apartment sold.

What catches my eye in the closet is de Kooning’s Gotham News. It’s a great painting from 1955. I don’t even see that it’s a jigsaw puzzle till I reach up for it and take it out into the light. I joke to my friend about taking it and put it back in the closet. A few minutes later though, I pick it up again and put it with my pile.

Weeks pass. Gotham sits in its box, leaning against the studio table’s leg. Up above it on the surface, some of the dead artist’s things have merged with my own. Soon I won’t be able to tell what was hers and what’s mine. We all just use these things for a time before it’s someone else’s turn.

I haven’t worked a jigsaw puzzle since I was a kid. I look at the box and wonder what possessed me to bring it home. Then, one day, I dump all the pieces on the carpet and sit down on the floor to see if I can sort them. A couple mostly frustrating hours later, I realize I’ll get nowhere down there on my ass. My back hurts from leaning over. My elbow keeps falling asleep. I gather the whole mess back into its box and start over on a table.

The hard part about a de Kooning jigsaw puzzle is there’s no representational shortcuts. No faces, trees, or houses. No cars or planes; just marks and colors. My first strategy is to sort all like colors together. It doesn’t really work because there are few discrete areas in the painting; everything flows into everything else.

I work the thing for days as a break from work. Sometimes I barely make any progress, other times it’s as steady as dominoes. One night I get so wrapped up in it I lose track of time and cancel plans I’d looked forward to all day.

As it gets closer to filling up, I wonder what I’ll get a puzzle of next. Then I realize that if I do that, there will soon be no time to do anything else. Best that this de Kooning be the first and last. It wouldn’t be the same to just buy one in a store or, worse yet, just click a button online. It wouldn’t mean the same thing Gotham News does.

Like a remake calculated to cash in on a surprise hit. A strange thing to think about a puzzle that was likely printed at least a few hundred times, but mine’s the only one that lived in that dead artist’s closet. I’ll think about her everytime I look at Gotham News now. I’ll glue the completed thing to a board and hang it somewhere in the house.

It’ll stay there until someone is invited here to take my things away.