Something old

I don't write much anymore.  This is a little sketch I wrote about 12 years ago, when I was still working on a big writing project (never finished).

*****

 Landscape

He realized one day that he'd lived in New York City long enough to notice the little changes in the backdrop.  Behind the moving crowd and its buzz of faces, he noticed that a famous restaurant had closed and emptied, that a thrift store had become a dry cleaner, a storefront that had once sold fresh vegetables now sold fast food.  In the overwhelming visual glut of the city, these changes occur all the time, and you have to work to notice the small changes in neighborhoods you don't frequent every day.  And it becomes exponentially more difficult to register the changes that are marked only by absences, that is, the changes in the people who make up the crowd.

            She used to come to the Impressionist galleries, the most crowded galleries in the whole museum, and she was so small and frail you worried she might be jostled to death in the throng.  Or even less, her skin seemed so raw that if someone just came too close to her, then that closeness would cause her pain even without a touch, just in the displacement of the air around her.  She wasn't old, but it was difficult to guess her age; not young either, but too young to be dying. 

            Her joints and extremities seemed swollen and nobbed.  Her lips, eyelids, and ears were rubbery and heavy.  Her hair was short and patchy and close to her head.  When she stood in the Impressionist galleries, she lingered in front of the paintings without reading the cards (tourists read the cards), and sometimes she closed her froggy eyes as if the painting could emanate sunlight, instead of just imitating it, and she were basking in the warmth.

            But she couldn't stand for long like that before she had to find a bench and rest, looking exhausted, but also, vaguely, happy. 

            As a guard in the museum it was his job to be invisible, except when someone needed directions to a restroom, or when someone moved too close to the art.  So he stood in the doorway and watched the people come and go, made up stories in his head about them when he was especially bored, overheard interesting scraps of conversation as they moved on to other galleries.  Like hearing setups all day with no punch lines.  So he would finish the conversations in his head, too, anything to keep his mind occupied with something other than his aching feet and how many minutes till his next break. 

            He recognized repeat visitors to the museum so he nodded and smiled to the sick woman when he saw her, and she smiled back, without showing her big teeth.  Other regulars: the dapper old gentleman who hit on young Asian tourist girls; the half-crazy woman who shuffled about the halls in her three pairs of camping socks and old sandals, sitting to write notes in her folder full of yellow paper and brown leaves; several young art students with sketchbooks and dirty hair; an aging socialite always done up with her best pearls.

*****

Random stuff

First of all, back to a lighter design palette for the post-Halloween blogging.

Second of all, ever since that brutal election day, I've had the full E Street Band version of Ghost of Tom Joad, with Tom Morello of Rage Against the Machine guesting on guitar, in my head. 

Third, made a trip to the Met a couple weekends ago when an old friend was in town.  Big show there was John Baldessari.  A quick look around my blog and my website and my picasa albums will probably tell you I'm no conceptualist.  I am a painter.  I like the stuff of paint.  I like to do stuff with paint.  And I probably wouldn't have even bothered with Baldessari, except our friend wanted to see it.

And...I wasn't bored out of my skull.  There was some playfulness, some fun, some surprises.  His use of film stills is interesting to me.  But all in all, a lot of it just seemed kind of fussy to me.  Odd, because the fussiness and preciousness seems anathema to his ideas. 

The Gossaert show - pretty good, in a weird kind of oddly drawn way, until I got to the last room, the portraits.  Which blew me away.  Gorgeous, and an example of how direct observation can outstrip idealization and fashion.  Damn, it was good.  I'd go back and only visit that last room. 

Some big Hodgkin prints I wish I'd spent more time with.  The Starn Brothers' roof installation was cool.  Saw it just in time, but didn't have the right shoes to go climbing in it. 

A vaporous Degas monotype of factory smoke.  A silky Seurat drawing of a similar subject. 

My son loved the Arms and Armor and the Greek galleries, where we looked for some of his favorite heroes and monsters.  And I liked 'em too, of course.

A whole case of rococo snuffboxes, which puts me in mind of my unfinished novel.

Coincidence or premonition or something

Once before I made mention here of a novel I started to write about twelve years ago but never finished. There are a few lines from that novel that describe an artist's work--small, black and white paintings--and seem to presage the b movie paintings. Here's the full paragraph:

Harry starts back toward the Medieval Hall. He walks quickly. It feels good to be moving somewhere, leaving burglary behind, but Archie keeps up with him. Archie is a painter, too, who took nights because he doesn't like tourists, and he likes morning light best for his painting. Harry saw his work once and didn't think the light would be all that crucial for his small, sooty, black and white cityscapes. It was in a group show in a Brooklyn storefront, and Harry didn't think much of it, but he told Archie they were like Truffaut movies, which made Arch happy, even if neither of them knew exactly what it meant. A painting can't really be like a movie, for god's sake. 'How's the party going?' Archie says, fumbling to hook his flashlight to his belt, while trying to keep up with Flynn. 'You got the restaurant tonight?'

So I just think it's a little curious how things go, how a throwaway line from something I wrote years ago comes back to kind of describe paintings I've been making recently, especially since one of the reasons I started to work from imagery like the movies is because I was in a studio with no natural light in the early aughts. Funny old world.

On Stretching Canvas

I recently prepared nine canvases the way I used to, with rabbit skin glue and oil priming. Because the process is rather time consuming, I had gotten away from this kind of preparation after my son was born. But the surface you prepare yourself is the best surface to paint on. And I probably waste time in the long run by painting on prefab materials of one kind or another. Returning to the oil priming process made me think of a chapter from my unfinished novel, in which the main character is preparing his own canvas and the work is described in detail. I stopped working on this novel about ten years ago, but never finished an entire draft, and most likely I never will, even though I still think about it now and again. But I am going to share that passage about the craft of stretching canvas here:

Harry takes the pan he never cooks food in, fills it with a quart of water, and sets it on a burner to heat. He takes the cup he never drinks from--it says world's greatest golfer--and measures into it six tablespoons (with the tablespoon he never measures sugar with) of rabbit-skin glue crystals. The crystals are almost as fine as confectioner's sugar. When the water just reaches boil, he will remove it from the heat and begin to slowly stir in the rabbit-skin glue crystals until they are all dissolved into a dirty yellow solution. With a soft housepainter's brush he will work the warm solution into the weave of a freshly stretched canvas and the glue will size the fibers by saturating them, and when the canvas dries, the glue will stretch it tight as a drumskin across the wooden stretcher bars. He will sand the dry surface lightly with a very fine grain sandpaper, and apply another sizing of warm glue. After that dries, he will not sand it again, but will apply the white oil priming that will be the ground of the painting. In two weeks, he can paint on it.

He has a friend who works as an art mover, driving a truck to deliver and pick up art and furniture from artists' studios to museums, galleries, and private homes. This friend gave Harry a beautiful set of stretcher bars made of poplar wood. They were from the studio of a famous artist who was going to throw them out, so the friend took them for Harry, and all Harry would need to do is assemble them into a stretcher frame. They are like architecture, these stretcher frames, more beautiful and better made than any of Harry's furniture, for god's sake. Only slightly less tall than he is, and with little metal bearings and rods that act as keys in the mitered joints--to buy stretchers like these made to order would cost most of Harry's rent.

While the water for the glue slowly heats, Harry pulls the assembled frame into his bedroom where the floor is clear. He carries the frame by the horizontal crossbar, and he leans the frame against the doorway while he spreads raw cotton duck canvas on the floor. He lays the skeleton of the stretcher frame face down on the canvas and cuts the canvas to fit, leaving a good six, seven inches to tack the canvas around the back. He uses a pair of pliers and a heavy-duty staplegun to tack the canvas back, gripping the material with the widemouth jaws of the pliers, the head of the pliers shaped like the head of a hammerhead shark. He starts from his knees, with a staple in the center of each side, first the longest side then its opposite, third one end, and last its opposite, moving around the stretcher frame slowly, standing and crouching, pulling the canvas taut so that a diamond shape is created by the folds in the canvas. Then moving back to the first staple, he pulls up the slack just right of center and tacks it two inches from the first. He moves to the opposite side and repeats. Moves back to the first side and this time tacks two inches to the left of the first tack, moves to the opposite and repeats. He tacks again the same way, the same order, on the two shorter sides until each side now has three staples and the diamond shape has pulled a little wider.

He continues tacking the canvas in this order, always pulling one edge against the opposite, crawling outward from the center and meeting force with opposing force, moving around the rectangle like a ritual performance, punctuated by the hard, loud punches of the staplegun, as the canvas skin grows tighter and tighter, inch by inch. He likes this careful work that precedes the painting, the rhythm of it, the dance of it, the thoughtlessness of it and the detail. The way the wood bites into the canvas and the wooden structure is slowly revealed as it is covered, as it begins to be something new. As he moves outward to the ends, one line meeting the other in the corner, he gives special attention to the careful folding of material at the corners, folding it under itself and pulling it tight before moving to the opposite corner to repeat. When the four corners are folded and tacked tightly, he flips the canvas so the painting surface faces the ceiling, lightly drums the center to check the tautness, brushes away the dirt from the floor , and inspects the edges for ripples. Satisfied, he goes to the kitchen, opens the pint bottle of beer, removes the pan of water from the heat, and begins to stir in, slowly, not too fast, the rabbit skin glue crystals, a fine, pale powder. The warm glue gives off a strange smell as it dissolves, musty and thick. When the crystals have all dissolved and the new liquid is yellowish and opaque and steaming, he takes a swig of his beer before he takes pan, beer, and soft housepainter's brush back to the canvas on the floor.

He works the hot, fluid glue into the weave of the canvas, stroking it this way and that, starting in the center and moving to the edges. As more and more of the raw canvas is sized with glue, he can already feel the surface shrinking taut against the wooden skeleton. When the entire surface is sized, he puts his brush in a bucket of water to wait for the second coat. It will take about half an hour for the first sizing to dry, and by then this batch of glue will be too cool to use; you can't re-heat it--that damages the binding strength of the glue. He'll have to dump what he didn't use--not quite half a quart--and make a fresh batch. He'll wait for the unused glue to solidify and then he can bag it and throw it out, rinse the pan and start again. So he sits with his beer until there's a knock at the door and then he carries the beer with him to answer it.

Through the spyhole he sees the bonehead chick from 5-E, distorted spherically in the fisheye glass, echoing the bends of the hallway like an expressionist picture. He watches her stand there, watches her knock again with a giant fist, fingers studded with rings. Harry takes a sip of beer, watches her some more. Well okay, he thinks, why not? And flips the deadbolt back and flips the door lock back and pulls his door open and there she is, life size and breathing. Jesus, that smell, she says, you got something dead in here?