POST #95: IMAGINARY CITIES

I’m not much of a reader any more; not the way I was when I was young when I could devour three or four books a week. Now, if I have free time, I want to do artwork. Reading seems such an indulgence. But I still have my favorite authors and I keep returning to their work, finding something new in them all the time.  At the top of my list of “serious” writers is Italo Calvino, an Italian writer of magic realist short stories, usually not my favorite literary form. Unfortunately he died about ten years ago and it’s hard for me to accept that there won’t be a new book every year or so for me to devour.

My favorite book by Calvino is probably the most unreadable of his work, “Invisible Cities,” an imaginary conversation between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan in which Polo describes the incredible (imaginary) cities he encountered on his journey from Venice to China in the 14^th century. It’s not “light” reading and two or three “cities” at a time are about all I can absorb (there are about a hundred of them in the book.) For example, he describes cities made of cobwebs; cities of dust, thin cities, cities of the dead. What appeals to me most about these phantoms is the visual images they invoke. The artist in me responds to the surrealism in Calvino’s work, allows my imagination to take over and create paintings in my head.

In Post #19, I described the drawings I did many years ago from my daughter’s 11^th story window on West End Avenue in New York City. Oddly enough, the view was actually quite interesting, full of fanciful rooftop structures: water towers on spindly legs, pergola -like arched elevator shafts, stepped facades and so on. When I went back to the drawings a few months ago, I saw them as surrealist, dream states, more like the work of DeChirico or Magritte than copies of actual buildings. I turned out around eight oil paintings based on these drawings and lately, I’ve been pushing the images even further away from visual reality, much like Calvino’s “Invisible Cities.”

I wish I could say that this was deliberate on my part, but it wasn’t. I start with a piece of charcoal and an empty, brown-stained canvas. Out of my subconscious come all these buildings; often just empty, stage-set facades. The perspective is off; nothing goes to a proper vanishing point, but somehow, there’s a visual reality to them. When I finish, I put human beings in the paintings, although I rarely saw them when I did my original drawings. What are they doing, you ask?  I don’t actually know. They are like DeChirico’s mysterious figures, only without the elongated shadows he loved to use. When I’m finished painting the buildings and the sky, I cut little figures out of black craft paper and move them around until I’m satisfied with the composition, Then I re-create them in paint. Let the viewer decide what they’re doing up there, all alone on the rooftops. Art needs mystery; it shouldn’t give up its secrets easily.

POST #94: MORE ABOUT WHY I WOULD NEVER MARRY ANOTHER ARTIST

 3D Photomontage   16"x13"x4"

Way back when I first started this blog (Post #5), I wrote about why I would never marry another artist. Some protective instinct always warned me to stay away from them; the successful ones were generally drunks and womanizers, but at least you got decent alimony when they left. The unsuccessful ones were even worse because you had to work at some job you hated so they’d be free to create.

All of this came to mind the other day when I read the recent NYTimes Magazine feature article about Robert Frank, the photographer (7/5/15.)  Twelve pages extolling his genius and contribution to modern photography, with barely a mention of his artist wives (past and present) and how damn good they had been. Until I read the article, I hadn’t realized that he had been married to two women who were prominent in the 1950s and whose work I greatly admired. They had dropped off the radar screen and I hadn’t seen their names mentioned in decades. Even now they were mentioned only as wife/former wife of Robert Frank, the famous photographer; their importance at the time he married them not relevant.

When I was a young art student, I knew of many artist couples, but in no case was the wife more successful than the husband, regardless of talent. And the longer the marriage went on, the greater the disparity. It seemed to me that to do more than “kitchen” art, you needed to ditch the man (and the children as well.) Louise Nevelson was a case in point; she was smart enough to look for nurturing women to take care of HER.  Alice Neel, one of the few serious women painters I knew, didn’t abandon her children, but required a succession of loser lovers to keep her and her sons housed and fed.

 3D Photomontage   16"x13"x4"

In true feminist fashion, I’d like to claim victim-hood for women artists, oppression by the male-dominated art world, but it’s not that simple. In my experience, this has been a route women usually chose, not have foisted upon them. Rather than a failure of nerve on their part, it’s a tribute to their “human-ness,” their capacity to put the needs of others above self. Sure, it’s great to be considered a GENIUS and have the Times devote twelve pages to you, but is it worth sacrificing your family, or not having a family, to do it? When Robert Frank won the Guggenheim Prize and set off to do the seminal photographs that made his name, he left behind (freezing in the wilds of Nova Scotia) an artist wife and two children (one of whom later became schizophrenic.) Would any of my women artist friends have the “balls” to wander around the country leaving a spouse and children in this condition? No point in carrying excess baggage the geniuses always say. But that’s why you’ve never heard of his wives, Mary Frank or June Leaf, although they are now in their 80s (and still creating).

Is it society’s expectations or something in our genes that makes women nurturers, enablers? We may not be able to answer that question for many generations. I still have the fantasy, however, that at this late stage in my life, I might acquire an “enabler” of my own. I have to say though that I have run across a lot of terrific people who for $15-$20 an hour are willing to (temporarily) fill that role.

POST #93: COME TO THE CABARET

I’m a great one for far-out ideas. Fortunately, most of them never happen. But several years ago, I came up with a doozy: a cabaret at Curley’s Diner, just what the city needed. Cabarets are a relatively new phenomenon in urban history, developing first in Paris in the 1880s as a place for artists, writers and musicians to gather and share ideas. It’s hard to imagine French art from Toulouse-Lautrec to Picasso without these hangouts. During World War I, many artists fled to neutral Switzerland and it was at the Café Voltaire in Zurich that the DADA movement (Futurism and Surrealism) began. When cabaret came to Germany, it took on a darker, anti-establishment character and in Weimar days was a venue for social criticism and dissent. 

I (in a moment of madness) decided what Stamford needed was a cabaret and what better place than Curley’s Diner, a funky 24/7 mix of high and low and everything in between. After all, their once a week “poetry night” had become a big success, providing one of the few places in Fairfield County where poets could try out their work in front of a supportive audience. Sure, there were other venues: church basements, bookstores, but none had Curley’s atmosphere (and coffee.) Why not a cabaret? The place was usually empty Friday night (the crowd appears after midnight) and the sisters who owned the place seemed amenable.

Finding performers (for free) turned out to be the easiest part. My lawyer friend Glenn, a former magician and tarot card reader agreed to be M.C. (Joe Grey style), a couple of musicians I knew said they would perform, the owner’s daughter, a wanna-be café singer said she was definitely “in” and I was persuaded to do my Marlene Dietrich imitation (I’m even more off-key than she was.) The top attraction was going to be a “Stella” contest run by a friend from New Orleans. The competitors all call out “Stella” and the one who sounds most like Marlon Brando in Streetcar Named Desire wins.

Everyone I mentioned the cabaret to was eager to come. “Please don’t forget us.” Friends from New Jersey and Long Island said they’d be there. It soon became obvious that success was going to ruin my idea. There simply wasn’t space enough in the back room (the only place you could hold it) for both a stage and an audience. Curley’s would have to add a wing in back which of course they weren’t about to do. My brilliant idea never got off the ground.

People still ask me about it and I apologize and explain. I’ve thought about other venues: church halls etc, but they won’t do. If we still had the old Yale & Towne factory buildings with their illegal resident artists, it could have gone there.

By the way, speaking of cabaret at Yale & Towne reminds me of an event that took place there around 25 years ago. A friend, the photographer Bob Baldridge, had a great loft on the sixth floor of one of the old industrial buildings….real BOHO style. He had a girlfriend at the time who wanted to open a restaurant and he offered to let her try out her skills at a spaghetti dinner in his loft. I said I’d help out. I designed some great invitations and asked all my friends. But we made one fatal error: we didn’t take reservations. and the night of the dinner, (for which we asked for a donation, wine included) more than a hundred people showed up. They were lined up outside the door. Our wannabe chef had only one spaghetti pot and despite her frantic efforts to get it to boil, no one got fed till almost midnight. It was a spectacular disaster but the wine flowed, performers performed and everyone had a great time. We never had the nerve to do it again.

POST #92: ROUNDHEELS: or, Putting Out in Public Life

In the slang of my youth,  “roundheels” was a picturesque way of describing a woman of easy virtue, “a broad that at the slightest provocation falls backwards into a face-up horizontal position.” The term, a sexualized version of “pushover,” meant that the heels of her shoes have become rounded from being pushed over backwards so many times. I absolutely loved the term. It reminded me of the rubber BOBO clown my children used to play with; you knocked it down and it popped right back up. “Roundheels,” aren’t so quick to get back on their feet, that’s not the idea.

Since the Sexual Revolution of the sixties, you don’t hear the expression any more; it’s obsolete. It’s the poor men who keep getting knocked down by a new class of aggressive women, not victims any more. There’s even a Garage Band called “Roundheels” but from what I’ve heard on You Tube, they’d be better off on their backs than in front of an audience.

I find the term applicable today, not to acquiescent women, but to local politics. I was once asked what it took to get nominated to one of the city’s Land Use Boards. I replied (with bitterness) that you either had to be “bought,” i.e. were in it for some personal gain, or, too stupid to know what was going on and just voted the way you were told. Anyone who asks probing questions in city government quickly becomes marginalized and eventually eliminated. This to me is a far worse example of moral turpitude that some poor girl who just wants to be liked. As a long-time observer of (and participant in) local politics, I am appalled at the prevalence of “Roundheels” in civic life.

A couple of nights ago I attended a public hearing regarding a new city contract. For at least a half dozen reasons, it was a terrible deal for the city, would cost the taxpayers close to a million dollars more than the alternative and even worse, rob the city of a landmark building on its original site. Out of a large audience that filled the room, only one person spoke in favor of the contract; everyone else knew that the city was going to be the significant loser. Several members of the review board recognized what a bad deal it was and refused to fall in line, but it was evident that city’s political leadership was behind the new contract and let it be known that they wanted it passed. Roundheels, remember? Just a push from the Mayor’s office and all judgment vanishes. Despite its flaws, the contract will probably be approved.

Just a week earlier, another city board reviewed the “Sweetheart” deal someone who claimed to be “on speed dial” with a top State official had received from the local Board of Education. It made no sense for this contract to be renewed, but, much to everyone’s surprise, the measure to rewrite the contract with better terms for the city miraculously disappeared and the “old buddy” contract remained in place.

My hometown is not the only place guilty of nepotism, corruption and the prevalence of Roundheels. When I googled the term, aside from the expected sexual innuendoes, I came across a blog from someplace called McHenry County (no idea where it is) that went:

“Summing Up the Round Heels of Legislatures Past and Present”

The title tells it all. I could write it myself. 

POST # 91: TRADE SECRETS

In Post #12, (almost two years ago) I wrote about keeping trade secrets, how artists (past and present) hide their work methods, hoping to keep the magic to themselves.  Like the Wizard of Oz, they are (correctly, I believe) aware that once you learn how simple something is to do, you’ll have less respect for it, or worse, can easily imitate it. Picasso was known among his contemporaries for stealing their ideas, while he, on the other hand, didn’t trust them and kept his studio door locked at all times. Chagall, in his days at La Ruche, an artists’ rooming house in Paris, refused entry to fellow artists, assuming that he had nothing to learn from them and they had much to steal from him. Of course, the rumor that he painted in the nude (he supposedly had only one suit of clothing he didn’t want to get dirty) might have discouraged him from admitting visitors.

Unfortunately, this doesn’t stop me from blabbing out all my trade secrets; too many years of teaching art have taken their toll.  My theory (probably incorrect) is that just because you know how I do something, doesn’t mean you can do it, or, do it well. I recently cut out some small figures and projected them on a superhuman scale as silhouettes on my studio wall. They looked an awful lot like the Matisse cut outs recent shown at MOMA. Matisse “supposedly” drew the figures on large sheets of colored paper using a long stick with a piece of chalk tied to it. His assistants then cut them out. But it’s hard to draw that way; any art student can tell you that. You don’t have much control and how do you correct your work? What if Matisse worked small (he was bedridden with arthritis at the time), and used a projector of some kind to blow up life-sized silhouettes for his assistants to cut out?

But what should I do if I really came up with something new? My stuff is so low tech that anyone can duplicate it. Or can they? Or do they even want to? I recently printed photos of my latest paintings, those mournful, surrealist cityscapes I showed you in the last blogs onto sheets of acetate and found that if I matted small sections and framed them under glass, they looked like late 19^th century miniature etchings or aquatints. Unless you really looked carefully, you couldn’t tell the difference. The first people who saw them asked if they were for sale. At last I had a saleable product  – and one that I could make more of at any time at a price anyone could afford. The only hard part was finding suitable frames. But my artist friends all wanted to know how I did them. Do I tell? Any idiot with a camera and a computer printer could copy the technique. But, would the work have my soul? My vision? Never!  Could Picasso’s fellow artists at the Bateau-Lavoir ever equal him? They all tried and nobody was as good as he was and besides, by the time they got the hang of it, he was on to something new and more wonderful than ever.

POST #90: CONFESSIONS OF A TECHNOPHOBE

Like most women of my generation, I’ve never been comfortable with technology. Men drove cars, fixed broken windows, repaired lamps. We were supposed to be decorative and cook. When the word processor came along, I took to that fairly easily; it was essentially just a smart typewriter. All the other bells and whistles were unfathomable – designed to be operated (and repaired) by the men in my life. Because I was paid to produce a newsletter several times a year, I acquired some additional skills: I can now send text and photographs to A MAN (Bob Callahan) who is a genius in Photoshop and puts it all together for me. I proudly take credit for the result, when all I did was use the computer to type and send photos. (yes, I know how to “SEND.”)

Photography is another mystery to me, although I have a couple of really great women photographer friends. I have a basic Point & Shoot camera (the $179. model) and now know which buttons to press. I know how to attach the camera cord to the computer, download my photos and SEND. Most recently, I discovered other miracles like cropping and enhancing. Will modern wonders never cease?

Part of this difficulty with technology is due to my age; I’m one of the few of my contemporaries who has any proficiency at all. Most of them own computers or I-Pads (bought for them by well-meaning children) but don’t know how to even open them When I ask if they have read any of my blogs, the usual reply is: “I need to wait ‘til one of my children stops by.” How can someone with a high IQ and an advanced degree from a reputable university not be able to open e-mail? This, of course, makes me feel very superior. I (capital letters, underlined) can open e-mail!!!!

My current challenge is my f-------g printer; I have a love-hate relationship with it. First of all, it’s ALWAYS out of ink. Hewlett Packard makes a living off suckers like me who buy cheap printers and then spend their life savings on ink cartridges. Lately, even the new cartridges weren’t working so I was forced to enlist the services of my computer guru, Bud Freund. He determined that I had left remains of the wrapping tape on the cartridge and that was literally gumming up the works. I am so angry at the machine (and myself) that I haven’t used it since.

I have decided that computers are like dogs; they sense fear. And that is why mine freeze up, gum up and generally screw up. They know I’m afraid of them and they are laughing at me. Thank God for people like Rosie who puts my blog together. Everybody is SO impressed with me. Little do they know that without the “young woman-next-door,” there would be no weekly message.

So, enjoy my son’s Photoshop paintings. I can’t believe I did them!

If you would like to see Ned's own work please click here.

POST #89: MY SENIOR MOMENT in the sun

36"x48" oil on canvas

Guess what? Older Woman Artists are the flavor of the month; we finally made it! You don’t believe me? Just read the New York Times: two big articles lately on women artists in their seventies, eighties and nineties. It looks as if the art establishment (who/whatever that may be) has tired of macho men, minorities and transgenders and turned their interest to older women. Now, it’s never been easy to be a “woman artist,” but if you were young and sexy, or married to someone important, you might have a minor career. An OLDER woman, forget it! They remind gallerists (and buyers) of their hated mothers… In the past, the best way for an older woman artist to get noticed was to paint flower vaginas, have well-publicized affairs with adolescent men or do portraits of themselves in the nude - generally not a pleasant sight. The sad part of the Times’ new found interest in “older women” artists is that the one’s they’ve chosen to “discover” have been around for decades and are, truthfully, not all that deserving of fame and fortune. They are okay and not much more.

36"x48" oil on canvas

Ironically, most of the better known women artists of the past fifty years, really deserved acclaim: Lee Bontecue, for example, is as good as any male artist in the last half of the 20th century – Julian Schnabel, Basquiat and the whole pack of Neo Expressionists from Germany included. Since I resigned from the New York Art scene a couple of decades ago, I have no idea who’s really hot today.

Linda Nochlin, the art historian, hit the nail on the head fifty years ago in her essay “Why There Have Been No Great Women Artists,” in a book entitled: “Art & Sexual Politics.” She criticized the nascent Women’s Studies movement for their interest in women artists, dredging up mediocrities and lauding them as neglected major figures in the history of art. Her well-taken point was that rather than to extol lesser talents, examine what it takes to achieve a high level of performance as an artist – male or female - and how women were not given opportunities for greatness. But, whatever the historic reasons, we need to look at the here and now.

How does someone achieve fame and fortune in the contemporary art world? Notice that I don’t even mention talent; that’s near the bottom of the list. We all know the importance of being in the right place at the right time, socializing with important people, calling attention to oneself by behaving outrageously and so forth. But the key factor, the one you rarely hear mentioned is chutzpah, gall, consummate arrogance, relentless self promotion, BALLS! How un-lady-like can you get? There’s a reason success requires “balls” (both literally and metaphorically) and women (or so they’re told) aren’t going to be liked – by either men or women - if they have them.

40"x36" oil on canvas

At one time, my goal was to be “discovered,” a great artist hiding away in a cottage in the suburbs. I always wanted to be in a Whitney Biennial; I’m as good as 90% of the artists who show there. But, guess what? Unless there’s some some form of Divine Intervention, it’s never going to happen; I’m resigned to that. And, in the old “be careful what you wish for” warning, maybe it’s for the best. I go into my studio practically every day. I’m peaceful; I paint. I dance around to corny Leonard Cohen records (I know; I should say I listen to Honneger or Philip Glass, but I happen to have a crush on Leonard Cohen). The seasons change from my north light window. My refrigerator is full and my bills are (mostly) paid. I entertain friends, fellow artists, feed them, go to Curley’s Diner (my version of Picasso’s Lapin Agile) and show my latest work to anyone willing to stop by. The Day of the Older Woman Artist will come and go; the Times will find another “hot” genre and I’ll still be here, unknown, undiscovered. And you know something? It’s ok with me. I’m as happy as any “famous” artist I ever met or whose biography I ever read: maybe happier.

And there’s still a chance I could make it into a Whitney Biennial. I’m not dead yet. Can someone get me an introduction?