POST #98: BODIES IN WATER

I recently re-joined a local health club designed for “seniors.” I had belonged to it in the past for many years but used it so infrequently that I quit when I figured out that each lap around the track actually cost me $34, a bit pricey for minimal benefit. Anyhow, the center recently converted its large swimming pool to salt water and a friend convinced me to give it a try; it would make a new woman of me. Dubious. Anyhow, I’m there on a one-month trial basis and, given the recent heat wave, I’ve been using the pool almost every day. I still do my basic set of yoga exercises at home plus the up and down movement of painting large canvases. That seems enough exercise to keep me in reasonable shape (for my age.)

If you are familiar with my work, you know that I’m an incurable social satirist, the George Grosz of Stamford. And what better place to find subjects than a health club, especially one that doesn’t cater to babes in bikinis. Unfortunately, as we get older, we all look better with our clothes on.

Which reminds me of a story: 

A few years ago, during my prior membership in the health club, my ever-present “advisor”, my Cousin Adele, ordered me to go to the Hot Tub and find a suitor. Before she died, two years ago, my housebound relative spent her free time worrying about and advising me. I tried to explain that the whirlpool bath was the worst place to find a man, but she insisted and to get her off my back, I decided to give it a try.  Now, I’m no Playboy model, but I’m reasonably well put together (for my age). As ordered,  I put on my new spotted leopard bathing suit with its foam-enhanced breasts and went to check out the contents of the pool. As Adele had predicted, it contained two men of suitable age, deep in conversation. Hot prospects? Not quite. More like a pair of prehistoric wooly mammoths. While they might at one time been passable, they were now obese, sagging flesh hanging over their bellies, bodies covered with masses of grizzly hair (except for the tops of their heads.) Not a pretty sight. I fled. I’d have to find romance somewhere else.

While the men won’t win any beauty contests, the women don’t come off much better. Obesity is so common in our society as to be the rule rather than the exception. But, as any art historian or painter will tell you, fat women make wonderful models. Remember the Venus of Willendorf we all studied in art history? Rubens, Titian? The women I encounter are contemporary Venuses with small heads, permed hair, huge, pendulous breasts and enormous bellies. Feminine pulchritude and prosperity personified and not a penny needed for silicone enhancements. I’m in artist heaven! The women at the pool float on the water like air-filled balloons. One monumental figure I frequently encounter “water walks” for an hour every day. It’s hard to imagine what she would look like if she didn’t! There’s a price to pay for living in a society of plenty, but I’m not complaining. It suits me fine.

POST #97: GOLDEN AGES COME AND GO

The study of Art History is basically a survey of Golden Ages, how they arose, flourished and eventually declined. First, there’s a lively Archaic Period, crude and experimental but full of vitality, then comes perfection, the so-called “Golden Age,” refined and technically flawless. And then comes a period of decay marked by excessive emotionality combined with a lack of structural cohesiveness. It looks like I’ve recently been going through a similar cycle, only mine is taking weeks instead of centuries.

In my last post, I showed you my paper plate interpretations of Greek Black Figure vases (the Archaic Period.) They’re strong and expressive and I like them a lot, the way I’m crazy about Greek Black Figure pots. The next phase, which I worked on all last week is my “Red Figure” ware, the so-called peak period (except my red is tan wrapping paper, not red clay), more refined but (to me) not as strong or interesting as the shapes in black. Unfortunately, for the past few days, I’ve gone into my Hellenistic phase, a period of decline; my plates have become overly detailed and fussy. My Golden Age of paper plate collage appears to be over. With the Greeks, (as in other cultures that lost their Golden Ages), you could lay the blame on social conditions, foreign conquests, internal upheaval. Sometimes it’s as basic as running out of a key material and not being able to replace it. With me, it’s my short interest span (my artistic ADD).

Oh well, nothing lasts forever, even well-designed paper plates.

Which brings me to my next topic: how my long and sometimes illustrious career  as an artist, appears to follow the same pattern: exploration, culmination,  decline. What set me thinking about this was a DVD my friend, Brian O’Neill recently sent me of an interview he had taped at a retrospective exhibit I was having at the Loft Artist’s Gallery on Canal Street many years ago. Brian and I walked around the gallery and he questioned me about the work. The show had been curated by two artist friends,  Lina Morielli and  Sandy Garnett, whose opinion I valued.; they had gone up to my attic, sifted through stacks of paintings and came up with about twenty pieces. I didn’t like everything they chose, but they were in charge and I wisely went along with their decisions.

Which brings me back to my Golden Age theory. Whenever I start a new body of work, there’s a period of experimentation with a lot of trial and error; not everything succeeds. Then there’s the peak period when my style and message come together and the work just flows. Unfortunately, my Golden Ages never last: they get cut off by one of life’s unavoidable catastrophes or I simply get bored; the boredom shows and it’s time to move on. That’s one of the problems successful artists have (not me); they get locked into a marketable style and even if they want to move on, their dealers won’t let them. The work my two friends chose was (to me) all over the lot: experimental, peak period and “late” (my Hellenistic phase). Fortunately, I  don’t think anyone viewing the show knew the difference.

POST#96: ODE TO A GRECIAN VASE….. or, Stealing from the best

Several months ago, I attended the opening of a show by a reasonably competent group of artists I knew. Unfortunately, I couldn’t find an original idea anywhere. I’m sure nobody was aware they were “stealing” (they never are) but all the work looked like something I’d seen before, many times. Originality is hard to come by; you have to be an authentic non-conformist yourself and unfortunately, few of us aspire to or achieve that level of rebellion. Most artists are so far removed from the source of their inspiration they don’t know where their ideas came from and get to think they invented them themselves. The moral of today’s blog is that if you are going to steal, know who you are stealing from and steal only from the best.

This is a long-winded introduction to my latest work. Fortunately, the guys I’m copying have been dead for over 2,500 years and couldn’t care less. I didn’t do it deliberately; it just happened. As many of you know, I’ve been cutting figures (people) out of black craft paper and projecting them as giant shadows on my studio wall. The pile of little cutouts I was using got out of hand and I got the “brilliant” idea of turning them into tondo (circular) compositions and pasting them on paper plates, plain supermarket plates: black figures on a white plate with a fluted border. Grecian vases? Kylixes (drinking cups) from 600 B.C.? Yes!!  When I taught Art History (for 22 years at the University of Connecticut) that was my favorite period. My subconscious had obviously remembered.

We don’t have any examples left of paintings from Ancient Greece; they all seem to have rotted away. But lots of ceramic pots have survived. First, the “black-figure” period, images with details scratched into the clay followed about a century later by the supposedly superior red-figured vases, clay-colored figures with exquisite, brush-painted details, I personally prefer the archaic, black-figure style. It’s the perfection of forms and the way they relate to one another, even the negative spaces between shapes that makes both periods so incredible. The work I was doing on paper plates was obviously reproducing (in an inferior way) the circular interior of a drinking cup, a kylix. All I needed was a pair of handles and I could hang them on the wall, Greek style. Even the “fluted” rims of the paper plate echoed one of the more popular borders of the period. A kylix (kye’licks) was supposed to have raunchy images (like my work) since you only saw the picture after you drank the cup of wine. Check the vases out the next time you go to the Met; you will be in the presence of art in its most superior form. Every shape, every line, the, the anatomy is perfect; nothing is superfluous or out of place.

So far, I’ve finished about a dozen paper kylixes and I’d like to share a few with you. They’ll never show up in Helen Gardner or Janson as high points in the History of Art or get a glass case at the Met, but I’m having great fun with them, (as you can probably tell!).  I’ll exhibit and sell them in a ‘pop-up’ show next winter so, if you want, you can have your own Grecian vase painting at a price you can afford.  I’ll let you know where and when.

Just remember, don’t put them in the dishwasher!

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.