Richmond

Richmond used to be the capitol of the Confederacy, but fell after the Yankees came up from Petersburg and said “Enough is enough!” (while shooting their way in, of course.) To this day, Richmond remains, if not a hotbed of secession, a very Southern city, both in its scrupulous regard for good manners as well as its charming way with small words, which are spelled with just a few letters, but become elongated in the mouth. My personal favorite is “hello”, a medium-sized small word that, when said, looks like this: “Hailleaiuoooo!” Unfortunately, Yankees are coming into the city as never before and such exuberant emphasis, resulting in a fruity sound few other places in the South can rival, may be lost. But it will save a lot of time.

When I first got to Richmond, I was captivated not only by the “tragic laughter that emanates from every portico and stair” – a memorable saying I just now made up - but by an urban culture that is pretty common in the South, but with uniquely indigenous variations. In Memphis, where I grew up, you saw it on the north side of town, where black people had to live; and on the south side of town, where more black had to live. As a white boy without any culture of his own besides “The Pledge of Allegiance”, I wanted to know these places better; there was something in them I wasn’t getting at school, at church (when I went), or from my own parents, who were moving up in the world sort of sideways and were glad to be where they were. So I took the bus downtown, got off at different stops along the way, and just walked around, often in the company of another white-flight resistant schoolmate named Kenneth Albright. (I got into the habit of going by myself after Kenny moved away, or when I was around thirty.) I think both of us found in the mom-and-pop groceries, the storefront churches (“The High and Mighty Church of the Omnipotent Redeemer” was not United Methodist), and the worn-out architecture a cultural overlay we could snap onto our own and reference as we needed it. Over the years, I’ve moved closer and closer to my adopted culture, which is sometimes long on flavor, but short on cash. When my friend Virginia and I moved to Richmond, we lived in a house so ramshackle that, on any given day, I wasn’t sure I’d be able to make it from end to end without falling through the floor. (Like the earth itself, the house was about twenty percent landmass (“floor”) and the rest ocean (“ocean.”)) When I came out of it with my painting gear, I had the sense that people were about to congratulate me for surviving. (“Way to go, guy!” “Hey, man, we know what you’re going through!” “Made it through again? All right!”) I used this house as a home-base for a number of years and painted Richmond, as an adult, the way I would have painted Memphis if I’d known how to do it well enough. Later on, I moved to my studio, which I still hold onto. This studio is in a part of town I’d always dreamt about living in when I was a kid. This should be a cautionary tale for everyone.

Incidentally, I did my biggest paintings to date in Richmond. An art supply store had a huge clearance on odd-sized stretchers. That is why so many of my paintings from this period have nineteenth-century, uneven-style dimensions. (Framers must’ve had a really hard time of it. “Put out the lights! That damned Whistler is coming again with his sixes and sevens!)

(To designer: I’d like to use a number of images as backdrop to the introduction as well as the “thumbnails” of typical paintings that appear on the screen.)


Backyard Window Acrylic/masonite 30 x 24 1996 Sold
On the Kanawha Acrylic/masonite 12 x 24 1996 $3,000
House of Seven Awnings Acrylic/canvas 24 x 24 1996 3,500
Evening Interior Acrylic/canvas 46 x 48 1996 Sold
Sleeping Porch Acrylic/canvas 30 x 24 1997 Sold
Grace at Lombardy Acrylic/canvas 47 x 37 1996/97 7,000
Green Door Acrylic/masonite 14 x 11 1997 1,500
3 a. m. Acrylic/canvas 36 x 44 1997 5,000
Noontime Acrylic/masonite 16 x 48 1997 5,000
First Richmond Memory Acrylic/canvas 41 x 47 1997 6,000
Rockpile Acrylic/masonite 18 x 36 1997 3,800
At First Base Acrylic/canvas 47 x 33 1997 6,500
Two Dormers Acrylic/canvas 24 x 48 1997 Sold
Two-Mile Bridge, at Canal Acrylic/canvas 35 x 52 1998 6,000
On All Night Acrylic/panel 30 x 18 1998 3,500
Big Rock Acrylic/masonite 18 x 24 1998 3,000
Cumberland Street Acrylic/canvas 32 x 45 1998 Sold
Near Meadow Acrylic/canvas 35 x 50 1998 6,000
Arent’s Porch Acrylic/canvas 42 x 32 1998 5,500
At Catherine Street Acrylic/canvas 28 x 34 1999 4,000
North of Jackson Acrylic/masonite 21 x 17 1999 Sold
Across Leigh Street Acrylic/masonite 24 x 48 1999 5,500
Gazebo Acrylic/masonite 14 x 18 1999 Sold
Worktable Acrylic/canvas 21 x 27 1999 4,000
Fourth and Leigh Acrylic/canvas 47 x 66 1999 8,000
(diptych)
Sunset: Leigh and Third Oil pastel 12 x 18 1999 2,000
Sunset, Brown’s Island Acrylic/canvas 36x 48 1999 Sold
Old City Hall Acrylic/canvas 35 x 35 2000 Sold
Canyon on Third Acrylic/masonite 24 x 44 2000 4,500
Sunset on Lombardy Acrylic/masonite 8 x 12 2000 1,000
Sunset on Lombardy #2 Acrylic/masonite 6 x 8 2000 600
Broad Street, from City Hall Acrylic/canvas 30 x 40 2000 5,000
Dirt Path Acrylic/canvas 30 x 30 2000 3,500
Shockoe Valley Acrylic/masonite 24 x 48 2001 5,500
Tredegar Acrylic/masonite 24 x 48 2001 6,000
At the Floodwall Acrylic/masonite 24 x 20 2001 3,200 Two Crossings Acrylic/canvas 24 x 48 2001 5,500
Above the Dam Acrylic/masonite 22 x 40 2001 Sold
West Jackson Acrylic/masonite 24 x 48 2001 6,000
Front and Back Acrylic/masonite 22 x 70 2002 8,000
(triptych)
One-man Picnic Acrylic/canvas 32 x 50 2002 6,500
Still Life Acrylic/masonite 36 x 24 2002 4,000
Last Light: Jackson and Acrylic/canvas 36 x 52 2002 7,000
St. James (diptych)
West Broad, at Church Acrylic/canvas 42 x 48 2002 6,000
Hill
Hospital Street (diptych) Acrylic/canvas 24 x 62 2002 7,500
Town of Hillsboro Acrylic/masonite 12 x 24 2002 3,200
Lloyd’s House Acrylic/canvas 28 x 30 2003 3,800
Silo (diptych) Acrylic/masonite 24 x 48 2003 6,500









Syracuse

People in Syracuse lack the complicated social rituals you still find in the South; most of them are just happy to be out of the cold, in a job of almost any kind, and preferably close to an Italian restaurant. Syracuse shares with Brooklyn, where I also lived for a time, its working-class roots, its clannish politics, its vaguely European flavor. I lived for a while near Schiller Park, named after the German poet Goethe. In Memphis, every park was either named after a Confederate general, or had one in it. Confederate Park was an attempt to create a sweeping monument to all the generals you could possibly name, or had forgotten, or maybe wanted to see again. Once you were in the park and started walking, they came up at you on pedestals, these little heads, mostly bearded heads, and they accompanied you all the way to the gun emplacements, where, as a kid, I crawled around on real rebel cannons! The cultural difference here is fairly obvious. Of course, there were war heroes in Syracuse, but they occupied in-between spots – places that had neither strategic nor economic value. One of the best ones stood outside of an all-night restaurant I liked to go to now and then. It’s one of the reasons I liked Syracuse from the git-go, and kept on leaving Memphis for years and years.

But Syracuse wasn’t doing much when I got to it. People water-skied on Onondaga Lake for the thrill of being suspended over one of the most polluted bodies of water in the land. There were slews of old factories on the lakefront, great rust-coated cubes and cylinders which lay bare, not only the geometrical foundation of our man-made universe, but the implacable erosion in our industrial economy. (And, if I’m not mistaken, there were some ugly-ass parallelograms in there too.) Behind this beat-up stuff, working people with not much to do except pull weeds and paint shutters were going quietly, but very surely, out of their minds.

Syracuse was, and is, very picturesque, even – or perhaps especially – under a snow-cover that’s reminiscent of the Russian front, except people in Syracuse know how to dress for it. The last year I was there, 1996, it got 168 inches. They called this “lake-effect snow” – the special kind of snow you get when you have a whole lake for raw material.

There were black people in Syracuse, but you hardly ever saw them if you didn’t look for them. Yet a few middle-class neighborhoods were integrated in a way that made you think all those sit-ins and marches and hosings-down didn’t happen in vain. There you’d see multi-racial parents nudging school-aged children up into a bus and looking worried after the bus went away. For six months of the year, both black and white people shoveled sidewalks and driveways. Some thought of how this good was for their upper bodies; others dreamt, impossibly, of Boca Raton. Snow has a way of unifying everybody and snuffing out divisions based on anything other than what will or will not move that snow. In a place like Syracuse, racial antagonisms freeze over like everything else. But, of course, there’s still the summer.

A sober and serious people by and large, Syracusans could get moonstruck over basketball; all of the untapped community spirit that might ordinarily go into recycling, went directly to The Orangemen, the SU basketball squad. Its glittering style of play, not to mention its ascent into the stratosphere of national attention, kept the sports bar on Grant Boulevard open after everything else had closed the shutters, turned on the alarm system, and took the night off. I think it’s dangerous to love a team so much. If you ever talk to a Red Sox fan, you’ll see what it can lead to: you can become a Red Sox fan. While the Orangemen won, the whole town was swept up in a kind of unnatural euphoria, from which you don’t go up but down. This is the kind of feeling old, defeated places are susceptible to, and they always fall for it because it’s the best thing that’s happened to them in a while and it might not happen again.

I loved Syracuse for its grainy-photograph textured self. A sort of rust-belt miasma hung over it; of old fire and white-hot forge; of strong guys with a hard job to do every day of the week plus Sunday. The people in the art world were as silly as they are everyplace else. But I never consider them part of any real population. They’re something else: a demographic maybe.


White Wall Acrylic/panel 24 x 32 1994 Sold
Sunset Over Grant Blvd. Acrylic/canvas 14 x 11 1994 $1,000
Sconce Acrylic/masonite 18 x 28 1995 3,000
Window Ledge Acrylic/canvas 30 x 48 1995 5,000
Frozen Canal, Acrylic/masonite 22 x 30 1995 3,000
Onondaga Lake
Yellow Sunlight Acrylic/masonite 16 x 32 1995 3,500
Out Back Acrylic/canvas 28 x 30 1995 3,500
Truck Acrylic/masonite 24 x 36 1995 4,200
Down Seeley Hill Acrylic/masonite 30 x 72 1995 7,500
(triptych)
Front Window, ‘Ananda’ Acrylic/panel 24 x 30 1995 Sold
Storefront, South Salina Acrylic/paper 21 x 39 1995 3,800
Street
Sunset at ‘Ananda’ Acrylic/canvas 16 x 12 1995 1,500
New Year’s Party Acrylic/masonite 16 x 20 1996 2,250
Late in the Day: Oil/masonite 30 x 30 1996 4,000
Fayette Street
Dusk: Fayette Street Acrylic/masonite 16 x 12 1996 2,000
Columbus Street Acrylic/masonite 24 x 28 1996 4,000









Other Places

Instead of going to college, I went to the library. During my first, and only, semester at Memphis State University, I became a devoted reader of texts that were not assigned - but, as I grew to realize, absolutely essential. I could go almost anywhere in the library and find books I didn’t necessarily have to read, but could if I wanted to. On one of the upper floors was a pristine collection of monographs and other high-risk publishing ventures that concentrated on photography. I wasn’t interested in the technical part of photography, and can’t say I’m a lot more sophisticated in that regard today. Sure, I know which way to point a camera, particularly if I’m in a bad neighborhood. I’m also pretty good at getting a jump on people who start to run after me for the sake of preserving a low profile, which the presence of a camera seems to unglue.

It was there, in the library, that I first discovered the likes of Walker Evans. And, through him, Bernice Abbott; one of the toughest broads to ever fool around with a developing tray. Through her I entered Paris through the incomparable Eugene Atget’s back door and came out a different person. When old Atget died, Ms. Abbott, in a gesture that sprung, as I’ve come to believe, from a kind of apostolic devotion, bought every glass negative he’d ever made and saved the lot until she could get somebody else to take care of them for her. (This is a story to warm every cynic’s heart. Did mine, but it pissed me off plenty too.) I still can’t believe how long it took MOMA to come and clear those old glass negatives out of Ms. Abbott’s apartment. And this was a woman who knew how to get things done.

Because very few people were “doing realism” in painting, you had to find it elsewhere. For me, elsewhere was that enormous collection of WPA, and pre-WPA, photographers, as well as “art guys” like Steiglitz and Weston and Ansel Adams – the photographer I wish non-profit organizations would revere a little less. I’d always been interested in cities, and could now see them, through the eyes of these poet-photographers, as magnets for my particular vision – a word I use strictly for convenience. I didn’t really have any vision yet, but when you’re just starting out, good eyesight is enough; it was certainly enough to get me up there in that big room overlooking a sniper’s paradise of milling students and sauntering professariat.

Skip ahead a number of years and I’m painting, convinced that, if Walker Evans could go to Mississippi and sleep in an old car, I could live in a small apartment on McLean Boulevard in Memphis, Tennessee, and find everything I needed. I went to the main library and found that, even if a lot of people weren’t interested in my paintings, paintings by Monet and Sargeant; by Homer and Eakins; by Courbet and Constable had moved a whole army of writers and curators and publishers to get books produced, articles written, and exhibits curated. At the time, I was glad that the books and the articles existed; that I could go to the Brooks Museum and browse around all I wanted; that there were people who let me in and let me out, even if I couldn’t go to a black-tie dinner and pay them all back with a pen-stroke. It wasn’t until a little later that I started thinking about The Problem, which stems from people who are not writers and curators and publishers not really wanting you to do anything of your own; but wanting stuff they know already, which seems very bad to you after you’ve looked at all of these people in museums and libraries. It was terribly disillusioning, this profound, but inevitable, alienation from the business-as-usual style of the commercial art world, and I got depressed over it. Barring certain intervals of unreasonable contentment, I think I’ve maintained the longest unmedicated bout of depression in the whole history of art. (Please speak up if you think you’ve done it longer; this is just a hunch.) I did some good paintings in those days, however, and want to thank my girlfriend, Paula, for making them all possible. My lack of usefulness was double-edged; when you do something nobody wants – or, rather, fail to do things people do want – you don’t make any money either. That’s the cruel part. I think the money popular artists make should be taxed and turned over to the talented, but unpopular, artists who can’t share in any of the wealth because of their special handicap, which makes them do things nobody has ever seen instead of the stuff the popular artists do, which they probably wouldn’t do as much of if they knew they were going to be taxed for it.

That’s reason enough to start the tax right there! Call it “The Kinkade Amendment” and test it out in California, home of provocative money solutions, first and let it spill over.


Central, at Southern Watercolor 16 x 20 1980 NFS



And Brooklyn, Too!

Skipping ahead to New York, oh, about ten or fifteen years later, I was still painting pictures almost nobody wanted and said as much – they did, I mean. Being as attached to writing mostly unsaleable material as I was to painting it, my productivity in both areas was uneven; if truth were known, I wasn’t at the top of my game until I went to Brooklyn, which, in those days, had almost as many people who didn’t want to open galleries or become guest curators somewhere as didn’t. I realize this is unimaginable today, but I promise it was so. You could shake a stick, or swing a cat, or just whistle loudly, and, like as not, a real person would tell you to watch what the hell you were doing. The other kind of people, who live there today, would think you were trying out some performance art ideas you’d been kicking around on the subway. And they wouldn’t say anything; they’d just think: “We’re not trying to be Bill Erwin now, are we?”

The work I did in Brooklyn encouraged me greatly, and led to the sort of work I do today. Even then, there weren’t many elevated trains, but there was no shortage of elevated highways. I liked the space underneath them, which both isolates and connects; I also liked the space around them, where a more fragile world, of individual notions and purposes somehow takes hold and survives. I had a full-time job, but with a part-time attitude, which was the key to my success – if you care to measure success by the ever-increasing volume of hours and minutes I subtracted from the job and gave to me without really hurting either. Eventually, I would leave the job entirely and devote all the time I had to me. Sounds selfish, doesn’t it?

Birmingham, Alabama probably doesn’t have as many artists to look after it the way New York does. There is a statue of Vulcan, the Fire God, in Birmingham, which I’m sure artists have painted at least a few times. But think of how many times artists have painted the Washington Square Arch or McDougal Street or the Empire State Building! This sort of product saturation is what makes New York City uniquely callous, even perseveringly indifferent, to its artistic caretakers. If you’ve got only two images of Vulcan the Fire God, you try to make room for them. But try keeping track of the Brooklyn Bridge! I’ll bet you somebody makes one picture of the Brooklyn Bridge every day. Even if all but one of them per year were bad, that’s still one good picture, every year, since 1883. That there can be such a surplus, a plethora, a never-ending cascade is hard to imagine if you’re in the Vulcan camp. But if you’re a New Yorker you just don’t want any new stuff around because you can’t even begin process all of the old stuff yet. I think the moral is obvious: if you live in Birmingham, you ought to start an exchange program under which Birmingham imports one underappreciated artist from any of the five boroughs of New York City with the specific purpose of increasing the number of Birmingham pictures – which are relatively rare – while going easy on NYC, which has more than it knows what to do with.

Are you listening, Birmingham?


Central Park Acrylic/masonite 20 x 34 1990 $2,500
Sunday Afternoon Acrylic/masonite 20 x 36 1993 3,500


Right Now

I live in Washington, DC, which has been shut down for the funeral of former President, Ronald Reagan. The motorcade came in yesterday, with the body, and plodded gravely up Constitution Avenue to the Capitol, where the former Chief Executive lay in state, round the clock, for a twenty-four hour period the honor guard – which stayed there the whole time - will probably never get out of its system. As I said, the entire city is off today for the funeral, though only a fraction of the population is attending it. The rest of the city is on hold till Monday. It’s the way things get done around here.

Washington is not an art town in the traditional sense, though artists have – and do – live here. Whitman was here during the Civil War, comforting the wounded, and writing the best letters a sick soldier ever sent home. The hard-working Constantino Brumidi lived in a now-ramshackle house on A Street all the time he was decorating the Capitol Building with allegorical figures that represented God (the bearded guy), Country (the buxom lady), Business Acumen (buxom lady with passbook), Military Might (buxom lady with sword), and Possible World Domination Within the Next Fifty Years (lots of buxom ladies who sort of close in on you). He worked in the same building for well-nigh upon forty years, which is what a lot of people in Washington do even today – excepting the president, his cabinet, certain staff persons, and people in the press these people dislike proactively. This is proof that stability really isn’t the best thing going.

I’m still interested in the city and am trying to find a way to get around it that leaves me with enough energy for the work at hand. This is hard because Washington is the sort of place that takes away first, and gives when it gets around to it. I was sprayed with parking-tickets the first months I was here – sprayed serially with them – and haven’t really gotten over it. I’m so circumspect about parking that I’ll just circle a place endlessly rather than park there. That there are so many real circles here is no accident.
Washington is a city of parks, but a lot of them are constantly in the line of traffic, so the amenities in these parks are stranded and not able to be enjoyed by the people who are on the other side of the street. The Metro siphons off traffic, I am told, but in a large city cars and people increase exponentially – with the result that where both things can be, there will always be more of them tomorrow. Mathematically, it looks like this: people plus available space equals twice as many Starbucks by Wednesday. If you repeat it slowly enough, I’m sure you’ll eventually get it. Took me years to grasp entirely on my own.

Washington is not giving itself a good name artistically, however. Of all cities in the nation, it is synonymous with symbolic renderings of our national pride and consciousness – in the form of monumental architecture, sculpture, or somewhat meandering and tortuous combinations of the two. Most recently, it unveiled the WWII monument between the mammoth sewing-needle otherwise known as the Washington Monument and the Reflecting Pool that lies at the base of the Lincoln Memorial – an almost-tolerable epitaph to a great man. It doesn’t speak ill of the dead to say that it could’ve been designed by Albert Speer, Adolph Hitler’s architect-in-residence during the Fuhrer’s gaudiest period. It’s not D-Day’s doing, or “valor’s fault”, or any fallen hero’s embarrassing excess; it’s simply one of those bad things people do for all of the right reasons and fall globally short of the mark. Great mountains of emblematic stone designed by honorable fellows; cut by intelligent, conscientious craftsmen; and moved solemnly into places nobody would dream of laughing at can nonetheless be very silly – and stay silly forever. No bad idea has ever mellowed. *Keats said it best:

And so stretch the sad and level sands
Doing their level best to say:
Don’t forget great Samarkand –
And give my regards to old Broadway!

Now I remember what I was going to say. Recently, the DC Arts Commission got a bunch of “artists” to paint panda statuary in a decorative or amusing way, dumped them overboard, and hailed them as “public art” – I guess, because they weren’t on private property (its notion of “public”) and you could look at them for free (its notion of “art” – which has traditionally been free to the public because it’s too damned expensive for anybody but the private sector to fool with). Local critics, dealers, and even artists jumped on the Arts Commission and gave ‘em what for. They said the pandas were tchotkes, tourist fodder, scrimshaw. They wanted to know why “serious art” couldn’t be put out there instead. They expressed shame and embarrassment; sadness and grieving; cussedness and outrage.

I could care less, personally. Drag “serious” sculpture into the public domain and you’d get the same sort of outcry from the public. “What is it?” “I could do that myself.” “What a waste of good material.” The moral I’m leading up to is that it’s impossible to do anything for anybody. All of those dumb monuments prove that. I’d rather have all that money go to people who are already doing things for themselves that have some sort of proven value to others so that they can keep on doing it. There’s no visible change, but often it’s best to leave well enough alone. Or try not to make something already bad much worse.

But in a place so politically charged as Washington, what can you expect? The tourists probably do like the pandas, the artists (or “artists”) got a little money, and the people at the Arts Commission can go to conferences and say they launched another successful art program that will resonate for years to come. And they’re right about that; it will. At least until they bring on the squid.

As for me, I’m attracted to the same sort of thing here that drew me to the North and South Sides of Richmond; to Edgecombe Avenue; Salina Street; Old Brook Road - to all of the run-down and depopulated areas of a fast-growing country that keeps on pushing its boundaries into ancient deserts; tree-covered solitudes; excellent white sands. I was out painting a small area in the Northeast part of town until workmen put chain-link fences around it, effectively goosing me out. There had been a taxi-cab company on one corner and a towing service – perfect synergy here – on the other. In front of the impoundment lot, surrounded by a chain-link fence of its own, was – and perhaps still is - a clover-field that stands in for the whole conundrum of human development: if we can get nature to do what we want it to do, we ought to leave a little bit of it in the event that we’re ever able to stop and look around.




*Phil Keats, famous hoofer who invented the “Shelley Two-Step”, which debuted in the hit musical, La Belle Dame, Mercy Me!

Richmond

Richmond used to be the capitol of the Confederacy, but fell after the Yankees came up from Petersburg and said “Enough is enough!” (while shooting their way in, of course.) To this day, Richmond remains, if not a hotbed of secession, a very Southern city, both in its scrupulous regard for good manners as well as its charming way with small words, which are spelled with just a few letters, but become elongated in the mouth. My personal favorite is “hello”, a medium-sized small word that, when said, looks like this: “Hailleaiuoooo!” Unfortunately, Yankees are coming into the city as never before and such exuberant emphasis, resulting in a fruity sound few other places in the South can rival, may be lost. But it will save a lot of time.

When I first got to Richmond, I was captivated not only by the “tragic laughter that emanates from every portico and stair” – a memorable saying I just now made up - but by an urban culture that is pretty common in the South, but with uniquely indigenous variations. In Memphis, where I grew up, you saw it on the north side of town, where black people had to live; and on the south side of town, where more black had to live. As a white boy without any culture of his own besides “The Pledge of Allegiance”, I wanted to know these places better; there was something in them I wasn’t getting at school, at church (when I went), or from my own parents, who were moving up in the world sort of sideways and were glad to be where they were. So I took the bus downtown, got off at different stops along the way, and just walked around, often in the company of another white-flight resistant schoolmate named Kenneth Albright. (I got into the habit of going by myself after Kenny moved away, or when I was around thirty.) I think both of us found in the mom-and-pop groceries, the storefront churches (“The High and Mighty Church of the Omnipotent Redeemer” was not United Methodist), and the worn-out architecture a cultural overlay we could snap onto our own and reference as we needed it. Over the years, I’ve moved closer and closer to my adopted culture, which is sometimes long on flavor, but short on cash. When my friend Virginia and I moved to Richmond, we lived in a house so ramshackle that, on any given day, I wasn’t sure I’d be able to make it from end to end without falling through the floor. (Like the earth itself, the house was about twenty percent landmass (“floor”) and the rest ocean (“ocean.”)) When I came out of it with my painting gear, I had the sense that people were about to congratulate me for surviving. (“Way to go, guy!” “Hey, man, we know what you’re going through!” “Made it through again? All right!”) I used this house as a home-base for a number of years and painted Richmond, as an adult, the way I would have painted Memphis if I’d known how to do it well enough. Later on, I moved to my studio, which I still hold onto. This studio is in a part of town I’d always dreamt about living in when I was a kid. This should be a cautionary tale for everyone.

Incidentally, I did my biggest paintings to date in Richmond. An art supply store had a huge clearance on odd-sized stretchers. That is why so many of my paintings from this period have nineteenth-century, uneven-style dimensions. (Framers must’ve had a really hard time of it. “Put out the lights! That damned Whistler is coming again with his sixes and sevens!)

(To designer: I’d like to use a number of images as backdrop to the introduction as well as the “thumbnails” of typical paintings that appear on the screen.)


Backyard Window Acrylic/masonite 30 x 24 1996 Sold
On the Kanawha Acrylic/masonite 12 x 24 1996 $3,000
House of Seven Awnings Acrylic/canvas 24 x 24 1996 3,500
Evening Interior Acrylic/canvas 46 x 48 1996 Sold
Sleeping Porch Acrylic/canvas 30 x 24 1997 Sold
Grace at Lombardy Acrylic/canvas 47 x 37 1996/97 7,000
Green Door Acrylic/masonite 14 x 11 1997 1,500
3 a. m. Acrylic/canvas 36 x 44 1997 5,000
Noontime Acrylic/masonite 16 x 48 1997 5,000
First Richmond Memory Acrylic/canvas 41 x 47 1997 6,000
Rockpile Acrylic/masonite 18 x 36 1997 3,800
At First Base Acrylic/canvas 47 x 33 1997 6,500
Two Dormers Acrylic/canvas 24 x 48 1997 Sold
Two-Mile Bridge, at Canal Acrylic/canvas 35 x 52 1998 6,000
On All Night Acrylic/panel 30 x 18 1998 3,500
Big Rock Acrylic/masonite 18 x 24 1998 3,000
Cumberland Street Acrylic/canvas 32 x 45 1998 Sold
Near Meadow Acrylic/canvas 35 x 50 1998 6,000
Arent’s Porch Acrylic/canvas 42 x 32 1998 5,500
At Catherine Street Acrylic/canvas 28 x 34 1999 4,000
North of Jackson Acrylic/masonite 21 x 17 1999 Sold
Across Leigh Street Acrylic/masonite 24 x 48 1999 5,500
Gazebo Acrylic/masonite 14 x 18 1999 Sold
Worktable Acrylic/canvas 21 x 27 1999 4,000
Fourth and Leigh Acrylic/canvas 47 x 66 1999 8,000
(diptych)
Sunset: Leigh and Third Oil pastel 12 x 18 1999 2,000
Sunset, Brown’s Island Acrylic/canvas 36x 48 1999 Sold
Old City Hall Acrylic/canvas 35 x 35 2000 Sold
Canyon on Third Acrylic/masonite 24 x 44 2000 4,500
Sunset on Lombardy Acrylic/masonite 8 x 12 2000 1,000
Sunset on Lombardy #2 Acrylic/masonite 6 x 8 2000 600
Broad Street, from City Hall Acrylic/canvas 30 x 40 2000 5,000
Dirt Path Acrylic/canvas 30 x 30 2000 3,500
Shockoe Valley Acrylic/masonite 24 x 48 2001 5,500
Tredegar Acrylic/masonite 24 x 48 2001 6,000
At the Floodwall Acrylic/masonite 24 x 20 2001 3,200 Two Crossings Acrylic/canvas 24 x 48 2001 5,500
Above the Dam Acrylic/masonite 22 x 40 2001 Sold
West Jackson Acrylic/masonite 24 x 48 2001 6,000
Front and Back Acrylic/masonite 22 x 70 2002 8,000
(triptych)
One-man Picnic Acrylic/canvas 32 x 50 2002 6,500
Still Life Acrylic/masonite 36 x 24 2002 4,000
Last Light: Jackson and Acrylic/canvas 36 x 52 2002 7,000
St. James (diptych)
West Broad, at Church Acrylic/canvas 42 x 48 2002 6,000
Hill
Hospital Street (diptych) Acrylic/canvas 24 x 62 2002 7,500
Town of Hillsboro Acrylic/masonite 12 x 24 2002 3,200
Lloyd’s House Acrylic/canvas 28 x 30 2003 3,800
Silo (diptych) Acrylic/masonite 24 x 48 2003 6,500









Syracuse

People in Syracuse lack the complicated social rituals you still find in the South; most of them are just happy to be out of the cold, in a job of almost any kind, and preferably close to an Italian restaurant. Syracuse shares with Brooklyn, where I also lived for a time, its working-class roots, its clannish politics, its vaguely European flavor. I lived for a while near Schiller Park, named after the German poet Goethe. In Memphis, every park was either named after a Confederate general, or had one in it. Confederate Park was an attempt to create a sweeping monument to all the generals you could possibly name, or had forgotten, or maybe wanted to see again. Once you were in the park and started walking, they came up at you on pedestals, these little heads, mostly bearded heads, and they accompanied you all the way to the gun emplacements, where, as a kid, I crawled around on real rebel cannons! The cultural difference here is fairly obvious. Of course, there were war heroes in Syracuse, but they occupied in-between spots – places that had neither strategic nor economic value. One of the best ones stood outside of an all-night restaurant I liked to go to now and then. It’s one of the reasons I liked Syracuse from the git-go, and kept on leaving Memphis for years and years.

But Syracuse wasn’t doing much when I got to it. People water-skied on Onondaga Lake for the thrill of being suspended over one of the most polluted bodies of water in the land. There were slews of old factories on the lakefront, great rust-coated cubes and cylinders which lay bare, not only the geometrical foundation of our man-made universe, but the implacable erosion in our industrial economy. (And, if I’m not mistaken, there were some ugly-ass parallelograms in there too.) Behind this beat-up stuff, working people with not much to do except pull weeds and paint shutters were going quietly, but very surely, out of their minds.

Syracuse was, and is, very picturesque, even – or perhaps especially – under a snow-cover that’s reminiscent of the Russian front, except people in Syracuse know how to dress for it. The last year I was there, 1996, it got 168 inches. They called this “lake-effect snow” – the special kind of snow you get when you have a whole lake for raw material.

There were black people in Syracuse, but you hardly ever saw them if you didn’t look for them. Yet a few middle-class neighborhoods were integrated in a way that made you think all those sit-ins and marches and hosings-down didn’t happen in vain. There you’d see multi-racial parents nudging school-aged children up into a bus and looking worried after the bus went away. For six months of the year, both black and white people shoveled sidewalks and driveways. Some thought of how this good was for their upper bodies; others dreamt, impossibly, of Boca Raton. Snow has a way of unifying everybody and snuffing out divisions based on anything other than what will or will not move that snow. In a place like Syracuse, racial antagonisms freeze over like everything else. But, of course, there’s still the summer.

A sober and serious people by and large, Syracusans could get moonstruck over basketball; all of the untapped community spirit that might ordinarily go into recycling, went directly to The Orangemen, the SU basketball squad. Its glittering style of play, not to mention its ascent into the stratosphere of national attention, kept the sports bar on Grant Boulevard open after everything else had closed the shutters, turned on the alarm system, and took the night off. I think it’s dangerous to love a team so much. If you ever talk to a Red Sox fan, you’ll see what it can lead to: you can become a Red Sox fan. While the Orangemen won, the whole town was swept up in a kind of unnatural euphoria, from which you don’t go up but down. This is the kind of feeling old, defeated places are susceptible to, and they always fall for it because it’s the best thing that’s happened to them in a while and it might not happen again.

I loved Syracuse for its grainy-photograph textured self. A sort of rust-belt miasma hung over it; of old fire and white-hot forge; of strong guys with a hard job to do every day of the week plus Sunday. The people in the art world were as silly as they are everyplace else. But I never consider them part of any real population. They’re something else: a demographic maybe.


White Wall Acrylic/panel 24 x 32 1994 Sold
Sunset Over Grant Blvd. Acrylic/canvas 14 x 11 1994 $1,000
Sconce Acrylic/masonite 18 x 28 1995 3,000
Window Ledge Acrylic/canvas 30 x 48 1995 5,000
Frozen Canal, Acrylic/masonite 22 x 30 1995 3,000
Onondaga Lake
Yellow Sunlight Acrylic/masonite 16 x 32 1995 3,500
Out Back Acrylic/canvas 28 x 30 1995 3,500
Truck Acrylic/masonite 24 x 36 1995 4,200
Down Seeley Hill Acrylic/masonite 30 x 72 1995 7,500
(triptych)
Front Window, ‘Ananda’ Acrylic/panel 24 x 30 1995 Sold
Storefront, South Salina Acrylic/paper 21 x 39 1995 3,800
Street
Sunset at ‘Ananda’ Acrylic/canvas 16 x 12 1995 1,500
New Year’s Party Acrylic/masonite 16 x 20 1996 2,250
Late in the Day: Oil/masonite 30 x 30 1996 4,000
Fayette Street
Dusk: Fayette Street Acrylic/masonite 16 x 12 1996 2,000
Columbus Street Acrylic/masonite 24 x 28 1996 4,000









Other Places

Instead of going to college, I went to the library. During my first, and only, semester at Memphis State University, I became a devoted reader of texts that were not assigned - but, as I grew to realize, absolutely essential. I could go almost anywhere in the library and find books I didn’t necessarily have to read, but could if I wanted to. On one of the upper floors was a pristine collection of monographs and other high-risk publishing ventures that concentrated on photography. I wasn’t interested in the technical part of photography, and can’t say I’m a lot more sophisticated in that regard today. Sure, I know which way to point a camera, particularly if I’m in a bad neighborhood. I’m also pretty good at getting a jump on people who start to run after me for the sake of preserving a low profile, which the presence of a camera seems to unglue.

It was there, in the library, that I first discovered the likes of Walker Evans. And, through him, Bernice Abbott; one of the toughest broads to ever fool around with a developing tray. Through her I entered Paris through the incomparable Eugene Atget’s back door and came out a different person. When old Atget died, Ms. Abbott, in a gesture that sprung, as I’ve come to believe, from a kind of apostolic devotion, bought every glass negative he’d ever made and saved the lot until she could get somebody else to take care of them for her. (This is a story to warm every cynic’s heart. Did mine, but it pissed me off plenty too.) I still can’t believe how long it took MOMA to come and clear those old glass negatives out of Ms. Abbott’s apartment. And this was a woman who knew how to get things done.

Because very few people were “doing realism” in painting, you had to find it elsewhere. For me, elsewhere was that enormous collection of WPA, and pre-WPA, photographers, as well as “art guys” like Steiglitz and Weston and Ansel Adams – the photographer I wish non-profit organizations would revere a little less. I’d always been interested in cities, and could now see them, through the eyes of these poet-photographers, as magnets for my particular vision – a word I use strictly for convenience. I didn’t really have any vision yet, but when you’re just starting out, good eyesight is enough; it was certainly enough to get me up there in that big room overlooking a sniper’s paradise of milling students and sauntering professariat.

Skip ahead a number of years and I’m painting, convinced that, if Walker Evans could go to Mississippi and sleep in an old car, I could live in a small apartment on McLean Boulevard in Memphis, Tennessee, and find everything I needed. I went to the main library and found that, even if a lot of people weren’t interested in my paintings, paintings by Monet and Sargeant; by Homer and Eakins; by Courbet and Constable had moved a whole army of writers and curators and publishers to get books produced, articles written, and exhibits curated. At the time, I was glad that the books and the articles existed; that I could go to the Brooks Museum and browse around all I wanted; that there were people who let me in and let me out, even if I couldn’t go to a black-tie dinner and pay them all back with a pen-stroke. It wasn’t until a little later that I started thinking about The Problem, which stems from people who are not writers and curators and publishers not really wanting you to do anything of your own; but wanting stuff they know already, which seems very bad to you after you’ve looked at all of these people in museums and libraries. It was terribly disillusioning, this profound, but inevitable, alienation from the business-as-usual style of the commercial art world, and I got depressed over it. Barring certain intervals of unreasonable contentment, I think I’ve maintained the longest unmedicated bout of depression in the whole history of art. (Please speak up if you think you’ve done it longer; this is just a hunch.) I did some good paintings in those days, however, and want to thank my girlfriend, Paula, for making them all possible. My lack of usefulness was double-edged; when you do something nobody wants – or, rather, fail to do things people do want – you don’t make any money either. That’s the cruel part. I think the money popular artists make should be taxed and turned over to the talented, but unpopular, artists who can’t share in any of the wealth because of their special handicap, which makes them do things nobody has ever seen instead of the stuff the popular artists do, which they probably wouldn’t do as much of if they knew they were going to be taxed for it.

That’s reason enough to start the tax right there! Call it “The Kinkade Amendment” and test it out in California, home of provocative money solutions, first and let it spill over.


Central, at Southern Watercolor 16 x 20 1980 NFS



And Brooklyn, Too!

Skipping ahead to New York, oh, about ten or fifteen years later, I was still painting pictures almost nobody wanted and said as much – they did, I mean. Being as attached to writing mostly unsaleable material as I was to painting it, my productivity in both areas was uneven; if truth were known, I wasn’t at the top of my game until I went to Brooklyn, which, in those days, had almost as many people who didn’t want to open galleries or become guest curators somewhere as didn’t. I realize this is unimaginable today, but I promise it was so. You could shake a stick, or swing a cat, or just whistle loudly, and, like as not, a real person would tell you to watch what the hell you were doing. The other kind of people, who live there today, would think you were trying out some performance art ideas you’d been kicking around on the subway. And they wouldn’t say anything; they’d just think: “We’re not trying to be Bill Erwin now, are we?”

The work I did in Brooklyn encouraged me greatly, and led to the sort of work I do today. Even then, there weren’t many elevated trains, but there was no shortage of elevated highways. I liked the space underneath them, which both isolates and connects; I also liked the space around them, where a more fragile world, of individual notions and purposes somehow takes hold and survives. I had a full-time job, but with a part-time attitude, which was the key to my success – if you care to measure success by the ever-increasing volume of hours and minutes I subtracted from the job and gave to me without really hurting either. Eventually, I would leave the job entirely and devote all the time I had to me. Sounds selfish, doesn’t it?

Birmingham, Alabama probably doesn’t have as many artists to look after it the way New York does. There is a statue of Vulcan, the Fire God, in Birmingham, which I’m sure artists have painted at least a few times. But think of how many times artists have painted the Washington Square Arch or McDougal Street or the Empire State Building! This sort of product saturation is what makes New York City uniquely callous, even perseveringly indifferent, to its artistic caretakers. If you’ve got only two images of Vulcan the Fire God, you try to make room for them. But try keeping track of the Brooklyn Bridge! I’ll bet you somebody makes one picture of the Brooklyn Bridge every day. Even if all but one of them per year were bad, that’s still one good picture, every year, since 1883. That there can be such a surplus, a plethora, a never-ending cascade is hard to imagine if you’re in the Vulcan camp. But if you’re a New Yorker you just don’t want any new stuff around because you can’t even begin process all of the old stuff yet. I think the moral is obvious: if you live in Birmingham, you ought to start an exchange program under which Birmingham imports one underappreciated artist from any of the five boroughs of New York City with the specific purpose of increasing the number of Birmingham pictures – which are relatively rare – while going easy on NYC, which has more than it knows what to do with.

Are you listening, Birmingham?


Central Park Acrylic/masonite 20 x 34 1990 $2,500
Sunday Afternoon Acrylic/masonite 20 x 36 1993 3,500


Right Now

I live in Washington, DC, which has been shut down for the funeral of former President, Ronald Reagan. The motorcade came in yesterday, with the body, and plodded gravely up Constitution Avenue to the Capitol, where the former Chief Executive lay in state, round the clock, for a twenty-four hour period the honor guard – which stayed there the whole time - will probably never get out of its system. As I said, the entire city is off today for the funeral, though only a fraction of the population is attending it. The rest of the city is on hold till Monday. It’s the way things get done around here.

Washington is not an art town in the traditional sense, though artists have – and do – live here. Whitman was here during the Civil War, comforting the wounded, and writing the best letters a sick soldier ever sent home. The hard-working Constantino Brumidi lived in a now-ramshackle house on A Street all the time he was decorating the Capitol Building with allegorical figures that represented God (the bearded guy), Country (the buxom lady), Business Acumen (buxom lady with passbook), Military Might (buxom lady with sword), and Possible World Domination Within the Next Fifty Years (lots of buxom ladies who sort of close in on you). He worked in the same building for well-nigh upon forty years, which is what a lot of people in Washington do even today – excepting the president, his cabinet, certain staff persons, and people in the press these people dislike proactively. This is proof that stability really isn’t the best thing going.

I’m still interested in the city and am trying to find a way to get around it that leaves me with enough energy for the work at hand. This is hard because Washington is the sort of place that takes away first, and gives when it gets around to it. I was sprayed with parking-tickets the first months I was here – sprayed serially with them – and haven’t really gotten over it. I’m so circumspect about parking that I’ll just circle a place endlessly rather than park there. That there are so many real circles here is no accident.
Washington is a city of parks, but a lot of them are constantly in the line of traffic, so the amenities in these parks are stranded and not able to be enjoyed by the people who are on the other side of the street. The Metro siphons off traffic, I am told, but in a large city cars and people increase exponentially – with the result that where both things can be, there will always be more of them tomorrow. Mathematically, it looks like this: people plus available space equals twice as many Starbucks by Wednesday. If you repeat it slowly enough, I’m sure you’ll eventually get it. Took me years to grasp entirely on my own.

Washington is not giving itself a good name artistically, however. Of all cities in the nation, it is synonymous with symbolic renderings of our national pride and consciousness – in the form of monumental architecture, sculpture, or somewhat meandering and tortuous combinations of the two. Most recently, it unveiled the WWII monument between the mammoth sewing-needle otherwise known as the Washington Monument and the Reflecting Pool that lies at the base of the Lincoln Memorial – an almost-tolerable epitaph to a great man. It doesn’t speak ill of the dead to say that it could’ve been designed by Albert Speer, Adolph Hitler’s architect-in-residence during the Fuhrer’s gaudiest period. It’s not D-Day’s doing, or “valor’s fault”, or any fallen hero’s embarrassing excess; it’s simply one of those bad things people do for all of the right reasons and fall globally short of the mark. Great mountains of emblematic stone designed by honorable fellows; cut by intelligent, conscientious craftsmen; and moved solemnly into places nobody would dream of laughing at can nonetheless be very silly – and stay silly forever. No bad idea has ever mellowed. *Keats said it best:

And so stretch the sad and level sands
Doing their level best to say:
Don’t forget great Samarkand –
And give my regards to old Broadway!

Now I remember what I was going to say. Recently, the DC Arts Commission got a bunch of “artists” to paint panda statuary in a decorative or amusing way, dumped them overboard, and hailed them as “public art” – I guess, because they weren’t on private property (its notion of “public”) and you could look at them for free (its notion of “art” – which has traditionally been free to the public because it’s too damned expensive for anybody but the private sector to fool with). Local critics, dealers, and even artists jumped on the Arts Commission and gave ‘em what for. They said the pandas were tchotkes, tourist fodder, scrimshaw. They wanted to know why “serious art” couldn’t be put out there instead. They expressed shame and embarrassment; sadness and grieving; cussedness and outrage.

I could care less, personally. Drag “serious” sculpture into the public domain and you’d get the same sort of outcry from the public. “What is it?” “I could do that myself.” “What a waste of good material.” The moral I’m leading up to is that it’s impossible to do anything for anybody. All of those dumb monuments prove that. I’d rather have all that money go to people who are already doing things for themselves that have some sort of proven value to others so that they can keep on doing it. There’s no visible change, but often it’s best to leave well enough alone. Or try not to make something already bad much worse.

But in a place so politically charged as Washington, what can you expect? The tourists probably do like the pandas, the artists (or “artists”) got a little money, and the people at the Arts Commission can go to conferences and say they launched another successful art program that will resonate for years to come. And they’re right about that; it will. At least until they bring on the squid.

As for me, I’m attracted to the same sort of thing here that drew me to the North and South Sides of Richmond; to Edgecombe Avenue; Salina Street; Old Brook Road - to all of the run-down and depopulated areas of a fast-growing country that keeps on pushing its boundaries into ancient deserts; tree-covered solitudes; excellent white sands. I was out painting a small area in the Northeast part of town until workmen put chain-link fences around it, effectively goosing me out. There had been a taxi-cab company on one corner and a towing service – perfect synergy here – on the other. In front of the impoundment lot, surrounded by a chain-link fence of its own, was – and perhaps still is - a clover-field that stands in for the whole conundrum of human development: if we can get nature to do what we want it to do, we ought to leave a little bit of it in the event that we’re ever able to stop and look around.




*Phil Keats, famous hoofer who invented the “Shelley Two-Step”, which debuted in the hit musical, La Belle Dame, Mercy Me!