My mother grew up on a farm in the early part of the 20th century. Nothing was wasted. Every leftover piece of lumber, every rusty nail and every damaged tool was saved for an unknown future need. My parents raised me, in a woodland home, to be a saver too.
Boatman talks to Bill
Bill Bengtson and his camera are in my studio, documenting more of my work, as he has for decades. The room darkening shades on the 10’x7’ windows are down and the lights off. The 14’ high tin ceiling and the 3,000 square feet of open space, originally the second floor of an 1870’s variety store, dwarf all but the largest of my works, making them appear modest in scale. Four wood posts support a beam running the length of the space. The posts and beam mark the midpoint in the fifty foot wide room. The floor joists sag in the middle of the 25 foot run from the outside walls to the center beam. That’s part of the building’s history as a 19th century store, a place that combined what we now call a department store, with a hardware and general supplies depot. There wasn’t much you could want that wasn’t sold here, from vacuum cleaners to overalls, paint, and women’s wear. Built before engineering was part of the design protocol, the builders guessed at the joist size needed to support the goods, the display cases, and the throngs of shoppers. They guessed wrong and the joists gradually bowed to gravity. It’s ironic that I didn’t have this studio until 1991, because the weight of all these goods ended up in my Boatman paintings in 1981, as a symbol of my desire to own everything I might need while in danger of being sunk by the same things.
With plenty of room to move his lights and tripod wherever needed, Bill dances around to get the light perfect on each painting. On this day’s shooting docket is a new painting from my Drama Series, a group I began in 2019 and continue now, in late 2021. In addition, there are more than a dozen earlier works to photograph, some from as far back as 50 years ago.
I set up the new painting first. It is brightly colored and filled with references to images I’ve used in the past, many of which Bill recognizes. We move on to several paintings done in 1981 and 1982. The American political environment was particularly dark at that time. Reagan, having made a secret deal with Tehran to not release American hostages until after he won election, sold Iran missiles after the election, using the money to covertly ship weapons to Nicaragua’s dictator, Noriega.Reagan also increased funding for bombers and missiles directed at the Soviet Union.
The paintings I began at that time, which I later called the “Boatman Series,” were done with black, liquid acrylic, made even less viscous by mixing in a generous amount of Pelican India Ink. The modified acrylic soaked into raw canvas rapidly, allowing me to paint with Japanese brushes, mimicking brush and ink drawings I had done earlier and having reference historically to Jackson Pollack’s pre-drip work.
Bill asked why I had chosen these materials. I gave him three reasons:
Cost
I told him I was broke in 1980. (Bill: Yea, of course.) In 1977, Terry Dintenfass Gallery, in New York, began representing my work. The gallery mounted my first exhibit in December,1979, six weeks after our son Forest was born. I drove the exhibit to New York. My wife, Molly Day, and Forest flew out for the opening.
In January of 1980, I drove my exhibit back to Chicago. I had expected to make some money showing at such a prestigious gallery, but a recession slowed the art market and little of my work sold. The expense of framing the work, driving it to MidTown Manhattan, where parking was an incredible $25 an hour, and making a second trip to bring the work back to Chicago, all left me with a mountain of credit card debt. I found some temporary work but I didn’t have a lot of time for it because our son required my care during week days, while Molly was teaching. I continued to rack up more credit card debt. I was desperate to get back to painting but had no money to restock my expensive artist’s paints. Using the materials I’ve described, I only needed to buy a gallon of black, liquid acrylic and a quart of Pelican ink, as I still had plenty of raw canvas.
Time
Because I was a stay at home dad, I could only manage a few hours painting each evening. I needed a process that didn’t require a lot of preparation time and yielded results quickly.
Grant Appeal
I wasn’t selling enough in early 1980’s to meet my current financial obligations, much less pay down my credit cards. I had at least one each of Visa, MasterCard, Discover Card, plus a Credit Union card, and six gas station cards. Every time I got an offer for a new card, I applied. Since I paid the minimum regularly, I was the darling of the industry. I was anxious to win a grant, so that I wouldn’t have to get a “real” job. Knowing how rapidly slides were reviewed by grant panels, I wanted a graphic style that would grab attention. There would not be many grant applicants submitting paintings using only black paint, so I knew that, if my work was good, it would be noticed.
Bill: Did it work? Yes, in 1982, the day before I was to sign a contract for a full time job in a design firm, the National Endowment for the Arts sent me notice that I was going to receive $5,000, enough to keep me in my studio for another year at least.
Bill: WOW!
Bill hears my reasons, but rather than comment on them, talks instead about the imagery. The figure “Boatman” appeared a third of the way into the series, together with his rowboat, piled high with material possessions. We don’t talk about the central figure per se, but the idea that Boatman is a quixotic hero with pretensions to mythic status seems obvious. It’s also obvious that I am the Boatman. Instead, we point out to each other the objects overburdening the small watercraft. I tell Bill my sources, when and where these objects had been, before I added them to the manifest.
There were three sources:
A. Molly and I had found some of them in the rundown, three-story, orange brick house we purchased in December of 1971, a few months before we were married and about one hundred years after it was built. The attic was packed with artifacts dating back to the late 19th century and the crawl space under the house yielded a few more. Added to these were items we left behind when we moved our living quarters out of 908 six years later.
B. Other objects were the tools of my trade.
C. Constant building repairs called for a cache of supplies that provided a third source of imagery.
From naming these loosely drawn objects in the paintings, I segue into telling Bill stories about my life at the time I painted them, pausing while he’s concentrating on getting a shot right, but picking up again when I move a canvas, or Bill changes the position of his lights. Another kind of light turns on: if I can rattle off these stories to Bill, I think I can put them on paper. Since, for 50 years, I have refused to write about my work, this idea comes as an enormous surprise to me. The only prerequisite is keeping an imaginary but curious Bill Bengtson in the room while I write.
I don’t tell Bill much that day regarding my first years as an artist, or even about the early 1980’s, because the day’s work is done. I help Bill pack up his equipment, carry it down two flights of stairs, and carefully lift it into his aging Ford Taurus station wagon . I do go home and begin writing what I would have told da about the dozen years preceding these black paintings, if we had had all day. Thinking about the origins of the Boatman series, I realized I had to reach back at least to my last years of college.
This is what I imagined telling him:
When I arrived at Harvard College in the fall of 1964, I had no particular career plans. I was there to get a Liberal Arts Education. I had done a great deal of independent reading in high school and was convinced that a well rounded education was my ticket to a rich life. I hadn’t thought it necessary to go to college. My parents thought otherwise. The first thing I recall doing, after unpacking, was to join the Harvard Radcliffe Orchestra, continuing with an extracurricular activity I had enjoyed since taking up the violin at age 8. Then came choosing courses and a major. Because I had always been interested in architecture (an interest cultivated by my parents) and had sometimes thought of pursuing it as a vocation, I looked closely at a major called Architectural Sciences. It had fewer course requirements than most of the other majors under my scrutiny. This would give me the best opportunity to choose a wide range of courses in other departments: anthropology, literature, history, Latin, and others, each of which offered pages of choices. The Arch.Sci. requirement had its share of reading and lecture courses, but also included studio courses in two and three dimensional design. One could also take for credit towards this degree courses in a new department called Visual Studies. These looked especially appealing because they were held in the just completed Carpenter Center, a magnificent concrete structure designed by LeCourbusier. To take any of these studio courses as a freshman, I had to apply for a waiver. I quickly obtained the waiver, aided by a friend of friends of the family, one who actually taught one of these design courses, Albert Alcalay. No money changed hands and no crimes were committed.
By the end of my sophomore year, I had taken the 2-D and 3-D design courses, a descriptive drawing class and a similar class in the Graduate School of Architecture. During the first semester of my Junior year, I had no courses at Carpenter Center. Towards the end of the semester, I ran into the instructor of my 3-D design class, a sculptor by the name of Wil Reimann. Standing under the large orange and blue Gulf Oil sign at the corner of Quincy Street and Massachusetts Avenue, he asked how things were going. I told him I sorely missed having courses at Carpenter Center. (Other than film, I had completed all offered studio courses.)
He suggested I apply for an independent study in drawing, masking the true nature of the course in the language of design. (Harvard considered painting and drawing to be trade skills not worthy of study at the world’s best university.) Reimann offered to help craft the application and act as my advisor. I jumped on this and, in January, began three semesters of independent work.
I made a studio in my dorm bedroom. For a drawing table, I used a sheet of 3/4” plywood held up by cement blocks. This gave me 32” of clearance above my mattress, which rested on the floor beneath. Clamped to the plywood was a new on the market Luxolamp, designed for architects. Below the plywood, next to the mattress, I kept a reading lamp. The Luxolamp remains in my possession and shows up as an image in my work, from time to time. Devoting many hours a week to drawing was only possible because I was getting course credit for it. In ten days time, I realized I wanted to be an artist, not an architect or anything else I had considered.
At the start of my senior year, in the fall of 1967, I convinced the administrators of my dorm, Adams House, to grant me the use of an empty room that had, at one time, served as the building superintendent’s office. Its door opened from the building’s foyer. A large, frosted glass panel in the door allowed in some light. The opposite end of the room was below grade but had a few small windows. I set up the work table from my bedroom and got to work. I continued the second and third semesters of my independent study, creating the Senior Project required by my major, Architectural Science: Urban Design. The Project culminated in an exhibit in the Adams House Common Room.
Having use of this room, my first real studio, inspired me to work even harder, and gave me privacy to do so. I was eager to try as many drawing techniques as possible, ranging through a variety of pencils, pens and brushes. I dove into large brush and ink drawings as if I knew what I was doing! After college, I didn’t return to brush and ink drawings until the early 1980’s, but it was my earlier experience with them that lead to the black acrylic on canvas paintings.
After graduating in June, 1968, I immediately began a summer program that was part of a Master in the Art of Teaching program at the Harvard Graduate School of Education. I enrolled in this program because my studies in urban design educated me to the need for elementary school teachers in the inner city. My plan was to teach an elementary school classroom during the day and work in my studio in the evenings. By the time I finished the program the following spring, I had come to the conclusion that teaching was so demanding and exhausting that I would never have the energy to work in a studio in the evening.
While I never did get a teaching job, being in the M.A.T. program kept me in the Cambridge area another year and a half. Having briefly met Molly Day a week earlier, we had our first date February 27,1970. Molly, who had recently graduated Wheelock, a college of education in Brookline, was teaching elementary school in an inner city neighborhood of Cambridge.
We quickly determined we were a couple and would stick together through thick and thin, with or without the benefit of marriage. With the resurgence of feminism at that time, the institution of marriage was not universally well thought of, and Molly, while willing to commit to a lifetime together, was not eager to institutionalize the arrangement. With the American atrocities in Vietnam still raging, I wasn’t eager to have our relationship sanctioned by government, so I was flexible on the issue of marriage. After we spent a few months together in Cambridge, I took a backpacking trip to Crete, Turkey and Tehran while Molly finished up her teaching year. She then moved to New York to start a Masters program at Banks Street Graduate School of Education. I moved to Chicago to figure out how to get a studio career started!
During 1970 and 1971, I produced a large volume of work, including my first lithographs at Landfall Press, which had just opened in Chicago. I had, since the start of college, made many detailed pen and ink drawings. Often, the compositions left little open space. I was introduced to the term “horror vacui.” Many conveyed a sense of things piled on top of each other. Misch Kohn, a friend of my parents’, and an influential printmaker teaching at IIT, formerly the Baus Haus/ Institute of Design, had a studio in the same complex as my parents. Seeing my pen and ink work, he urged me to make some lithographs at Landfall. I didn’t know what a lithograph was, but I was going to find out. I did so, and one of the earliest of these new prints was titled “Crane Mountain,” with imagery suggesting a landfill of epic proportions. Every kind of manmade object was, by implication, buried there.
In addition to the prints and drawings, I also managed to paint a dozen works. I mainly used a technique to which I returned in 2019, drawing outlined images directly on canvas, then filling the shapes with solid colors. Green Lady, Psychodrama and Overhead Crane are examples.
I had studio shows with my parents in the fall of 1970 and 1971, cash from which allowed me to continue to pursue studio work rather than find a regular job.
In December of 1971, Molly came to Chicago to look at some houses I had scouted during the previous months, while I was working in a sublet section of Johnnie Johnson’s studio, a few doors south of my parents’ at 1825 S. Halsted.
I convinced Molly that we should buy our own place because artists who rented studios were forced to move constantly. We bought 908 West 19th Street, in Pilsen. It was only a block and a half from my sublet, my parents’ studio, Misch Kohn’s studio, a dozen other artists shops and ateliers, and Ruth Duckworth’s ceramics studio, where I got some employment, as well as friendship and mentoring. However, it was west of Halsted, across an invisible line into a neighborhood not considered safe for people like Molly and me. The 3.5 story brick structure was beautiful, though neglected. It had a Tree of Heaven in front, which was a major selling point in an almost treeless neighborhood. Mr. Strnad, the lawyer and realtor representing the seller, twisted my arm, after I offered $5,000 and convinced me to pay $7,000, out of pity for the elderly owners. I told Molly that, if we didn’t like living there after a few years, we could abandon the place and not have spent more than we would have if we had been renters for that period of time.
When the papers were signed, we drove the few blocks from Strnad’s office, on 18th and Blue Island, to inspect our purchase and get the keys. We were overwhelmed by the reality of owning such a large object, a beautiful structure that had not yet revealed to us the enormity of the work that lay ahead.
The building, which we thereafter called “908,” had a front door reached by a large set of limestone blocks resting on brick walls. In one of the supporting brick walls was a door leading to the Garden Apartment, which was at ground level, though the streets and sidewalks were raised above it. A separate set of steps down from the sidewalk was necessary to reach it.
Long after it was first built and occupied as a generous two story home with an attic above and a rental unit below, it had been subdivided into five units, with a total of 3 bathrooms, 2 of which were shared. Bathrooms were not part of the original building. In the 1870’s, when this house was built, outhouses and wells were located in the back yard. After streets were raised to lay water and sewer pipes, hollow sidewalks provided space for a toilet. As soon as a family had enough money, they brought running water into the building for kitchens and bathrooms. Bathroom floors had to be built 8” above the original floor level, to accommodate the cast iron plumbing Later, electric lights replaced coal gas lighting. When we got the building, some of the wiring was still knob and tube, though much had been upgraded to the earliest version of BX, metal sheathed wiring. A typewritten letter I found in the attic tells much about the history of heating in that neighborhood.
PEOPLES GAS LIGHT AND COKE COMPANY
Peoples Gas Building
122 South Michigan Avenue
Chicago 3, Illinois
Telephone WAbash 2-6000.
Anton Dowiatt
908 W. 19th St.
Chicago 8,Illinois
May 27, 1954
2nd [floor] only
Your patience and understanding of the gas situation in Chicago is appreciated. A limited additional supply of gas is now available for single family residential heating. If your application is for this type of premises, you may obtain gas for space heating.
The enclosed self-addressed postcard, when filled out and returned to us within two weeks, will be your way of telling us whether or not you will want to use gas for heating. Please fill out either the upper part of the card and return it to us so that our records can be complete. Customers who will receive a letter of authorization will have until December 1, 1954 to complete their installation. ……(after additional details, the letter closes as follows:) We look forward to serving you for many years with the ideal fuel for heating, cooking, water heating, refrigeration, clothes drying and incineration.
Very Truly Yours,
Roy B. Munroe, Manager Domestic Sales Department
This letter indicated that our natural gas space heaters, complete with ceramic heat exchangers and Eisenglass flame barriers, dated from 1954 and were less than 20 years old. Earlier occupants had coal or wood stoves for heat. Coal dust was heavy within the walls we removed, so most likely coal stoves were the primary heat source. The space below the sidewalks had earlier provided space to store coal, once the first toilet had been moved indoors.
In January, 1972, Molly returned to New York. I began some rudimentary improvements enabling me to comfortably camp out on the top floor. I tore off wall paper and painted everything I could white, including the floor. The wall paper came off easily, revealing walls that had first been colored with calcimine paint. I was relieved to learn that lead was not an ingredient in calcimine. I shared my two rooms with hundreds of cockroaches. We didn’t fight over territory.They had free reign at night, but had to retreat to their crevices during the day.
The front half of the top floor was unoccupied, when we made the purchase. The woman who had occupied it had either died there recently, or been hastily moved to a nursing home, because many personal effects were left behind. The bathroom, which had been shared with the tenant in the rear of the same floor, divided what had been the second floor of the original home into two units, leaving the first floor as a separate apartment. When I asked the rear tenant to move out as soon as possible after we bought the place, he found a room above the tavern at the northeast corner of 19th and Halsted.
His quarters were squalid. I could barely get myself to enter. The fact that this man left so many of his personal belongings behind spoke to me of deep resignation. The refrigerator was a chamber of horrors. It may not have been opened for months. Because the electricity was turned off at the meter, it wasn’t running. The contents had morphed into forms that were hard to identify. A tiny bedroom room was full of suits and overcoats piled on a bed. I can’t remember many details, but the quantity of objects in these small quarters was something I had never before seen. Among the many snapshots we took of our year and half converting the space to our needs was one of this rear apartment. There are so many objects and the photo is such poor quality that it is difficult to identify individual items. They seem to have lain in one place so long as to have become fossilized into a single tableau.
Much of it was garbage that hadn’t been taken out. Unwashed dishes were stacked in the sink and around the apartment, wherever a meal was finished. It was apparent that he had eaten out of jars and cans, when there were no more clean dishes. Getting a sandwich at one of the many corner taverns must have been the final dining solution. I imagine this man, whose name I can no longer recall, only came in at night to sleep on a dirty bed. Since the light bill had not been paid, moving in the dark with a flashlight must have been required. What had brought him to this modus vivendi I have no idea. Perhaps the loss of a job or a spouse and the onset of depression. When I asked for the apartment to be vacated, I sensed relief that a decision had been made for him that would solve an ocean of problems.
Molly planned to help with renovations in May, once she finished school. I drove to NYC in March so that we could marry (We decided to marry, after the local savings and loan bank, refused to give us a mortgage unless we were married!)
Molly was on spring break, so the day after our trip to the courthouse, we drove to Chicago. (After the wedding, we mailed to close friends an announcement using a drawing I had made. It was inspired by a Malcolm Lowry story about the loss of their remote island home to fire. My drawing showed the remains of a dwelling, with a naked couple sitting in front, holding hands.) Once in the Chicago area, we stayed with my parents in their woodland home, a Mid-Century Modern dwelling designed by my father in 1942. I didn’t want to ask Molly to camp out at 908 yet. While her New York apartment had its share of wild animals, it at least was clean and had modern plumbing We made plans for the work ahead of us, before Molly had to fly back to Banks Street. The ideas we roughed out were enough for my father to draft some architectural drawings to guide us towards our eventual goal. I returned to the work on our new home full time, a project that lasted a year and a half.
While I ceased making art at my sub-let studio space on Halsted, I kept it to store my art supplies and finished work. This consisted of a few paintings, numerous pen & ink drawings, and the first 16 editions of lithographs I made at Landfall Press during 1970-71. Many of these, like my paintings and drawings, displayed my fascination with accumulations of things: stacked blocks of color or dense arrays of small animals and organic materials.
In June, when Molly arrived in Chicago to stay, she joined the serious deconstruction and renovation underway. We had no experience in the trades. The only things that got done somewhat properly were those for which we hired help, such as the wiring. Some of these hired tradesmen were working for below standard wages, were unlicensed, and were more creative than skilled!
In spite of wearing masks or bandanas much of the time, we inhaled a lot of plaster and coal dust as we tore out walls and ceilings. We found crumpled newspapers stuffed for insulation inside the walls. As we tore out walls, we often stopped to read the news!
After sorting lath strip from plaster, we bundled the strips, carried them down two flights of stairs to the alley, and then carried the plaster down the same stairs, in 5 gallon buckets. The open windows were our only form of air conditioning, but the early summer was kind to us. We didn’t dare get a dumpster, for fear of attracting the attention of a building inspector. The neighborhood was in such decline that inspectors rarely appeared there, but we wanted to minimize the risk of having to get permits! The cost of doing everything according to code would have been far beyond our means.
Our piles of plaster and lath in the alley were carried away by city garbage trucks. On some days, we greeted the sanitation workers with six packs of beer, as thanks for the extra work. The work was not only extra, but extra-legal.
On the final push to remove the last of the 16 walls and eleven hundred square feet of ceiling plaster, our mountain in the alley reached the top of the chain link fence on our side of the alley and its angle of repose left a foot of plaster resting against the foundation wall of the building opposite. It was an impressive sight and would have made a fine work of installation art, if I had been so hip. We had carried it all down a narrow interior flight of stairs, then a narrow, iron, spiral stairs to the backyard, and finally up six steps to the above grade alley. While concerned we might get nailed by the building department, we still took considerable pride in the volume of debris we had moved!
I knew that it would take more than a few six packs to make this mountain disappear! I called the supervisor for our sanitation district, whom I had come to know in the course of our wildcatting. I asked him to come out and give me an estimate. He came promptly and shook his head. “John, this is going to take some figuring. I can’t give you a number without asking people all up and down the line, including the manager at the landfill.” In a few hours, he was back. I had no argument with $125.
(I imagined Bill saying “That’s Chicago, the city that works.”)
Once we cleared out the attic and, aided by some less than professional friends, nailed up sheet rock against the rafters, Molly and I camped out there all summer.
We carved out a rough loft style space by tearing out all the walls, installing a beam and columns that ran the length of the house to replace the load bearing walls, cut 144 square feet out of the attic floor and the corresponding roof above. The roof opening we covered with corrugated fiberglass. Despite my frequent attempts to seal it, I don’t think there ever was a time it didn’t leak. Cutting through the roof, I was fascinated to find the original slate roofing tiles intact under a layer of rolled roofing. Those tiles have reappeared many times in my work since that time.
Both to save money and provide character to our loft, we re-used almost all the demolition lumber. The 2×4’s were oversize and rough cut, as was the industry standard of the 1870’s, and mostly Southern Pine. We cobbled together a kitchen counter and open shelving with them. Vinyl floor tiles glued to plywood make a slick counter. The 2”x10” rafters removed from below the attic floor were turned into a giant dining table that had a medieval feel to it. Nearly four feet wide and ten long, we had some well attended dinners with everyone seated at one table! It took four people to move it, making it impractical enough that we eventually disassembled it, using the lumber for something else.
Molly had worked hard on renovations with me over the summer of 1972, then, in September, she began her new teaching job at the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools in Hyde Park, a 15 minute drive. On Columbus Day, I still had a good week of work before I could turn on the heating I was installing. As the morning sky began to lighten and we awoke, an early snow was falling! A week later, we had heat and felt comfortably settled, even putting up window shades!
By June of 1973, I considered the tasks most needed for us to enjoy living there had been completed. I moved out of my sublet and set up my studio in 908. While I did no artwork during the construction period, I subsequently developed many drawings, watercolors, and paintings from the experience, beginning as soon as I moved my studio into 908. Old themes continued and were well fed by the construction experience and new themes emerged that continue to follow me.
There were there four windows on the north and south sides of the floor we were using as our main living and studio space. There also were six on the east and west sides. The west side of the building was only a few inches from the next house. This made the windows on that side of no use, even for ventilation. We nailed plywood over them. All the windows were six feet tall and divided into many panes. Much of the glass was about 100 years old and, as we learned, were liquid, not solid. Over that length of time, the glass slid, so each pane was thinner at the top than at the bottom, and the entire pane had patterns that new glass does not. Not having been tended to or painted for decades, I spent much time replacing broken glass, broken sash cords and cast iron counter weights, to make these windows operable. They were beautiful and filled our work/live space with light. They also became a central motif in much of my work since that time. Several of my first drawings completed in the new space were views out of these windows. In one, looking east, the window framework, drawn in some detail, was a transition from my drafting table and Luxo-lamp on the inside to a view of our neighbor’s roof, chimney, and the parapet wall ceramic copings, beautifully overlapping one another. Beyond was the windowless wall of a three story apartment building and the sky above it.
Bill: We all had Luxo-lamps then.
Another pen and ink line drawing looked south, through the southern windows. In this area, we had removed the plaster, leaving the brick wall exposed. In the foreground of this drawing were outlines of houseplants I enjoyed. Out the window, I drew, branch by branch, the Tree of Heaven, now leafless in the winter, which framed our view of the street. Its branch patterns were complex and as beautiful as the simple ceramic coping out the east windows. Beyond this tree, across the street, a one story brick building was suggested, with an enormous garage door for the cartage business of the Vavrik Brothers, whom I came to know in a neighborly way. Who knows for sure where my fascination with trucks began, but having a trucking firm across the street surely fed it.
As I embarked on the business of being an artist, I had some stationery printed with my apocryphal business name Darryl Licht Transport. The pun on derelict was not obvious to every one, nor was the meaning of Transport. The name was meant to indicate that I, an artist and therefore a social derelict, hoped to transport others by my images rather than by truck. Thirty years later, I became more direct, using an image of a truck as my central motif, in a continuing effort to transport my audience.
From 1972 until 1977, 908 served as both home and studio. As we thought about having a child, it became obvious this would not be an easy place to raise one. Open spaces, lack of railings, a backyard that would be hard to reach with a child, and not a suitable play area anyway- these were some of the reasons we bought a condo in Kenwood, a couple of hundred feet down the block from The Ancona School, where Molly was now teaching. I kept my studio where it had been and rented out some of the living space we no longer needed.
When we moved our home to Kenwood, we left behind some furniture and odds and ends of personal possessions that just didn’t fit the new place but which we couldn’t bear to throw out. The already large quantity of art supplies and finished work continued to grow. Also growing were the piles of building maintenance and repair materials.
At times, it all seemed like a treasure trove. At other times, it felt like an overwhelming burden.
Art and Art Supplies
Rags.
Tables.
Easels.
Flatfiles.
Every kind of tape.
Every form of canvas
Pencils, pencil sharpeners.
T-Squares, tear bars and rulers.
India inks, and five kinds of glue
Triangles of various sizes and shapes
Cardboard tubes for shipping and storage.
Brushes in cans, bristles up, or in piles, like pickup sticks
Watercolor pads, sketch pads, note books and books about art.
Rolls of fine drawing paper, rolls of tracing paper, rolls of Kraft paper.
Cans, tubes jars and trays of oils, acrylics, watercolors, and gouaches. Sheets of drawing papers, graph papers, tracing papers, and carbon papers.
Building maintenance tools and supplies.
Levels, plumb bobs and chalk lines, with bottles of blue, yellow and red chalk. Claw hammers, framing hammers, tack hammers, five pounders, and a sledge. Pipe benders, pipe wrenches, pipe fitter’s compound, and plumbers putty. Sheet metal shears, the red one, the green one and the yellow one.
Paint brushes and rollers and the matching cans and pans. Pipes, street elbows, nipples, reducers, tees and unions. Drywall compound and related trays, hawks and knives. Cross cut saws and rippers, circular saws, jig saws. Lumber and doors we hadn’t used but might.
Step ladders and extension ladders. Wall paper strippers and steamers Paints for every purpose.
Muriatic acid.
Clamps.
Drills.
Wire brushes.
Roofing tars and applicators.
Wire cutters, scissors and pliers.
Trouble lights and extension cords.
Bricks, mortar, tuck pointing trowels and hods.
Sealants in tubes and caulking with caulking guns.
Spools of electrical wires, red, white, black and green.
Electrical gang boxes, switches, outlets, plates, light fixtures. Rolls of tar paper, roofing paper, builder’s paper and polyethylene.
Everything Else
A cigar box of pins and badges for fraternal orders and military rank and service.
A postwar document advising the coming residential natural gas supply.
State of Illinois Depression script, worth nothing then and less now.
Street address guide, with ads for venereal disease treatment.
Cast iron counter weights for double hung window sashes.
A 19th Century 8×10 view camera with tripod.
A WWII Victory glass washboard.
A copper wash tub with cover.
A galvanized watering can.
Funeral photographs.
Postcards in cursive.
Sinclair roadmaps.
Suitcases.
Even after our building was habitable as home and studio, there was always more work that could be done and changes to make. I frequently deployed our fine collection of roof tars, sealants, caulking guns and applicators as I hung over the peak of the roof, a rope tied around my waist. The hemp rope was secured at the other end through the roof hatch to a toilet. The toilet wasn’t hooked up to anything but weighed enough to keep me from slipping. If I fell, the toilet wouldn’t fit through the roof hatch, so I was perfectly safe. Every new project added more left overs to the storeroom.
During the photo shoot, Bill saw that Boatman, carrying in his small craft many of the items listed above, was sinking. Under the dual weights of my family responsibilities and an obsessive need to paint, I often felt I was sinking too. These colliding forces generated intense energy.
Arriving at my studio late in the day, short on energy, I could launch into this work with little physical preparation, though the very nature of black paint on raw canvas required intense mental preparation. One wrong move would require staring over with a new canvas. The large gestures kept me from falling asleep. I also made many small brush and ink drawings, one of which lead me to create the next major series after Boatman, the Meeting Series. The brush and ink drawings I drew while still in college, made this manner of working feel familiar. The college era brush & ink drawings were abstract. While suggesting landscape, they had no narrative imagery. These paintings started with that approach, and at first had an all over pattern suggestive of vegetation. Then, a few paintings with a man and a woman emerged, perhaps a reference to Adam and Eve, but, at the same time, a celebration of marriage and of our family. Then, the image of the man boat appeared in a boat, surrounded by the accumulations of his lifetime.
Piling things up seemed an intuitive approach, not something I gave much thought to at the time. Evidence for this is visible in early lithographs like Salad, Crane Mountain, Ether Ore and March. But here, the objects were more personal than universal. They were mine, not the castoffs of all mankind. Even so, they symbolize the cargo we have to deal with as individuals and collectively.
Before Bill left for the day, we questioned whether Boatman was trying to escape with all his possessions, leaving behind an untenable situation – rising waters, failing light, storms? Or had he set out for greener pastures and misjudged the dangers of the voyage? We weren’t shooting the Boatman series in the order in which they had been painted, but, since they were sitting around the studio, leaning against walls and tables, we discussed the narrative created, when viewed in the order of creation: the origins of life, the appearance of human civilization, and the serious state of affairs we have brought upon ourselves.
I pointed out to Bill the bare head and raised arm protruding from the waters next to Boatman’s craft…a figure begging to be taken aboard. There is no room on board for another soul, nor does Boatman appear to have any desire to help anyone, preoccupied as he is with his own survival and that of his possessions. It isn’t clear that he is aware of the figure in the water.
I also drew Bill’s attention to some items in the load of freight, objects that had been in my studio 40 years ago. Some are in my current studio: the wooden flat files from Sargent & Lundy, the ladders, brushes, building maintenance and construction supplies, a watering can and a quart bottle of Pelican ink. I mentioned that in each subsequent painting, the gunwale is closer to the trough of the waves. Then, I hung a painting for Bill to shoot which, while still one of the series, was less complex. None of the possessions were visible, just the bow of the boat pointing skyward as Boatman, his head seen from behind, just above the waterline, raised his hand…perhaps to grab something by which to save himself or to wave goodbye to his life and his boat.
The subsequent paintings, “Troubled Waters” and “Flotsam and Jetsam,” bore no sign of Boatman, just a few of his things floating in the dark sea. The next painting of the group, “Clear Sky,” suggested, at least to me, clearing of the skies, the flight of birds, and an after the flood moment. Finally, to end the sequence, three paintings filled with organic growth, similar to the paintings at the start of the series, like Spring Green, concluded the Boatman Series.
Bill and I are done with the day’s photography session. I tell Bill that, while I’ve resisted writing about my work for 50 years, talking about these paintings with him makes me feel I can also write about them, as long as I imagine I’m talking to him!
Bill: There’s no need to write about your work. It speaks well enough for itself!