Arts and Crafts and Grandma

My parents called me up to a spare bedroom.  They were rummaging around, trying to find things, and figured it would be a good time for me to take whatever few items I had left there.  They opened a blanket chest and pulled out a shank of braided, auburn hair (almost honey colored), wrapped in a plastic bag.  "This was your grandmother's hair.  Do you want it?"  It took me a moment, but I said no.  

I knew my grandmother had been a model, which was not your average grandmother's calling.  She also had some pretensions to artistic endeavor and these pretensions expressed themselves in little crafts projects.  I offer two of them below:

This is a print which Grandma took the liberty of very lightly coloring in (so lightly that the camera couldn't pick it up).  She then signed it in a larger signature than the actual artist's, whose signature appears almost directly above hers nearer the neckline of the cowl.  It measures approximately 7.5" w x 9.5"h.

 

This is a vase which Grandma painted by hand.  It measures 5"d x 4"h.  As you can see in the full sized version (just click on it), the paint has worn away on a few of the outer buds, which I think is due to Grandma using paint that was too watered down.

 Why I like these pieces:

These are remembrances more than art, but I included them here because I think that they are exactly how art is in its simpler forms.  All art partakes of craft, but not all craft is art.  In the first example, my grandmother wouldn't endeavor to draw a young girl, but she would "gild the lily" and add color to improve, in her eyes, a worthy effort.  Art always competes with people's expectations of what art is.

The vase is my grandmother's and hers alone.  She perhaps copied the flower theme from some other item or work that she knew, but she knew how to mix the colors on the brush to obtain the desired effect.  I remember this vase placed on a bracket on the wall in her kitchen, holding a philodendron.  

What these pieces remind me of:

Of course, they remind me of my childhood.  My grandparents had a very nice 3 bedroom house with a good piece of land behind it.  Among all her other interests, gardening was my grandmother's passion, and she had fairly elaborate plantings, leading on a garden path down to a terrace which held a fireplace for grilling.  Further on were two trees where a hammock was usually hung in the summer.  Not bad for a suburban setting which today is very developed.

My grandmother was a stickler for good behavior.  There was to be no running or screaming or general roughhousing.  Speak only when spoken to, and always say "please" and "thank you."  This was quite different from my maternal grandparents, where kids were generally expected to be kids, which meant a little noise and/or conflict was par for the course. Each set of grandparents spoiled us in their own way.

 

A friend and an artist

John Lesnick was a close friend of mine.  We met felicitously in front of the loft building in Chelsea where I was visiting an ex-boyfriend at the time and where John lived.  I remember that he had just bought groceries and we greeted each other with the brown paper bag he was clutching acting as an annoying barrier between us.  We were immediately attracted to one another and had a brief affair which turned into a  lasting and deep friendship.  I was privileged to know him for the remainder of his life, through all of its ups and downs. He is in the collection at the Museum of Modern Art,  Visual AIDS, and most of his art is now housed by the Leslie-Lohman Gay Art Foundation.

I bought this piece of art from him not too long after it was produced:

 

It is part of a series of full-figure male portraits that he did in a large format print.  This particular print (not titled) is number 7 of 10, is signed by John, and dated 1984.  These prints were produced at the Lower East Side Print Shop.  This organization became John's second home during the early '80s.  He was very productive at the time, but unfortunately not successful commercially as an artist.  

John discovered that he was HIV+ during this time, but he continued to work and travel and enjoy life as fully as possible.  He became an AIDS activist and was a case study in the advances in AIDS-related medicine during the '90s. I purchased one or two more pieces, and he gave me a couple of other pieces of his work as gifts.  When he passed away, I was able to complete this work:

 

As you can see it is quite large and fills one wall of the foyer to my apartment. (Apologies for the poor photography and the glare in both these photos.)  Each framed quarter measures 35.25"h x 43.5"w, so the full work is 70.5"w x 87" high.  It is number 7 of 12, signed and dated 1984.

Why I like this piece:

This piece puts me into a sort of meditative trance.  The pose of the swimmer's right hand appears to me as if it were a gesture of benevolence, but I can't quite figure out why that is.  I bought the original upper right quadrant because it stands as a piece on its own.  The reason it does that is because it encompasses that enigmatic gesture.

As a whole, the work partakes of photography and, to my mind, theater.  It is a set piece for some unwritten play, and it represents an aspect of one of the characters, perhaps the villain, that is decidedly unexpected.  I can imagine this portrait coming to the fore of the stage in the last act to symbolize the villain's attempt at redemption.  ("Angels in America" anyone?)

What this piece reminds me of:

This piece reminds me of loss and of peace with that loss.  John led a very full life, had many friends, and not too many enemies.  He was respected and loved.  John was the closest experience I could imagine of knowing Lazarus.  He very nearly died prior to the advent of protease inhibitors for the treatment of HIV.  When he came back to life, he lived as fully and as creatively without (too much) complaint that he had nearly been robbed of this second chance.  

The longer I live with this work, the more I appreciate it.  It is a comfort.  There is much more of John's work to show, and each will remind me of some other aspect of life during those times.  

Terry's Art: Another Inheritance

Terry was a very visual person and had aspirations of an art career in New York.  It did not quite work out that way; he was very good at the software design he did for Intel.  He did produce some interesting work.  The four pieces here are, as far as I know, the only print project that he completed, and I believe it may have been done before he arrived in New York.

He also produced a series of photos of himself in drag which tell the story of a lonely woman's day and her ruminations on life.  That may come in a later post, but is rather heavy on the imagery and will take some time to organize. I apologize again for the quality of the photography; it doesn't quite capture the colors of these prints.

Terry created these four prints as a group:

 

 

 

 

The images are very saturated in color.  Each image measures 17"h x 14"w.  Each print is signed, not dated, and they are labeled in the artist's handwriting as Artist's Proof with a number for each copy and the number of proofs for the edition.

Why I like this piece:

These are idealized male torsos, and represent a type of art created by gay males during the post-Stonewall era to express their love of the male body.  The suppression of such images prior to the early 60s created a generation of artists to whom the image of the male body was the highest expression of their artistic skills.  Without a long-winded discourse on how the male of the human species, regardless of sexual orientation, became such a visual creature it is clear that the latter part of the 20th century may be remembered best for its mini-renaissance of male beauty.  From the physique photography of the '50s through the Abercrombie & Fitch catalogues stretching into the early 21st century, there was never quite so much attention paid to the male and all the variations on the ideal of that human form.

On another level, because of the colors in play on these prints, they relate rather well to the Floc'h and Riviere work in this previous post.  They partake of the same simple background, with a single subject in each frame. 

What this piece reminds me of: 

Although this series of prints reminds me of the time I spent with Terry, one aspect that he spoke of nearly came true, but in a weird way.  These prints have traveled with me to several different abodes.  When I settled in my current apartment, I became familiar with a neighbor whose profession was that of a lead glass window designer.  One of Terry's ambitions for these prints was to have them transposed into leaded glass.

I hadn't thought of that for years before meeting this neighbor.  I told her I had something she might consider for a subject, but her face fell when she saw these prints.  I don't think she was quite ready to approach the subject matter objectively.   

Update: Artist Located!

I was going through my collection of business cards and discovered that I had one from Yvonne Gayle Butler, whose work you saw in this post.  I took a chance and called the number.  The person who answered took a message and I soon received a return call from her daughter.  After I explained the purpose of my call, I was told that Yvonne would be in touch.  About 2 hours later I was talking to her in Paris!


Yvonne has since dropped the "Butler" to become Yvonne Gayle.  She is living primarily in Paris, though she visits New York frequently.  She has been exhibiting in Paris galleries recently.  As soon as we have established an email correspondence and she has a chance to check out the blog, I'm sure it will be interesting to follow her career and see how she is doing.

A "Family" Inheritance

This piece was one of the few things I inherited from a family member.  It is an abstract work which is a portrait of the person who ultimately passed it into my hands.  His name was Fred, and he was the person who introduced me to New York city, and not just to NYC, but to gay life in NYC.  

This work was done by Fred's boyfriend from the 1960's, Richard Passantino, who changed his name at some point to Richard Santino.  Richard went on to become the lover of Richard Poirier, a noted literary critic.  Mr. Poirier acknowledged Richard Santino as his lover, and as the creator of the collage for the front cover of his book "Robert Frost: The Work of Knowing" which remains a valuable reference on Frost's work. (A scan of the cover is included after the jump at the end of this post.) This book was assigned to us in a class taught by Joseph Brodsky at Columbia when I was a poetry student there.  I did not take the time to read the introduction of the book back then, so I had no clue of the connection until researching this post, but it goes to show what a small world this is.

The work is entitled "Mon Homme," and is a serigraph, signed and dated by the artist.  It measures 11.5" x 15.5" and is in the original frame.  It consists of an arrangement of mainly abstract cubes with the figure of a man seeming to recline on those forms.  There is a patterned background, and the overall colors are blue and yellow.   

Why I like this piece: 

I can verify that, as a person, Fred was composed of these colors.  He had very blue eyes, and his wardrobe almost always included a splash of yellow with the blue he used to set off his eyes. This piece is fairly simple in its composition.  I do not generally favor abstraction, but this clearly comes to us from the 50s and 60s when abstraction was more the norm.  But because of it's simplicity, the piece seems to have no grand aspirations other than an artist trying to capture the personality of, and his own feelings about, the man he loved.

What this piece reminds me of: 

This piece is my "madeleine" of the first few years in New York.  I moved to the city to attend graduate school at Columbia.  When I first moved here in January of 1978 it was merely with the intention to attend school.  The city held no fears for me, or attractions other than I knew that movies always opened here before they were shown in the rest of the country, and there were quite a few that appeared and never were shown to the rest of the country.  But the main thing was that, other than getting an education, I had no expectations of the city.  

One of the lifelines that I had in this endeavor was my father's cousin, Fred.  He taught English as a second language at New York University, and was well-known among ESL teachers for having produced a series of useful text books for the college level. My father put us in contact, and Fred put me up for the first weekend I visited Columbia to complete the registration process.  A week or two later, I moved into a Columbia University dorm for grad students.  

Fred introduced me to the subway system, pointed out some of the architectural wonders, and generally acted as a tour guide for those first few months.  He was a very good guide, having lived in NY for most of his life.  His apartment was in the Washington Square Towers, just south of Washington Square Park.  Early in the summer of that first year, he asked me to take care of his apartment while he was away on vacation in Puerto Rico.  It was a great opportunity to get a break from the dorm.  

I had an off-again, on-again girlfriend in medical school at the time, but our relationship had strained due to the long-distance aspect of the affair, as she was attending school in Philadelphia.  When I stayed in Fred's apartment, I had already decided that I wanted to explore the Village.  Christopher Street seemed a natural place to start.  It was already famous as a gay mecca, but I was more innocent than I knew.  That first evening, I could not believe what I saw and felt as I walked down that street.  Men were looking at me openly, very opposite to the furtive way I had always looked at men.  It took me three passes before I finally got up the courage to walk into a bar at the end of the street.  That night I took a man home for the first time in my life.

When Fred returned from his trip, he noticed the change in me.  As we were walking by Sheridan Sq. one evening not long after his return, he asked if I had anything I wanted to tell him.  I came out to him, and he came out to me.  "Now," he said, "you can meet all of my friends."  And I did, and it was one of the best coming out experiences that could be imagined. 

Fred was one of the best people to know if you were a young man coming out of the closet.  He had been involved with the Mattachine Society in the early 60s.  He regaled me with tales of how secretive gay bars and gay society was when he first came out.  He talked about the codes and signals that gay men used to identify each other in social situations, and how careful it was necessary to be at work.  He told me of his love for NYC; how it provided a gay man a real life.  He talked about his flirtations with students and with how he and his friends had come to know and love one another. 

That was Fred; one of the most generous men I've ever met.  I still use the stainless flatware that he gave me when I had to move out of the dorm.  He nursed and nurtured me through the usual heartbreaks and fears of becoming an out gay man.  

Fred too was taken by HIV.  He became ill on a visit to his beloved Puerto Rico.  During our last phone conversation, he spoke from his hospital bed.  I was in the process of losing two other friends and couldn't bring myself to tell him of these other catastrophes.  So while I kept the conversation light and topical, he pronounced me as being a very boring person.  

As was so often the case, when Fred passed away his "family" swept in to remove all the evidence, as if the family he had created in New York was of no account.  (Yes, I deem the quotes to be correctly applied.)  They did have the good grace to ask me if there was anything in particular I wanted.  His portrait was the first thing that came to mind. 

You can see the cover of "Robert Frost" by Richard Santino after the break.

Art, and Betrayal and Friendship

This piece of art was obtained in a roundabout way.  It is not a particularly happy tale, but it is about how art can twist things, even relations among best of friends.  This piece was first spied in the front window of Peter Spielhagen's antique store in the West Village.  I saw it out of the corner of my eye and stopped short.  My boyfriend at the time, Terry, went a few steps beyond before noticing that I was no longer at his side.  He hated when I did that.


I pointed to the painting in the window and said how much I liked it.  We went in and asked as to the price, and of course I didn't buy it on the spot. Again, I had to somehow justify the purchase.  I didn't think the piece would sell very quickly in any case, but knew that I would be back to take another look.  When I did go back, about three days later, the piece had been sold.  I won't say that I was heartbroken, but I did feel as if I had lost one of the best things I had seen in awhile.

This work portrays a boy grasping tree branches to climb out of a lake or pond, and glancing back for friends or just to check his progress above the water.  (Other observers may insist that the swimmer is checking to place his next step down into the lake.  I don't agree.) The piece is dated 1969 and signed by the artist, Robert Kalthoff, a winner of the Sargent Medal.  It measures approximately 14.5"w x 9"h.

Why I like this piece:  

There is a certain calm aura to this work.  At first it was a mystery to me why the artist chose to portray the swimmer leaving the pond with his face turned away.  But I realize that although the subject is approaching the viewer, and the sense of movement out of the water is palpable, the subject's backward glance creates a tension between time progressing and regressing.  The piece therefore has a heightened sense of the suspension of time which translates well to the viewer.  

Time can only "regress" in our minds, our memories.  We can't stop the cycles and flows of time around us.  But the artist has created a scene that partakes of stopping time in its simplest elements.  This is quite different than taking a snapshot and saying that time has been stopped.  The piece communicates its central message without any extraneous narrative; it shows a moment, at a shore, when a boy is climbing out of the water.

Many of my friends have expressed their wish to have this work when I'm "finished" with it.  It has pride of place whether it hangs solo on a wall or is grouped with other work; it always takes center stage. 

What this piece reminds me of: 

The first encounter with this work was in late 1983.  By the summer of 1984 I had mostly forgotten about it, but one evening while visiting Terry, my now ex-boyfriend, it did come up in conversation.  Terry said he had something to confess, went over to a closet, and pulled the art work out.  He said that he had intended to give it to me for a birthday present, but then decided to keep it for himself. 

Now, Terry and I were still very close friends.  He was a software engineer for Intel, and had a very strong artistic bent as well.  You will see his work in a later post.  Unfortunately, Terry was beginning to have symptoms of HIV-related illnesses in 1984.  Although our sexual relations had ended, his illnesses, and the friendships I had gained through knowing him, kept us close. 

When he pulled this out of his closet, and explained himself, I could barely contain my anger.  I was flabbergasted, and came very close to ending our friendship right there.  Of course, there were a few weeks during which our contact was minimal.  I was trying to process how he could do that, how he could hide from me something which he knew was important to me.  I went through all that and decided he was more important than what he had done with the art.  

Terry passed away in early 1985.  His parents were very supportive, both of Terry and of the group of friends who had taken care of him prior to their arrival.  Terry had admitted to them the gravity of his illness in late 1984.  They did not challenge the estate, and so his possessions were divided equally among those named in the will.  Everyone knew the story of the picture.

Cut to about a decade later.  I had a new partner, Dan, and we were working on putting together a country house on the Delaware.  Milford, PA was becoming a destination town for people looking for reasonable country homes.  Much of the town was being renovated.  One prominent new resident was Sean Strub, who had purchased an old hotel.  Diagonally across the street from that hotel was the old Pennsylvania School of Forestry, a building dating from the late 1800s.  It had been renovated to house several antique vendors.  One of those vendors was Peter Spielhagen.  He and his partner's business now occupies a majority of the building.

On a visit there over ten years ago, I noticed canvases that were eerily reminiscent of the "Swimmer."  Mr. Spielhagen confirmed that it was the same artist.  So a piece of art that already had a decidedly strange history in my life took another turn.  I discovered that there was a living artist with an important career behind it. Peter Spielhagen gracefully reminded  me of the artist's name in a recent email. 

An artful vase

This is not a "visual" piece of art, but it is very visual.  This vase, entitled "Various Worlds, Various Ladders #1" was created early in the career of the ceramics artist Edward S. Eberle. This vase is not very representative of his work in that it is a very traditional template for vases.  Works he has created after this have gone in un-traditional forms, mostly representational of people and places. 

This was purchased at a store that used to be on 2nd Avenue, near 4th St. called Civilization.  It was a gift and housewares store, and unusual at the time because the Lower East Side had not yet gentrified up to the level of some of the items this store carried. 

 

 

The piece has a matte black glaze which has been extensively etched by the artist.  Each world, represented by the circles, is separated by a ladder border.  There are top and bottom borders of what I will call filigree. The bottom border serves to ground the whole piece, using hemispheres that relate to the world contained in the quadrant above it. Overall the piece is very harmonious, with all of the elements of the etching fitting together very well in a theme.

Why I like this piece:  

In my naivete, I thought that I had figured out the piece immediately upon my first encounter with it.  The four worlds were not "worlds" in my mind, but simply the four phases of the moon.  The first world (top photo) looks very much like the man in the moon to me, and the third world is a blank spiral, so that was the new moon. 

It has something more to say than just being a vase, and that was the clincher when I bought it.  It was enigmatic, (particularly after I bothered to check the bottom of the vase and found the title for it), and it was decorative in a thoughtful way.  The vase could be turned to present any one of the four different worlds.  The balance among them was always maintained by the ladder borders.  Although the etching is of a piece, it still seems as free as a doodle on paper.

All that being said, it is a piece I would be willing to part with.  In a way, it has become a responsibility that I no longer wish to carry.  After 25 years of ownership the vase has accumulated in value perhaps, but it is  not something I appreciate every day in the way I do the artwork on the walls.  I don't use it for flowers or for any other utilitarian purpose.   

What this piece reminds me of:

I am reminded of what the Lower East Side became during those few short years that were the decade of the 80s.  By the 1990s, there had already been the semi-riots around the development of Tompkins Square Park, the removal of Wigstock to larger venues, and the construction of New York University housing everywhere.  I was a witness to the evolution of the Lower East Side from being a frontier where a friend at the time was mugged for almost every month of the four months he lived on Avenue C before leaving the city in terror  into a territory of high-end bars and restaurants living off the fumes of CBGB's.  

It was a gay neighborhood by default because it was so cheap to live there and the Club Baths were still open on First Avenue.  Quentin Crisp was occasionally glimpsed in the area. There was off-off-Broadway, off-off-price designer duds, and away-from-Soho galleries.  While this piece doesn't trade in any of the grime and grit of that era, it does show what gems can be found amongst the dreck.  

I realize that sounds like I didn't consider the Lower East Side livable until it cleaned up its act, but in fact I started many weekend nights by heading there first.  It is where young smart people congregated and met and hung out.  I never lived there, already ensconced in the much grittier Hell's Kitchen, but what I'm  trying to express is that something is lost when the frictions created by old and the new are homogenized into, for instance, what is now Times Square.