Walking Beside Gramercy Park
Self Portrait (from memory),
walking beside Grammercy Park
with back pack and paint box.
1965 (Greenwich Village Period)
Cold November back in 1965, still pretty close to the middle of the twentieth century. Walking home with paint box in hand, back pack (which wasn't in vogue those days) and a military-style fatigue cap. Since the days of the assassination of John F. Kennedy, men just stopped wearing hats. Up until JFK went around bare-headed, the style dictated, right up to the '50's that men wore hats. Usually cheese cutters and snap-brims were the options. But that stopped abruptly in the sixties, putting major hating industries out of business.
And the back pack! Boy, was that an unpopular thing to do. People would ask if I was going camping. They associated backpacks with boy scouts and in my case they were right. I'm an eagle scout. It stays with you for life. The two most valuable things I had with me on the road, and it was a long and tough one, were my army training and my boy scout training. Serious. Be prepared. Three fingers.
Hear the one about the guy who cloned himself so he could be pre-paired? Yuck, Yuck!
The park was on the way, the shortest way between Twenty-third and Third and Bedford Street two blocks East of Seventh. One night in the studio apartment I remembered the park and did this brush and ink painting on paper from memory. The painting acquired the red while jammed with other stuff in a portfolio or something and as you see, the paper has deteriorated with age so part of the park in the background has vanished with the paper that crumbled away through time.
But it's important to remember memory. We've got to keep remembering what memory can do for us. The trick is not to mind if it seems a bit primitive. Primitive is okay. Primitive will get you where artists fear to tread. Beyond the logic and confines of perfectionism and stereotypes of what "good" art should be. Now, there's a place for appropriate detail, sure. But you can't let perfectionism, dignity, or embarrassment prevent you from using those memories to come up with some really great and moving stuff.
I'm scolding myself, here. We all, as artists, or at least most of us, spend too long balking at good potential within us because we lack sufficient visual references. The difference between an object or scene before us, or a photograph, and a memory of such or a conglomerate of memories, is freshness and life. I think that's what made Mark Chagall so great. He certainly used memory quite a bit. People loved it. Also he has a way with gentle but vivid pastel-shades of color.
Maybe someone could use the feedback page to help encourage me on this one. By now with all my travels, I've got an incredible treasure-trove of memories. Incredible scenes. Extreme situations. I had a good friend once, a fellow artist, Jake, who had a photographic memory. He could see a face and days later draw an incredible likeness of it. That's a terrific ability and I know Jake must have gone far with it. I lost track of him when I took off for Paris where the busking (street singing) was good. But you see, we tend to subconsciously jump to the conclusion that it's only these guys that have the mandate to use memory.
There was a painting I was working on in Venezuela, in my hotel room I visualized in my mind's eye an incredible scene of a nude bather in a stupendous gallery of vaulting lapis lazuli, a gorgeous blue crystalline stone, which is actually semi precious. The natural ceiling of this vaulted cavernous chamber with lake must have been hundreds of feet high, yet in the painting, I subconsciously reverted to a memory of the Staten Island Ferry coming into Manhattan -- the skyline, the huge pilings to cushion the boat into it's moorings, it's all there, but as enormous crystals of blue lapis.
"Visions of the Forest of Blue Lapis", Caracas, Venezuela, June of 1987. Acrylic on canvas.
The combination of the visionary, the memorial and the actual can often give us some magnificent, or at least moving, results in our artwork. Give it a try. I always say, "Two's company, three's a tri." Be prepared.
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