I notice that many people are blogging about the Wall Street protests. The media is certainly playing up the movement with stories on the evening news night after night. I find it interesting for a reason completely unrelated to Wall Street or big bank bailouts; before boxing up my art supplies I created a massive painting I called The Protest.
I’d been working on a difficult assignment to create sixty small but complex illustrations for a client. To shed the confines of working small I decided to create a massive composition unlike anything I’d done before, not an illustration but a huge work of art. The painting was approximately fifteen feet wide and twelve feet tall. I ordered the exceptionally large bolt of canvas from a supplier in New York, emptied our savings account to afford paints and brushes, and labored for two years to make my vision a reality.
I’ve always been drawn to painting people and I wanted to create something that allowed me to depict as many human expressions as possible. Since scale and perspective would be involved, I resolved to paint a group of characters on the steps of a building so the figures in the foreground wouldn’t block those behind them. I came up with the idea of a “protest.”
In the finished painting, a mob of people come together on the steps of a bank-like building. The media is present, along with the police. A bag lady happens onto the scene but isn’t really participating in what’s going on. The fellow at the center of the composition looks slightly like my dad. He also resembles the man in Norman Rockwell’s famous Freedom of Speech. I could go on and on about the details that consumed me while creating this painting, but the question most people asked when they saw it was, “What are these people protesting?”
At the time (this was painted eleven years ago) I decided it would be clever to not reveal the subject of the protest. The banner behind the main character doesn’t offer a clue. My intention was to let the viewers participate in this imaginary event by deciding for themselves what this protest was all about. I’m not certain this was such a good idea because many people have found this painting confusing.
Which brings me back to the Wall Street protests. The movement confuses me, much as my painting confused many who have looked at it. I want to know precisely what is going on. I want to understand how people hanging out in parks thousands of miles from Wall Street can affect the greed of corporate banks. I want the same information I denied those gazing at the last painting I ever created.
When I finished The Protest I didn’t have a clue what to do with it. The rooms of our modest house were too small to accommodate it. Galleries weren’t interested. Hoping there was a big empty wall somewhere in the city where my picture could be displayed, I phoned our city’s public arts commissioner, a gruff old woman named Margaret Zorn. Ms. Zorn agreed to visit my studio to check out my painting.
She was shriveled with age, bent, and wore a bright red wig, and in her voice I could hear every cigarette she’d ever smoked. Although the painting covered an entire wall she rasped, “So where’s the painting?”
I pointed to it.
She pulled a cigarette from her purse, lit it and studied my painting, a picture that, at the time, I felt to be my masterpiece. I waited patiently, watching ash from her cigarette fall to my paint-stained floor as she frowned at my painting. Finally she said, “Nope. Can’t hang this in a public building.”
Trying to conceal my disappointment I asked, “Why not?”
“It isn’t suitable,” she said. “It’s too busy. And the subject matter is disturbing. Many city employees are disturbed enough already and we don’t want to hang anything that will make them want to “off” themselves. You got anything quieter? Maybe in nice pastel colors.”
“No,” I said.
“Too bad.” Before heading for the door she said, “So tell me, what are all those people in your painting so upset about?”
I don’t know where the words came from, maybe the despair I felt about finding a home for my ridiculously big painting, or the regret I felt for wasting two years of my life creating a picture no one wanted, but I blurted out, “They feel hopeless.”
Eleven years have passed since my meeting with Ms. Zorn. Today I don’t need to ask myself: what are all those people in our parks and urban centers so upset about? I know the answer.
They feel hopeless.
The Protest never did find a home. I removed the canvas from its stretcher bars, rolled it up and stored it in our garage. Years have passed since I’ve seen it. Maybe the time has come for me to brush off the dust and prepare my painting to once more see the light of day.
I’m the tallest man I know, but only when I sit down. I’m 5’8” when standing—the height of the average American thanks to Hispanics and Asians—but seated around a dining room table I tower over everyone. I know what you’re thinking: You must have an ass as big as a Rose Parade float, but I don’t. Well, maybe the size of those carts that scoop up the horse poop. The problem is my legs. They’re too short, not Toulouse Lautrec short, but Boys Department short.
Someone seated behind me in a theater once whispered to their companion, “Why do I always end up seated behind someone tall?”
Before sitting down I’d purchased a drink the size of the Statue of Liberty’s torch. I had to pee like a stallion halfway through the movie but I stayed in my seat until the credits rolled and they left. I didn’t want to disappoint them.
Back when I was a teenager and realized I probably wasn’t going to grow much taller, I asked my mother why my legs were so short. She said, “You have the legs of a doryman.”
“What does that mean?” I asked.
“Your ancestors were fishermen and Whalers in the Azores. They spent a great deal of time in small boats rocking about on the waves. People with short legs are more surefooted, less likely to fall out of a lurching boat.”
This from a woman who didn’t believe in Darwin or natural selection, and thought cave men rode around on brontosauruses like the Flintstones. Like many of her answers, this one was off-putting: I had no intention of becoming a fisherman. I’m not fond of fish, I get seasick and now I feel responsible for harpooned whales. So I’m stuck with the legs of a doryman, far far from the sea.
But short legs are the least of my problems. Once I was 5’8.5” tall. My doc recently told me that I’ve lost half an inch over the last five years. I’m not good at math but I’m willing to bet a mathematical formula exists that can determine when I’ll disappear completely. But I doubt I’ll be worrying about it for long. Although I pride myself on learning something new every day, at my age I forget two things daily. I don’t need to know much about math to realize it’s only a matter of time until my brain is a clean slate.
Is nature toying with you? Are you shrinking or falling apart? Let us know about it. You’ll feel better.
Now that Halloween has come and gone I can’t help but reflect on how inventive and imaginative people are out there in the Blogosphere. Such talent and creativity! It makes me think back to the time I decided to become an artist.
I grew up seeing red.
When I was a kid my parents bought a painting of a bull fight. During my formative years it hung in our living room. The picture was hardly unique; over the years I’ve seen hundreds of similar pictures, most worse than this one, but I grew up staring at that matador swirling his red cape in front of a charging bull.
Few homes on our street had original artwork, and this was the first real painting I’d seen. Even as a kid I didn’t think much of it; the matador didn’t look like a living breathing person, and the bull wasn’t quite right. But there was a single stroke of magic in the picture.
While the artist was painting the red cape, he wiped his loaded brush on the side of the black bull. A simple stroke of paint, but the effect was miraculous. From the far side of our living room that stroke of red paint looked like hot shiny bull sweat picking up the red reflection of the cape. Mesmerized, I would climb up on the couch beneath the painting and press my nose to the picture—and see only red and black paint.
No magic.
I wanted to pinpoint the moment my eye worked this miracle, the moment that single stroke of red paint transformed into hot, wet bull sweat. I’d jump off the couch and take a step back. No transformation. Another step—nothing. Back a little more and…there it was—the magic. For a while I did this daily until it scared the bejeezus out of my mother.
“What do you think you’re doing?” she asked one day when I was perched on the back of the couch with my nose pressed to the canvas.
I didn’t feel capable of explaining that I was trying to pinpoint an optical phenomenon, so I said, “I’ve decided to be a painter when I grow up.”
She looked relieved. “Thank God! You had me worried for a minute.”
“I did? Why?”
“I was worried you were going to tell me you wanted to be a matador!”
What did you want to be when you grew up?
