J.T. Kirkland, Woven, 2005, aromatic cedar, 9.25x13.25x1.5 inches
Today my wife Dawn and I helped in the early stages of hanging the Blogger Show at Agni Gallery. We got the kids off to school and drove through Manhattan over to Brooklyn to Stephanie's place, carried about forty boxes down from her fourth-floor apartment, loaded them into our minivan and her SUV, then carted it all back to Manhattan to the gallery. During this trip I learned that a) I should always, always, always bring clear directions, even if I've been there more than once before and think I know where I'm going, because driving aimlessly around Red Hook (the completely incorrect area of Brooklyn) while thinking I know where I am isn't a good use of time; and b) that E. Houston Street splits to become Houston Street and E. 2nd Street, which, amazingly enough, was exactly where we needed to be. As a lifelong resident of New York City and environs you'd think I'd know this already, but I'm pretty much entirely ignorant below 14th Street until you get to the Staten Island Ferry.
At the gallery we were met by John Morris and Agni Zotis, John being the driving force behind the show and Agni being kind enough to loan us her space for it. Agni finished moving her stuff around while we unloaded everything.
We were worried that, considering this is a small works show, the boxes seemed awfully big. We hoped they were simply over-packed, which mostly they were. After we'd cleared away some space we began taking boxes apart.
"It's like Christmas!" Stephanie enthused, although it was only like Christmas if instead of really cool toys when you opened your gifts you got incomprehensible, obtuse objects. Which, come to think of it, is just like my Christmas in those years when no one could figure out what to get me.
Lucky for us only one artwork arrived with slivers of glass in the box. Note to any artist sending framed works through the mail: Use Plexiglas. The artwork wasn't harmed but figuring out what to do with the glass pieces was entertaining, since the gallery doesn't have much of a trash can. (I ended up taking them home with me.)
While we were unpacking, Libby Rosof and Roberta Fallon arrived to deliver their pieces. Shortly after that some guy started filming us from outside the door, then came in to greetings from John. The cameraman turned out to be James Kalm. With the camera rolling he asked me and Stephanie for a quote regarding Charlie Finch, which we gave; James found our statements unexciting and noninflammatory, which seemed to disappoint him, but he stayed to help unpack boxes and reframe the work from the glass debacle while he told us many, many times that he'd been at this for 25 years.
While unpacking I found out something curious. I didn't check the names on the boxes before I began, but every time I was impressed with a good packing job, the piece turned out to be from someone I knew, liked, and respected. Every time the packing job was bizarre, confusing, or just covered with a ton of pointless tape, I had no idea who the artist was -- I hadn't met them, don't read their blog, have no contact with them. So for example I opened this one box from which the painting slid effortlessly and flawlessly, and I exclaimed, "Now this is some great packing!" only to find, as I removed the bubble wrap, that it was from Nancy Baker.
And now to let you in on a little secret. The absolute best part of helping to hang an art show:
YOU GET TO TOUCH THE ART.
This is so awesome I can't even express it. Dawn had laid a box on the table and called to me, "Hey, isn't this some guy you know?"
"Who is it?"
"J.T. somebody."
"J.T.!"
J.T. Kirkland, Woven, 2005, aromatic cedar, 9.25x13.25x1.5 inches
"I'm holding a J.T. Kirkland piece," I said, amazed. I brought it close to my nose to smell it. Aromatic cedar. "Smell this." I held it out to Stephanie.
She closed her eyes and leaned forward to take a large breath. "Reminds me of my gerbil," she said dreamily.
I held it out to Dawn. "Smell this."
"No."
"Come on, smell it."
"No!"
"Smell it!"
"NO!"
"Smell it?"
"Fine," she surrendered, and gave it a perfunctory sniff.
Dawn, as she never tires of telling me, is not an art person.
"I smelled a Pollock once," added James.
"That sounds cool. What'd it smell like?"
"Musty."
A little while later I was opening another well-packed box, following the directions carefully written on the sides, and as I removed the painting from its protective wrapping I saw...it was Tracy Helgeson's. The very first painting I'd ever seen by her -- I'd only seen JPEGs before. And here I was holding it in my hands.
Tracy Helgeson, Out in Front, 2007, oil on panel, 16x20 inches
And I got to hold it. Move it around. Bring it close and then hold it away. What a privilege! What a rare gift!
Nancy Baker, Backstroke, 2007, oil on wood panel, 15x25 inches
Steven LaRose, 09/24/07 a, 2007, vinyl acrylic on wood panel
Once we had everything out, we began to lay them out leaning against the walls, whereupon Stephanie began to work her magic, which mostly seemed to involve pacing back and forth and muttering. Dawn and I found we had nothing much to do while John kept up a steady patter of what can only be described as Johnspeak, seemingly random musings between long stretches of almost inaudible humming. Stephanie finally began putting things on the wall in a preliminary way and John and I applied ourselves to figuring out how to mount some of the pieces; most notably two unframed works on paper. Ordinarily these kinds of things are pinned to the wall -- one even had pinholes in it -- but the walls of this gallery are made of some rock-hard plaster into which pins cannot be pushed. Our final solution -- which John suggested -- was to drill 1/16-inch holes and put archival cloth tape over them, then pin through the tape. This seemed to work very well, although I had to operate the drill (which was mine) because apparently John is under orders from Susan Constanse not to touch power tools.
Everything seemed well under control when Dawn and I left -- kids, you know, they get out of school eventually. I'm expecting the opening on Saturday night to be a lot of fun.
Labels: J.T. Kirkland, James Kalm, John Morris, Nancy Baker, Steve LaRose, Susan Constanse, the Blogger Show, Tracy Helgeson
——– COMMENT-AUTHOR:
Steven LaRose
COMMENT-DATE:11/02/2007 02:17:00 AM
COMMENT-BODY:I just swiped your post. Thanks. Have fun.
——–
COMMENT-AUTHOR:
COMMENT-DATE:11/02/2007 09:51:00 AM
COMMENT-BODY:NIce post, I can hardly wait to see the show. Sounds like one in the "best of year" category. The few included images were enough to sell me a dream.
——–
COMMENT-AUTHOR: k
COMMENT-DATE:11/04/2007 01:19:00 AM
COMMENT-BODY:Chris, what a fabuous post. Thank you. I was wondering, SO much, and certainly didn't want to disturb Pretty Lady during this time. Ya know. Tugging on her sleeve... Jayne Rose
COMMENT-DATE:11/06/2007 09:00:00 AM
COMMENT-BODY:Just jumped to your blog from Tracy Helgeson's blog. Chris Rywalt
COMMENT-DATE:11/07/2007 03:07:00 PM
COMMENT-BODY:Thanks everyone. Jayne especially.
——–
COMMENT-AUTHOR: The Aardvark
COMMENT-DATE:11/26/2007 09:43:00 AM
COMMENT-BODY:Good post, Chris.I've met more people over the last year than I have since freshman year at college. I've relearned that some people stick and some don't; it always mystifies me that relationships appear out of nowhere with some people and with others nothing materializes. It's tempting to assume that the people who don't stick are jerks or dopes or mopes or losers; or that I'm a jerk or dope or mope or loser who can only attract similar. Generally I assume those who befriend me are into charity cases, or are maybe too polite to tell me to go away.
Tracy Helgeson and Doug Miller are a couple who have so far stuck. I don't know what they see in me but I know what I like about them: They're intelligent, interesting, talented people who return my e-mail messages. The only problem with them is that they live so far north in New York State they're nearly in Canada. (Although most New Yorkers are pretty sure Canada starts just above Westchester, and anything north of Yonkers is "upstate." You can often find New Yorkers saying "She moved upstate" in much the same tone they'd use for "She passed away.")
Because Tracy and Doug live in Canada, I don't get to see them as often as I'd like. In fact I'd probably drop by a couple of times a week to pick up eggs from their chickens if they lived closer. But they don't, so when Tracy told me she was coming down for a weekend and wanted to take a hike through Chelsea looking at art, I signed on as the tour guide. Why anyone would need a tour guide to Chelsea is beyond me. And I don't know nearly enough about anything to act as a guide to anything, but Tracy asked, so I said yes.
We met bright and early on Friday, March 23, 2007, at about ten o'clock, on West 26th Street. I had made a list of galleries and people we could visit, including, of course, Ed Winkleman, Schroeder Romero, Valerie McKenzie, and Lyons Wier-Ortt -- all my favorite places. We started on 26th Street because not all of my favorite places -- in fact few galleries in general -- open at ten; most open, for some reason, at eleven. Lehmann Maupin is one of the earlier galleries, and that's where Tony Oursler was showing.
Tony's work for this show is in two parts: First there are some drawings and things arranged in grids; second are large brightly painted aluminum cut-outs in eye-catching splatter shapes. The drawings I barely glanced at, although Doug gave them a few more minutes. The drawings and ephemera arranged in arbitrary/non-arbitrary coded/meaningless grids is one of those forms for which I just have no patience.
I was really interested in the laser-cut aluminum. Each shape has a smaller section cut out of it with a looped video of a body part showing through the hole. A few had warped eyes going through various video color alterations -- solarization filter, ho! -- and at least one had a mouth. I was taken with the flat, intense colors and the wacky splooge shapes but could've done without the videos; they struck me as easy and uninteresting. Doug, being at least as much of a tech nerd as I am, studied the pieces from the side, where we could see the smaller ones appeared to be portable DVD players, while the larger ones were actual Apple laptops -- an expensive piece of hardware considering what it's doing. The whole group seemed neat but ultimately not mind-blowing.
The three of us walked along for bit when the Stephen Haller Gallery caught Tracy's eye: She saw some messy, chunky paintings, and she loves that stuff, so we went in and saw Ron Ehrlich's show. Ron's working in an Abstract Expressionist vein, I guess you'd say, with his all-over compositions and general sloppiness. Clement Greenberg'd probably go on about his shallow picture plane and so forth. I found it decorative in that intentionally non-decorative way some corporations have of decorating their offices. You can see where Ron turned his canvases over to work on them because the drips go down every which way; some pieces have intentional horizon lines; there are clear diagonals to set off the verticals and horizontals of the drips and canvas edges. I found it all kind of precious and calculated, although the more deeply colored canvases -- when Ron got into the reds, for example -- were more striking. Doug and Tracy both seemed to like these, though, oohing and ahhing over the textures of one or how the other one gave a sense of depth with its layers of paint. If Tracy likes a painting she wants to run her hands over it; she's very tactile like that.
Next Doug found a gallery I probably would never have seen; Tony Shafrazi is sort of upstairs and not very obvious to me. But Doug found it and so we saw David La Chappelle's Awakened.
When putting together a list of places to go with Tracy and Doug, I had avoided photography because I didn't think they'd be interested. And I was pretty sure I wouldn't be interested either. But I had sort of forgotten that Doug has a photography blog going and is actually very interested in fine art photography, so it was great that he found this show. It also gave us a chance to argue over whether photography qualifies as art, and given the largest photo in David's show, we had a perfect example to argue over.
The first room of Awakened shows flooded and ruined churches, such that I was wondering if they were staged or documentary photos from Katrina-ravaged New Orleans. I know La Chappelle from Rolling Stone; his photos of celebrities were always crazily baroque. I much preferred the photos of Mark Seliger. Since La Chappelle seemed to be a big fan of the staged photo, I couldn't tell where these came from.
The second room cleared that up. It was dominated by a huge, long mural of a photo of a number of mostly nude people escaping, or caught in, some kind of deluge. The photo so clearly wants to be a classical allegory painting, some kind of modern "Raft of the Medusa," to see it is to realize that photographers really are failed painters. Everything about this photo, from the overwrought lighting to the backdrop which is actually painted, screams "I wish I was Caravaggio -- or at least Ingres." Now, don't get me wrong -- I love photos of naked people. Big fan of nudity. But to stage a painting as a photo just strikes me as strange. Maybe I need a better sense of humor.
Circling the big photo are a number of smaller, but still larger than life-size, photos of people floating underwater. The people are studiously from all walks of life: Old men and women, skinny people, fat people, a man in a business suit, a woman nude from the waist down, black, white, what have you. Doug seemed to find the photos almost religious, so when he asked me what I thought, I was forced to commit blasphemy. I admitted that I thought they were neat, and a little interesting, but wasn't sure if they were art.
It's always fun to have an argument over whether photographs are art or not. Doug tried to convince me. Tracy, for her part, admitted that she used to agree with me, but Doug had talked her onto his side. Doug tried to tell me abut how many choices the photographer makes, about the intention of the work. He pointed out the bubbles visible near one person, and asked me how I could not find that beautiful. He explained all the work that goes into making a photograph and asked what made it different from the work going into a painting.
In the end I wasn't convinced. I am still of the opinion that what makes a photo worth looking at is that it's of something real -- even if it's something Photoshopped, at some point, there was a real thing in front of a camera. And ultimately that's what keeps it from being art, in my opinion: It's not a communication from deep inside a human being, it's a document of a moment in the physical world. Staged or not. And, at bottom, I'm interested in people, not in images of people.
Although I did thank Doug for finding the show, because in the third room there was a topless photo of Pamela Anderson, and I haven't seen her boobs in a while. So that was okay.
There was more to David's show, and we did take it all in, but eventually we tore ourselves away and walked uptown a block to see if Ed Winkleman was around. He wasn't, alas, and some people in his gallery were putting together the next show, so we went next door to Schroeder Romero where we met Sara Jo Romero and saw Michael Waugh's show Lead Me Astray.
What I think I've been seeing over the past year or so is the rise of the obsessive-compulsive artist. Many artists seem to have an obsessive-compulsive streak in them, but some are more insane than others, and I feel that I've been seeing more and more of the really crazy ones in galleries. Michael Waugh represents some kind of weird pinnacle so far: What appear to be pencil drawings turn out to be text, written longhand, forming the lines of a drawing. Doug was pretty sure that the text of George Washington's speeches had been used to form the drawing of The Assumption, showing our first president possibly being assumed bodily into Heaven.
The net effect is like wandering into a benign version of one of those serial killer lairs they show in the movies, where the walls are lined with cut-apart photo collages and notebooks crammed with incomprehensible theories are stacked all over the floor. I squinted, tried to make some sense of the words, realized no sense could possibly be made, and moved on to the next one.
Michael also had a video playing, which I didn't watch, of course, and a piece commenting on the Art Basel/Miami fair which was mostly made up of printouts from the Web of various galleries' verbiage.
I found the show curiously over- and underwhelming. There was a lot of motion for very little noise. The only real questions that came up were, if someone bought one of the pieces, would they read all of it? Would they try? Would it matter if they did? My guess is no, no, and no.
After that we headed east along 27th Street, checking through the windows and doors of any galleries that looked interesting. Doug dragged us in to Foxy Production and their show Surface Wave, which I found deeply uninteresting. Eventually we fetched up at 547 West 27th, a building with a number of galleries, most notably Priska C. Juschka Fine Art, where I was looking for Carolyn Salas. Her show turned out to be wacky, one of those collections of pointless and incongruous objects -- a two-headed bird tapestry! Little mirrors hung from the ceiling! Dreamcatchers! -- which I guess was some kind of symbolic tour of some subject the artist cares deeply about or something.
Tracy and Doug were both much more taken with John Sparagana's work, which consisted of images from magazines and such sliced into thin ribbons and then glued back together. Sometimes two images seemed interpolated, sometimes a single image seemed duplicated -- I found the images too murky and muddled to look like much of anything. I thought they were aesthetically unpleasant and purposeless, kind of like listening to a poorly tuned-in radio station. Doug seemed to like that and thought the amount of effort involved in the pieces somehow redeemed them.
In the same building we also saw Peter Feiler at Galerie Adler. Peter's Ausstellung was titled Mankind - Nature - Technology. His work reminded me strongly of Kelli Williams, only nowhere near as sophisticated; Peter also seems to be another of those obsessive-compulsives I mentioned earlier. Altogether I found his work to be colorful, bizarre, twisted, and boring.
Another obsessive artist was on display at PH Gallery which was showing Shuji Yamamoto. Shuji's wall-hung work -- I'm not sure they were really paintings -- were like little artificial bonsai gardens with carefully repeated patterns of leaves; and his sculpture consisted of fake rocks and sand on the floor. I was tempted to step in the sand but refrained.
We saw a few more things in that building, but nothing to write home about. We also went through Sundaram Tagore and saw Merrill Wagner's show Flowers. The gallery verbiage calls the work paintings but I immediately thought of them as sculpture: Each work is flat and hung on the wall, but made of geometric plates of steel, some painted. I thought they were rather neat but I couldn't get overwhelmingly excited about them.
Eventually we made our way to 25th Street, where we saw so much I think I'm going to save it for another post. Consider this part one. Part two will be up soon.
Labels: David La Chappelle, Doug Miller, Merrill Wagner, Michael Waugh, Peter Feiler, Shuji Yamamoto, Tracy Helgeson
——– COMMENT-AUTHOR: Jon Erik
COMMENT-DATE:4/18/2007 12:21:00 PM
COMMENT-BODY:Wow great post and great writing. Yes traditional hand developed black and white is ART. Thats because the artist uses math, alchemy.the third eye open,and seeks to document a moment that is gone the next.Useing a traditional camera requires skill and talent, where as digital camera is part of automation art and its really non archival .This is a great blog.j-e
——–
COMMENT-AUTHOR: Chris Rywalt
COMMENT-DATE:4/18/2007 12:45:00 PM
COMMENT-BODY:Thanks for the compliments. Tracy
COMMENT-DATE:4/18/2007 01:08:00 PM
COMMENT-BODY:Chris, I totally missed seeing (or I possibly don't actually remember seeing it) the topless photo of Pamela Anderson. Darn. Sunil
COMMENT-DATE:4/19/2007 11:35:00 AM
COMMENT-BODY:Chris, Steven LaRose
COMMENT-DATE:4/19/2007 02:01:00 PM
COMMENT-BODY:Always my favorite, since your early gallery slogs, is learning about the sloggers as much as the "art". Chris Rywalt
COMMENT-DATE:4/19/2007 02:36:00 PM
COMMENT-BODY:Steve sez:
COMMENT-DATE:4/19/2007 06:33:00 PM
COMMENT-BODY:Chris, you make not such good shows sound like so much fun. Thanks.
——–
COMMENT-AUTHOR: Tracy
COMMENT-DATE:4/19/2007 08:01:00 PM
COMMENT-BODY:Ha! Compared to my son, who does have OCD (minor, or he would drive us more nuts than he already does), I do not have it. It's true, I am way too messy and lazy. The barns are result of focus rather than OCD. I am painting barns because they still interest me. At some point they won't, I suppose and I will move on. Right now I am still trying to paint that perfect barn painting. Steven LaRose
COMMENT-DATE:4/19/2007 10:18:00 PM
COMMENT-BODY:Tracy, no insult intended. I hope you weren't. I pine for the day to be in a zone again, and with an audience. I was going to try and circle everything around to the difference between OCD and ritual. Tracy
COMMENT-DATE:4/20/2007 09:40:00 AM
COMMENT-BODY:Steve, I wasn't insulted at all! I just wanted to explain why, perhaps obsessively:) I keep painting barns.
——–
COMMENT-AUTHOR:
COMMENT-DATE:4/20/2007 10:12:00 AM
COMMENT-BODY:Aren't these two a couple? Do they need to communicate through someone else's blog? Chris Rywalt
COMMENT-DATE:4/20/2007 11:52:00 AM
COMMENT-BODY:The Shadow sez: Steven LaRose
COMMENT-DATE:4/20/2007 01:22:00 PM
COMMENT-BODY:the shadow, huh, i get it, i think. . .
COMMENT-DATE:4/20/2007 09:59:00 PM
COMMENT-BODY:boo hoo
——–
COMMENT-AUTHOR: Tracy
COMMENT-DATE:4/21/2007 09:34:00 AM
COMMENT-BODY:Ha! I am offline for a day and I come back to find out I am a couple with someone I haven't met and that Chris uses improper adjectives in his reviews. Chris Rywalt
COMMENT-DATE:4/21/2007 04:23:00 PM
COMMENT-BODY:Well, actually, the Shadow does have a point about my adjectives. If I were really looking to critique the work, I'd probably go more in depth than "rather neat." But sometimes the work just doesn't interest me enough. I can't get up a good critical lather if the work's just too frictionless. Basically, if all I can say is "rather neat," that's actually a negative review. Tracy
COMMENT-DATE:4/22/2007 10:06:00 AM
COMMENT-BODY:If the work didn't really excite me, I've forgotten it almost entirely.
COMMENT-DATE:4/22/2007 10:25:00 PM
COMMENT-BODY:There are probably lots of ways to right a "correct" and "respectable " review, but like art, perhaps a piece ( or a review) can be judged by its effectiveness in reaching beyond itself.....and any means that achieves this is fine. I personally have a problem with highly stylized wordings and references and quickly loses interest in those types of writings. I enjoy immensely, your personal style of writing and approach to art noticing. I just want good stuff, whether it is a dinner, a review, or a piece of art. And I don't want it served in the "same old, same old" way.
COMMENT-DATE:4/27/2007 09:15:00 AM
COMMENT-BODY:just wanted to mention that one of my favorite things here is the changing quote that appears when I enter your site. Today's Jack London's sentiment of going after inspiration with a club....ahhhhh. C. I. Artist
COMMENT-DATE:4/30/2007 09:14:00 AM
COMMENT-BODY:Thanks for the roundup. Tony Shafrazi is a wannabe. Ron Ehrlich is good. Carolyn Salas is wacky - you got it right. I liked Peter Feiler. Shuji Yamamoto screams Japan.
——–
COMMENT-AUTHOR: the expat/pissedpoet
COMMENT-DATE:5/13/2007 09:24:00 AM
COMMENT-BODY:"I am still of the opinion that what makes a photo worth looking at is that it's of something real -- even if it's something Photoshopped, at some point, there was a real thing in front of a camera. And ultimately that's what keeps it from being art, in my opinion: It's not a communication from deep inside a human being, it's a document of a moment in the physical world. Staged or not. And, at bottom, I'm interested in people, not in images of people." Michael Waugh
COMMENT-DATE:6/03/2007 07:46:00 AM
COMMENT-BODY:I think that a lot of art labeled is labeled as OCD in order to make it entertaining for collectors and dismiss larger meanings. Though, in general, I'm not realy interested in biographical criticism, that is, trying to find the meaning of a work of art as merely an expression of the artist's biography or psychology. Chris Rywalt
COMMENT-DATE:6/03/2007 10:33:00 AM
COMMENT-BODY:When I use a term like OCD to describe an artist, of course I'm not using it clinically. It's not intended to say anything about the artist's psychology; it's really about the work and how it looks. It's convenient shorthand, and like all shorthands, it has no nuance. Chris Rywalt
COMMENT-DATE:6/03/2007 10:35:00 AM
COMMENT-BODY:Whoops, forgot to finish my parenthetical comment. (Just to be completely honest, I want to note I'd never heard of micrography until I looked it up just now.)
——–
AUTHOR: Chris Rywalt
DATE: 9/14/2006 03:14:00 PM
—–
BODY:
After the debacle that was Super Thursday I was down. Art sucked. I considered giving up on art and switching to mowing lawns or digging ditches or something so physical that after a day of work I'd be too tired even to think. I could do that until the day I died and end up in a cheap casket with my callused hands piously clasped over my broken heart. Sounds inviting, doesn't it?
But I wasn't allowed this rest. Jim Wolanin invited me to a show at Three B Gallery in which he'd be showing. My first reaction was that I wouldn't go. I'd seen Jim's paintings three separate times and I felt that I'd shown my support for his art career enough for a while. So unless Jim was willing to sleep with me -- and I'm going to take a flyer here and assume he wasn't -- I saw no reason to go.
Then Tracy Helgeson chimed in and said that she'd be there and wanted to meet me. I still considered not going; but finally Steven LaRose wrote to me saying that Tracy was expecting to see me there. Okay, fine, drag me out into Manhattan on a Saturday night.
I barely had time to see the show or any of the work in it; by the time I arrived, they were kicking everyone out so they could rearrange the art and hold the after-party. I thought it very smart of the organizers to do this; hopefully it would avoid any more art destruction moments like the one in D.C. last season.
I did see a couple of things I'll mention because I liked them. I have no photos, though. Jeff Faerber had some really good looking work. And this other artist whose name I didn't get (my camera phone is too low resolution for me to read the thing I took a photo of) had a couple of neat things: First was a life-sized cut-out, like you might see at the front of a music store -- although not of this kind of activity -- of the artist fucking a woman from behind. Where the woman's face would've been was an oval cut-out so you could stick your face through and have your photo taken, like an attraction at a theme park. Kind of obvious but it made me laugh anyway, probably because of the gleeful look on the artist's face. Second was an action figure, in the clamshell bubble, of the artist himself. Clearly he wants to be Jeff Koons when he grows up, and more power to him. If I remember correctly he went by me with a pretty girl under each arm, so he's on his way.
Of course I did meet Tracy and her husband Doug and, again, Jim. I fell in love with Doug and Tracy pretty much immediately.
After being kicked out we went to the Mexican place Jim recommended and had some good food and some good talk. Jim describes the night pretty well; an argument over a chair broke out at the table behind us, unfortunate epithets were hurled, a little sad homophobia was revealed, and then everything calmed back down. Your typical night in one of the more vibrant neighborhoods in New York City. Jim is right when he says San Loco is not much to look at but the food is good. And, yes, I did lose my car, but not for too long.
To add some narcissism to the account, though -- something Jim would never do, even though it was his show -- I told the three of them about Secret Project #2, which seemed well-received, and I showed them a sample I've been working on for Secret Project #1.
So, holding on to this wonderful thing I've been carting around with me for weeks trying to imbue it with a scintilla of the beauty I intend for it, Tracy asks, "What about your drawings?"
"Yeah, I like the drawings," chimes in Jim.
I don't know if they meant this in the tone of "Um, this new stuff is crap. Why don't you go back to your previous crap?" or "You're wasting your time trying to be original; your drawings, while derivative, are much better." Or maybe they were just being nice. No matter how exactly they meant it -- and, seriously, I believe they sincerely like my drawings and think I should do more (and I agree) -- I appreciated hearing it. Particularly from Jim, who doesn't talk much, so when he does, it means something.
I only wish I could've stayed out longer. Thank you, Tracy, Doug, and Jim, for making it a good night. And an extra thanks to Doug for paying for dinner.
Labels: James Wolanin, Jeff Faerber, Tracy Helgeson
——– COMMENT-AUTHOR: Tracy Helgeson
COMMENT-DATE:9/14/2006 08:26:00 PM
COMMENT-BODY:Sometimes, well usually, my mouth talks faster than my brain. The question about your drawings was only meant as a compliment, but perhaps my timing was bad, as I surely did not intend to make you doubt your secret projects! I have to work on my timing, I guess. While you did a great job of explaining your projects, I think I'd have to see more to get it. What I can really relate to now, are your drawings because they are really nice (that's a very high compliment from me) and of the work of yours that I have seen, they have really stuck with me. Also, they are the kind of work and imagery that I tend to connect with best, at least initially. Chris Rywalt
COMMENT-DATE:9/14/2006 09:47:00 PM
COMMENT-BODY:It's not you. It's me. I'm just unsure of both Secret Projects. I'm not sure they'll work, I'm not sure if they do work they'll be any good, and I'm not sure even if they're any good if anyone will care. I'm eager to have a better sample to show people, something to give a really good idea of what I'm doing, so I can get feedback on it. I'm afraid what I'm doing is really obvious and has been done before, and probably better. James Wolanin
COMMENT-DATE:9/15/2006 09:08:00 AM
COMMENT-BODY:Chris, Chris Rywalt
COMMENT-DATE:9/15/2006 09:13:00 AM
COMMENT-BODY:I'm coming to believe that my lines are my strength.
COMMENT-DATE:9/29/2006 10:09:00 PM
COMMENT-BODY:Chris you haven't posted in a while. I wonder if you've been depressed. I read your post on depression. I am also depressed. I hope you are ok.
——–
COMMENT-AUTHOR: Chris Rywalt
COMMENT-DATE:9/30/2006 06:55:00 AM
COMMENT-BODY:I have been depressed. But I've also been very, very busy. I'm okay. Getting by.
COMMENT-DATE:9/30/2006 09:11:00 AM
COMMENT-BODY:I'm glad you're ok. staying busy is good. i'm trying to do the same
——–
