A Rainy Weekend with Antoni Gaudi and Max

My brother Mike has given us a subscription to National Geographic for several years. The magazine excites my son Max. This weekend he opened the current issue and saw this drawing of Antoni Gaudi's unfinished cathedral, 

Basílica i Temple Expiatori de la Sagrada Família. 

Max said we should begin building a model of the cathedral immediately. We spent a good part of this weekend on our model, and Max is deservedly proud of it.

I first saw cathedrals in Europe when I was twenty-five. After an afternoon inside Notre Dame in Paris, I wrote:

These people wanted to construct an edifice so big and high and powerful that everyone would look at it and say, "Wow, they must have mighty faith! I'd better listen to them!" The weight, the solidity, the permanence of the cathedrals was a reminder of a faith just as solid and indestructible. When I stood under that magnificent vaulted ceiling, I couldn't help but think that they succeeded.

New York and Me—Part 1

New York, you’re a fickle woman. Just when I want to leave you with no regrets, you pull off your blouse and rub your breasts in my face. —1994

Coming to New York for the first time is like meeting a famous world leader. You can't hope to separate the actual city from the legends told about it. I grew up far away, but the city forced its particles into my brain: Central Park, Radio City Music Hall, Times Square. Growing up in any part of America, we'd hear these place names many times. Half the power of visiting Manhattan is to plug in to their reality: "There's Radio City Music Hall! It's real!"

New York took on new allure when I watched Woody Allen's movie, Manhattan. I left the theater jumping up and down with excitement. It was a vision of a different life. A place where people talked for entertainment, where a beautiful woman might call and say, “Would you like to walk through Central Park with me this afternoon?” No freeways, no loud music. It looked like a black-and-white heaven to me! I loved the silvery photography. I loved the Gershwin music. The love stories were a bit silly, but I wanted to be Woody, to live in that world. Of course I would discover that Woody's Manhattan did not exist. But first I'd have to get there. 

I was twenty years old. My art school in Philadelphia organized day-trips to New York, and I went up on the first one. How can I describe the excitement of just walking along Fifth Avenue on an autumn afternoon? New possibilities opened up in every direction. Each minute felt more important, when spent here. The stones throbbed under my feet. I stood on the beating heart of the world. 

During the 1980s, I cultivated a connections in New York. I spent many days and nights in Manhattan. I felt comfortable, never threatened or intimidated by the city. The excitement did not wear off, but I had to deal with reality, not cinema. Woody Allen's characters do not stand shivering on urine-soaked subway platforms; the subways were a vision of Hell during the 1980s. 

Another let-down was the constant noise of New York. Allen's characters exist in a hushed environment, where they can speak in whispers and be understood. In the real New York, a rumble pecks at your brain always, everywhere, and no amount of money can protect you from it. More than once, I awoke on Central Park South at 3AM, to the sound of crashing metal and spine-tingling shouts. I looked out my window and saw—what else—sanitation workers, screaming at each other and bashing trash cans together, working as though they were paid to keep every person in the city awake. Like other frightening titles given to New York, "The City That Never Sleeps," isn't an exaggeration.

Another title well-deserved, New York is the capital of the art world. Other American cities have good art galleries and museums, but people rarely fly to them specifically to see or buy art, as they do here. When I first saw it, the Metropolitan Museum of Art was New York in miniature for me. I thought every important painting in the world was here. All the images I'd only seen in school textbooks, like George Washington Crossing the Delaware by Emanuel Gottlieb Leutze. On my first day at the Metropolitan, I stayed four hours, determined to conquer the place with my eyes. I failed. At the end, the museum had many more rooms, but I couldn't bear to see anything else. I ran from the building, breathing hard. 

Central Park, 1986, L to R: the author, Regina Pettus, Reginald Pettus

At graduation, I was happy to stay in Philadelphia. I had a restaurant job I liked and a serious girlfriend. I even had money in the bank from a grant award. I contacted art galleries and made appointments to show my paintings. No one scooped me up, as I'd hoped. This disappointment fed into a larger re-consideration of my future. Within a few weeks my girlfriend broke up with me. At the same time, I noticed that Philadelphia was difficult to live in when I didn't have school to build my life around. I spent most of that summer alone, thinking hard about what to do next. 

I didn't come up with many ideas, at least not consciously. I went on working my job, and got a new apartment for the next year. I didn't know it then, but that summer would have been the ideal time for me to move to New York. If the idea hit me, I didn't take it seriously. Instead I signed my new lease and gave Philadelphia another year to turn around. 

Meanwhile, a less conscious part of my brain said, "What you need is a new girlfriend." In September I duly acquired a new girlfriend. For the following ten years, every decision was determined partly by my desire to keep her. New York could not help in this effort, so moving was off the table. Nevertheless, New York and I would meet again.

Chess Lessons

My son Max is learning to play chess, so I'm playing again, after thirty years' absence. Chess teaches me important lessons, rank amateur though I am. 

The most important lesson is to focus on a goal. The rules prevent an easy win by accident. You must plan ahead and avoid distractions. This is hard to do. It's much easier to keep the false score: how many pieces have you taken? Once you start paying attention to this side issue, it's almost impossible to remember the goal. The goal is to pin your opponent's king, not to take his other pieces or protect your own. A good player projects his mind to the end of the game, then calculates backward to see which move, now, will get him closer to victory. 

Life is even more distracting than chess. We find ourselves planning just to get by. We only want to keep our job or get a promotion, without thinking of our longer-term goals. Where do we want to get in life? Will this job will take us closer or further away? What will keeping this job cost us, and what do we plan to do with the time, energy and money we have left?

 

Chess also forces the player to act. You can't stand still and hope for the best. You may not be able to think of a brilliant move, but you will move, brilliantly or not. 

This part of life is tough. Because mistakes are costly, we learn to fear them and hold back from acting. Is it better to move forward, even if your actions backfire? In most cases, I answer "yes." Often the only way I can come up with the right plan is to try the wrong plan first. 

I had a friend who didn't like her job, or the city she lived in. She got an internship in another city, moved there, and hated it. She worked through her contract, thinking hard about where to go next. She ping-ponged between coasts, and today she lives in New York and loves it. She might have ended up where she started. She might have discovered that her dissatisfaction had little to do with the place she lived. But in my experience, there is no discovery without action. 

You shouldn't rush in blindly, of course, but make the smartest moves you can. And yes, doing nothing can be the best option, but make it a conscious choice, not a surrender to fear. If you move and your first move turns out badly, realize it was probably necessary, nonetheless. In the long run, doing the wrong thing is usually better than doing nothing.

The last important lesson I get from chess: almost every position has unique advantages. Even a weak position can be worked to enormous advantage. This statement is counter-intuitive, but the game demonstrates its truth continually. If your opponent stomps across the board and takes half your men, he often opens up a corridor to his king. The king is now easy to pin, because his escape routes are blocked.  

In life, a weak position enables a bold move toward your goal. I can't stop myself from quoting Kris Kristofferson here: "Freedom's just another word for 'nothing left to lose.'" My country, the United States, owes its success to our ancestors' bad luck in their mother countries. If the Puritans had prospered in Europe, they would never have braved the long journey and harsh conditions to settle in the New World. 

I was able to move to San Francisco because I failed to get a life together in Dallas. That failure made it a reasonable risk to leave, even though I had no job, no apartment and almost no contacts here. If I had landed a good job in Dallas or bought a house there, I might never have risked giving them up, no matter that I liked San Francisco better. 

Benjamin Franklin wrote about the game of Chess:

The game is so full of events, there is such a variety of turns in it, the fortune of it is so subject to vicissitudes, and one so frequently, after contemplation, discovers the means of extricating one’s self from a supposed insurmountable difficulty, that one is encouraged to continue the contest to the last, in hopes of victory from our skill, or, at least, from the negligence of our adversary, and whoever considers, what in Chess he often sees instances of, that success is apt to produce presumption and its consequent inattention, by which more is afterwards lost than was gained by the preceding advantage, while misfortunes produce more care and attention, by which the loss may be recovered, will learn not to be too much discouraged by any present successes of his adversary, nor to despair of final good fortune upon every little check he receives in the pursuit of it.

Farm Life

I lived in Kansas in 1974-76. Our tiny town floated like a ship on an ocean of wheat and corn. You could walk from one city limit to the other in fifteen minutes, and when you reached the last street, you faced an endless, flat horizon of grain. Despite the isolation, I liked the town and the school I attended.

A young farmer hired me to help with his operation north of town. His name was Don and he lived in a trailer on the flat land, with no cover from the vast Kansas sky. He was married to a pretty woman named Rosa, so they named the place RosaDon Farms. I usually worked at Don’s paired up with another boy from my high school. Don treated us with respect and paid us well, far above the minimum wage at that time.

It was hard, physical work, exactly what you’d expect on a farm. At that time, I had spent most of my life in rural areas, but as things turned out, Don’s was the first and last farm I’d work on. We cleaned up his pig pens, sweeping and pushing their poop down a trough toward a drainage pond. Pig poop has a very distinctive smell. It nauseated me at first, then vanished. I no longer smelled the pigs and their wastes, only the grain in their feed troughs, which smelled delicious. I was reminded of Jesus’ story of the Prodigal Son, who got hungry for pig feed while similarly employed. 

A less agreeable task was cleaning out a long, low barn where the baby pigs were born. Baby pigs need shelter. On the other hand, putting a roof over blood, water and poop has predictable results. This biomass attracted thousands of flies who multiplied furiously then died. The floors were covered in heaps of dead flies. We aimed a high pressure hose at them to help sweep them out. The smell those fly corpses gave off when the water hit them is the foulest vapor that ever entered my nose. As I type this, I’m still gagging thirty-five years later.

Don came from a farming family, but he did a lot of things that were, well, um, unskillful. Obviously so, even to 15 year old boys like us. There was no shelter for his vehicles, and he left his car windows down, so the dirt blew in. When we went to get seed or equipment, Don left his pickup’s engine running the whole time he was loading.

Most of his irrigation was accomplished by pipes along the ground with spout holes where the water came out. To be effective, he needed to plow in a specific pattern and line up the spout holes so they faced down hill. Gravity ensured even water distribution. But Don often got it backwards, so the water puddled around the pipes.

One night as the sun was setting, my friend Paul and I were ready to go home. We walked back to Don’s truck through a wet field. Don had pumped way too much water into the field, and we sank down to our calves in the mud. Don drove for the house, and asked us if he should take a short cut across the field we’d just walked through.

“Do you boys think I can make it across that field in this truck?”

“No, Don, there’s no way you’re going to make it. There’s too much mud.”

“Paul, do you think I can make it?”

“No, Don, don’t try it. You won’t make it.”

Don revved his engine until the pickup was doing about fifty down the dirt road between fields. Then he hung a sharp left across the mud. The momentum carried us about twenty-five feet before I felt the tires go squishy and heard the whirr, whirrr of their futile spinning. We opened the doors of the cab and saw mud all the way up to the door frames. Don was a faithful Christian man, studying for ministry, so he breathed a sigh and said, “shucks.”

 

Tired and dirty, Paul and I were not in the mood to deal with this situation, but we had no choice. Don tried to pull the truck out with his standard red tractor. The tractor got stuck in the mud also. In the darkness, Don went balls-out and came back with a giant green John Deere tractor. Its wheels were tall as I was. Even these enormous wheels spun a little in the mud, but eventually pulled the red tractor and the pickup out. I laugh hard every time I think of this story, but I liked Don. He was a wonderful guy. He gave up farming, became a minister and died many years ago. Today Paul lives in a huge house on Highway 83, directly across the road from the land we helped Don farm in 1975 and, of course, the place we got stuck.

More Drawings

Or as if I do not secretly love strangers! (O tenderly, a long time, and never avow it;)

—Walt Whitman

I've drawn people while on the bus, in restaurants and bars, at performances and during jury duty. It's like hunting; any place I can corner them for a few minutes, I must take a chance. I don't do this now, because my life does not contain the kind of time and space necessary. If I outlive the present project, I may return to the drawings. I'd like to observe the human figure again, after many years of concentration on other subjects.

The big constraint in this work is time. I almost never asked someone to sit still for me; I didn't want them to know I was there. I knew they would get up and go somewhere else in a few seconds to a few minutes. The challenge was to steal as much of their visual soul as I could in the time available. Predictably, much of what I produced was really terrible, but occasionally I got lucky.

I especially liked drawing on the trains in Tokyo. Japanese people usually ignore others deliberately, so I had more freedom to work without drawing any attention to myself. It also helped that I couldn't speak the language, so I never worried what they were saying. 

  

Riding a bus in San Francisco can be a similar experience; almost no one speaks English here either. This young woman became my favorite model several years ago, but I never spoke to her. I imagine a tense dramatic scene, as in a movie: "A model on the bus, is that all I am to you? Do you think you can just draw me for twenty minutes and then walk out the back door?" Yes, I do.

Sojourn in Britain

I hear the drizzle of the rain 

Like a memory it falls 

Soft and warm continuing 

Tapping on my roof and walls

And from the shelter of my mind 

Through the window of my eyes 

I gaze beyond the rain-drenched streets 

To England where my heart lies. —Paul Simon, Kathy's Song, 1966

1994 was a bad year for me. I went through several disasters, climaxing in a permanent separation from my first wife. For many months, my head felt like a grenade with the pin pulled out. This feeling added disturbing depth to routine tasks like walking to work and getting home with the groceries. I sweated a lot, and worried I might forget where I lived.

Lucky, my family and friends weren't willing to let me go down. They literally saved my life in a hundred ways. Several years before, I had worked with a young man from Northern Ireland named Jason Coppel. Now Jason offered me lodging at the flat he shared with his brother Toby in London, while Jason took a long holiday. I'd never been to England, and wanted to visit. I had almost no money,but I did have three weeks' vacation accrued at my job. Traveling scared me, but so did staying. I scraped my pennies together and bought a plane ticket. 

Jason and Toby's flat was elegant, much nicer than my apartment in San Francisco. Toby stoically tolerated my presence; I almost never saw him. 

Day and night I explored London, on foot, bicycle and bus. At night I drew people in the pubs and sidewalk cafes. 

Many musicians played traditional English and Celtic folk music at night. I was thrilled to hear them. This music had been important to me since I first heard it in Philadelphia in the early 1980s. The musicians in the drawing above were members of a band, The Northern Celts, who played at a pub called The Pint Pot. 

Jason's parents spent money wisely. When their children went off to college, instead of paying rent for their lodging, they bought a flat in the college town, then charged other students rent to cover the note. They owned another flat in Edinburgh, and Toby encouraged me to take the train up there, while I was visiting the island. 

The Edinburgh Coppel was out of town, so I introduced myself to his flat-mates, a good looking young couple named Stephen and Zoe. Zoe was a perfect little doll, with honey hair and blue eyes. When I saw her I immediately heard Robert Burns's song in my head:

As I was walking one fine summer's evening

'a walkin doon by the Broomie Law

'twas there I met wi' a fair young maiden

She'd cherry cheeks and skin like snaw.

Zoe spoke in a standard English accent in Edinburgh, but when she got on the phone with her girlfriend back in Northern Ireland, she sang a lilting melody I scarcely could believe: "And how are you and Paddy doin? Does it still feel like love, Lass?" She actually used the word "lass." Surely this world was a good place, after all. 

I arrived during the famous Edinburgh Festival, when the city was given over to theater and music. I went each night to The Acoustic Music Center, where I could hear a sampler of musical acts at the festival. The music, the crowd and the Guiness helped me pass pleasant evenings in the far north. 

I am grateful to everyone who put up with me in Britain, and helped me through a difficult time. I close with a journal entry from my last days in London:

Tonight I rode the 19 bus through town and across the river at Battersea Bridge. The sunset turned crimson and purple over the roofs and the river. I walked back across Albert Bridge. The narrow streets of Chelsea were silent. The buildings were beautifully designed and well cared for. Row upon row, and block after block, each group named “—— Mansions,” and true mansions they were. Flowers waited in the window boxes, big old bicycles leaned against the railings, and I heard their riders, talking quietly in the upper floors. 

The Current Project, 2010

In the summer of 2007 I began work on a long painting of San Francisco. I've spent the last three years drawing the land, trees and buildings in black and white paint. I began 2010 sharpening up the drawing of Canvas 3, which goes from Aquatic Park, across Pacific Heights and into the Presidio. It's the most challenging part of the city to draw, because there's so much stuff to squeeze in.

I went on to build up the Marin Headlands, beside the north anchorage of the Golden Gate Bridge. The bridge itself got swallowed in the sunset light. I'll pull it back out later. I read that the maintenance crews paint the bridge in a continuous loop; when they complete the last section, it's time to put a new coat on the first. Coincidentally I work the same way, inching across the twenty-eight feet of canvas from left to right. When I've done all I can to the far right canvas, I get to start over again on the far left.

Now I'm in the exciting phase of painting the water, way back east, under Oakland and the Bay Bridge. The attempt humbles me, because water always kicks my butt. I prepared many studies and designed the larger pattern ahead of time. Now I get to stand in front of the easel and hack away at the waves, until they look somewhat wet. The score so far: Water 752, Artist 0.

This north shore of the city is in shadow during most of the year. The sunset graces it for only a few days, around the summer solstice. I board a boat into the Bay each year at this time. I look at the city and the water. It's like having a girlfriend I can only see once per year.