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Dam, June 30 2004
One time I sent a sketch of the obelisk in Central Park to a friend. It is much like the shape of the Washington Monument. The recipient told me I was making a "male" art, celebrating the male form. So then I sent him my sketch of the Grand Coulee Dam, if indeed he wanted a "female" form.
Dam, I called it. All the openness and the water, all that power.
In 1978 I came back from London an exhausted girl, maybe a little defeated. I stayed with my mom for the first time since I had left home (1974) for 6 weeks just to recover and recoup. She had a tavern in Grand Coulee, Washington, very old style, from the 40s. Big fans went round and round overhead.
I worked in her tavern to get some cash together while regrouping. But what influenced me the most during this stay was the dam. It provided energy for millions of people and was really something to see. Especially at night, all lit up, it was an incredible spectacle.
But I didn't paint it till 10 years later while living in New York, off a postcard image. It looks way too calm to me now. The place rips and roars.
Turk LeClair, June 27 2004
The other day I unexpectedly received a painting in the mail. I was a little taken back, as I know the artist, Turk LeClair, has not been well for years. Perhaps he was dispersing his estate? A letter arriving the following day confirmed that his cancer was back.
I first met Turk at the InterDada 84 festival in San Francisco. He was already a legendary coot by then. He was a beat in the 50s, met and performed with Warhol in the early 60s, was always on the edge of everything. He no doubt stayed at every party too long. He was a great correspondent too and we have kept in touch via the post ever since.
While I lived in New York he was passing through but wound up in the hospital; he had cancer and his voice box was removed. I visited him there and this in some way sealed a connection.
At this time I was working on Fifth Avenue and I think he thought I was worlds away from where I should have been. No doubt the truth. I am so glad I was able to get back to the crazy world of a fulltime artist!
Turk, sly fox that he is, paints naked young women and takes their picture. He also paints of myths and pagan dreams. He performed and wrote great poems. At a NXNW music festival here in Portland I read one of his poems once, knowing he could no longer read them aloud.
Mark, June 25 2004
Today’s’ Oregonian has a small blurb on Mark Kostabi. I was amused to see it, for however much Mark may be out of the fashion, I like him.
David Polonoff, a writer originally from Portland, introduced us when I first moved to New York. It was 1986 and the glimmer of the East Village art scene was on the wane. Kostabi was just about to move from his loft in Tribeca to a big factory-like setting in the West 50s, where I still saw him around.
If you read his philosophy on his website or at his column on artnet, you get a fairly pragmatic take on the artist. Very calculated if not cool. Everything seems to be for some decided effect.
I’ve decided that there’s nothing much wrong with it, as I’ve been fooled by those who seem very artless, careless and uncalculated, and discovered later it was a scheme in its own right. Having it all upfront is less nerve-wracking.
Still, he’s got a naïve way about him in person that lets you feel that you really matter. He asked me what I thought of all his paintings while I was in his studio (this was back when he was actually still painting them all) and seemed to be quite concerned with my opinions.
It was only later, when I began reading his advice column that I saw he asks these same questions of everyone. Even the UPS guy, he takes polls. Should this be blue or red and so on? And I guess he goes by the popular vote.
One time a reader in Artnet asked him: “You once said that making a painting in a) oils and then b) big and finally c) red --- was the way to success. Does this still apply?” Mark went on quite the diatribe but yes, dear reader, big and red and “oil on canvas” still gets ‘em every time. Right after that I made my piece, The Red One, with that (amongst a million other things) in mind.
The Red One
Recently he published a book with Baird Jones that is all about the East Village art scene. I haven’t checked it out yet but want to. He wants to square away the notion that nothing of interest has happened in NYC since Abstract Expressionism. He’s protecting his place in history.
I think he’s right though. What we are missing in history -- and it is such a huge hole --- is all the great artists who did not survive that era. Some of the very brightest artists didn’t make it to 30. A huge epidemic claimed the lives of so many.
Just recently the film Downtown81 was shown at the NW Film Center. The basically plot-free film follows the enigmatic Jean-Paul Basquiat and friends through the downtown NYC of the early 80s. It is terrible and still unbelievable to see how many incredibly original people, many of whom made mostly casual appearances in the film, are no longer with us.
The Guillotine, June 24 2004
This piece was basically a response: “You want edge? I’ll give you edge.”
There was a special exhibition in New York at some French cultural institute --- I cannot recall the exact place but do remember that it was in the upper East side --- which was all about execution. Pretty dark actually.
You entered very dark rooms where just one device might be dramatically lit. In this case, it was this guillotine. It was huge and had quite a history behind it, having beheaded several famous people.
The painting was huge too, at least for me, much bigger than myself. I could never quite reconcile the size in my head. At the time I was dealing with that size matters issue in my work and in New York. It’s almost like you’ve got to scream to be noticed. And take out the measuring stick.
When it came time to move back to the West coast, all the really big paintings got left behind. So all I have is the slide and that’s OK.
I am sure someone has it though. NYC has the great scavenger tradition. Whatever you put out on the street, someone will want. I had one friend who furnished her entire flat off the streets.
Over the years many paintings I no longer wanted went out on 56th Street.
I moved only once while in NYC and that was just up the street. As it was such a short distance I moved most of stuff myself, trip after trip over several days. One day a certain man came up to finally talk to me….
I say finally because I had seen him around my hood for a decade and never a word. I had even seen him in Central Park often on skates and I was on skates too. Generally skaters are a tight social club but nothing much coming from him. I wrote him off.
But there he was, while I was out on the street struggling with canvases. “Are you Eva Lake?” he asks me.
Well yea. “I’ve got 7 of your paintings,” he tells me and then goes on to say that some are here, some are in his summer home, one is on loan in upstate NY and so on. Turns out this guy who I think is such a snob is living with me and sharing with his friends too. He loved my work, was on the constant lookout for it, but had never said a word to me. That changed on that day of course and we became friends.
The Body as Architecture, 22 June 2004
Most of the work I did as a makeup artist was routine: make professional women look pulled together and not tired. You might have thought it was society women looking for something to do but not true. I was a pro who gave other pros advice and a new look when they did not have time to figure it out for themselves. My best clients in NY were doctors, lawyers, real estate agents.
But as painter of course I still regarded makeup as paint and I had my fun with it, especially in the 80s. I created stencils of all kinds of shapes and painted entire bodies. In 1984 I hosted an Art to Wear party in North Beach in San Francisco, where designers and stylists and hair people all showed off their work.
The photo above is a trial run I documented for a piece I did called The Body as Architecture. This was all inspired by the writings of Claude Bragdon, a theosophist and idea-man around the turn of the last century. Basically, he likened the body to the building.
In the real performance, the model came out all taped up with masking tape for the stencil. Fast and furiously I painted her in front of several hundred people --- in dark and light blues, silver and white. The cool colors of San Francisco inspired the palette, as they did for just about everything I made while I lived there. Eventually I painted her hair, eyebrows and lips all in silver too. Then the tape was all ripped off in flash --- she was a masterpiece, covered in skyscrapers!
The model was all of 18 and I remember she shook like crazy during the whole performance. She must have liked it though ---later on she moved to New York and for a spell, was an exotic dancer. Last I heard though, she is a very well situated men’s clothing designer.
Flying Tiger, 21 June 2004
While the paintings I make now are abstract, I’ve had my own journey with rendering and representational art. If you can draw, it’s just one of those things you feel almost compelled to explore, like a responsibility. I loved graphic, simple modern art. But I could draw and I often followed it almost like a penance. It was not easy to make the transition out.
I was a makeup artist in New York and it had been a long time since the face or indeed, any human form, interested me. When you paint 20 faces a day in factory like setting (Georgette Klingers on Madison Avenue), people are the last thing you want to see. But in inanimate objects, like buildings, ships or indeed planes, I could inject a face or personality.
As a worker of the world I had little time to pursue any kind of art career but could at least make attempts at home with art. When I had no real studio I made small watercolors. For some time I made nothing but airplanes, fighter jets, often in formation. It’s possible that it was the formations I really loved but I had to work my way through it all. Some of them were very intricate and some of them were very loose, like the Flying Tiger above.
As to the term abstract art, I actually don’t feel I am making that at all, even today. I am with Yves Klein again on this one and paint what is exactly my reality.
A Love/Hate Relationship, June 15 2004
Like many artists, I’ve had a love/hate relationship with Andy Warhol. He’s been in my life more than any single artist and maybe that is why. When someone has so much dominance you can get a bit resentful.
I was a child in the 1960s and though I grew up on a dirt road, I was still plugged into the culture. I loved Twiggy and by the late 60s, Andy too. A friend of mine got ahold of the first Interview in ‘70 or so and we treated it like it was the biggest underground newspaper around.
They were basically about the movies at that time and had a touch of nostalgia, which fit in perfectly with the times. He made everyone look like a real old fashioned film star.
But things had changed by the end of the decade. All that work he did with socialites was repulsive to us punk rockers. We weren’t the only ones who felt that way --- for awhile, the tides turned against him.
Of course now it is easy to see that he single-handedly reinvented and updated the portrait for the 20th century.
Still, I made my Anti-Warhol statement in my very first fanzine, Beyond the Black Thing, in 1978. Then sort of forgot about him for awhile. I was deep into painting when he died in NYC and while I was living there. It wasn’t till years later that I saw how everything I did had a bit of Warhol in it. And I’ve decided that’s not a bad thing.
In 2002 Hipfish, a magazine in Astoria, Oregon, printed some collages of mine, including the piece right above. I then received an anonymous call, telling me I had my nerve ripping off Andy Warhol.
I had to laugh, as no one does that better than Andy himself. Did he create the original Flower pattern? The lore has it that his great friend Henry Geldzahler showed him the flowers in a magazine and suggested that when he got off the Death and Disaster series, to go in this direction.
So no one owns those flowers per se, although I did quiz the well-known Portland art lawyer, Peter Vaughan Shaver all about it on the radio once. He told me that yes, I might be vulnerable to a lawsuit, even though Warhol owned the original image no more than myself.
More Entries: May 2004
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