The Right Place, September 28 2004

Like a lot of young Northwesterners in the 1970s, I got swept up in the book Ecotopia. In Earnest Callenbach's visionary novel (published in 1975), the west will no longer abide by a nation occupied with greed and planet consumption. It is now 1980 and Oregon, Washington and Northern California have seceded from the union. Ecotopia lives in a much different way to the rest of the first world.

As fiction it was no great work of art, but as an idea it was very successful. Put Ecotopia in a search engine and the word spawns magazines, organizations and all kinds of hopes and dreams.

At the time I privately felt that the faraway future was in the west, in the Pacific Rim. But had I been anyplace else? No. And once I left the border those ideas and enthusiasms were melted away. Melted away by rock, style and a subculture only then possible in urban settings like London and New York.

Sometimes I have been lucky to be at the right place at the right time, like London 1977. But I've spent plenty of time thinking I may be in the right place at the wrong time or vice versa. It gets real exhausting thinking that elsewhere is the somewhere you need to be.

It has occurred to me, as I read of the various phases and conceptions of "the future," that I am at least once again, in the right place at the right time --- and not just culturally.

The body knows when the mind doesn't; the body will confess. The mind will play tricks and have its own ideas but the body will often play it straight: from the moment I arrive in New York, my stomach starts hurting. Within a couple of years I have a vast array of Zantac and Tums and God knows what else. A full armament to get by. When I arrived here in Portland, 11 years later, I've got the eternal bad stomach with a drug entourage and that's what life is.

But guess what? It's all gone. I hadn't even thought about it until I noticed a handbag empty of that arsenal. Somehow, within a few years, it was gone, all gone, and I have none of that to mess with. 

Expensive Hair, September 25 2004

It never has been but my friend told me it looks it. A sweet gay pal who worked in Bergdorf's cosmetics told me in the early 90s: ‘Eva, it looks like you've got expensive hair.’

But for many years, in true artist and punk style, I did it all myself. From Ziggy Stardust to purple to half black/half white.

Once I got into a quandary...going from Elvis blue-black to platinum, my hair got stuck in strawberry blonde. It just wouldn't bleach further. So I asked my friend Nancy (who was going to Beau Monde beauty school here in Portland at the time) what I should do. Her instructor told her RIT DYE REMOVER. It removed my hair basically -- in big clumps --- and I was soon sporting a bleached out version of Sinead several years before she came around. The above photo was taken several months later (1980) in that painful grow-out period, still looking pretty hacked at.

Many people have no hair these days but it was pretty brutal back then. It was actually OK by me --- I worked at a record store and could look weird--- but poor Nancy was crying as she pulled my hair from my scalp, cutting where it needed. I'll never forget her response. She was truly traumatized!

Eventually I went to beauty school myself to be a makeup artist and then I worked in salons, surrounded by hairdressers for years. They were all ready to ply their trade, so you might say that I got very spoiled, having expensive hair and never paying a dime for it. But I've also had just about every weird thing done to it.

Innovator, September 22 2004

I’ve been cozed in with a book on Charles Rennie Mackintosh. This book has many accounts and memories of people who knew him and gee, it is depressing.

When you look through a catalogue from Pottery Barn, you'll see lamps and various items which they call "Glasgow Style." It is not any Glasgow style at all. Glasgow ran him out of town! It is Charles Rennie Mackintosh, someone who built in that town.

Now people from all over the world go to Glasgow for mainly one reason: to look at his work. He put the town on the map, but boy did they give him grief while he was alive. Turns out he died a pauper, ill and practically unknown. But by then many young architects were copying his style (he died in the late 1920s) and had no use for the real thing.

These kinds of stories really bother me.

He speaks to me because he combined very simple lines with nature, which is often complex. The work can be angular or curved and is generally both. I love his use of just black and white. Of course we tend to take it all for granted, but there was no Modernism when he started doing his thing. No art deco, none of that. I think he is a Great Innovator.

When I was making money in the mid-90s in NYC, most of the time I just lived life day to day in champagne and pretty clothes and did not invest much. But I did need some furniture. I went to a firm in Soho that licenses Mackintosh and bought a table and chairs. It was not expensive either, considering what it was.

Within five years the Metropolitan Museum of Art came out with a huge retrospective of his work. I felt very smug of course, but I didn’t need that kind of confirmation really. It was the smartest thing I ever invested in and only thing, till I bought a house last year.

It disturbs me greatly that it was so tough for him but I guess that is par for the course. Much of what he designed could not get built and Glasgow actually tore down some that was. He wasn't able to live long enough and healthy enough to execute much (as opposed to say, Wright, who lived a long time and could build into his 90s, when he came back into fashion).

I see Macintosh in many, many things. He was so ahead of the curve that as an artist, you can still mine him. And I do.

Initial Image, September 21 2004

I used to wonder if much of life was just a long and complicated journey back to whatever interested you most as a child, or the kind of experiences you had back then. Now I’m sure of it.

Getting back to that center with a new understanding… like somehow it was taken away from you, for whatever reason, and you've got to find your way back to it.

Being back in Oregon may have had something to do with it. I was gone for 16 years. I returned to the land where I was raised and it is possible that it triggered off reactions or scenarios that just didn't get played out elsewhere.

Erinn Kennedy once turned me on to some writing of Audrey Flack, in which she talks of the Initial Image. This artist says most of us have one, some image which is at our core and which we may lose but will search out again.

This idea hit me very strongly when I returned to my studio one day around 2000, sleepy or stoned, and saw my XXX in a completely new way. The XXX was not all that different to an Indian blanket which belonged to my Granddad. I knew that blanket like I knew anything but had not been around it in years. But there it was in working drawings for my painting. I was not inventing. I was going home.

Swifts, September 18 2004

It seems that almost all kinds of good art is surrounded by some sort of controversy. Someone a long the way is offended. The better the artist the crazier they are. When I mentioned to someone two years ago that I was to show Callahan, she said: ‘Oh I hate that guy. His work really offends me.’

I can understand that too. But somehow I fell under his spell. He and I once had a real verbal knock-down drag-out fight (as much as you can have with someone in a wheelchair) about feminism right outside the Laura Russo Gallery.

There are quite a few things I don't agree with him about. But maybe that big fight was the turning point in our relationship. I think I blew his mind that I dared to get right in his face and go off. He said ‘People are thinking you’re going to hit a quad,’ but that situation can’t always protect him.

Visiting him really affected me. I would leave his place and not sleep much that night. He is running his chair all over, a lot, in a way you or I would pace in distraction.

He lives close to Chapman school, where all these swifts (birds) have found a home in a chimney. The school stopped using it for heat so the birds would keep coming. Around early evening in September the birds gather every night and people stake out space in a park to watch the arrivals. Now over 40 thousand birds sleep there during this time, the largest safe harbor for swifts in the world. In the evening when I left Callahan's house, I passed by these thousands of birds swirling in air, like a tornado, filing into the chimney.

Arp, September 16 2004

Today is Jean Arp’s birthday. He is one of my favorite artists.

Thinking of him today I immediately go to a place where I first got into him: San Francisco. It was maybe only a place and time in my life but I think there might be some other reason… the open sky full of constellations. San Francisco is a place to study the sky and Arp is a man for constellations.

Another factor was the color theme: grey after grey, many shades of white and blue. Such is SF and such is Jean Arp.

Arp wrote a lot about the laws of chance. He trusted chance like he trusted nature, where eventually all of his art was rooted. For him art could be a natural as a star or a flower. Many of us are not very successful with this kind of sweetness or sentiment but Arp was the master. Fully credible, believable.

Supposedly the collage at the top was made according to the laws of chance, in which he ripped up the paper and let if fall where it may. I have a hard time believing that this paper fell so perfectly as what we see here. Then I realized that the chance of Jean Arp was probably the best in the world and left it at that!

First and foremost Arp is one of the original Dadaists, all of whom I love. I have been to Zurich to the original Cabaret Voltaire and seen one of his reliefs right on the street where this famous bar was almost 100 years ago. An Arp right on the street, untouched and often ignored by all the people who walk by. I went day and I went at night as I stayed just up the street from it. Even today this is a raucous part of Zurich.

Recently I have considered the influence of his wife Sophie Tauber-Arp. He loved her like crazy and she is a great artist too. One could say: “…. a great artist in her own right” but I refrain from this kind of condescension. It has occurred to me that just like Christo and Kienholz and so many other male artists, this mate gave more than moral support…

If you study Jean, his work radically changed the more influence Sophie had. I think it is very possible that the organic signature he is known for, which got him into Venice biennials and into the art history books as one of the greatest --- comes from her.

Jeff Jahn has referred to him as Hans Arp, but he is wrong. Arp is one of those Alsatians, which means he has roots in both German and French culture and he was born with both names. But Arp changed his name finally and formally to Jean alone because he did not want to be German in any sense ---not dissimilar to John Heartfield on that score.

Arp is a marvelous writer and poet. If you can ever find Arp on Arp, a collection put out by Viking and their “documents of 20^th century art” series, check it out.

Picture vs. Process, September 14 2004

In art school I could observe how different we all are in our creative approach, in the process. I learned a lot about myself by watching others.

Kandinsky once said he was taught to look at the model, not the canvas. But he changed that approach a great deal when he went into the abstract. No model, outside of inner forces, to look at. He spent more time looking at the space he was about to alter.

I had a similar discovery when I noticed how much time people put into their palettes. You might think I am one for the mix of paint but I have always been consumed with the image, as opposed to the palette. I do what I have to get where I want but the palette is nothing I have to romance.  

Some painters worship the paint itself, while I worship the painting.

Another factor is time. Now I understand how it is that some people ‘spend all day’ in the studio: they stare at the canvas, walk up, apply a stroke. Answer the phone, go out and smoke, talk to someone. I'm not putting it down, but I’d never spend all day "art making" like that.

My mind is at work constantly so that when I get to the job at hand, I don’t meander. In some ways it’s like I made much of it in my head already. So that when I get in front of that canvas, nothing gets between me and it.

No way can I paint for more than 4 hours, especially with what I do now. With representational art and art school art,  it was faster and easier, but even then I did not chitchat along the way.

Another artist said she also liked picture (the image) more than process, as though it were a guilty pleasure. Let's have no guilt here!

I think we can release the importance of process. There was a time everyone I knew was all wrapped up in it. "I'm a process artist" --- I heard on more than one occasion.

But I say we all take some road to get there. I don't know that I LOVE my process at all....art is hell sometimes and a birth. I've got an image in my mind I've yet to see in the flesh. It’s a haunting thing.

Even those who dwell on ‘process’ or ‘concept’ still end up with an image.

Wallpaper, September 11 2004

The night before I moved from New York to Portland (1997), I met my best friend outside of the World Trade. We sat at a bar right on the water. It had been a favorite place of mine since I had worked in that neighborhood in '91.

Sure, it's straight around there. It's not a cool hangout of any sort. But there was a luxury in that, and there was especially a luxury in taking in the water and the boats and all the newness and pretending it was someplace like San Francisco or Marin County, for it surely was nobody's typical idea of "New York, New York."

After a drink we walked up the windy tunnels and various abandoned alleyways. Not a lot ever happened there after Wall Street people left. I always loved the bareness.

Finally you reach the heart of TriBeCa and you hit Odeon, one of my old favorite cafes. I stared into an ashtray, the haunting logo of Odeon, the hatted man surfacing from the subway, printed in red on the tray. I can't steal ---- it's a crime if you believe in karma, but in asking the bartender, he was kind enough to give it to me.

Lots of things get broken around here; I'm kind of a maniac. But I still have the ashtray.

And of course that area is all changed now. I may as well be recalling the Berlin Wall.

For several years I've subconsciously and then consciously distanced myself from New York. It was a survival tactic if I was to be happy in this town and where I am in life. One can't be always referring to a place and a people and a style that is no longer yours. I must have done just exactly that the first few years I lived here in Portland.

I felt like a traitor in some way. I didn't know how to explain to my friends there...why I wasn't there and why that was actually, finally, OK....why I wasn't languishing for not visiting.

With every 9/11 one is pulled back, but to a New York that was not mine. The New York Times had a piece in which people confessed that they were 'so over 9/11' though it felt weird to say it.  Maybe that is me too.

I took images which bombarded me. There were several collages I made in late 2001 on this order. The outcome is something like wallpaper. Repeated design and some of it horrific, but it’s also just a pattern. My own version of William Morris for this turn of the century.

My Private Eye, September 9 2004

I read crime novels of New York characters and they remind me of my pal Pierre. He is someone I met as an artist first --- a performer and visual artist --- who I later found out was a private detective.

The first time I saw him he was performing at the DADA 84 festival in SF. He drove out on the stage in a huge finned car from the early 60s with about 5 hot sequined babes in tow. He went on to mix martinis and sing tunes of the same era like A Summer Wind. He wore sharkskin suits, hair slicked back, lanky with a quirky face, a crooked smile. He called himself Mr. Lucky.

It was only later that I found out he was a private eye for a living and it seemed really perfect for him. He just had that certain kind of demeanor, confidentiality, on the up and up but also the down low. You could trust him but you knew that he trusted no one.

One day I said to him: ‘Hey Pierre, maybe you can find my dad for me.” Since he obviously had the resources. Two weeks later he handed me an address and phone number.

It hadn’t been that big an issue for me (thus far), the fact that I had never met my biological father. My step dad was crazy about me. Unfortunately he died when I was twelve and this left me open for issues to invade. I never really got over his death and by now I think fuck it --- I don’t have to. And perhaps that story is for another entry.

Pierre gave me this particular information the night before I left San Francisco to move to New York and so I spent this final night with him. He made that goodbye very singular.

We met at his home which was this condemned old motel. That area holds the museum now and is completely revamped but in the mid-80s it was still a no mans land. He knew the owner and was sort of a guard for the place. He had access to room after room, all of them dark and decrepit and full of ghosts.

I didn’t know he was also what you used to call a fine artist --- he showed me rooms where he worked, where he did life drawing. Sculpture everywhere. Very old-fashioned and educated in the classic way, but really way ahead and innovative.

And my god the crime novel collection he had! Row upon row of tawdry paperbacks from the 40s and 50s with titles like "The Blonde was Dead" or "Ticket to Oblivion" or "Harlem was my Haven".

Of course nowadays these book covers are made into postcards and lounge culture is a standard hipster fare but Pierre was a pioneer in his fascination for these things. Plus like I said, he just looked the part and as he was originally from New York, he had that clipped accent.

He gave me a tour of the motel and then we took a drive in one of his huge, finned cars. Eventually we drove along the water by all those old piers, some of my favorite structures of San Francisco. These moments play in my mind like a favorite movie.

We kept in touch and he took me all over the village when he was in New York, which he knew like the back of his hand. He knew Chumley’s well --- where you go down nameless alleys and through a nameless door to find one of the warmest and sometimes raunchiest bars in the city.

One time we kissed and he said "Ah Eva, maybe you and I are going to be an item," or something like that. We never were but I feel very lucky to have had that moment too with him. He was (and still is) a total original.                                          

Art School, September 7 2004

My affair with the Art Students League predates my time in New York City.

It must have started with reading about American art history. Just about anyone in the who’s who of art before about 1970 went to the League, at some point in time. Even Andy Warhol. But also Jackson Pollock, Robert Rauschenberg, Edward Hopper. And of course --- Georgia O’Keeffe.

I couldn’t help but remember that Georgia moved to NYC at age 29, same as me. This is the deal with Georgia – you can love or hate her work, but if you’re a female American painter, you just can’t get around her. I rarely think of her now but often felt her spirit when I first moved to NYC and went to the League.

I had these old American Art Student magazines from the turn of the century to about 1935 or so. Hard to believe I would actually cut those things up and use them for photomontage (like the one above) but I did (and no regrets). There were these ads for the Art Students League in them. Also all my old Art Forum magazines from the 60s --- the League had ads in the back.

So all of that contributed to the pull and romance of the place.

Then I had the opportunity of getting an illegal sublet on 56th and 9th --- very close, as it turned out, to the League. I was supposed to be there only 3 months. It turned into 10 years with me getting the lease.

The man who had the lease was also a well known dealer in San Francisco who told me I must paint, that photomontage would never make me a ‘serious artist.’  Looking back, whatever his rationale, it was kind of stupid; I had a wild and flourishing career. The only problem was that it was not created within the gallery system.

No doubt he thought I would go to some place like Pratt or Parsons, but I chose the League and for different reasons than his. It was more like a big studio space than a typical art school. Old-fashioned too --- strictly painting, drawing and sculpture --- whereas I was not. I also liked it because they gave me a 2 year scholarship. 

Basically I just wanted a place to paint, with a little bit of input, as I had my own kind of huge work ethic. The League provided a loose atmosphere in one way, while giving very traditional information when it came to paint and composition.

I should have said “Watch me.” Instead, I put away those sketches and went back to representational rendering. I would have forgotten that whole scenario of being so near yet so far had it not been for my diary, in which I recorded it all down. It was not until 1999 that I returned to this kind of image.

This, by the way, came from a teacher I had for 2 years who never said my name once. I was always Sweetheart or Darling. You see this as endearing until you start to realize that your career is one he will never know. Your name could be put up in lights at MOMA and he will never know that he taught you. Because he never figured that your name was one to remember.

Well what can we say about it now? They may try to beat it out of you but they can’t kill it. Such was the case with me. It’s almost 20 years later and I’m painting how I want to paint. But I don’t regret learning how to draw or construct.

At this time early American art was on my reading list and what I went to see at the Met. Some people, maybe they go to New York and get into the 50s or the 60s. Of course I did some of that, but what I was really interested in was people like Albert Pinkham Ryder, the Hudson River School, the Luminists, the Eight, the Ashcan School and so on. Art of 100 years ago right in this country.

I’ll never forget my first term there. It was the summer and the place was fairly quiet. My class was on the top floor. I used to arrive early, climb on to the roof, see so much of that beautiful city and smoke a joint. What is weird is that I have, in general, terrible vertigo, but I overcame it so I could feel on top of the world at this school, this beautiful old building. Then I would edge my way down the roofline and paint like crazy for 3 hours 5 nights a week.

It’s not the getting stoned that I want to relate to you so much – what is important was that King of the World sensation I had on that roof, that freedom and optimism.

Later on I found out that no one was ever supposed to go up there. Over time I investigated all the nooks ands crannies in that building.

The smell of the turpentine runs into my head. I instinctively go way back into the old studio I spent most of my time in and start balling my head off. Like Niagara. The pain of not living as an artist was killing me. I went home to smoke my cigarettes.

More on the Art Career, September 6 2004

Lauren Mantecon said on the radio that as regards her show, she was hoping to let go of the ego a bit. Another artist (Kenny Higdon) listening in said he liked that response a lot.

But what did I do then but take the interview another direction by asking: “What, is it just some awful thing for a woman artist to have an ego?”

I now realize that I guided that interview into a direction it may never have taken left to its own devices. Lauren might have gone down the road of the Spiritual Revolution. But I stuck to goals and ambitions and who gets what.

Some can believe that an art career can be “nothing, really” and that putting rice on the table is much more important. An Art Career --- let me put this in capital letters --- is not a lofty goal in and of itself in the grand scheme of things.

From where I am sitting this attitude comes from those who had a choice about it. You can afford to think it is nothing if it was assumed you would do something, be someone, achieve, make your mark. Then you can stand back and say: “I release that. That is your agenda, not mine.”

But if you grew up to be restrained, pretty and ornamental, quiet and obtrusive, in accordance with all while having no real voice of your own, just smile, arch your back ever so slightly – well, then ‘wanting nothing’ is just part and parcel with the expectation laid out since birth.

Go right ahead and be a high person and want nothing. Go right ahead. Madonna is all about that now. But man that girl had something to prove before she ever got to “this is all very unimportant.”

For years I made art about a Spiritual Revolution and in the back of my mind and at the very core of my art, it is there. It cannot go away. But in the meantime, I’ve decided I want all the other things that successful people (even some artists!) get. Putting rice on the table my way, how about that? And credit.

In 1990 I got very sick. For the next 2 years I went through about 25 doctors and healers and whoever else might help me. One guru told me that to want anything ---- even wanting to be well --- was no good.

At the time I demurred but had to comply on some larger level. I had been through so much nameless, mysterious pain that I had to resign in some ways. I would be happy with just a pain-free life, I said to myself and many times. That was all.

I had heard more than once: “Look at the easiest way to do something. Difficult is out.”  And as I slowly recovered that was exactly what I did. I kissed goodbye many things and an Art Career in New York City was one of them. Once well, it was glaringly obvious that the life of part time work and no health insurance --- the life most artists lead --- was not an option for me.

Ambition for your art is a complex enough issue. A lot of us feel funny about what it is worth, this thing that comes out of us and then, who is it for. For yourself, of course, it better be. But after all that has passed I’m like yea it’s also for the world too, the whole world, and there’s nothing wrong with that.                                

Old Pal, September 1 2004

An old pal was getting married. A total adventurer. I made this montage as a wedding gift an hour before the party. But I think it was a premonition kind of work too. She might have been blinded to the situation, as love alone can accomplish.

I was there for her first wedding too, a marriage that lasted over 15 years. As the years went by I secretly took credit for the longevity, as I had prayed for her marriage at the Grace Cathedral in San Francisco. She had known the guy about 6 weeks. The prayer seemed like a good idea.

This woman was the ever moving and conquering fire, who naively may offend along the way in their gregariousness, but means well. Don't hate them because they're beautiful either.

I met her through Randy, who had the first Punk band in this town: Randy and the Randies. They were so early they could not even play! But two of those girls went on to form the Neo Boys who could indeed by that time play well enough.

We followed each other around for years. She was my roommate in London for awhile in ‘77, before she found a room in a big boarding house in Chelsea. Adam Ant lived right above her, silly and very pretty. He was still performing a bit in the shadow of Jordan and this was long before that pirate thing. Still, he had that great song Plastic Surgery. We loved that song.

Once back in Portland we roomed again, but things were not as smooth that time around and she got a little clutching. That graffiti that was on the Morrison Bridge for years --- Be Bland Be Boring Be Eva Lake, I am pretty sure that was written by her.

She always had Cold War dreams of the Soviets -- being a spy or a journalist or something---and did follow her dreams. She lived all over Russia for years. I have no idea where she is now. Last I heard it was somewhere in South America.

More recent entries: August 2004

                                      July 2004

                                      June 2004

                                      May 2004

For information about the diary, read here

Lovelake