“In the pantheon of modern styles, Expressionism is – after realism – the most conservative. It is the least adventurous in the pure inventions of mind, the most hesitant to tear asunder the basic constituents of traditional easel painting, the most eager to reform rather than to revolutionize what it inherits from the past. Yet it is the most fastidious in sustaining – even, it might be said, in celebrating – the momentum of raw emotion in the picture-making process. Thus Expressionism aspires to a pictorial ethos to which Expressionist priorities of feeling inhibit easy access.”
Hilton Kramer, The Age of The Avant-Garde, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York,
1973, P. 230.
Shortly
after buying paintings from me, Jeff invited us over to New Jersey. I had
decided to wait at least until the end of Christmas. Since Carol had to be in NCAD
for her assessment and most of the spring would see her consumed with work for
her graduation, we decided to go over in mid January - despite the winter snows
that would await us. Since my mother’s death in January 2009, I had only left
the house to go to the shops, visit exhibitions and buy art materials or occasionally
to go to dinner with my brother and sister. So the thought of leaving my house
for ten days terrified me. I dreaded coming come to find my house burnt down
and my life’s work gone! I feared travelling in a plane and coping in New York.
However, my greatest worry was leaving our dog Lucy behind. She was usually by
our side all the time so we hated the thought of leaving her alone. We worried
about our cats too, but as long as they were fed, we thought they would be ok. Luckily,
we managed to find an excellent pet minder, who agreed to call to my house
twice a day, walk Lucy, feed, and spend time with our pets. However, while Lucy
and our cat Scrapper were fine, Casey our other cat and mother of Scrapper was
distraught by my disappearance and hid from the pet-minder.
First
thing on Tuesday 18th January, we flew out of Dublin after being all
but probed by immigration. I had been to America three times before in my
youth, but for Carol it was her first transatlantic flight. When we landed,
Jeff met us at the arrivals lounge. Although we had emailed and skyped, this
was our first meeting in the flesh - so we were delighted by Jeff’s boundless
generosity and warm companionship. We arrived to find snow everywhere and piled
high by snowploughs. As it turned out, January was to have some of the worst
snowstorms in recorded history in New Jersey and New York. Nevertheless, we
were impressed with how quickly the authorities cleared the main roads of snow
compared to Dublin - though Jeff told us that New Yorkers had complained that
the mayor had still not done enough.
Jeff
drove us to New Jersey and we put our bags away and freshened up. We had wanted
to have a quick nap - but neither of us could sleep with excitement. Jeff took
us to a local Freeway store where we
stocked up on American sweets, crisps, cakes and cookies. We must have looked
like two stoners as we went around the store eyeing up the huge variety of junk
food. Then Jeff took us to Pearl Paint
in Paramus. It was a warehouse-sized store off the highway. I had never seen
such a big art store in my life and I did not know where to look first. I
bought Sennelier and M. Graham & Co. oil paints, Chinese
calligraphy brushes, Sharpie markers and coloured pencils. Then we went to the
Westfield Mall where Carol was able to buy Hello
Kitty toys in the Sanrio store
and buy jewellery in Hot Topic. Later
we went for dinner with Jeff at Joe’s restaurant in the mall.
When
we got back to our hotel room, we unpacked and watched American television.
Carol and I loved the reality shows, commercials and local news channels. However,
the best thing on TV for me was the boxing on ESPN Classic which Carol lament
went on all night! Both of us loved American TV and found it a welcome relief
from the avalanche of bad news on Irish television. America was going through
its own recession, a vicious battle between the right and left and the public
sector and the private sector - but as a tourist, I did not understand the
subtleties of the political arguments that were raging and besides Ireland’s
situation was far worse and closer to my heart. In the past few years, I had
already gone through shock and denial, pain and guilt, anger and bargaining,
depression and resignation both economically and existentially. Until thanks to
Jeff’s kindness and support, I had found some hope - even if sadly it had come
at a time so bad for others.
The
following day we went into Manhattan with Jeff. On our way, we stopped briefly
at Fort Lee, and Jeff showed us the view across the Hudson River to Manhattan.
Jeff told us how George Washington had positioned his forces along the
palisades to control the Hudson, how the English had tried to surprise attack
his troops and encircle them - and how Washington had staged a tactical retreat
just in time to save his forces and live to fight another day.
Our
first stop in Manhattan was to MoMA the “St. Peter’s of Modern Art” as I joked
to Jeff. The crowd in MoMA were hip and cool - a pleasant mix of art students,
artists, art lovers, families and elderly New Yorkers. It also had many
stunning looking arty girls and cool looking arty boys. It had a vibrant
celebratory feel - everyone seemed crazy about art.
In MoMA,
we saw a revelatory exhibition of Abstract Expressionists, which included
masterpieces by Pollock, de Kooning, Rothko, Still, Kline and Newman. The
Pollock’s and de Kooning’s, which I had pored over in books since a child, most
impressed me. I felt like a parched man stumbling out of a desert to find and
stand under a waterfall. Before seeing the show, I had read Lance Laupind, who
had said, “Mitchell, who, for my money, is better
than Pollock, feels literally pushed aside.” (‘A Retrospective's Tale of Two
Cities’, Lance Esplund, The Wall Street Journal, 29th December 2010.) Jeff
and I wondered what planet he was living on. Even if you put aside the issue of
originality - where she would lose to both Pollock and de Kooning - her
paintings were unresolved messes.
Pollock
made all the other painters apart from de Kooning and Rothko look like students
- their work studied, schooled, theorized. Pollock’s work in comparison was
molten, intense, volcanic and unruly. He broke all the rules and yet managed to
make it work. His pencil drawings of flame like figures showed a surprising
subtlety, softness and intense slow build up of shaded colour. Yet his work
looked pointless in postcards – they demanded to be experienced in the full
scale of their reality.
The
Ab-Ex’s sense of scale was radical, their bold designs on large canvases were
echoes of the grandeur of American landscape painting of the 19th
century. American art in their hands was not just large it was epic. Almost
every Pollock in the show was a one-off masterpiece – a radical experimentation. That is why he suffered such an artistic
block in later years - he simply could not fake it or pastiche himself.
Rothko’s
stained and scumbled colour was elegiac in its intensity. His work seemed to me
to stand alone in its tragic minimal drama. Only Barnet Newman’s work seemed to
bare any kinship with Rothko, but his work totally lacked Rothko’s depth of
feeling and ambition.
If
Pollock represented a maximalist approach to abstraction then Ad Reinhardt
represented a minimalist one. Where Pollock had tried to push painting to its
expressive extreme - Reinhardt tried to show in his ‘black’ paintings how even
the most subtle shifts in hue and tone from pitch black to violet black to
mauve black could induce aesthetic awareness and questioning. If Pollock art
was Dionysian, Reinhardt’s was Zen – a painted equivalent of John Cage’s
composition 4`33, where silence is
never just silence there is always ambient sound.
Most
of the contemporary art I saw in MoMA was instantly forgettable, Nan Goldin’s
work disappointed me and next to Cindy Sherman she was blown-away. There was a
huge Rauschenberg print of newspaper pages but it struck me a big so-what.
There was a bale of hay, with a golden needle and thread wrapped around it - so
what. There were smart arsed paintings, and smart arsed video pieces and smart
arsed sculptures. My time was short in New York never mind on this earth so I
passed them by not even caring to read the helpful in-depth explanations. I saw
an Elizabeth Murray painted shaped canvas, and wondered in rage, at how Robert
Hughes and others, could rate her so highly - and Julian Schnabel so poorly.
Ed
Ruscha left me cold. Although I could see how he provided a link between Pop
art and language based conceptualism - his canvases felt empty and smart arsed -
and as paintings facile and just about competent. James Rosenquist’s paintings
clearly influenced David Salle as well as Jeff Koons, yet while they were
technically skilled and often lush they suggested a new kind of academicism to
me.
Ellen
Gallagher’s multi page mixed-media piece was stunning. Even a conservative art
lover would have to acknowledge her craftsmanship, attention to detail, formal
inventiveness and material sophistication. Her use of plasticine, glitter,
collage, print and paint to comment on black fashion magazines and their
attempts to promote white western standards of beauty to black women was
poetic, thought provoking and sorrowful.
After
looking around MoMA Jeff left to do some business. We went into the American
Museum of Folk Art a slender building next-door, which seemed like an
afterthought to MoMA It was a bit of a disappointment. I thought IMMA in Dublin
had a far superior collection of Outsider Art. I found most of the Folk art
quaint and almost comical after the intensity and strength of the MoMA
collection. There was an exhibition of American quilts – that neither Carol nor
I had any interest in. My favourite works in the American Folk Art Museum were
Henry Darger’s watercolours and source material, and the tender pin-up shots of
his wife by Eugene Von Bruenchenhein. However, I found Von Bruenchenhein’s
acid-trip like abstract paintings and chicken-bone sculptures just goofy. In
the cafe, I ordered a cappuccino and was presented with the largest cappuccino
I had ever had. “It’s as big as a soup bowl!” I exclaimed. Even the waiter
laughed at that.
With
still some time to spare until Jeff picked us up, we went into the MoMA
bookshop. It was one of the best art bookshops I had ever seen. It was cool and
funky and it was obvious a lot of care and thought had gone into its design to
make it at once fun, functional, and highbrow - yet light-hearted and
entertaining. It was superbly stocked with Modern and Contemporary art books,
as well as countless gadgets and souvenirs. I bought a book on Lovis Corinth
another on Jean-Michel Basquiat and a DVD of an interview between Jean-Michel
Basquiat and Paul Tschinkel made in 1983, as well as a huge catalogue from ‘The Eighties Revisited from the
Bischofberger Collection’ an exhibition that had recently been staged in
the Kunsthalle Bielefeld the previous year. New York was a shopper’s paradise,
even for a specialized shopper like me. I am not usually materialistic, but in
New York I saw so many art books, paints and art related nick-knacks that I
could have turned my whole house into an entirely art related den.
I
found it quiet a culture shock to come from provincial Dublin to the busting
metropolis of New York. The largeness of life in America was astounding, as was
the energy of New York and its vertical scale. It was my first trip to an
English speaking country since London in 1997, yet I came to understand the
expression “two nations divided by a common language” and I often found it hard
to adjust to American expressions and local trivia. Apart from art, my other
great passion in the U.S. was junk food, which I adored - eating more in ten
days than I had in months. Yet to my disappointment, when I returned home and
weighed myself, I only put on a couple of pounds but they went straight to my
stomach!
Jeff
collected us outside MoMA and we met up with his wife Rita. Before going for a
meal, they brought us to Target in Fort Lee. Again, Carol and I were filled
with childish wonder at a megastore with so much to choose from. We had dinner
in Outback a restaurant in Fort Lee.
I ordered a small steak, but as I tried to swallow my first bite - it lodged in
my throat. I struggled to cough it up, but I did not want to be rude and spit
it out in front of everyone - so it remained stuck as everyone looked at me
with mounting concern. I had visions of myself dying in New York just as I had
my first success in years. Nevertheless, I managed to cough up the steak - and had
to spit it out.
On Thursday, Jeff again drove us into Manhattan to go to the Whitney Museum. I disliked the entrance to the Whitney, which reminded me of a Cold War bunker. However, the galleries themselves were pleasant enough. First, we saw a group exhibition called Modern Life. Edward Hopper and His Time. The Hopper exhibition was a surprising delight. I had only ever seen a few individual Hopper’s in other museums, so to see so many of his oil paintings, watercolours and prints was a revelation. It only served to increase my esteem for him tenfold. In reproduction, I had feared his work was too illustrative and indebted to the example of photography. A situation not helped by his numerous lowbrow imitators who lacked his drawing and painting gifts and eye for the poetry of modern life. Yet in reality, Hopper’s work was much more painterly than I had expected. He used unusual colour combinations - underpinned by rigorous drawing and an original sense of design. In fact, his work was far more cinematic than photographic.
I
admired Hopper’s ability to take the so-called ugly and lonely aspects of
modern life and give them a poetic, magical and eerie beauty. Strangely, he
reminded me of a twentieth century Vermeer. His paintings had a brooding
melancholy that was hard to pin down. They were dramatic moments of life caught
in mid scene - before or after - something sinister had happened. His brushwork
was neither flashy nor falsely brilliant - rather it was understated and
evocative - a kind of fuzzy cinematic Impressionism. Like all truly great art,
it looked deceptively easy, yet comparison with his peers proved that Hopper
could conjure poetic images that they could only dream of creating. All his contemporaries
came out of this show in my mind as provincial also-rans. In the bookshop, I
bought Modern Life. Edward Hopper and His
Time, an excellently accessible guide to the exhibition.
Looking around the rest of the
Whitney we saw Ed Kienholz’s life-size assemblage The Wait from 1962-64 - a spooky domestic scene with a elderly
female figure sitting on a chair in a living room interior with photographs of
family including one of a young man in army uniform on a table by her side.
Perhaps she was awaiting the return of her son from war. In a birdcage beside
her, there was a beautiful, live gray Parakeet - that was cleaning its
feathers. I did not want to frighten the bird so I stayed at a distance from
the lovely bird that seemed oblivious to its importance to the artwork. Yet again,
I was viscerally impressed by Kienholz’s ability to bring fetishistic magic to
found objects.
We also saw Shadow a new video piece by Slater Bradley in collaboration with
cinematographer Ed Lachman that was a kind of prologue to Dark Blood an unfinished Hollywood film from 1993 that was not
completed because its charismatic star River Phoenix had died of a drugs
overdose outside the Viper Room. We
were all entranced by this beautifully shot and atmospheric video piece - and
spent some time watching it.
Later
Jeff dropped us off at the Neue Galerie, where I was hoping to see an
exhibition of Franz Xavier Messerschmitt’s ‘Character
Heads’. However when we arrived we discovered that we had missed the Franz
Xavier Messerschmitt exhibition by two weeks! In the lobby by the bookshop,
there was a replica of one of his heads for $650, I would have loved to own it,
though Carol thought it would give her nightmares. However, she bought me the
poster to the exhibition as well as four postcards of his Character Heads.
Sadly,
the 3ed floor of the Neue Galerie was closed. However, one floor of the museum
was open. The first room contained
largish oil paintings by Klimt and Schiele as well as Viennese clocks and
furniture. On view was Gustav Klimt’s painting Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I 1907, which had been bought in 2006 for $137 million, making it at the time the most expensive
painting in the world. Was it worth it? Well many less laboured and
original works had sold for similar prices. Is any painting worth the kind of
money that would save the lives of many a starving African nation? Of course
not, in an ideal world, but art continued to be part of the treasure and booty
of the world that retained its unique value even in an apocalypse. Did such a
price tag inevitably sully any genuine aesthetic appreciation? Of course it
did, and personally I ignored it and tried to appreciate it as it had been intended
by its maker not his collectors. Looking at this modern Byzantine expression of
luxury and neurosis - I felt dazed. As my eyes scanned the dense symbolic
freeze of golden and sliver eyes, swirls and lozenges that almost encased Adele Bloch-Bauer in a Midas like nightmare of privilege - I nearly swooned.
The
Klimt was flanked by two marble sculptures by George Minne of kneeling male
youths, which I had seen in reproduction before but not paid much attention to.
In the flesh, though they were very sensual and moving.
There
were also several oil paintings by Schiele. A town painting by Schiele
surprised me with its topsy-turvy stacks of houses drawn out in ultramarine
blue and filled in with bright colours – I saw for the first time that there
were people in some of his town paintings - which I had previously presumed -
were always devoid of inhabitants.
The
second room contained watercolours and drawings by Schiele, pencil drawings by
Klimt, watercolours and drawings by Kokoschka and drawings by Alfred Kubin. Looking
at Schiele’s drawings made when he was in his early twenties left me speechless
with wonder. I felt a gush of reality hit me - as I realized how far off his
brilliance I was as a teenager and how stupid I had been to think I could ever
match him. I could think of few artists in history who had such an original and
startling facility. I laughed at my teenage self for ever thinking I had a hope
in hell of competing with Schiele as a draughtsman. Klimt’s drawings in
comparison were beautiful but rather insubstantial and sketchy. I liked the
Kokoschka’s but not as much as I might have wished. Yet I could see how Schiele
in Kokoschka’s words had “stolen” his brittle line and subject of emaciated
teenagers – but he had done so to far great effect and with more imagination
and skill.
Looking
at these Expressionist works, I became conscious of the mindset such work
demanded compared to conventional art. The commercial glitz of Pop, the vain
posturing of conceptual installation and the nutty obsessions of Folk art
fitted well into the fast paced meanderings of a tourist with a lot to see and
little time to see it. However, Expressionism I felt was different. You could
not just say hello to an Expressionist and gossip and joke – you were dragged
into a heart to heart whether you liked it or not. So we went around the two
open rooms a second time to make the most of what was on view.
Before
we left, we decided to have something to eat. We went into the ground floor
cafe, but I got scared it might be too expensive and we decided to go down
stairs to the cheaper cafe. Carol, forgot her shopping bag and just as I
spotted this, I noticed the actor Eliot Gould who was sitting near us pointing
it out to us. We went downstairs to the basement cafe and quickly had Mocha’s
and chocolate cakes. Jeff collected us in his car and brought us on a drive
around Manhattan taking in Greenwich Village, Tribeca, Chelsea, the Meatpacking
district and 5th Avenue introducing us to many sights we would have
missed had we not had his local expertise. Then we headed back to New Jersey.
On
Friday, we spent the day in the Westfield Mall in New Jersey. Carol bought more
toys in the Hello Kitty store,
jewellery in Hot Topic and clothes in
Torrent. I bought two t-shirts in the
Affliction store, chinos and socks in
Banana Republic and American Painter magazines and a
moleskin sketchbook in Borders bookshop.
Overall, the standard of service in America was superb, I had been in so many
countries were staff acted as if they were doing me a favour by serving me. In
America, staff were friendly and helpful without being obsequious. We had lunch
in Wendys, I loved their burgers but
hated their fries made with potato skins still on - though Carol preferred them
to regular fries.
In
the AMC cinema in Westfield Mall, we watched The Fighter staring Mark Walberg and Christian Bale. It told the
story of ‘Irish Mickey Ward’ who
became famous for his trilogy of fights against Arturo Gatti. Ward narrowly won
Gatti v Ward I, a barnburner of a
fight that was awarded fight of the year by Ring
Magazine. Ward lost the following two bouts but the third - was again named
fight of the year by Ring magazine. Funny, heartbreaking and thrilling The Fighter was by far the best boxing
movie I had seen since Raging Bull.
Even Carol, who had no great love for boxing found it enthralling, largely
because its main subject was Irish Mickey Ward’s chaotic family life and
troubled relationship with his Crack addicted brother.
When
we got back to the hotel, we read our art books and then I watched Aurturo
Gatti v Ivan Robinson II from Atlantic City in December 1998 on ESPN Classics.
It was a terrific fight. It went all ten rounds, Gatti lost by one point which
he had lost due to a low blow. Round three was an unbelievable war that Gatti
won - but Robinson out boxed him in the later rounds.
On
Saturday, Jeff drove us into Soho. I had arranged to meet up with an artist
friend of mine Paul Behnke from MySpace on Canal Street. Before we met with
him, Carol and I strolled around the galleries, boutiques and bookshops in SoHo
like the beautiful Anna Sui boutique
and Taschen bookshop. Then we looked
around The Arcadia Gallery,
which specialized in bloodless 19th century pastiche, by painters
living in a time warp. Their technique was impressive, but it was
substanceless. It reminded me of a higher quality Oisín gallery kind of art. In the Arcadia Gallery, I was foolishly impressed by the slick technique
of the neo-academic painter Jeremy Lipking. I bought catalogues on Jeremy
Lipking and Francis Livingston - but later I felt like a man who had just been
duped by conmen.
Then
we met up with Paul and went into Pearl
Paint on Canal Street – where I imagined the likes of Warhol, Schnabel and
Basquiat buying their supplies. This three-story ramshackle art store was far
more evocative than the Pearl Paint warehouse we had visited in Paramus. The
staff were old, eccentric types who knew their subject. I bought some Sennelier
oil paint that I needed to make some minor retouching to Archway in St. Anne’s, 2006, which Jeff had bought from me and had
been damaged by the framer. We then ducked out to a local cafe and had coffee
and cakes.
We
all took the subway up to Chelsea where we met up with James Erikson another
painter friend of Paul’s. We followed them around the galleries of Chelsea. Had
it not been for Paul and James, we would never have found our way around so
many high-end art galleries and we were so grateful to them for their guidance.
Chelsea
had been the centre of the New York contemporary art world for over twenty
years. Apart from art galleries, and a few fancy restaurants - there seemed to
be nothing else but car repair shops.
In one of the first galleries, we
saw Suckadelic, an installation of
sci-fi action figures with big dicks and obscene text in a room graffitied with
vulgar words. At the entrance to the gallery there was a pink Storm Trooper from Star Wars collapsed
on the floor and surround by beer bottles and dollar bills - other
‘masterpieces’ featured Boba Fett
crucified in a shrine with rosary beads
draped over him. Carol loved it! I loathed it intensely, it was frankly the
most juvenile, amateurish, stupid and desperate to shock exhibition I had seen
in thirty years. However, despite sticking its middle figure up to everyone –
all the works were for sale.
In the Heidi Chow Gallery we saw abstract paintings by Steven Alexander
and Taro Suzuki which were pleasant wall fillers. In the Pavel Zoubok Gallery we saw goofy assemblages and collages by
Barton Lidice Benes that Carol loved but I was indifferent to. In the Luise Ross Gallery we saw some promising
dreamlike paintings by Marzie Nejad.
In
the Pace Gallery we saw 52 Variables - new neo-Pop paintings by
Keith Tyson of large playing cards depicting a variety of corporate logos,
low-brow icons and High Art masterpieces. They were mixed media on aluminium.
Each image was rectangular with a curved white frame around them to mimic the
boundary of a playing card. The images were highly polished and meticulous as
well as knowingly Post-Modern. I admired them without loving them. There was
little in them that had not been said already by better artists in the 1960s
and late 1980s. Still I bought the catalogue to the exhibition, which came in
the form of a deck of playing cards with intellectual quotes on the back of
each. I asked the beautiful but highly groomed receptionist, “is this the same
Keith Tyson that won the Turner Prize for installations?” “Yes.” She replied
abruptly. “Did he paint all these himself?” I asked incredulously. “Yes!” She
abruptly replied. I did not believe a word of it.
In
the Gagosian Gallery we saw new work
by Ellen Gallagher, which Carol and I were blown away by. Greasy was Gallerger’s first solo exhibition in New York for six
years and continued her exploration of African-American culture,
natural-history, marine life and the personalizing of Minimalist grammar.
Although there were some very large collaged canvases, again I found her
strongest works to be the smaller pieces. Though a beautiful show, it lacked
the bite of her earlier works.
In
the Luhring Augustine gallery, I liked Tulsa an early black and white film by the photographer and
filmmaker Larry Clark who had caused a scandal with his later Kids film. At the Lehmann Maupin gallery, we saw Law
of the Jungle a group exhibition of art works curated by Tiago Carnerio da
Cunha. There were some terrific paintings and sculptures in the exhibition, but
my favourite was a visceral 3D oil painting Cannibal
Landscape by Adriane Varejao.
In
the Robert Miller Gallery, we saw a
museum quality Lee Krasner exhibition of Abstract-Expressionist paintings. In
the male dominated art world of the 1940s, Krasner had been over shadowed by
her husband Jackson Pollock. Yet, she had been crucial to his development as a
painter as well as his success - which she had networked due to his anti-social
nature. It was only late in life that the strength of her work had been
acknowledged. My favourite paintings were a series of orange and purple
canvases from 1963 that Krasner had painted at night due to insomnia – they had
intensely worked surfaces often manipulated with her hands and fingers. I loved
the exhibition and found the works full of psychological meaning and intense,
hard won feeling.
In
the Mary Boone Gallery, we saw new
watercolour/gypsum paintings by Joe Zucker. They reminded me of pretentious
Post-Modern mosaics - or lifeless, neo-academic exaggerations of a small
fragment of Paul Klee’s wonderful oeuvre. “What do you think of them?” Carol
asked me. “Their fucking crap!” I exclaimed and heard a grunt of disgust from
the offices. However, all I could think was how in the 1980s Mary Boone had shown
the likes of Schnabel, Salle, Basquiat and Fischl and now they were reduced to
this kind of smart arsed academia. In fact, like most of the galleries, I was
more impressed by the floor to ceiling bookshelves crammed with catalogues than
by the art on offer.
In the Stephen Haller Gallery, we saw From
the Moment Passed a series of oil and mixed media paintings by Linda
Stojak. In a way, her figurative show of paintings of women in dresses typified
everything that I hated about most of the art in Chelsea. These largish
paintings were clever, schooled and claimed feeling – but all I saw in them was
an art-school project writ large in different colours by a talented but
uninspired pupil. They were appealingly painted, they suggested feminist issues
and there was nothing off-putting about them - so they would look good over
anyone’s chase long on the upper west side - but that was about it. There was
nothing about them - that suggested the ugly and vulgar pressure of real
creative risk taking.
In another of the Pace galleries we saw new paintings and some older drawings by Brice Marden. Looking at the Marden’s in the Pace Gallery, I wondered at his
‘success’. A cult minimalist in the 1970s with his encaustic coloured panels -
which I had briefly loved when I had studied them intently in Amsterdam in
1992. In the late 1990s he had changed towards a looping abstraction that was
reminiscent of Asian calligraphy or Middle Eastern arabesques - filtered
through Pollock’s legacy. In this show, his ‘radical’ departure was to add a
gray border to the sides – it struck me as a pointless negation. Not that my
opinion matter a dam - he had exhibited worldwide, been praised by critics and
writers I adored and made a small fortune for himself.
At
the Fredericks & Freiser Gallery
we saw Images from a Floating World: 19th Century Japanese Erotic
Prints and the Echo in Modern and Contemporary Art. Apart from the discreet
Japanese prints - in which coitus was only a small detail in elaborate and
beautiful prints of domestic life - there were works of varied quality by Matisse,
Carol Dunham, John Wesley, Lisa Yuskavage, Pipilotti Rist and Tracey Emin. It was one of the most boring
exhibitions of erotic art I had ever seen – so I suppose that meant in
contemporary art terms it was brilliant! Even Matisse’s efforts looked fey and
unconvincing. It really must have taken quite a lot of artistic skill and curatorial
editing to turn the uncontrollable and dangerous sex-drive into a tranquilizer.
Surrounded by a room of damp firecrackers, I imagined my work going off like a
pound of Semtex - and once again realized how far off the planet I was.
In
Chelsea, I must have seen three mono-print drawings, two neon works and one
stitched drawing on fabric by Tracey Emin. Not one of them struck me as a major
work of art. They had fizz but no bite. In fact, they appeared utterly facile
exercises in self-deception and self-promotion and hardly worth a second
glance.
Finally,
in the Sean Kelly Gallery we saw a
collaborative installation of watercolours by Callum Innes and writing by Colm
Toibin influenced by Innes work. Individually, I thought little of
the Callum Innes watercolours.
They were meticulous and well crafted but so was virtually everything in
Chelsea. However, the installation, with the room painted an eggshell gray, with
Innes watercolours hung high and low about the room with Colm
Toibin’s text Water/Colour the story of
a grieving widow and the colours of the Irish coast printed alongside in
floating sentences really was beautiful and entrancing. I happily stayed chatting
with the others in the installation for half an hour - slowing enjoying the trance
like experience of the installation.
I
enjoyed going around so many galleries I knew of - because of their adverts in Artforum - but I felt all my illusions
about contemporary art in New York crumble away. Living in a backwater like
Dublin, one could over-estimate the brilliance of contemporary art in
metropolises like New York - yet many of the works I saw in Chelsea were no
better than that of the star pupils in an NCAD graduation show. Much of the
contemporary work I saw Chelsea broke my heart with its soullessness,
simplistic professionalism, blatant commercialism, gimmicky ideas and
production line look. The art market is about the
in-crowd, celebrity and product so I felt my art that battled with inner
demons, pathology and unanswerable existential dilemmas had no place in this
world of commerce. I saw little that would change the world or
the way we see it - it was just expensive interior decoration. A surprisingly
large amount of the gallery work was predictable abstract paintings and novelty
sculptures. In fact, I saw so much unoriginal and pleasantly unambitious
abstract painting – that my respect for the genre plummeted. I saw virtually no
self-portraits, nudes or political works never mind works critical of the art
market. In fact, I saw virtually nothing in over 30 swanky galleries that
related to my art in any way. I felt some empathy for Lee Krasner’s work from
the 1950s-60s and admiration for Ellen Gallagher but saw nothing by a man that
spoke to me.
On
Sunday, Jeff drove us into Manhattan and we spent the day in the Metropolitan
Museum of Art. It would be one of the loveliest days Carol and I had ever had.
I had been looking forward to seeing the Met, but Carol who much preferred
contemporary art had thought she would find it boring. However, there was such
a variety of art on display that every possible artistic interest was catered
for in the Met. It also was also graced by some of the most heartbreaking
beautiful Jewish and African American arty girls I had ever seen.
We
started on the ground floor and the Greek and Roman section. I am not a
sculptor, I have only ever made a couple of crass sculptures and a handful of
throwaway 3D art works, yet I have always loved Greek and Roman sculpture and
would rate their work at the very top of human creative achievement. Since my
teenage years, I have drawn from sculptures many times, so I took many
photographs of the sculptures on view, thinking I might do so again.
We
also saw a Roman mosaic from about 300 A.D. that had been recently uncovered in
Israel - and was on loan Israel Antiquities Authority and Shelby White and Leon
Levy Lod Mosaic Centre. It depicted exotic animals, fish and ships and was in
remarkably good condition. It had a beauty and complexity that was beyond most
artists today especially the likes of Joe Zucker.
Then we moved on to the Oceanic and African tribal art rooms. The art of Oceania was another revelation to me, since I was more familiar with African Tribal art. Carol adored these works, as did I. They had a primitive magic and intense power that was hard to deny. Carol said some of the masks looked like cartoon characters which was true. We both would have loved to have time to sketch in the museum but sadly, we didn’t. There was such a variety of art to see in the Met that we could only get a taste of its treasures. Looking at the Rocco pink and gold porcelain, I joked to Carol that my mum would have loved them.
Then we came across a collection of twentieth century masterpieces including work by Picasso, Braque, Matisse, Modigliani, Chaïm Soutine, Beckmann, Klee, Balthus, Dubuffet and Giacometti. Some of my favourite paintings in the whole Met were by Modigliani, I admired his ability to reinvent the nude and portrait in a way that preserved a love of beauty and character. I found it bizarre that a man that had been such a tortured brute at times - could produce such serenely beautiful, romantic canvases. Looking at the mass produced canvases that Modi used and were now hung in ornate frames - I wished I could see them stripped of their frames - as they had been after he created them. I marvelled at Modi’s elegant line and sparing use of paint. Of course, he was not as avant-garde as a host of minor artists of the day never mind the likes of Matisse, Picasso and Duchamp but he had produced soulful works that needed no manifestos or academic theorizing.
I
was surprised by how much I loved the Paul Klee works I saw. They were so
humble, yet perfectly crafted and poetic. Miró’s painting The Farm, from 1921-2 was a revelation
to me. I had mostly seen Miró’s later and far more simplistic paintings, so to
see this complex work - which Miró had spent two years painting - changed my
understanding of his early work and how it had provided the intensive
foundation for his later symbolic simplifications.
The
20th Century realism of Balthus, was the most credible I had ever
seen, despite the fact that he looked back to Courbet his work managed to be
both traditional and modern which I think is one of the hardest things of all
to do. Balthus’ technique was traditional but the psychological mood was
Freudian.
The
soundness of Dubuffet’s paintings surprised me, despite the fact that he mixed
his oil paints with chancy materials like sand, plaster and tar. In fact, his
paintings were in far better condition than many of the Belle Epoch painters
who came only a few decades before him.
Some
art I ignored not because it was bad, but because I was already familiar with
it. I did not bother with Cézanne or much of Degas or Cubist Picasso. On the other
and I liked looking at Braque’s later Cubist works and even Renoir whose best
work I had seen far too few of in the flesh. Renoir impressed me with his
sugary skills at flattering rosy checked children, plump naked women and
society women at play. Nothing dark or sinister ever happened in a Renoir yet
his fiction of idyllic bourgeois life seemed as real as any other. However, as
a painter I found his art a frivolous cul-de-sac. Manet on the other hand
impressed me canvas after canvas with his radically modern approach to
painting. His mix of skill, intellect and character, which never descended into
academicism, empty virtuosity or trivial picture making – could make even a
simple flower in a small glass vase seem like a radical poem in paint.
Some
of Picasso’s late paintings from the 1930s shocked me with their haste and
crudeness which was barely saved by his unfailing design and power of line. However,
seeing his early paintings from the Blue Period restored my wonder with their
slow detonation of sorrow in a build up of blues. Looking at his Portrait of Gertrude Stein I could
understand why it had taken repeated sittings over several months to complete.
In it, one could witness his attempt to conquer the legacy of Ingres yet at the
same time move towards the monumentality of Iberian sculpture, while at the
same time capturing the formidable character of Ms. Stein.
Picasso
was famous for painting over 10,000 canvases, his productivity was a thing of
legend. However seeing his canvases in a kind of giant historical group show
like the Met, I wondered how many of his individual works were truly
irreplaceable masterpieces? If the Met was on fire, and I could only save a few
dozen paintings, I personally would not have chosen a single Picasso. After all
even confining his efforts to the twentieth century, did Picasso ever paint a
nude as sexy as a Modigliani, a landscape as powerful as a Chaïm Soutine, a
portrait as good as a Balthus or a group scene as good as a Beckmann?
Some art works disappointed me, like
the late religious Dalí paintings. Yes, they were skilfully painted and
technically complex, but they lacked the mystery and magic of the old masters
like Vermeer and there was something fundamentally off about them. A collection
of huge prints by Howard Hodgkin I found far more satisfying.
After
taking in the modern art on the ground floor, we decided to take a break for
lunch. We went downstairs to the cafeteria and had coffees and cake. The Met
had a lovely atmosphere - celebratory and welcoming. The staff were friendly and
helpful despite the crowds. I was delighted that the Met was so large that one
never felt hemmed in by other visitors. The crowd included families, couples,
art lovers, and students but thankfully not throngs of crass tourist groups
ramming their way through galleries snapping photographs like in the Louvre. The
people were laid back and clearly in love with art. The children were adorable
and wonderfully well behaved. The bookstore was like a department store, a
wonderland of books, posters, t-shirts, and nick-knacks. In the Met bookshop, I
bought the museum catalogue, a book on Franz Kline by Harry F. Gaugh and a
couple of Met t-shirts.
The
Metropolitan Museum of Art was quite simply the greatest and most varied
collection of art I had ever seen in a single museum. It would be easier for me
to list the things we did not see than the art we did. I felt dramatically
humbled but also immensely inspired. In the past, when young I would have found
excuses and critiques that would have formed a barrier between masterpieces and
me. However, fast approaching forty I felt no need to protect my ego. Just as
the universe was vaster than anything I could imagine, so art was full of
countless masterpieces I could only humbly acknowledge or foolishly derided out
of childish petulance. At times looking at the old and modern masters, I wanted
to give up – yet at other times, I felt inspired to try harder.
After
lunch and ducking outside for a cigarette, we headed upstairs and looked around
the drawing section, which included stunning works by Schiele, Seurat,
Rembrandt and countless others as well as some early photographs. We saw some
beautiful Impressionist and Post-Impressionist paintings including works by
Renoir, Bonnard, Vuillard, Van Dongen and a late airy Balthus nude interior. In
the Met we saw some of the most charming and skilful depictions of children -
who are notoriously difficult to paint. In many Renaissance paintings, one can
see how difficult they initially were to capture - by the doll-like or midget
like way many artists resulted in making them look. However, by the nineteenth
century artists like Renoir were masters at making them look fully alive and
believable.
We
strolled around the late Gothic rooms seeing powerful works by Memling and
Cranach. Pieter Brueghel the Elder’s painting The Harvesters 1565, was a revelation to me, it was so succinct, so
well drawn, and composed. Lacking the artifice and mannerism of Italian
Renaissance art, it was startlingly modern in its realism. Then we had a look
around the late Italian Renaissance masters like Titian, Veronese and
Tintoretto whose broad and broken brushwork was shockingly modern in its
expressiveness.
In
the Dutch rooms, Rembrandt stood out as a painterly magician in a world of
coloured drawings. His paintwork was always inventive, unexpected and
stupendous. I felt like a deluded, crazy provincial in the Met whose eyes had
suddenly opened to the gap between my minor league efforts and the A league
game. The work ethic of the masters was stunning. No wonder so few artists
wrote. They simply had no time. They must have worked morning, noon and night
at their craft.
An
unfinished painting by Jean Baptiste Greuze Aegina
Visited by Jupiter 1767-69, was a wonder to me. I was thrilled to see its
unfinished state, which revealed how even in the first layer of paint Greuze
was expertly and passionately drawing, shading and colouring the canvas.
Ingres portraits had me
transfixed. The immaculate perfection of his technique and grandeur of his
idealism was hypnotic. A lot of rubbish had been said about Ingres. I remember
Shane Cullen who had seen a retrospective of his work saying, “They’re not that
good you know. You could do them!” It was a ludicrous dismissal of Ingres and
an empty attempt at flattery of me that even at the time left me speechless.
Academicism was usually a source of ridicule for me, it had produced so much
lifeless and pompous art but Ingres was an exception, partly because of the
perversity and complexity of his vision - which was married to draughtsmanship
of stupendous quality.
Wandering
around the French galleries we came across Comtesse de La Tour-Maubourg (née
Marie-Louise-Charlotte-Gabrielle Thomas de Pange, 1816–1850), 1841 a dreamlike portrait of a
lady with a long face by Théodore Chassériau painted by the amazing prodigy at
the age of twenty-two. It was a terrific and superbly crafted painting worthy
of a mature painter - but all the more impressive from one so young.
Courbet’s nudes were also
stunning. The myth of Courbet as an egotistical revolutionary and proto-typical
modern artist obscured the tremendous quality of his talent which was meatier
than most but skilful beyond the dreams of most young tyros.
We had
a look around the 19th century French academic art including works
by Gerome whose technique stunned me, but his paintings soon faded from my
memory like most of this academic work. I was surprised by the thinness of
paint that most of these ancient painters used. How they began drawing and
shading the figures with the very first layer - which they brushed into shape.
Impasto like that later used by van Gogh and Georges Rouault looked crazy,
crude and anti-social in such company.
In
the Gilded Age section of the Met, I liked Anders Leonard Zorn’s painting of Mrs. Walter Rathbone Bacon
from 1897 and I was shocked by its rawness and
hasty brushstrokes that seen close up approached Abstract Expressionism in
their boldness. John Singer Sargent’s painting The Wyndham Sisters: Lady Elcho, Mrs. Adeane, and
Mrs. Tennant from 1899 was huge (as big in size
though not in scale as a Pollock) and shocking in its flashy brushwork yet
stunning sense of tone and colour. I
also lingered over Giovanni Boldini’s portrait of Consuelo
Vanderbilt, Duchess of Marlborough, and Her Son, Lord Ivor Spencer-Churchill
from 1906. “Does it remind you of you and your mum?” Carol asked. “Yes a bit”,
I replied, “but I also love Boldini’s flashy style”.
With
only an hour left, we came across yet another section this time dedicated to
late Twentieth century art including work by Pollock, de Kooning, Still, Kline,
Jasper Johns, Andy Warhol, Cy Twombly, Kiefer, Baselitz, Rauschenberg, Chuck
Close and Freud. Sadly, pushed for time, we had to hurry through these rooms.
Overall
my favourite works in the Met were: the ancient Greek and Roman sculptures,
Rembrandt’s portraits, Ingres female portraits, Balthus’s Lolita’s, Courbet’s
nudes, the African and Oceanic masks, Vermeer’s interiors, Modigliani’s nudes, Cranach’s
nudes, Titian’s nudes, early Picasso, Chaïm Soutine’s portraits, Pollock’s abstract canvases, a late self-portrait by
Chuck Close and Freud’s painting of Leigh Bowery seen seated from behind. The
day we spent in The Metropolitan Museum of Art was one of the best days of my
life.
Miscalculating
the time, we left the Met too early, so unfortunately we had to wait for
fifteen minutes before Jeff arrived in his car. Standing outside in the bitter
cold, we jumped around and held each other to keep warm from the cutting winter
wind. I have never been so cold in my life. When Jeff arrived, we all drove
back to the hotel.
Carol
and I spent the night relaxing, watching television and flicking through our
art books. Repeatedly, I had to tell Carol I could not believe my luck. I was sure
my mother was up there somewhere looking out for me. My only regret was that
she was not alive for me to tell her all I had seen and done in New York.
In
the second week, Jeff brought us down to his hotel in Rockville, Maryland in the
greater Washington D.C. area - where seventeen of my paintings hung in the
lobby of the Best Western Plus Hotel & Suites. As we drove, Jeff gave us a
potted history of the places we were passing. I had never visited a country
where we had a friend to guide us and point out the places of interest - so it was
great to have Jeff’s insights. We stopped off in Baltimore harbour for lunch in
a Uno Pizza restaurant. The sky was
crystal-clear and see could see an old ninetieth century warship in the
harbour, a submarine and ramparts of an old fort.
When
I saw my work in the Best Western Plus Hotel & Suites, I was speechless.
Seeing my work so wonderfully installed, left me filled with gratitude. I was
so touched and loved how my work looked in the lobby. I had worried my art
would not look good enough. However, in their frames they looked great. It all
seemed like a dream to me. Then we were brought up to our room and were stunned
that they had given us a beautiful suite.
Washington
was a much cleaner city than New York and the people seemed friendlier. Carol
and I loved the Washington accent with its Southern lilt. We found American’s so
friendly, helpful and welcoming. We met many people with Irish heritage and
others who loved our accent. Everything in America was bigger and better. We
began to joke that everything we saw was the biggest in the world. While in D.C. we took a bus trip around the
city and spent an afternoon in the West and East wings of the National Gallery
of Art Washington. We had no idea that there was so much art to see in Washington.
We thought it was just a political town, but it had in fact over fifty museums
covering everything from art and spying to space travel.
The
National Gallery of Art of Washington D.C. was another mind-blowing collection
of art works and like most of the museums in Washington D.C., it was free! We
could have spent weeks studying the varied and superb collections of the
National Gallery of Washington. We started in the West Wing, which was
impressive with its vast modern spaces, natural light and fine collection of
modern masters. Its ultra-modern rooms contained a stimulating collection of
modern art including Honoré Daumier, Manet, Degas, Picasso, Schiele, Klimt,
Dubuffet, Pollock, Franz Kline and Chuck Close. The highlights of the West Wing
for me were small oil paintings by the Impressionists, paintings by Dubuffet,
collages by Matisse, a Schiele self-portrait bronze and a Kirchner wooden
female bust.
There
was a room of huge paper collages on canvas by Matisse. I had seen these in
reproduction countless times, but to see them for real was a revelation. They
were joyful and inspiring works made by Matisse in old age when he could not
leave his bed. Painted in gouache and cutout by Matisse they were then glued on
canvas by his assistants - they still looked modern and relevant. Even Calder
who I had never felt much about one way or another looked terrific when his
mobiles were seen properly staged and lit in a museum. I loved the shadows his
mobiles cast and their playfulness.
We came
across two Kirchner oil paintings from his later life, which were great to see,
but even for me somewhat disappointing. I found them unexpectedly crude and
indecisive. They looked over-painted, under-designed and his brushwork as crude
as mine at the age of nineteen. However, a wooden painted bust of a woman by
Kirchner wowed me.
My
esteem for Dubuffet was reinforced with each canvas I saw by him. There was so
much artfulness, obsessive intensity and craft in his supposedly crude and
artless works. Yes, Art Brut influenced them
- but he gave it a new scale and tasteful knowingness, which gave it
another meaning.
One of the surprise
highlights for me was a painting of cakes by Wayne Thiebaud from 1963. I was
familiar with his work only in reproduction and had often liked it. However, in
the flesh his delicious manipulation of thick paint was compellingly modern yet
also respectful of the past. His pallet was also delicious with its aqua blues,
candy pinks, luscious pastels, and rich maroons.
The
installation of Barnet Newman’s ‘Stations
of The Cross’ a sequence of twelve striped down canvases also impressed me
with its solemn minimalism and storytelling through just line and space. A room
dedicated to minimal art about nothing including works by Joseph Kosuth, Robert
Ryman and other forgettable ‘artists’ left me with nothing to say.
Finally,
in the West Wing, we saw a wonderful collection of small Impressionist
paintings from The Chester Dale
Collection, which included gems by Corot, Honoré Daumier, Latour, Manet,
Degas, Renoir, Monet, Sisley and Toulouse-Lautrec.
The
older palatial East wing was even more wonderful, with its vast marble atriums
and tastefully decorated galleries and comfortable couches. It held one of the
finest collections of Old Masters I had ever seen as well as 19th century
European and American art. We had little time so we had to be very selective.
We saw works by Rubens, Hals, Rembrandt, Vermeer, and American great
masterpieces by Sargent, Homer, Bellows and Wyeth.
With
little time to spare, I was wilfully selective in what I looked at. I mostly
allowed myself to be drawn to works from a distance. I found the drab, dry
works of Eakins and Whistler disappointing and they did not encourage me to
look more closely. Whistler I found to be a drab let-down, the only exception
being his haunting The White Girl
(Symphony in White), which drew us to it from across the room with its
brightish pallet of whites, grays, sienna and subtle flesh tones.
Sargent’s
smaller canvases were impressive in their concise fireworks display of colour
and brushwork. George Bellows was represented by a handful of larger six-footer
canvases including another boxing picture, Both
Members of This Club, which was far superior to a more cartoony looking version
we had seen in the Whitney’s Edward
Hopper and His Time exhibition.
In
the National Gallery of Art, there were three Vermeer’s on view plus another - to
my eyes - very dubiously attributed to him. I said to Carol, “that can’t be a
Vermeer! If it is... It’s Vermeer on a
very bad day.” “Actually, they think now that this might be a Vermeer.” The
guard who was standing nearby interjected. “There are only twenty-eight Vermeer’s
in the world and we have eight.” He informed us. “Oh...” I replied not wanting
to correct him that there was more like thirty-four Vermeer’s in the world.
“Well I don’t think that’s a Vermeer, there’s no comparison between that and the
other’s.” I replied - quickly moving away to look at the art. The delicious Girl with a Red Hat was on view – it was
a luscious gem of a painting and I instantly fell in love with it. I marvelled
at Vermeer’s masterful and minute brushstrokes that were at once precise and
yet softly focused.
For
me there were broadly two kinds of painterly brilliance. The minutely detailed
kind that one found in Holbein, Vermeer or Ingres and the broad bravura
virtuosity of Hals, Velázquez and Manet. Both were astonishing in different
ways. When I was a teenager, I had been most impressed with the former, now as
a middle-aged artist I preferred the later.
The
National Gallery of Art had a superb collection of portraits and self-portraits
by Rembrandt that were unquestionably the highlights of the East Wing for me. I could agree with Max Lieberman when he said, “Whenever I see a Frans Hals I feel the
desire to paint; but when I see a Rembrandt, I want to give it up.” (Max
Lieberman, quoted by Robert Wallace in The
World of Rembrandt, Time-Life Books, 1969, P.69.) Rembrandt was a
magician with brush and paint with a depth of humanity unparalleled in visual
art. The way Rembrandt could put so much feeling and humanity into the faces of
his sitters was incredible - but it was trumped if possible - by the painterly
drama he could then bring to a golden chain, white ruff, a lace collar, the
fall of a sleeve or the embroidery of a dress. Although Rembrandt always
resolved his faces – his treatment of other clothing details could be almost
Abstract-Expressionistic when seen up-close. In fact, in parts of the paintings
the paint was so thin and sketchy that you could still see the tinted
undercoat. I remembered how in an interview the year before Damien Hirst had
said “anyone can be Rembrandt” and I fumed with incredulity at his arrogance, aesthetic
stupidity and blindness. Many people still tried to copy Rembrandt’s style,
usually their efforts were facile and kitsch in comparison – all flash and
convoluted bravura pastiche - with none of his deep understanding of form or
humanity. Even his pupils and assistants looked cartoonish in comparison.
By
4:30pm, we were mentally and physically exhausted. We slumped in a couch in
front of Ruben’s huge canvas Daniel in
the Lions’ Den from 1612-13. Daniel sat
forlorn, his hands in prayer, as he looked up to heaven for salvation - while
surrounded by a pride of lions and the skulls and bones of previous victims.
The lions were fantastically believable, though it looked like just one lion
had provided the model for all the pride. The painting was ruined for me though
by the utter unbelievablity of Ruben’s treatment of Daniel’s flesh – that
looked airbrushed and over idealized. I was reminded again, of how many Ruben’s
paintings I had seen which had similarly annoyed me with their systematic play
of warm and cool flesh tones - that resulted in perhaps the most unrealistic
flesh by any Old Master.
The
bookshop in the National Gallery was huge but it lacked a great collection of
artist’s monographs - so I just bought the guide to the National Gallery of Art
as well as a small book of works from The
Chester Dale Collection in the museum.
That
evening we went back to the hotel and met up with Jeff who then took us out for
dinner in Rockville. The following day we drove back up to New Jersey.
Friday
28th January was our last day in America and Jeff brought us into
Manhattan for a final trip around before our flight. He brought us into Central
Park that was knee deep in snow. We walked to the Bethesda Fountain and then had lunch at the Loeb Boathouse. Later Jeff showed us were Strawberry Fields the memorial to John Lennon was - but it was
covered in snow so we could not see much. Going across the road we saw the
Dakota building were John Lennon had lived and been shot outside in 1980. Then
Jeff dropped us off in Time Square where Carol rapturously bought toys in the
Disney Store. Finally, Jeff dropped us outside Pearl Paint on Canal Street and with
the last of my money I bought more Lascaux
and M. Graham & Co. Acrylics,
coloured pencils and aids like a battery operated pencil sharpener, a
brush-cleaning jar and a ceramic watercolour pallet.
Jeff
dropped us off at the airport and we all hugged tearfully. In the airport,
while waiting for our flight, I had a spiked milkshake with Baileys and Carol
had a Red Velvet cake in the Garden State
Diner. On the flight back to Dublin, I watched The Social Network, the story of Mark Zuckerberg the founder of Facebook. Its story of the socially
illiterate programmer made multi-billionaire was somewhat predictable, but
saved by its stylish look and somewhat engaging acting. I did not mind the
length of the flight, but I hated being crammed in a tiny seat like a sardine
for seven hours.
It had
been quite simply the best holiday I had ever had. Carol and I had a wonderful
time together because she was as addicted to art as I was and I was so happy
that I could give my dearest Carol some treats. Still it was great to be back
in Dublin and home safe and sound with all my pets. I had loved all the art in
New York and enjoying meeting so many nice people, but I had missed the humble
scale and greenery of Dublin.