In the winter of 2019, I was working regularly in a shared art studio in Clinton Hill. It was on the second floor. One window was masked with something almost opaque, maybe paint, so only light came through. The other looked out onto the loading entrance of an Asian vegetable distributor and a few dumpsters. An apparently dead but very long spider plant hung from the upper pane. I loved it all.
My studio-mate was a metal worker. She milled her own metal, and had a rack of strange tools—hammers and pliers and blowtorch nozzles and little cutting things—that I admired every time I came by. She was never there, so I was always alone, save the two or three other artists I could hear shuffling around in their own studios. While we rarely interacted, we felt each others’ presences in the still popping soap bubbles in the communal bathroom sink, or the muffled music drifting down the halls. I had two walls, a closet and a loft compartment for my stuff, and I could bike to the space in about 12 minutes. It seemed like something I could do for years, and I was just striking a band of work I felt could accommodate a long, exploratory timeline.
When COVID came down, I knew my studio was history. I texted Natalia, the metal maker, and told her I’d have to break the lease and she replied that it was ok, everybody was. We agreed I would leave the key on her work table and I felt this surreal, far off feeling like I and everybody I knew were falling off separate cliffs.
I went to the space one final time with an acute sense of dread that every surface I touched and every cube of air I passed through contained the virus. I roughly stacked and rolled my piles of paper and tossed my pens and brushes and vials of ink and tubes of paint, which felt like they had finally come to rest, into boxes. It’s surprising how heavy a giant roll of paper can be. After a few awkward trips down the stairs, the car was loaded. And that’s where my artwork stayed. We weren’t going outside much, let alone driving anywhere, so the car functioned mainly as a storage space for a few months. When George Floyd was killed, I unloaded a bunch of work and passed the proceeds on to Black Lives Matter. The rest I stored at my in-laws’ on Long Island during the first outdoor, masked and distanced visit with their grandchildren. I kept a few pieces. I’m not sure how I decided which. Ones that felt unfinished or otherwise desirable, I suppose. I also kept a blank notebook and a few pens, my seeds for a future garden. But as I stashed it all away on an upper shelf of the closet, between the bin of beach towels and the trove of snapshots printed at Walgreens I’d amassed over the decades before iPhones, I knew I wouldn’t be seeing those things for a while. They were already obsolete. In the moment, it felt like exactly what needed to happen — the abandonment of as many physical, mental and emotional burdens as possible. A modest marker of the survival instinct. But I was also stricken with a sense of grief, for somewhere deep inside, I understood that my art practice was being forced into an indefinite dormancy.
After the initial quakings of the pandemic settled, I found my mind drifting to the notebook and pens in the closet. I wondered—maybe there’s something to say now? Maybe whatever you draw during this bizarre time will be really interesting? Maybe it will just feel good? But usually, I didn’t even pull them off the shelf. My mind and body were so uninspired by the prospect of touching a pen to paper, it was startling. I’d gone through periods of my life where art-making was not at the forefront. But never quite so detached, so alien was the idea of making images. Even idle doodling felt eerily pointless. This utter lack of motivation made it all the weirder that, as the pandemic wore on, I found myself making art all the time.
When I look at my children now, it’s hard to believe what they were when we first took to our apartment. Every evening at 7 o’clock, as the clatter of pots and pans, air horns and whistles, a form of applause for the doctors and nurses beating death away from thousands of sick New Yorkers, wafted across the city like a stiffening breeze, I lifted my four-year-old son onto the window ledge. He was tall enough to reach most of his head out the high one that opened widest. He would woo-hoo or clap, adding to the sweet but unnerving cacophony. Our daughter, who was only 1, would too, aping her big brother. But she wasn’t tall enough to reach the window. She was still getting her legs, having learned to walk just a few months earlier. Now, they’re almost 4 and 7. They bicker, read together, go to the bathroom by themselves, and have practically no memory of life before COVID.
Those days had an urgency to them. An energy, a drive to do something, perhaps because we were surrounded by so much nothingness. The walls that had confined us and determined our daily paths and routines were leveled. And the walls of our apartment became, for a time, the boundaries of our world. With two small children to not only raise but raise within some framework that allowed for joy, excitement, learning and pleasure, we went about the business of keeping them busy. Artmaking, of all kinds, was a reliable activity.
It wasn’t lost on me, as I crafted The Wizard of Oz characters from popsicle sticks and felt, or designed a new board game, or made construction paper marionette puppets, or simply sat in silence between two children drawing with markers and crayons, that I was being asked to do the very thing I found I had no reason to do. “Can you make __________” became a familiar, if not tedious request. And my answer, uttered with varying levels of exhaustion, was always: “I’ll try.” On one hand, I marveled at my ability to rise to the challenge. To actually draw a decent rhinoceros, or robot, or Mickey Mouse. On the other, I was perturbed that this is where I was. Doing this instead of my real work. Sometimes, however, I got lost in the project at hand, so much so that the children could have taken or left the end result. After all, they didn’t need such detail on the cardboard box space helmet – it didn’t need so many unique buttons. The lion mask didn’t need to look so real. But I couldn’t help myself. And as I think back on it now, I know that this was my way back to art. This was my way back to the practice I thought I knew – through the eyes of children seeing it happen for the first time.
My dad was an artist. He had paintings all over the house. He went through a fruit and vegetable period in the 80’s. He painted still lifes of corn, onions, mushrooms, peas. They were incredible. I used to look at them real close up, trying to understand how the brush and pencil strokes came together to make a picture. He made candle holders out of beach glass and polished stones. He made tiny clay heads and strange mashups of old farm tools. He carved old western towns from driftwood. He made exquisite birthday cards with handmade fonts, lovely illustrations and cartoons. His photo albums were legendary for their mastery of layout and design, punctuated with profound and sometimes melancholy jokes, handwritten poems and drawings. Near the end of his life, he made these little dioramas using found objects. One was Jerry Garcia on a tiny stage, performing in front of a cheering crowd. He was an artist. But not really. He was in advertising (account, not creative). And while he made things with the skill and compulsion of an artist, I’m not sure he would have ever used that word to describe himself. In fact, I never heard him use the word at all. Maybe he thought there were too many artists, and not enough of whatever he was.
It wasn’t unusual that my dad would gather us around the dining room table in the evening, put a pile of art supplies in the middle, and more or less tell us to start making something. It wasn’t exactly a way to get us out of his or my mother’s hair; he would sit there too. I often watched in awe as he seemingly made things out of nothing. Paper would get sliced with scissors or lines would get applied with such confidence and grace, I couldn’t quite comprehend what was happening. Then suddenly, the thing would come together and a face, or an animal, or a scene would appear. Almost like magic. All the while he worked away, looking down underneath his glasses, chewing little bits of things he had sucked from his teeth. And when we got frustrated with our own pieces, he showed us what might make that thing look a little more like a leg, or a tree, or a monster. Art was his answer to so many things: boredom, anxiety, fear, time. And in the time of COVID, it became ours too.
Two years on and our family art practice has evolved. There aren’t quite so many projects. I think we exhausted the hunger for attacking our scarcity with creativity. Things are a little more open now, and the days don’t have the same tenor of being cornered, so we don’t rely so much on recycling, rethinking or trickery. But we draw every day, sometimes a couple times a day. The children seem calmed by it. It gives them purpose. And it is wondrous to see them manifesting thoughts and pictures on paper. It’s wondrous to see them get better.
I slowly started taking out my notebook when they took out theirs. At first, I only sketched in marker or crayon, the standard medium at our dining room table. And instead of drawing something that the kids were drawing too, I would draw some of my own things. They would look on and ask me about the faces or shapes I was making. I couldn’t really explain what they were, I told them. I realized that the months of drawing things for them had actually been a form of practice. If I had any hope of being convincing, I had to really contemplate what it was to draw a human face, or a body, or a flower. Eventually, I grabbed one of my own pens. I tried returning to some of the themes and styles I left back in Clinton Hill, but it wasn’t the same. It was precarious. After drawing for children for so long, I didn’t really know what to draw for myself. The itch was there, but nothing else. Anything too specific to the present moment felt absurd. The times of COVID, not to mention the mayhem and dysfunction of America were so viscerally disturbing, it felt like years before those feelings could properly crystallize into thoughts or ideas. The process of getting back to making art felt very much like a process of not thinking. Not even really feeling. But reacting. Reacting to the crude impulses that so quietly, but powerfully, drive your pen in the first place. I made a lot of bad drawings at first, but I think that was sort of like revving the built up grease from an unused engine. I had to blast out the sticky learnings, the old connections, the immature lines, from my body and arrive at a starting point completely fresh. The paper started to build up again. And as I felt around in the dark, patiently waiting for some form to solidify, something happened; I started having fun again. It was like an old friend had arrived at my door. The friend was older, perhaps thinner, like they had been through something. Sickness. Or war. But it was them. And I was so happy to see them, I cried.
I now find myself in a tentative but exciting new chapter of work. I’m not sure how to describe it yet. There are some familiar styles, but new juxtapositions. New tones. New lines. New freedoms. This work, which is in its infancy, has inevitably been shaped by my experience in this apartment in New York City, the so-called epicenter of the COVID-19 pandemic. But equally, if not more so, it has been shaped by my experience as a dad, desperately seeking something in his limited toolbox, in this small place, in this large cloud of time, to teach, show and create love…in the best way I knew how.