June 27, 2007
Corner of Penn and Mathilda
The Bloomfield and Garfield neighborhoods of Pittsburgh meet one another along Penn Avenue, which is becoming something of an alternative arts district in the city, with affordable live-work spaces for artists. Community organizations help artists buy and renovate buildings, so that the artists have a real stake in the neighborhood’s future.
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Thank you for this, Elizabeth. It’s a lovely drawing, and the link to the arts district housing initiative is of great interest to me. Daryl and I often talk of finding a good place to retire–a city with a relatively low cost of living, interesting/quirky people and neighborhoods, decent public transportation, and 4 seasons. Pittsburgh is starting to sound really good. I would love to live in a building such as the one in your drawing, with corner windows that open out.
Elizabeth–I love this drawing and all of your drawings. I also like the sense of a Lived context they all have; you seem to somehow occupy your work without intruding upon it–a mind and world melded in a way that never purports to be the only way, but is always set in a way that seems suddenly to be the best way.
On another note–one that I hope you won’t read anything into!–do you remember seeing seeing the documentary bio of Crumb? It’s great, and one of the things I remember is a bit in which he talked about how he went around the city (Van Nyes, CA and environs [sp?]) drawing intersections and power lines and car lots as backdrops for his comics. He had a wonderfully stylised way of rendering such things and they always seemed to instantly reflect the bleak emotion behind much of his work. So here’s a question: Do you ever find yourself avoiding the selection of some subjects in your walking and looking about because they have been “used” before, by other artists or advertisers, in ways that sully the fresh view you seek? I guess I’m talking about the aesthetics of the “innocent eye” here, and the labyrinthine underpinnings of it that some artists examine an others avoid thinking about for fear that that will sully the process. This is a subject that is dear to my heart because I have always been a person whose heart leaps when, at the theater, I get a brief glimpse of the empty wings with all of its neglected clutter. I also love the bleak annonymity of some landscaping around businesses: I love the thought that I might hide under an island planting of boxwoods, in amid litter and dry leaves near a stray cat blinking in the shadows and thin beams of light–seeing all who pass by but remaining unobserved myself. It’s a kind of thanatotic desire, I think. A desire for dissolution into all that surrounds.
There–I’ve said way too much, again. Sorry. And thanks again for the delight of your drawings.
Mmm.
Cindy – Pittsburgh has no ocean. Alas. If I ever move away, that will be the reason. Everything else about it is wonderful enough that after 23 years, I’m still living here. Any time you’d like to visit, let me know. We live in the neighborhood surrounding the arts district, and it is in turns scruffy and elegant, diverse and awful and fabulous.
Daryl – Wow. Thank you.
Although I sometimes worry that my work will fall into a set of habits, I’m finding that as long as I am willing to plunge ahead and let intuition lead me into new spaces, I do o.k. An advantage of beginning to draw in my forties, is that whether or not I choose to be conscious of it, I bring a lot of history to everything I do. If I worried about doing a thing well, or doing it differently, I think I’d get stuck – but because I try to take risks to keep it interesting… I keep learning, and it stays fresh for me.
As for R. Crumb – I’m honored by any comparison – and didn’t he once say “Drawing is just an excuse to crosshatch?”
I also love the views backstage, and abandoned store windows, and the unfinished edges of things. I take pictures of broken toys at flea markets. The sneakers got me started on this picture – I was thinking of the moment when they were tossed, and what someone’s mother said when they were missing, and whether they’d been there long, as I hadn’t noticed them earlier in the week.
The phone lines and utility poles structure so many of the views in an older city like Pittsburgh – I’ve given myself permission to notice them. They were and are the threads of communication and civic pattern, stitching us together across neighborhoods and generations…