Sometimes I’m working on a painting, revising and tweaking and changing colors, and it is just not happening. All the draperies, wallpaper, extra characters, or funky appliances in the world won’t make it work. The problem obviously lies much deeper, and the thing is starting to feel destined for the scrap bin. I wrote about flailing in this manner in a previous post, but that time I had waited until after the painting in question had already landed safely and had even found a home.

One of those problem paintings has been hanging around my studio for over a year now, a reject from my Manet covers series which I’ve since finished and shown and published a book about. In that series, I had restaged some of my favorite Manet paintings in mid-century suburban America, using characters I gleaned from various vintage magazines ads.The Waitress, 1879: For my cover of this work, I found the right fifties’ lady holding and contemplating a serving tray, three people turned mostly away from the viewer, a musician, and a sort-of-dancing spunky gal sporting capri pants. I always work out the compositions first as charcoal drawings, then I figure out the shapes of the panels and what fabrics to cover them with.

Sure, the six-figure composition was a little unwieldy and sprawling, but that felt true to the wide-open American suburbia that these people had to inhabit. The housewife serving the beer was in a much larger space than her Parisian counterpart, but her domesticized world was so much smaller in every other way.

The deep expanse of the living room felt kind of claustrophobic with all those people squished in the foreground. Which is what I was going for. So far so good.

I sort of organized the people into “teams” and partially separated them with one of those very mid-century room-divider things.

The yellow squares are paint samples that I’ve made to help me pick colors. But finding colors that would play nice was proving to be a bit of a challenge…

Out with the yellow table! It was pretty and everything, but it had to go. Then the guy’s suit went from blue to green and he acquired a hat. What’s with his friend? I’d chosen her for her weird snail hat, and now I had no idea what to do with her. Unruly, the lot of them. Except maybe the guy at the piano. I kind of had a crush on him, but I couldn’t decide how to decorate his little corner.

The deadline for the show came and went. I had plenty of paintings for it without this one, so it went unfinished into the painting rack, where it sat for about six months. When I finally pulled it back out, one look told me it was never going to work out as I’d planned it. So I unbolted and separated its two halves, and then got ruthless with the white paint. I spared only the areas of fabric that formed figures, and not even all of them made it.

Out went the problem lady and the guy with the hat. Away with that pesky husband sipping his beer at a funny angle. After some hesitation, I let the piano player go, too.

Then I put the two panels away again, hoping I would forget about those awkward, unwieldy characters and their strange preoccupations. Forget about the original Manet, too. These would be just some bits of ephemera I could riff off of when I needed a new bit of something for my brain to chew on.

Brain-chewing day finally arrived last week. I decided that this lady needed a floor to ground her in a world. I’d bought a chalk-line for the specific purpose of making perspective lines, and I was nerdily excited to break it out for the first time. A couple of tacks where the vanishing points go, and chalk away! Fun!

I knew immediately what color her new, clean, streamlined, tiled universe needed to be. Sometimes the technical, repetitive task of filling in dozens of receding squares is soothing and satisfying, clearing my mind and letting me enter the world of the painting.

She’s now been put away for a bit and her orange tiles are drying.

The next day I pulled out her friend and gave her a chalkline grid, too.

I found an interesting receding chevon tile pattern in an advertisement that I’m replicating within the grid. Turquoise is her color. Beyond that, I don’t know where this is going. I’ll figure out their new stories and add the rest of their surroundings as I get to know them. Stay tuned.

 

Last summer, I started a project: drawing the Alaskan Way Viaduct in its final years. This highway from the fifties is a loud, ugly, overbearing monstrosity that blocks the waterfront, drowns out conversations, spews tire dust everywhere, dominates the cityscape, and reminds us of a less enlightened age when freeways obliterating the human-scale landscape seemed like a good idea.

Well, here’s the thing: I kind of like it. I mean, I’m still looking forward to the party we’ll have when the viaduct is finally demolished, but by drawing it I’ve gained something like an aesthetic appreciation for the damned thing. Susan Sontag observed that photography favors traditionally “ugly” subjects, conferring on them a kind of beauty. I’d add that a century and a half of looking at photographs has made us all appreciate the ugly a bit more in person, too.

Looking at it so much made me realize that it actually has a design, something I’d not previously been aware of. Someone at some point had to think up those giant blocky arch sections that recede into the distance; they’re not completely accidental. It has a color, too, closer to burnt umber than to grey, which I think is the color that everyone assumes it is.

It has an uneasy but nevertheless affectionate relationship with its surroundings. This little Frankfurter stand sits nestles so cosily in its shadow, while the shiny glassy blue and coffee-colored post-modern office buildings behind it tap their toes impatiently as they wait their turn to finally face the water.

I can’t imagine what was going through the mind of the person who decided to tag it with “Oprah.” Maybe something to do with her giving all those cars away.

Landscape painting came into its own when rural life was beginning to disappear. Pining for the soon-to-be-lost is sometimes a shortcut to aesthetic appreciation. I can’t say I will be sorry or nostalgic when the viaduct is demolished, nor when the automobile era finally grinds to a smoky, smelly halt at that final traffic light. But for now, I’m taking the time to appreciate the charms of the ugly and embarrassing while it’s still with us. I’ll be back under its deafening canopy next summer, too, with my sketchbook. (If I miss your call that’s probably why.)