The Foundation: 028

This one is about art.

Uneventful nights

In the fall of 2023 I taught journalism students at the University of Arkansas. In class we talked about videos that showed people dying. I urged discretion, and respect for the permanence of homicide. Memories, as I spoke, some videos and some witnessed: Three-finger chest compressions on an 8-year-old girl in black flip-flops. A13-year-old boy gasping for air, a police officer heaving nearby. A 7th-grade boy in a white hoody leaning against a wall and then sliding to the floor to cry alone in a middle school hallway. Flashlight, streetlight, blue light. A woman tightening a white tuxedo around the body of her 9-year-old son, a kiss on the forehead barely a touch.

Standing there in the moments after someone’s been shot and is dying, or standing there with someone coming to understand this is true, time can seem to stop. A vortex of bad energy, never a lesser comprehension or care of what exists beyond sight and sound, and never a truer understanding of what lays before us in those moments. On the street and in the classroom I had this feeling of lost time, I lost its tether, and when that passed, was left with lingering unease, a feeling of something missing, an abdominal anxiety, like holding the steel over glass railing at the edge of an 11^th-floor terrace leaning out over the canyon of a city park below. This lapse in time a reminder of everything seen and proof it was all real, and even if felt born by fever dream I am alive and alone next to a fissure that can’t be made whole. This was the last day of my first week teaching. This seemed too abstract for the students.

After class I drove toward the airport, tired by first-week minutiae: faculty ID, introductions, new keys, new apps and new passwords. Tired from talking with strangers and talking about all this. I had a few hours between teaching and the flight home. There’s an art museum nearby, and I wanted to experience this part of the country that was new to me. When otherwise? It felt a luxury.

The museum is built over a pond at the end of a path past a school and some office buildings and another smaller museum, each standing alone some distance from the road separated by expansive parking lots. Off the expressway, not in a neighborhood but not downtown either.

I felt nervous, and a little warm. With art I feel unmoored. In spaces like this I feel I don’t belong, and there’s the insecurity that comes with that. I didn’t know what to expect. When friends or colleagues bring up their tastes or when I see something new I worry about revealing myself gullible by my view of some work. I hoped to blend in.

Through heavy glass doors into the first gallery, “We the People” stitched to the wall in ribbons of fabric. Beyond that some, early American art. It felt too new an experience to register and articulate an impression of the work, or the space. I didn’t have the language for that. Modern, though, tall ceilings and open floors. I felt tense, I felt it in my neck and shoulders and tried to slow down, to breathe some. I walked slow.

The first painting I stopped to see, or that stopped me, was a 200-year-old vision of “Cupid and Psyche” by Benjamin West, at first just dark around the outside toward the frame, a large painting with some ordered chaos surrounding a center I couldn’t yet see. I waited for the couple in front of me to move so I could see from a few steps back.

And when they moved I stood the way if surprised by – with hindsight, I see this – the first time I approached a scene knowing somewhere lay a body and then being disturbed by its sudden close appearance. The painting is large, the two figures not life-size but not far off. Cherubic, winged Cupid, Psyche unclothed sitting on a sheet-covered stool, held there by Cupid who’s flush, flush cheeks, left arm under Psyche’s shoulders and supporting her with his left leg as she leans back. I had a rough address, an intersection, and used what I saw driving up to guide me. Barely a police presence, just a little tape, nobody standing around. No grief I could see or hear. Both Cupid and Psyche ceramic skinned, child-like, set against what looked a stormy coast surrounded by objects of obstacle from their myth. I parked, walked a few feet, turned a corner and the victim was face down prone a few feet away, a gray morning between sunrise and rush hour middle of a quiet street under peeling-yellow steel frame of the L next to the Dan Ryan expressway, surrounded by vacant lots grown over with waist-high sandy green grasses. It felt like a summer morning should have felt, warm and promising, a breeze ushering in the day. And still, this. Photos of the painting don’t do justice to its color. In my memory it’s a darker scene, the contrast between their skin and the surrounding tempest greater. More than surprise, but less than startle. Unnerved. Not fear – just a flicker to reassess surroundings.

So then comes “The Evening Walk,” one of James McNeill Whistler’s “nocturnes,” a small painting that captures the view of a river from some remove, people along a path and in the grass nearby, gentle models of everything seen from a distant remove. It’s of a series of paintings another museum described as “moonlit,” that the artist described as “breath on the surface of a pane of glass.” It felt a depressive memory of an otherwise enchanted day or place, or what you’d expect from either. The dusk and fog that makes strict memory difficult or impossible. The people in the painting, standing near the river … it’s vague, it’s unsettled.

I felt sad, and that realization disorienting. Then gentle grief, then melancholy. The mossy gray. How would I have felt this painting some other time in life? It could have been the autumn light and anticipating in Chicago our months of darkness. It could have been this phase, entering or near or firmly “middle-aged,” and the way relationships change, get recast or end. The shifts in priorities, in cadence. Kids, jobs, habits, distance, kids born and friends and relatives dying. But this is when I found the painting. No experience in a vacuum.

Toward the end of the museum, past the older paintings and into a room of “contemporary” work, a delicate and tender and just-shy-of-explicit portrayal of two lovers, “1000 Thread Count” by Cecily Brown. In thick brush strokes, vague remnants of a bedroom scattered around a man and a woman lying down, he leaning over her on her back, his hand on her hip and her knee just lifted a little toward him, their faces near enough to see into each other’s eyes but not so close to lose focus, her hand reaching to his face. A bra or tank top hanging over a piece of furniture, a lamp, a blind over a window, the colors almost all warm, shades of red and orange and pink, even out what looks a glass window. Chaos and serenity, the paint in places placed-upon. I stood at this painting, and I felt uneasy. I realized here that I felt vulnerable and wanted to be alone. So I left.

I know artists don’t create out of yours or my feelings, and that I see something deeply in the work means I mapped my own feelings onto it some. I know that. But sometimes there’s a moment of congress there where without words they capture something so held and their expression of a place or time or moment so closely tracks emotional memory of that thing or that place that it moves a physical response.

Maybe that’s what makes these museum-quality, the capture of something near universal to our experience - almost how naïve or dangerous love can feel, or pure maybe, and the idea of environmental or psychic obstacles to moments of ecstasy, there but for what. For what. Who’s not been so consumed, or so entangled, or left static even, that the memory is din and glow and the colors blended all taking tones of each other.

Often in the moment I can understand why I’m sensitive to display of affection, render of passion, even if only for the desire to feel those again, out of fear that work all those years, the work that led me to Arkansas, maybe deadened some related part of me. Or made more sensitive, more needy. It can’t be both, but it feels so, sometimes, and I’m between these ends stretching away from each other, each day each growing more distant. The feeling sets in sudden, and then some turbulent flashback, then the chain of connections along the way and back present again in less than a blink and then I realize I’m standing in a classroom again.

Even the photographic memories I have exist adorned with the visceral, the sounds and movements and smells. I think about this a lot: I’m still making meaning and sense of the decade of trauma work, and the desire to do more, the ongoing pursuit of an answer to the questions of why and how people hurt each other. 

There’s an artist in Chicago, Dmitry Samarov, who captures this. His work is tied to notions of trauma - “the pain of old memories,” or “the root of intrusive dreams,” exhilaration and primal fear and despair and optimism but mostly, for me anyway, quiet moments that make me feel more of this city by the solitude and intense loneliness I feel standing in front of them, some shadowed evocation. I don’t know if this is how he’d describe his work. But it’s how I experience it.

I bought a small painting from him a few years back. A view from Bridgeport in the winter, a look out from a second- or third-floor apartment in the neighborhood, not abstract but the interpretation isn’t literal either; there’s a disorder there that feels like home. Overcast in opaqued watercolors, browns and grays, olive yellow siding on a frame home, snow along gutters.

Between trips to Arkansas I stopped into a storefront gallery near Calumet Park, the exhibit there centered on Samarov’s collage work. The space used to house an auto-parts store. Letters and photos and years of ephemera adorned a drawn-and-painted upon white wall. It felt a more intimate extension of his other work, the deeply-city paintings where Chicago’s industry features, in this gallery the iron of South Chicago in its bridges and history, the insides of taverns and coffee shops too. Everything freighted with colors of brick, bark and charcoal and earthy red and sooted yellow. And when the gallery closed the collage came down and everything else disappeared under a coat of whitewash.

I thought about him on a flight home from Arkansas. Passengers opened their shades to see downtown as the plane banked over the lake. Sprawling gothic beauty, and the city then from that remove an abstraction. You can lie to yourself up there, about its problems and about your own problems within. I thought of the place along the lake I used to hide, and some days I fantasize about lying down there with my eyes closed if I could let my guard down, or get someone to lookout, while I listen to the water loll against the pier. Black water, pretty lights, anticipation. Loamy smell of the lakefront.

Samarov doesn’t paint these things, explicitly. But he captures the feeling of memory. In that way, the view of the city, is more romantic by recall than by living. Comfort in the familiarity of cold air and exhaust. Skyscrapers from the hilltop or leering up Halsted or Ogden like out a hollow ended at the skyline, the lights, a dim halo, amber glow and lavender veil and a slate blanket over downtown. Snow-muted din of expressways, the hiss of tires on wet streets, steps over salted slush and snow toward shelter, toward warmth.

I’m sure my attachment to this painting is rooted in my work. A little patch of asphalt in Bridgeport was one of three places to rest when my responsibility was to violent news. One other south a couple miles on the edge of three neighborhoods, and the third in Lawndale. Listening for precursors of violence. Young men policing neighborhoods shouting for rivals to come outside. Fast, open roads into city sprawl. A car chase over a rusty bridge, through red lights like they aren’t there but it’s OK because the roads are empty except us. A boy running, and a 40-ounce bottle broken on his head over raised arms, cornered, fists and boots, fetal against CTA glass. A gunshot victim spread under a gas station awning, fluorescent daylight the only for blocks because someone pulled wires from the city lamp posts, survival gestures toward a man with uncertain pleading eyes alone kneeled, hunched over to help.

There’s a period at night when dark doesn’t change, time can’t be tracked by shifting light. Almost hallucinatory, with no natural way to discern early or late. Here, when possible, time to breathe. To think. Coffee, and a slow drive. Slow, toward downtown. Or just slow, just to be out. Slow, toward the lake. Over a grass berm waves against a steel and concrete breakwater. Out the window, and in the paintings, stone and glass and steel proving some day to come.