Posts

The story of how I came to live in a condemned, haunted building on Skid Row in San Francisco, and create paintings there, is too long and complex to tell in this post. But there is a special painting, a memory, inspired by the ghosts of those long-ago years that I’d like to tell you about.

But first, the Reno Hotel. It was as wide as a city block and when it was alive and still breathing in this world, it stood on 6th Street between Mission and Howard. During the late 1960’s, in addition to the Tenderloin, 6th Street was The City’s home for winos, prostitutes, street hustlers, liquor stores, flophouse hotels and porn theatres. The Reno did not cater to transients; it was a residential hotel, home for truck drivers, longshoremen, pensioners, men and women without families. Many had lived there for years and the Reno was the only home they had. Until it was stopped by a class action lawsuit, San Francisco’s Redevelopment Agency radically changed the neighborhoods south of Market Street by condemning dozens of residential hotels like the Reno. What you see in the photo above is only the skeleton of the home the Reno had been for its residents before they were evicted. In time it came to be the home of several artists as well, until a few years later when it was finally destroyed by fire.

The ground floor consisted of the lobby and front desk of the hotel, a bicycle repair shop, Louie’s Liquor and Groceries, a prizefighting gymnasium, The New Home Baptist Church and Nicholas Refrigeration Repairs. In the three stories above the ground floor there were at least 400 rooms, although the exact number was difficult to calculate. After the residents had been expelled, the upper floors were gutted: all sinks, tubs and toilets, all electrical fittings, including switches and light bulbs, were removed and the rooms became empty shells. Except for the ones I remodeled and lived in, quite illegally.

Read More

“I was conscious only of following my fancies as a butterfly and was unconscious of my individuality as a man. Suddenly I awoke, and there I lay, myself again. Now I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterlfly dreaming I am a man.”

Chuang-Tzu (c. 369 BCE – c. 286 BCE) (tr. Herbert Giles)

In the West, we tend to think of ourselves as distinct from Nature: I am I, an ego that is separate, distinct from– and often in conflict with– whatever is not me, my own “self.”  From the Buddhist point of view, the cause of our incessant conflicts and suffering on this earth is trishna, our craving to grasp and hold on to what cannot be grasped or held on to. Two illusions form the basis of this frustration: The first is– there is nothing “out there” beyond the periphery of your skin that you can hold on to because nothing is permanent–everything is changing, constantly and always. The second illusion is– there is no You, that is, no “self” as a separate ego distinct from everything else “out there.” The “self” seems to be real, but it is only a construct, a useful one, to be sure, as the Equator is also a useful construct. But is there any actual line on land or sea that you can point to and say “there it is, the Equator?”  For Buddhism, in short, there is nothing to hang on to, and even if there were, there is no “you” to grasp it.

More than a century ago, many artists began to realize that the tools they had inherited from the Renaissance to create the illusion of three-dimensional space on a two-dimensional canvas, techniques such as linear perspective, for example, were inadequate to express the rapid changes of the modern world. The discovery of x-rays and quanta, the inventions of the the light bulb and the phonograph– to say nothing of the automobile and the airplane– forced artists to imagine new ways to depict the constantly changing world they lived in. Pablo Picasso and George Braque understood that one  drawback of traditional perspective was that it was based on only a single point of view. They wondered, was it possibe in a world of constantly shifting points-of-view, to give multiple points of view on the canvas? Their response was “yes,” and they constructed a new way of seeing, later called Cubism.

Read More

“How long did it take you to finish that painting,” is a question people often ask. They are usually surprised that the time to complete a work is much longer than they had imagined. Perhaps it’s because they think that making art is simply a matter of talent and inspiration, rather than hard work and sweat as well. For example, The Vintners took more than 900 hours to paint, that is, roughly six months. (Nine-hundred hours, by the way, only refers to the days and weeks of actual painting and doesn’t account for several trips driving from Grass Valley to the Napa Valley and back in my beat-up old Datsun pickup– 2 1/2 hours each way– to draw, photograph and interview the 39 principals in the painting. They included growers and vintners, a journalist, two restaurateurs, a professor of viticulture at the University of California and a banker without whose loans, one vintner told me, “all of us would still be unknown here in an obscure valley in California, stomping grapes with our feet.”)

Read More