Considering “Considerations” (which just sold) has me thinking about how looking at my paintings in this way, online, in large quantities, allows the brain to infuse a monochromatic piece like “Considerations” with many other attributes from previous paintings. That is to say, if a person walked into a gallery and saw this without knowing any of my other work they would see it differently, I think, than someone who has seen hundreds of my paintings over time.
Let’s leap back to the damp and drafty studios of Paris in the early 1900s, when painters may have sold their work to those who came along to see what was new. I have a fictionalized version of how this went, with the painter hauling out canvases to show potential buyers and collectors. Possibly gallerists. I do not know how it all went down, but I see broken panes of glass and the odd mouse running through the scene, maybe with a baguette under his arm. Maybe wearing a beret at a jaunty angle and a striped top. Watching too many Saturday morning cartoons provides this kind of anthropomorphic template for the duration of life.
My dad had two studios that I recall, other than the studio in the back yard. One was right downtown in a commercial building on Vancouver’s main street, Granville. It required a freight elevator ride with a sliding metal door that apparently needed to be clanged shut. There was a deli at street level where my dad ordered sandwiches and cokes. I think I went downstairs to get lunch. Or maybe we went together. Possibly they brought it up. Any version seems feasible.
Somewhere I have a photo of myself at maybe 8 or 9, sitting by the window using the manual typewriter. I’ve posted it before so some will recall it. I can’t find it, so I drew it. I remember the tall buildings beyond the wonky window glass and a sense of being an artist experimenting with the typewriter in some way.
I don’t know how many times I went to this studio. Probably not that many. I was a happy kid with lots of energy. If I went with my dad because my mom needed a break, I was not aware of that. I have recollections of my being in my dad’s studio at home and him saying, “Why don’t you go and talk to your mother?” And me saying, “Because she doesn’t laugh at my jokes.” At the time I certainly didn’t interpret this as, “Get out of my hair kid; I’m trying to paint.” I interpreted it as go and cheer up your mother as she would vastly benefit from your wit and frivolity.
The second studio was a few years later. It was in a semi-industrial area of North Van and was more about commercial art than painting. He’d quit the job at the ad agency to paint full time some years before, which eventually resulted in him having to find commercial art jobs to make ends meet. Traditional story. I think my mom would have encouraged him to rent space rather than being in her hair all day. He was a very big talker.
I recall she made him a lunch in a brown paper bag just like the lunches we took to school. When I went with him this studio, he thumb-tacked the brown paper bag to the wall to keep it away from mice! He did this as if it was normal. That may have been the weirdest part!
This brings up another funny thought. Some time after my parents went into assisted living, after I’d brought quite a bit of their stuff here, I said to my dad, “What I’ve learned about you guys is that you solved a lot of your problems with clothes pegs.” He immediately agreed in that way he had of immediately agreeing as a form of deflection and protection. A subtle point, but maybe rings a bell with someone else.
Back to Paris. The visitor to the studio would only be seeing what was there in front of them, as opposed to having access to the entire history of paintings. Maybe they’d been over at Gertrude Stein’s house and seen some other paintings. Maybe they’d visited the artist many times before to create a memory bank of progressions. There wouldn’t have been the regular inundation made possible by technology, that’s for sure.
When someone here looks at “Considerations” it is imbued with so many other faces in paintings. Yes, it’s a surprise that it’s all blue and the title informs us that it is nighttime, but I wonder what else the brain does with all those other faces it has chronicled.
I still have the original drawing table my dad ordered from back east when he was getting started as a commercial artist after WWII. Semi-ornate cast iron legs with an adjustable, now slightly warped, wooden top. Evidently it came out by train. Possibly from Chicago, but I may be misremembering that part. It would have been in all his studios, ending up in the “little room” in the single-wide mobile home they lived in out past Langley for the final 35 years, before they went into assisted living.
“Granville Street Studio 1960s” (pencil on paper 8 x 11″)
“Considerations at Midnight are Somehow Different” acrylic on canvas (14 x 18″) in vintage frame painted gold by the artist (19 x 23″)
SOLD / $600 USD
Jean Smith 