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The Hamptons
I was trying to decide whether to move back towards the city or out to the Hamptons before I moved out of Ricky?s. Moving into Brooklyn didn?t really appeal to me, but I had to spend some time checking it out for appearances. The prices were out of my range unless I got a full time job, and carving stone in such a crowded area would be difficult. It also would have been too easy for Jolanta to drop by unannounced. I had hoped the relationship was going to cool after I left the museum. It had, at first, probably because she felt betrayed that I was no longer willing to carry on her fight there. She had plenty of other fights she thought she could enlist me in, so that didn?t last long. She was perfectly content to have me working and living in an area where she could visit and not run into anyone she knew. That was a sure bet, since I was living in one of the armpits of LI and working a tech job in a small optical coating company. The owner of the company needed someone to finish a big project he had been working on for over a year and wasn?t able to devote the time needed to complete it. The unit was a large vacuum plasma optical coating chamber. His company specialized in quick turn around, short run work and he had eight other small chambers working.
The basic idea is simple, but the controls have to be exact. A sealed chamber had the air vacuumed out of it, usually by a two stage pumping system. One stage removes the bulk of the atmosphere and the other removes as much as it can at a higher vacuum level. The particles that remain are cycled through a fountain-like bath of liquid that wouldn?t evaporate and traps the remaining molecules. Interior heaters slowly bring up the temperature of the glass that?s going to be coated so that the heat of a plasma arc didn?t crack them. The arc is similar to a welding arc but had electrodes that don?t melt. It vaporizes pellets of different materials to deposit the molecules on the lens or mirrors that are being rotated in the chamber. Depending on what type of coating is required, different materials are used, sometimes applying as many as 50 different coats to the optics. There is a sample piece being monitored by the technician to control the density of the layers and the order of the deposits.
Tony, who owned the company, would buy used chambers and retrofit them with new equipment. He wanted to start coating larger lenses and had gotten a comparatively huge chamber, which was the one I was going to complete. The other units? chambers weren?t much bigger than an oven, and with the attendant equipment had the floor space of a medium bathroom. The inside of the big chamber was larger than a 5? cube and the entire unit was over 12 feet high, taking up the floor space of a large bedroom.
Because of the heat generated in the various stages there needed to be an extensive cooling system, and there were large chillers on the roof that would cycle antifreeze through the crucial areas.
The first part of my project was to get all of the leaks out of the cooling lines. There were two large manifolds; each attached to a feed or return line of the cooler on the roof. The manifold was composed of 2? diameter copper plumbing fittings with valves that led to seven different sections. There were leaks everywhere, and I removed both of the manifolds to re-sweat the pipes with solder. Fortunately Tony had a lathe in the back because the compression fittings that attached the pieces to the main feed were scarred. There was enough material left that I was able to shave some of the facing off to make a snug fit. It took about two weeks to get the leaks out of the copper piping before I started on the leaks in the rest of the system. There were pipes, wires and sub units everywhere, and moving around was like being in a jungle obstacle course. Antifreeze is kind of greasy, slippery stuff and working around the unit was treacherous
I?d never worked on this type of equipment and I was learning as I went. Things weren?t really making sense when I started on the subassemblies. Solenoids controlled when each part of the cooling system was active, and everything seemed to be running backwards. Pressure gauges monitored the coolant flow and it took me a while to come to the conclusion that the main manifolds were switched. I didn?t understand the system at first, but Tony assured me that there were still bugs in the unit. When I got a better idea of what was going on I went to him and was able to prove the entire flow was backwards. I felt I had to be careful how I went about it because this was a unit that Tony had been working on it for over a year and it was a major goof, but I was able to prove my point and he took it well.
I got along with everyone in the company and had a good time playing ?Mr. Fix-it? throughout the facility. I hate not being able to find things, and took it upon myself to organize the stock of parts and the machine shop area. I could have continued working there for a while, the money was good and I was given a free hand. When I was applying for the job Tony checked with one of my references, Stuart Singer. I had worked with Stu on and off for years at Fairchild/Weston when he was Director of the Optics Department. I found out Stu told Tony to ?Hire him, give him as much money as you can, and let him do anything he wants. Heady stuff.
I took a few days off after Ricky?s? suicide but wanted to keep working and keep my mind as occupied as possible. It was a good place to recover; I didn?t have to work with anybody except Tony, and I only needed to talk with him occasionally. I wanted to move on, not flee, so I stayed a few more months while deciding my best move was to go out to the Hamptons. The decision was pretty easy to make, but I had to draw it out for a while. Jolanta hated the Hamptons and that was a good enough reason to make the move, but it had to look like I explored all the options. My earlier experience looking for a studio out there was frustrating but I got lucky this time. Well, lucky for a while.
I found an old potato barn for rent in one of the local papers. It was on Main Street in Wainscott and was advertised as 3,000 sq. ft for $1,500 a month. When I went to look at it I was more than surprised. It was the largest structure in a group of four buildings and across the street was an open field with a pond on the far side, some small dunes and the ocean peeking through the dunes. The landlord, Lawrence Osborn, apologized when he told me that the barn wasn?t 3,000 sq. ft but 4,000. With the exception of a few pieces of farm equipment that would be moved out it was empty. It was still used to store potatoes in the winter, and I could see some that had been left on a corner structure 14? in the air. The ceiling was a good 16? high and covered with sheet metal. There were long channels on the floor running from front to back of the barn covered with thick wood slats that sat on a lip so they were level with the floor. Lawrence explained that the barn had been built as an experimental structure back in the ?50?s. Most of the potato barns in the area were ?bank barns,? so named because a small hill would be cut out in the center and the barn would be built in the channel that was removed. The dirt ?banked? on the sides would insulate the structure during the winter. It is a common sight in the area to see a small hill with a roof. Since they were running out of hills at the time, the Cornell Co-operative designed a freestanding structure with one-foot thick insulated walls and a thick layer of vermiculite above the sheet metal on the ceiling for additional insulation. The channels in the floor would circulate air through the potatoes to prevent mildew rot. The concrete floor had a 3/4-inch covering of dirt that had been glued together with the starch of potatoes crushed by the bulldozer used to load and unload them. The dirt on the floor would grow a rug of fine one-inch high white fungus tendrils when the fog rolled in.
Lawrence was part of a long line of Osborns that had owned the property, which was still in the hundreds of acres, since the 1800?s. Large parcels had been sold off over time, but there were still huge tracts of farmland in the back.
He admitted to be a lousy farmer, and he rented out the fields for others to work. Truth was he admitted to not being good at anything. He was refinishing floors for a while, not very successfully, and after he tossed a cigarette butt into the path of a floor sander he was using it exploded. It seemed that the only thing he had done well was deliver milk back when that was a viable business. I ended up helping him fix things around the farm on occasion, and it was plain to see he wasn?t a mechanic either.
I took the barn, originally just for the summer, to see how things worked out between us. My first project as to scrape the floors of the caked on potato juice. It took a good month using a flat shovel and a wire brush, but I thought of it as therapy. I was still getting over Ricky?s suicide and the long hours of mindless work helped me get through it.
When I started cleaning up around the outside I dug out a hardened bag of sackrete from behind the barn. It was a shock, because one side looked like a complete skull and the other showed the impressions of the bag that had rotted away. It took me a while to come to terms with it, and when I did I made some slight changes in the nostrils and covered the gray surface with the dark reddish brown wax that?s used for casting bronzes. I named it Yo Rick, alluding to both Ricky and Hamlet?s Yorick scene. I considered giving it to Ricky?s brother Fred, due to his interest in the macabre, but decided against it and eventually gave it to another friend with similar tastes.
I went back to a cache of Black Cherry I had found in Glen Cove and brought the trunks back to make Chelsea Series #s 9, 10 and 11. When I want to get back into the sculpture groove and I usually start with woodwork. If it doesn?t work out it makes great firewood. Once I decide on the form they go by without much thought, but a lot of hard work. I did the first two wood pieces quickly as a warm-up for the 9 ft tall Chelsea Series #11. It made an impression, forming the large piece on the bottom and then hoisting the top section up with a block and tackle for positioning and then locating a stainless steel rod to mount them together. Most of the series is carved from Black Cherry, which grows like a weed throughout LI. The fruit is a favorite with the birds and the seeds get spread everywhere. The horticulturists know it as Chokecherry. The trunks of some of the older trees are over 3 feet in diameter and can reach up over 100 ft. The fresh wood smells like cherry liqueur while you?re working on it and it?s intoxicating. It has a beautiful fine grain, and when it?s raw it has a light pastel salmon color. When it?s finished it darkens in the sun to a deep iron red.
I had a lot of visitors while I was working on the piece and I?m always friendly. I never get upset when I?m interrupted. If I need to keep a thought I?ll be distant for a minute or so while I lock the idea in, and then I?m fine.
The Hamptons are filled with artist?s studios, so it wasn?t unusual to see someone working. When the shoreline of the pond across the street was in bloom with Lythrum the plein air painters lined up along the road with their easels. I thought of it as a Wolf Kahn landscape, and sure enough, he dropped by the studio with his photographer in tow. They were out taking pictures of the shoreline for him to paint later. He was a nice guy and could have easily been mistaken for a dentist. He absolutely flipped over the Pillow, and couldn?t get over the workmanship.
Lawrence?s brother owned the field across the street. They had split the family property at the last inheritance and they stayed as far away from each other as having only five houses in-between allows.
Ronald Perlman lived on the east side of the field and didn?t want it farmed. He rented the 33 acres from Lawrence?s brother as if it were farmland, and then threw on some coarse grass seed and had it mowed on a regular basis. Anyone that walked out there was met by a truck from the Perlman compound, about six buildings, and told they were on private property and must leave immediately. The road in front of the barn ran straight into one of the most celebrity populated areas in East Hampton, the east side of Georgica Pond.
In a place like that I didn?t think I needed a gallery. Word of mouth was attracting more visitors and artists, and I was told on a regular basis that I had the best studio in the Hamptons. At the end of the summer I told Lawrence that I?d like to keep the studio, and wondered if I could get a break on the rent. He talked with the family and at that point they considered me a local and brought the rent down to $1,000 a month. His son, Elisha, was supposed to be in charge of the goings on at the farm, but he owned a rowdy bar in Sag Harbor, and didn?t have the time or interest to manage the place. It was the type of bar you go to after you?ve been kicked out of everywhere else. He was very proud of a mention in one of the youth orientated give-away weeklies in their review of the local dive bars, especially their description of a volcano of toilet paper in one of the men?s room stalls.
I started courting the best gallery in East Hampton, Vered. I had met Ruth Vered when I started taking the stone sculpture seriously. When I showed her my work she said, ?Come back in a few years.? I considered that a compliment at the time and it was still my first choice in galleries in the area. I brought Jolanta by to show her the place. Ruth thought we were a very handsome couple and she invited us to the next opening. Jolanta?s prior experiences coming out to the Hamptons were the traffic jams during the annual Horse Show in Bridgehampton, a huge event that snarled traffic for the entire time. The trip was still long, but she?d come out mid-week and started enjoying the ride in her little sports package BMW.
We started talking to Ruth and her business partner and companion, Janet Lehr. Janet was a shark and wanted to capitalize on Jolanta?s connection with the Holocaust Center in Glen Cove. She broached the subject of organizing a fund raising event at the gallery and we started making plans.
Frank was still trying to get his Super Glam PhotoShop images into a gallery and he wasn?t having much success. People didn?t want a portrait of someone they didn?t know unless they were famous, and putting up a show to get him clients for future images doesn?t jibe with the way galleries work. He introduced me to one of the gallery dealers he was working on that liked my work, Alex Echo. I still wanted to get into Vered, and didn?t want to hurt my chances by showing with someone else.
Towards February we had a final sit-down at Ruth and Janet?s home in Sag Harbor. The six months of prior talk had been nebulous but full of promise for Jolanta?s project and she had been relaying her enthusiasm to the Board.
When the pair finally spelled out things, we were so shocked that we had no reaction. They wanted the promotion of the Benefit to be paid for by the Center and only a few pieces on display would give a portion of their sales profit to the charity. Essentially the Center was going to pay for everything and get a small return on pieces the gallery selected. Janet was counting on Jolanta?s commitments to the board and the promise of the ?High Profile? association publicity to keep Jolanta on the hook. We were still stunned when we left, and a mile away I pulled into an empty lot to talk it over.
Yes, we did hear what we thought we heard, I agreed with Jolanta. In her mind it was over, and she felt betrayed. I?m more used to people pulling the rug out from under me. The next day I went in to see Janet at the gallery and explained the benefit was over unless we could work something else out. I told her that Jolanta had no idea I was going to talk to her, which was the truth, and that the Center would never go along unless changes were made. We agreed that the Center would pay for the printing of the invitations, but not for the mailing, and that the Center would be allowed to display some donated work whose entire proceeds would go to the Center.
I called Jolanta, who was shocked that I had gone to Janet to work things out. When she calmed down enough to listen she thought it was a good plan. She got back on track and started looking for people to donate paintings for the event. She ended up making an excellent connection with someone affiliated with the Center that was getting on in years and downsizing his collection. He?d receive a sizable tax refund for the donations, probably more than they were worth, but they were name artists. He was a well-known figure in the Hamptons and a big collector, and Janet had trouble refusing the work since she wanted to stay on good terms with him and buy some of the work he was de-assessing for herself. After the show he came over to my studio to pick up a piece that was withdrawn from the show. His daughter decided she wanted the print and I was holding it for her. He fell for D.D.B. and I sold it to him for $1,500. When I went over to his cottage to deliver it he wanted it placed between an Alex Katz and a Jean DuBuffet, both oils. If I had known it was going to be in that kind of company I would have given him the piece. It got back to me later through Jolanta that he was telling people that he had gotten it at a steal for $15,000.
Janet had the invitations printed, and they were totally inappropriate for the charity. She used a black and white Man Ray Photograph of a woman with ?stylish? wounds on her face and body. Jolanta was enraged and fortunately there was enough time to print new invites with the design plan of the Children?s Memorial Garden, which is where the donations were going.
As a go-between I was getting shit thrown at me by both sides. I had left it to Jolanta to negotiate some involvement of my art at the gallery and I was left out in the cold. Even a donation of one of my pieces was rejected by Janet, who was adding pieces to the show as favors to friends of collectors she wanted to curry favor with.
When the reception opened there was so much animosity between camps I?m surprised there weren?t fistfights. I told Jolanta to control her people but she did nothing. Janet was showing her true colors as well. Jolanta had gotten several cases of the best wine a local vintner produced, and Janet whisked it all away and substituted it with the cheapest wine she could find. In spite of all of the rancor the event brought in over $30,000 for the Center, an unheard of amount when almost every one of the benefits Vered had were a net loss for the charity. When I first was dropping by the gallery I made friends with Oliver, one of the people that worked at the desk and installed paintings in the client?s homes on occasion. He was a talented young painter that, if he dyed his brown hair black, would have made a good Elvis impersonator. The lips were a lock and he had the attitude. We got along well when he was at the gallery, and he filled me in on some of the dirt that went on behind the scene. Once in a while I?d help him install a painting that the gallery had sold, and on one job we had to work with Ruth?s nephew, who?d come over from Israel in the summer to help in the gallery and mooch off Ruth.
Just after the Holocaust benefit closed I went with Jolanta over to Vered?s to start hashing out the final details of the works sold and the place was in a tizzy. They were tight-lipped at first, but ended up telling us that the jewelry that was on display for the event, valued at over 1/4 million dollars, had been stolen. The police had already been over, and the alarm system hadn?t been set off so it was some kind of inside job. When we went back out to the car I saw Ruth?s nephew walking in from the parking lot. I pointed to him and told Jolanta that he was the prime suspect.
The next day it was all over the papers, with a very unflattering article in the Independent, a weekly give away newspaper that Vered didn?t advertise in. The cover had a picture of the outside of the gallery with the Pink Panther superimposed on the shot, scratching his head, and the article lead off describing the gallery as showing ?The worst of the best.? It was the biggest jewel theft in the area in years and the rumors were flying.
I found out a few days later from Oliver that there was a lot of pressure on the nephew and he worked out a deal with Ruth to give him enough time to leave the country if he returned the jewelry. He disappeared and the stash was found taped up behind a Frank Stella painting.
I still thought I might show with Vered when all the dust settled. I had shown restraint, and Janet told me she didn?t want me showing with Vered by getting in the back door, which I could understand. I didn?t know at the time that my coffin was laid out, and it wouldn?t be much longer before it was nailed shut.
I had been out there a little over a year and I needed to start showing. Frank was badgering me to show with Alex Echo, the gallery he was still trying to get involved with. Alex was badgering me to show with him, and after the event at Vered Jolanta jumped on the badger wagon as well. I finally relented, thinking that if I had a successful show Janet would come around. Even if they showed the worst of the best it was still the highest profile gallery in the area and knew how to sell work.
Frank had invested in a very good printer for his computer, and I urged him to print out the pictures of Ice Machines he had taken back in Point Lookout. He had done a whole series of them, and I was constantly asking him to make prints so now he had no excuse. While I was setting up the show with Alex, Frank came out with the prints. They were even better then I remembered, the age and dust around the frame of the slides enhanced the images. When Alex saw them he flipped, ?Why didn?t you show them to me sooner? You would have already had a show! I?ve got the summer booked so I can?t do it this year, but you?ve got to show these, they?re wonderful!? Out with the Super Glam, in with the Ice Machines. When Frank would come out we?d tour the area, and he took shots of every ice machine east of Riverhead.
My show had been up for a week when Alex, without telling me, he took everything down to do a one-week ?Special Show.? Someone had gotten access to the Twin Towers ?Ground Zero? site and snapped a lot of pictures with a 35mm point and shoot camera. Alex put up a show of the prints, with some of the proceeds going to the Firemen?s Benefit. The show opening the same night that Janet was doing her long planned and promoted Firemen?s Benefit reception. My coffin was nailed shut. Janet was furious and my name was dirt. Alex?s show only lasted a week, and mine was re-installed, with the exception of It?s Not As If I lacked Depth, which he had broken during the move. ?You can fix it, can?t you?? Then Alex went on a crack binge for a week with the money he had made from the Ground Zero show. I knew he was in AA and had some problems out in LA, but I didn?t expect that. When I finally got into the gallery I found that he had left the heat blasting at 85 degrees, and combined with the lack of humidity in winter the wood portion of Muse of Decision had split wide open. That can?t be fixed. When he got out of the crack haze he made some amends and sold the repaired It?s Not As If I lacked Depth for $1,100 without taking a commission and $500 lower than I was asking. Then he managed to get the art critic from the East Hampton Star, Rose Slivka, to review the show, promising to keep the pieces on display without telling her that they were going to be in the basement and not in the gallery. I got a great review, and found out later that Rose was a very respected critic.
Like a lot of addicts Alex was able to sweet-talk everyone into forgiving him, except Janet of course. I was still on speaking terms with her, and she approached me with a shady deal for the Center. They would accept a donation of a painting, giving the donor a tax write off, and she?d turn around and sell the work, giving them a commission on the sale. I knew it was a scam but broached the plan with Jolanta to see how they would react. After all the animosity and contention, all the bitter bile that was spewed, they agreed to do it. I told Jolanta and Janet that they needed to talk with each other because I wanted nothing to do with it. I was disgusted with the Center for even entertaining the idea, and lost any faith I had left in Jolanta.
Frank came up with a project for me. He was working for McCann-Ericson, one of the world?s largest ad agencies. They wanted me to a Calderesque mobile for a presentation they were making to Maytag. Maytag was using another agency to create the ads for it?s different product lines, Amana, Hotpoint, Whirlpool and the main line, Maytag. Maytag was spending 100 million for ad space that year and McCann-Ericson would make 10% of that to steer the ads to TV, newspapers and magazines. The agency wanted a large mobile hanging over the presentation conference table with each of the division?s logos as the elements.
I put together the tools and wire I thought I?d needed and drove into the city too work out a model for their approval, and then make the mobile. The mobile was a last minute idea, and there were only a couple of days to put everything together. The approval for the model went pretty quickly and just as quickly I knew I was working in a snake pit. Most of the people I was working with started working against me, and it didn?t surprise me that much that Frank was the one stoking the fire. The shop did all the artwork and mock-ups for the ad campaigns. Most of the other agencies did the work on computers at that point, and this was one of the few hands-on shops left. They were all veterans from a time Photo-ready work was done on a letter-by-letter, cut and paste basis.
I had never been involved with Frank in one of his work environments before, and it didn?t take me long to figure out why he had so much trouble keeping jobs. He was very talented or he wouldn?t have been able to get the work in the first place, but he had no idea how to deal with the politics. He had been there for months and was having problems with the group?s supervisor, who had decent hands-on skills but nothing special. He became a glorified clerk and manager by default, and a whiney bully by choice.
I went out to lunch with the guy calling the shots, Mike Love, Vice-President of Creative Services and not a member of the Beach Boys. We talked over the job and the things I?d need to complete it. When I got back to the shop I found out Frank barely knew who Mike was, let alone his position. Frank saw him on a regular basis, his office was two doors over from the shop, but Frank couldn?t see past the direct chain of command.
One of the features they wanted for the mobile was to have it hang from a silver globe with the Maytag logo printed on it. I made it plain to everyone that I didn?t have the skills necessary to put a logo on the globe, and Frank?s supervisor said that he could do it. They ordered the adhesive lettering and I went down to Canal St. to get the globe.
The logo press-on letters had come in overnight, and when I came in the next morning the supervisor told me to do the application on the globe. I tossed it back to him, pointing out that I already said I couldn?t do it, and that he had said he could. At first I thought he was joking, but it turned ugly. He said I should be able to do it if I worked there, and I told him I was there to build the mobile, period. I wasn?t there to do the artwork for it, he had told everyone he could do it, and the ball was in his court. Frank started freaking on me, insisting his job was on the line and I needed to apologize to this boss. I didn?t see anything to apologize for but he hammered me for hours, and after lunch I spoke with the supervisor to straighten things out.
I found out later that Frank had told people I was a screamer, which is 180 degrees from the truth, and his boss was trying to get me into a big enough fight that I?d be fired and they could do the mobile themselves.
All of the things I was promised for preparation were never available. The mobile was to be 18? across and I needed a room to start setting it up as well as a mock-up of the final panels for weight and placement.
I got nothing until the midnight before the 8 am presentation and had spent the time in any cubbyhole I could find, trying to work out as much as I could in advance. When I finally got the room and all the finished artwork the tension was running pretty high. I worked all night and I almost felt I could be finished by the 8 am deadline when I was told I had to be out of the room by 7 am so they could do a final practice run before the presentation.
It was either going to go up or it wasn?t, and I doubted I?d get paid if it didn?t. I wouldn?t have the time to firmly affix it to the lighting braces with wire and I took the chance on just hanging it from a thin nylon lacing cord that I knew was strong enough in my head but not in my heart. It felt like I was hanging the sword of Damocles over the top brass of the ad agency and the Maytag execs. For the first two hours of the presentation I kept peeking into the conference room, imagining the lawsuits that would ensue if the cord let go.
The meeting was supposed to go for just an hour but it went way over schedule and I left the building trying to distract myself. When I got the call that the meeting had broken up I rushed back and disassembled the mobile and went out to lunch with Mike. During lunch I got a call from the Account Director of the presentation, asking if I could come back and pack up the mobile for shipping. The AD had promised to give it to the Maytag people for the entrance for their corporate head quarters.
I told him no. It was held together with a kiss and a prayer, and the artwork wasn?t printed in archival ink so it would fade in sunlight within a few weeks. He was really upset but Mike knew what I was talking about and backed me up. I offered to make a permanent one, but they didn?t want to pay for it.
It would have been a nice gesture on their behalf, but it didn?t turn out to be necessary. They won the contract and a cool ten million. I got paid well; making $400 an hour for the time I spent there, mostly sitting on my hands.
When I got back to East Hampton I found out Alex was in serious trouble, the Ground Zero photographer wasn?t delivering the pictures, and the clients were demanding their money back, money that he had spent on his crack binge. His landlord wanted him out, and people were pretty much fed up with his promises. He was a talented painter and was able to sell a few pieces to fill the gaping financial hole, but had to move everything over to a basement studio.
Oliver had left Vered?s and was working at the counter of the Cigar Store in the middle of East Hampton, and with his help I talked the owner into putting one of my sculptures in the front window. It may have not been an art gallery, but had some hi-powered clientele and a lot of traffic. Oliver had made some good connections through the gallery and introduced me to one of the local collectors, Sal Raineri. Sal had not one, but two houses in one of the most exclusive parts of East Hampton. It was in the middle of the golf course next to the Maidstone Club, and easily had one of the best views in town. He had bought the main house from one of the biggest TV and movie producers around, and was concerned that the house next door would be demolished and replaced with a McMansion. It was called the Spaeth House and it historic importance. It was designed by one of the innovative architects in the area for the Director of the Guild Hall and John Drew Theater in E.H. After buying the place Sal called in consultants and historically re-built the house. When it was complete Architectural Digest did a large feature on the place. The interior was one of the most color-saturated homes I?ve ever seen and I loved the space. Sal and I got along very well, and he purchased Faust for one of the rooms, putting it in an electric lime green cabinet that worked very well with the piece. It was a big sale for me and I gave him Lily as a Christmas present, which he loved and put in the master bedroom of the main house. Then he bought Chelsea Series #10 for the second floor landing of the main house and placed it underneath a beautiful little Grandma Moses oil. I made a new base for the bright yellow Dangerous Curve, using the same style as Chelsea Series #10, giving it a faux finish of florescent blue and black so that it looked like it was made from cobalt glazed ceramic. Sal bought that for the Spaeth House and then finally Spacescape #8 for the den in the main house. A strange thing happened the day I finished the piece, Discover magazine had been in my mailbox and the cover photo of an embryonic egg in a womb might as well have been a close up shot of the planet floating in space in the stone carving.
The sales were a relief. Fewer and fewer people were dropping by the studio. During my second summer there my landlord?s son Elisha sold off the rowdy bar and started an auto repair shop in his section of another barn. There was instant friction between us. He was used to bullying everyone around, and looked like a serious weightlifter. It?s like he never left High School, even though he had one child with a common law wife and another on the way. He had a spoiled rich boy arrogance about him and was just as incompetent as his father when it came to fixing things. It turned out that he had taken so many steroids to get the wide-boy body that he developed rheumatoid arthritis in his mid-thirties and he was as week as a kitten. Some people that hadn?t seen him in years assumed I was Elisha, some others assumed that I owned the whole place. I was trying to take advantage of the setting and I worked facing the road, using the darkened, cavernous space as a backdrop to set myself on stage.
Elisha?s wife gave him a boxer dog for his birthday as a surprise. His old one had died a few years before and he professed to not really want another one. He didn?t train it at all, and it started barking at everyone that walked by. The more it disturbed me the happier Elisha was. Eventually, even people that were coming over in cars turned around in the driveway and left.
I did complain to him and his parents, pointing out that people were lawsuit happy and they had a good amount of money to lose. Elisha?s earlier boxer was aggressive, and they were sued after a woman had broken her leg when the dog lunged at her. Their insurance company had voided dogs from the coverage in their policy and they could have lost the property in a large settlement. I?d watch helpless as a little girl on a tricycle rode down the sidewalk with the boxer a foot away, snarling and barking. I?d point it out to Elisha, and ask him how he?d feel if it was his daughter, but even that didn?t get through. Nor did someone else?s calls to the police, since the animal control officers were all locals.
Alex was closing up shop and moving to the DUMBO section of Brooklyn. He had gotten a show in a small gallery that was just opening at the far end of Broadway near Chinatown. A week before the reception Jolanta?s car had broken down on the far side of Southampton while she was coming out. I drove over to pick her up, and rather than drive all the way out to Montauk for our weekly sessions and then drive her back to Oyster Bay I wanted to have lunch in Southampton and visit the Parrish Museum and a few galleries. She wasn?t too happy about that, and lunch was a little chilly. It got even chillier when we were seen by one of Connie?s friends from the Board of the NCMA. Jolanta calmed down after walking through the Parrish, and we went down the street to a gallery I was trying to hook up with. We all sat down to talk and it quickly turned to Jolanta?s involvement with the Holocaust Center, and the possibility of doing a benefit. In an hour and a half not one word was said to try to get the gallery interested in my work. I didn?t say anything about it to her on the drive home, but I knew I had to end a relationship that was only going one way.
When we went to Alex?s opening I made a bit of an ass of myself, nothing that anyone but her would be offended by. It didn?t take her long to get chilly and insist on being taken home. She didn?t say a word to me on the way back to Woodbury, where her husband was going to come and pick her up. While we were waiting she gave it to me with both barrels. She said everything she could think of to hurt me and tell me it was over between us. I was smiling the whole time, just making it worse.
I left thinking I was a free man. I called up Alex the next day to apologize for anything inappropriate and he didn?t know what I was talking about. So much for making a scene.
A few days later Jolanta called, mad at me for not calling her to apologize and beg her to get back together. I told her she had to be joking, and if what she told me that night was how she felt she should be happy I was gone. I told her I was happy the relationship was over, and I wouldn?t have to listen to her complain for two or three hours everyday while she was checking up on me. She kept calling for a few months but I would only meet her in restaurants. I had decided that if she asked me for Ronin as a going away present I?d give it to her, but I wasn?t going to offer.
I started working on Spacescape #6 to stay focused, and ended up wasting two weeks trying to find the right size and placement for the floating white orb in the center above the flaming sun. Then I had months of problems getting the pedestal right. I kept looking back at all the mistakes I had made and was afraid to make decisions for a while.
In mid-January, on a cold, dark Sunday night there was a knock on my back door. It was after ten and the only light in the house that was on came from the computer I was working at. I was a little hesitant when I went to answer the door, and even after I turned on the light all I could see was a parka. I opened the door and Jolanta walked in. ?Oh, it?s you,? I said with a mix of relief and an incredulous ?what are you doing here?? in my voice. ?I just need to use the bathroom,? she said, as she walked inside and over to the john. When she came out a few minutes later she replied the same way, only adding that ?she was in the area.? Not likely, and as she left I could tell she was disappointed that I hadn?t greeted her with open arms.
When I got to my studio the next day I founds some of my favorite pieces missing. Up to that point I had never locked the door to the barn. The circuit breakers inside controlled more than just my area and I never felt there was a problem with theft. I thought that the only things worth stealing were the tools, and if I made it hard to break in the thieves might get pissed off and destroy some sculptures in the process. I instantly suspected Jolanta. Quirk was missing, and it was in a box in a pile of boxes. I couldn?t think of anyone except Frank that knew it was there. What I considered the heart of my collection, pieces that I didn?t want to sell, was gone. It wasn?t hard to put two and two together, and I called the police to report the theft. When the detectives came they reached the same conclusion, but couldn?t confront her in another county. She probably didn?t have them at home anyway and the detectives asked me to phone her while they recorded the call.
I did, but I didn?t get anywhere except to learn that she wanted to get back together, and that she had left her husband the night. When she came over she was going to stay and marry me. Thanks, but no thanks. The detectives agreed that I could probably get the work back if I went out with her again, but I wouldn?t do it. I wrote her a letter saying the police had recorded the call and that she was the prime suspect. It wouldn?t be a good idea to ?drop out? again, and that a police report had been filed with her name on it, a preliminary step in filing a restraining order. I?m sure she wanted Ronin, but it was too heavy for her to move so took the others instead. I considered finding an intermediary to make the trade but couldn?t think of anyone that could handle it well. I?ve never heard from her again and I have no idea where the pieces are.
It was still worth it to be rid of her. I threw myself back into work and made Kirk?s Exploding Paint. I had been trying to free myself enough that I could do purely abstract work, and I had started a group of little pieces I called the Composition Series. They were pieces of stone left over from larger work that would only take one or two days of free hand effort. Similar to my Familiar forms, I didn?t want them to be anything in particular, like the non-objective sketches that painters use to warm up and get loose.
My original intent with the new piece was to make a cloud of smoke, and when it neared completion I puzzled out how to mount it. I started with the idea of the smoke streaming from some type of industrial smokestack. Then I thought about having it erupt from a Duchamp-inspired Sapolin Enamel paint can. Taking the idea further I realized that any labeling would logically be burned by whatever was generating the smoke and decided to use a paint can anyway, but make to look as if the metal was sweating from the heat. I bought some empty quart paint cans and began to experiment with a torch and some braze. It took me weeks to get the can so that it had a realistic sweat bordering on molten look, and then I finished it with a classic English Brown patina for bronze. Since brass is a similar alloy to bronze it was appropriate. I mounted the can on to a black walnut base that was a flattened homage to Brancusi?s bases. I still liked the idea of a paint can and created, or appropriated, a label for it based on Kirk?s CocoHardwater Soap. I matched the lettering and colors on the computer and then scanned one of the labels? arrows for the front copy and made up my own directions for the back.
I talked the owner of the Cigar Store, Dennis, into letting me put on a faux rollout of a new product, Kirk?s Exploding Paints. It was still early in the season and he let me use some of the cigar display cases for the installation. I made about 30 cans of the ?paint? for the display and filed the rest of the cabinets with fragments of the exploded paint (the Composition Series), a couple of brushes the paint had been allowed to harden on after not being cleaned (chips of stone I had carved to look like used paintbrushes, attached to real brush handles). I put Kirk?s Exploding Paint in the front window and made promotional flyers for this ?innovative new product.?
I sent in press releases to the newspapers and the NY Times and the local papers listed the show.
The summer season hadn?t started yet so it was more of an in-joke then anything else, harking back to my store front installations of the Pop-Surrealist appliances. When July rolled around I took everything out and placed Spacescape #6 in the front window. One of the writers for the East Hampton Star saw the piece and wanted to talk with me. She was writing a novel and wanted some background on being a sculptor for one of the characters and ended up writing a nice article on me for the Star. There was no contact information on me, but a few of the local artists started dropping by to find out what was going on. One woman came by while I was working on a stone piece in front. She looked around the studio and told me she liked the pieces better before I painted them. Obviously she hadn?t read the article and I explained that was the natural coloring of the stone. She told me that was ridiculous. I sprayed the piece I was working on with water to bring out the color to show her. She was a watercolorist and continued to insist that what I was doing was impossible and left in a huff.
After the article Frank started turning on me. He always got upset when he thought I was getting more attention for the art then he was and began ripping into me on a regular basis.
Hoping it would pass I rolled with it for a while with no luck. I had been through it often enough to recognize the signs. When he was having problems he?d turn me into the bad guy. He had ruined the Ice Machine photos like he ruined the Warhol images, spending weeks tweaking each image to a point they lost all their honesty and felt plastic. I was pretty upset during this and I did a series of Maelstroms that reflected my feelings at the time. I don?t think I do my best work when I?m like that, but they?re accurate in their honesty.
Frank finally went too far one day, ripping into me for hours. I blew it off, knowing where it was coming from. He called me a few days later, pretending to apologize without apologizing while he was driving with a car-full of screaming children, and then emailing me to ask what my problem was. I don?t mind acting the bad guy when necessary, but I was tired of taking the back seat to his ego. I still miss the good Frank, but he no longer made the bad Frank worth tolerating. I?m sure there was some residual guilt over Ricky?s suicide that he still hadn?t come to terms with, but at that point I didn?t care. After all of those years of holding his hand while he was having troubles I was glad the friendship was over. When someone goes out of his or her way to hurt me I can get the point.
I got an email from someone interested in my sculpture that wanted prices on four of the wood pieces. One of them was the earliest piece I had done, Cubist Crotch. I didn?t really want to sell it so I put a large price on the piece. At $25,000 that was the piece he wanted. I was shocked and started asking people I knew in the art world if this was for real. He was sending a cashier?s check for $30,000, instructing me to wire $5,000 to his art handler in Texas who would arrange for the shipping and paperwork to send the piece to Spain, as well as pay off some money that he owed him. I thought it was bizarre and asked around again. Everyone I spoke to told me cashier?s checks were as good as gold, including galleries, a big art mover I knew, and my accountant. My accountant did think it was strange, but then he thought everything in the art world was a little off, and a cashier?s check was a cashier?s check. Fed-Ex delivered it and I went to my bank to make the deposit. A couple of days later I went in to withdraw the payment to the shipper and after I got the cash I went out to my car and called all of my credit card companies to pay them the full amount I owed. The cashier?s check scam was new at the time, and a week later the bank was telling me that it was a forgery. I had spent $16,000 of their money and they wanted it back. At the time of my deposit I had all of $3.37 in my account or they would have just taken the money immediately from my funds. The only thing I splurged on with my newfound ?wealth? was a new pair of work boots and a couple of music CDs. When I spoke to the bank?s security investigator I told him I would pay back the funds I had used to pay my credit debt, but they would have to eat the $5,000 I got scammed for, which I had notified the FBI about. I wasn?t going to try to borrow money to pay that back, and ended up declaring bankruptcy a few months later. If I were a more cynical person I would have maxed out the credit cards before I did it.
I made a few sales of small pieces so I was able to float for a while, and a sculptor I knew recommended me to a new gallery in Southampton that liked my work quite a lot.
Only I wasn?t going to be able to hang on that long. The phony check had put a pall over the relationships I had and really disheartened me.
It?s always taken me a while to get into the artistic groove after a move, and some of the pieces I had recently done I considered the best of my career, like Venus De Kooning and Am I Going To Heaven, Hell, or the Next Guggenheim? On the other hand I knew the path back, having gone through it so many times. Since 1994 I had moved my studio five times in eight years and I had been able to get a lot of good work done in between.
I knew how easy it was for an established artist to use someone else?s ideas and take credit for them. I had avoided sharing my techniques and suppliers with other artists and had played down my sculpture to the stone supplier as well.
I had seen some terrible work done with what I still considered ?my? stone. Fortunately the work was so bad that it wouldn?t even be considered the same material.
I had done something completely new in sculpture, but the other side of the coin is that no one had ever seen anything like it before. I had a hard time getting people to believe the work was real. For years I had been trying to find a gallery in NYC to represent me. The reactions I got were anything but satisfying, although they all liked the work. Some responses were even brutal, and no one could believe they were carved out of stone. Molded plastic, ceramics, or painted plaster would have been understandable and accepted. My years of ?hiding in plain sight? worked against me as well. Some galleries wanted me to send in the ?real? artist and told me that I couldn?t have created work like this. Even Jolanta had one of these experiences. She had shown some pictures to a collector and her friend, a painter, in Princeton. The painter looked at the work and asked Jolanta if she was sure that a man had made the pieces. Jolanta was pretty sure I was male and asked her what she was talking about. The artist replied, ?Men usually don?t paint this well.? Jolanta was flabbergasted but I was used to the reaction at that point.
I had considered going west for years but had opted against making that big a move without having a firm financial base. After I finished making and Am I Going To Heaven, Hell, or the Next Guggenheim? I felt I no longer had to prove anything to myself or anyone else. No one was going to be able to take credit for an idea I had been building the foundation of for twenty years.
I called up the owners of the quarry and offered to represent them and the stone to the various sculpture supply houses around the country. I?d leave a piece on display with the suppliers and answer any questions they had about my techniques, come by to instruct classes if they arranged them and market the wax I had formulated specifically for the stone.
I?d share the wax sales 50/50 with the quarry and build a website for them so they could directly market the stone. I wanted help setting up an initial studio where I?d stock the stones I?d select for sculpture and set up a photo area to take pictures of six sides of each piece to post on the site, along with the dimensions and weight. When everything was done I?d turn the studio over to the quarry and find my own place.
I contacted one of the sculpture houses in NYC that I had dealt with for years and gave them the stone I had in stock to get the ball rolling. They loved it and the next time I went in they were selling it for $1.50 a pound. At the time it was costing me less than $0.25 a pound for the stone and the shipping from Utah, so there was considerable room for mark-up. I didn?t want to be seen as profiting from the sale of the stone itself, and had avoided marketing my work as a craft rather than an art. Maybe it?s just misplaced idealism, but to me it?s never been about the money. Like I told Elaine Benson, I just want to be able to continue making art.
The quarry agreed to pick up my stuff the next time they sent a truck out to LI to deliver one of their loads of ornamental stone. I decided to put everything I was taking on to pallet skids to make the move as easy as possible. Even after giving away enough stuff to fill three pick-up trucks, four SUV?s and the raw stone that was too big to move into the city myself I filled 14 skids with tools, supplies and sculpture. All of the large wood sculptures I left behind except Chelsea Series #11. I chain-sawed If Elected?, Reclining Figure and the Giraffe into pieces that another sculptor was going to use as elements in his work. I packed up the stuff I was going to take out with me in the car with my dogs and drove out west.