Tower Cam Kiss
This wordless short story can be read beginning with the top four panels left to right, and then bottom four panels left to right. The [large version][1] might be easier to make out. This window installation is on view in the front lobby of the [Lawrence Arts Center][2]. [![][3]][1]Tower Cam Kiss ([view larger][1]) [1]: http://media.lawrence.com/img/blogs/l... [2]: /places/lawrence_arts_center/ [3]: http://media.lawrence.com/img/blogs/l...
Artist writes down what he said about his wordless short stories
Adapted from my [June 3rd Artist's Talk at the Lawrence Arts Center][1] On one of the first warm evenings this spring I was sitting outside the [Bourgeois Pig][2] when a friend asked me "Dave, so why do you stay in Lawrence?" Before I could redirect his question, out of nowhere a red fox came cruising down 9th street. He looked over at us as he casually trotted by and I could swear I saw him shake his pointy snout in a knowing way as if to say "Hey, you. Yeah you. You lookin' at me?" We glanced back and wondered aloud why a fox was ambling down this busy street. Was he lost? On a hunt? Did he live near by? Was it something to do with global warming? Or what ? Truth was that we probably were all out just enjoying the nice evening and checking out the scene - people or fox watching as it goes..We do this all the time. Overlooking into other's lives and trying to make some sense of them. You know, like when you're at a restaurant or bar and there's a couple across the way and you speculate: First date? Married? Breaking up? Just friends? Co-workers? or whoops (when you finally catch a bit of conversation) Father and daughter. Without being able to hear what they're saying, the nature of the couple's relationship is left open to our wandering imaginations, and our interpretations probably say as much about us as they do about them, like in the Hitchcock movie "[Rear Window][3]" where overlooking across an apartment courtyard - what is seen and what is imagined - drives the plot and draws out Jimmy Stewart and Grace Kelly's characters. We measure our own actions and lives against those we see from afar, taking cues at a distance about what it is to be a human or a pigeon or a fox.There are few words in this show where maybe they'd be expected (Where are the omniscient narrators and the dialogue bubbles?), but words and writers are at the heart of them in many ways.A few years ago, I was commissioned to create a big mural in downtown Hutchinson. (The photo used to identify this blog shows a tiny me in front of the wall in Hutchinson before we started painting.) The theme for the mural was the night sky. My take on this, after meeting with locals, included an astronomer, a poet, and a parent and child looking at a sky full of imagined constellations. The astronomer viewed the stars through the lens of science, the poet saw the sky as an inspiration for art, while the child on his parent's shoulders was still able to grab a hold of one of the constellations with absolute belief. The poet in this group is actually based on the great Kansas poet [William Stafford][4], who I was introduced to while doing research for the project. Reading through a book of Stafford's I was so struck by one of his poems titled "Keepsakes" that I put him in the mural beginning to write it. Here is the poem.
![][5]
Keepsakes by William StaffordStar Guides: Any star is enough if you know what star it is. Kids: They dance before they learn there is anything that isn't music. The Limbs of the Pin Oak Tree: "Gravity what's that?" An Argument Against the Empirical Method: Some haystacks don't even have any needle. Comfort: We think it is calm here, or that our storm is the right size.The poem is a bracelet of small jewels. I especially like the bit about kids.In fact, kids draw, sculpt, paint, sing, and act before they learn there is anything that isn't art. And then something happens, usually. Maybe it was this line that got me thinking about how in the hell I am still making art, and since has developed into an as yet unfinished piece I've been calling The Geography of the Art World. Here's a little preview:Geography of the Art World(Imagine a darkend classroom with a geography teacher standing at an overhead projector)When I was a kid like four or five, it seemed like everybody I knew was an artist, and everywhere was an opportunity for art. My dinner plate, the sand box, my leg, the bathtub, and any and every wall. (I guess that hasn't changed.)My mom was an artist. My dad. My uncles and aunts. My babysitters. The waitress at the B&G diner. Even my little bother Tim.We all made art and usually together, each of us contributing his or her ideas into paintings, sculpture, performance - very interdisciplinary stuff that might be called 'new media' today. There were few limits. (Mom said we weren't allowed to burn things after me and my best friend DV sent a lighter fluid soaked teddy bear down a zip line from my bedroom window. It was beautiful.) Some times we worked with crayons, other times play dough, but our preference was working with stuff outside - mud, sticks, trash, snow, and the like. So my geography of the Art World looked sort of like an art [Pangea][6], you know with all the continents fused together into a giant land mass without borders, a contiguous landscape of creative expression without critics, dealers, or professionals. It was fun. We were kids.In school things started to shift, and by the time I got to high school art was divided into categories, mostly we had to work alone, and there were always competitions. Working together was frowned upon or called cheating. Only at recess could we make stuff from mud, sticks, insect parts, and broken glass. We thought we were making important things out there. Our teacher called it play. We were both right.At home I felt a change, too. When I would copy cartoons out of magazines or try to make my pictures look 3-D, some grown-ups would give me complements saying "Maybe you'll be an artist :when you grow up." And "I could get never get past stick figures." Then usually they would end with something like, "At least you're not going to be one of those abstract artists like Jackson Pollock. That's a joke. My dog could do better." With this new knowledge, my geography of the Art World was modified. The new map showed three separate continents: 1) Maybe someday artists, 2) Stick figure makers, and 3) Abstract / worse than dog artists.Going to college and then grad school (twice) should have helped clear up my questions about abstract art, stick figures, and what it meant to be an artist (when I grow up), but instead I just got more confused. What had been an Art World made up of three continents was breaking into ever smaller pieces, each with highly fortified borders constructed of elaborate and scholarly sounding talk. And so my map had to be revised again. Now added to the stick figure makers, worse than dog painters, and someday artists were:- The union of hyphenated artists which took up much of the land in the northern hemisphere.- The great American Art Desert, a disputed territory fought over by outsider and naÃive artists.- Sunday painters living in autonomous districts, who were continually lobbying their leaders for federal art recognition status.- Folk artlands mainly in the southern hemisphere.- The republic of MFA's and their shadow partners - exiled colonies for delinquent graduate school debtors.- Professional artist gated communities entered into only with proper pedigree and forfeit of 45-60% of sales.- Strange rag-tag renegade clusters of artistamp makers, stencilers, cairn builders, and yart devotees. - And the ever increasing number of lands and people deemed artless.The whole business was disheartening. I couldn't figure out where my place was. At the time I was torn between being a 'landscape painter' and being a 'political artist.' It felt like I had to choose when I really wanted to do both. Instead, I chose none, and got a job at the co-op managing fruits and vegetables. I wasn't sure if I'd ever make art again. When I finally did, I did it without the old map. Without all those artificial classifications, my work took to new forms - gardens, murals, street art, writing:wordless short stories, and slowly I've been able to feel a new alignment in the geography of the Art World. The borders are less distinct, travel between artlands with different philosophies is no longer forbidden, (stick figure makers and outsider artists have been seen drinking coffee together) collaboration and sharing are encouraged, and the art continents are moving into new positions. The future looks promising... Lights please.Okay, I want to go back to Stafford's poem and the first lines that read:Star Guides: Any Star is Enough if you know what star it is.This is the line that Stafford is writing in his notebook in the Hutchinson mural. Things connect in the minds of artists I guess, because this line from Stafford immediately felt like dejà vu when I first read it. But it wasn't dejà vu. I actually had known that line my whole life, except it had sounded like this, "If someone loves a flower of which just one example exists among all the millions and millions of stars, that's enough to make him happy when he looks at the stars" (spoken by the Little Prince to the pilot).Do you know the story of "[The Little Prince][7]" by Antoine De Saint-Exupery? If you don't, I hope my references to it below pique your interest. It is as important to me as few things are, coffee and cast shadows among them. I began this by talking about a chance encounter with a fox. Well, as you probably remember, if you know "The Little Prince", that there is a wise and curious fox in that story, too. In it, the fox and the Little Prince meet by chance in the African desert.![][8]The Little Prince, feeling homesick, asks the fox to play, but the fox says he can't unless the Little Prince tames (create ties with, or captivates, as my friend Julie understood the fox when she read the book in Portuguese) him. The Little Prince says he doesn't have time because he has ":friends to find and so many things to learn." The fox replies, "The only things you learn are the things you tame. People haven't time to learn anything. They buy things ready-made in stores. But since there are no stores where you can buy friends, people no longer have friends. If you want a friend, tame me!" And after receiving some pointers on the nature of taming (or captivating), the Little Prince tames the fox.But the Little Prince is still sad about the ordinary rose that he left behind on his asteroid. He feels it doesn't compare with the many flowers he's discovered in a rose garden on earth. (The grass, like Portland or New York for Lawrence artist-types, is greener always at the horizon.) The fox suggests, now that he understands the idea of taming, that the Little Prince look at the rose garden again and he would discover that his rose was the only one in the world for him. Because as the fox says, "It's the time you spent on your rose that makes it so important." And then the Little Prince realizes that his rose has tamed him, and that the many other flowers in the rose garden were just flowers empty an unnamed. And so his flower is the star he knows, like Stafford said, "Any star is enough if you know what star it is." There is much more to this story but I need to get back to the question my friend asked before we were distracted by the first fox: "Dave, so why do you stay in Lawrence?"I didn't have to answer then. I'll give it a try now.The drawings in [this show][9]. That's my answer, and probably a better one then I could ever write. Lawrence. This neighborhood. This is the place I've spent time on. Lawrence is a star I know, and here in this place is the flower I care for, the baobabs I weed, and the volcanoes I rake out (even the extinct one) because as the Little Prince reminds us, "...you never know." [1]: http://www.lawrence.com/events/2008/jun/03/28111/ [2]: http://www.lawrence.com/places/the_bo... [3]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rear_Window [4]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Stafford_(poet) [5]: http://media.lawrence.com/img/blogs/l... [6]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pangea [7]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Litt... [8]: http://media.lawrence.com/img/blogs/l... [9]: http://www.lawrence.com/events/ongoing/24554/
“Four Corners”
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"Four Corners" [View full strip][2]
View this and other paintings like it now at the [Lawrence Arts Center exhibit, "Short Stories": New Work by Dave Loewenstein][3].
[1]: http://media.lawrence.com/img/blogs/l... [2]: http://media.lawrence.com/img/blogs/l... [3]: http://www.lawrence.com/events/ongoing/24554/
Please Excuse Our Progress
The area around my dad's new condominium is a part of Evanston where I don't know any short cuts. Hometown but not home turf. When I visit, I usually try to get away at some point and make my way ten blocks east to our old neighborhood. Unrecognizable as a forty-year-old version of the kid I once was, I wander around the blocks between Judson and Hinman, Greenleaf and Dempster, a streetside archaeologist looking for evidence to confirm sketchy memories of my childhood. The setting where I stumbled to many early milestones, Miller School, holds the most promise for discoveries. I attended Miller for just two years, third and fourth grade, before it closed, but the lot behind the school and the surrounding geography of alleyways and backyards was where I lived between the ages of eight and fifteen. The ruddy multi-purpose field and old-school institutional playground behind Miller was where I first kissed a girl, first drank a beer (Schaefer), first painted on a mural, and where I got my first nickname "loewe." Returning thirty years later was a small heartbreak. The place I'd mythologized ever since I left, looked like a cheap black and white replica of my technicolor memory. It was an impostor. It was too clean, too small, and too quiet. Most significantly, Miller had been where I wound-up nearly every day for eight years to practice pitching. But looking out from the spot where I used to dig my foot into the dirt to make a pitching rubber, I saw a good-sized maple tree between me and the blue rectangle strike zone spray painted on the wall. If I'd only had a chainsaw: Miller had been given a complete make over, including a new official City of Evanston park name emblazoned in yellow painted letters on a big wooden sign where the jungle gym used to be. It's not Miller anymore, it's Currey. Seeing that sign was like getting snubbed by a best friend. Who the hell was Currey? It wasn't Currey that was carved into stone above the doorway to the school, it was Miller. Feeling a mild bout of vertigo coming on as I walked away, I thought, this isn't home, this isn't what I remembered.Places and people can get stuck in time if we don't see them regularly over the years. The fragile and incremental way that we piece together a relationship with a place, a close friend, or a lover can be easily and unconsciously whittled down into a singular static image by our absence. I think this is why places from our childhood, like Miller, look so small when we revisit them as adults, and why it's so easy to forgive an ex-lover, you swore you would never speak to again, upon seeing them again for the first time in years. Like an overgrown battlefield, it's easy to lose track of the markers and motives that guided us in our past if we leave for too long. And unlike Billy Pilgrim, from Kurt Vonnegut's "Slaughterhouse Five," we are stuck in time and saddled with that most anesthetizing of human traits the capacity to forget. Places and people can get stuck in time not just by absence, but also because our knowledge of them is too thin to begin with and not fleshed out by experience. I realized this again on a recent trip to Greenville, Mississippi, where I went to work on a mural. In my consciousness, I remembered Mississippi as some thing that happened a long time ago and then ended like a chapter in a ninth grade U.S. history textbook. Mississippi had been an early spelling test word, the legacy of slavery, cotton, blues, the Civil Rights movement, and not much else. And since my education concerning the state ended with civil rights, I hadn't really considered what happened to Mississippi since the mid-'60s. Mississippi is still there.Mississippi is still there. This is what I've been telling friends who ask about my trip to Greenville. It's a beautiful state, lush and languid, a home to great artists and greater legends. It is also a state of three million people that ranks last or nearly last in the nation in per capita income, academic achievement, and spending on public education, but is notably ranked second in legalized gambling. Driving one-way up Washington Avenue in Greenville on a Saturday afternoon there is an eerie stillness in what was once the center of downtown. You can hear the clicks of the traffic signal switching box as lights change from green to yellow to red without a car passing. Those bright lights were the only saturated colors I saw around until a busload of convicts arrived one day, in green and white stripes, to mount grinning elves and candy cane Christmas decorations onto all the street lights. Most of the six-block stretch of the old retail center is abandoned and crumbling if not already razed. Like bottle glass on an ocean beach, shards of brick and tile are ground down into ever smaller pieces until they become unrecognizable as building materials and disappear into the growing fields of gravel. Highlighting this scene, like a sarcastic punch line, is a large orange sign in the middle of the street that reads "Please Excuse Our Progress." [![][1]][2] Visitors from a hip and healthy town like Lawrence may see a melancholic beauty in the exposed decay of a place like Greenville. I did. Walking around the foundations of what had been a shoe store or a pharmacy reminded me of visiting the ruins in Rome, but these weren't ancient ruins and they certainly were not a tourist attraction. Greenville, unlike [Greensburg, Kansas][3], was not recently hit by a arbitrary act of mother nature. The damage there has come slowly with less drama and is more the result of human choice than intended harm. There is no FEMA or documentary film crew anxious to help people living with this type of misfortune, only casinos as far as I could tell. Without a personal connection to the place, my thoughts wandered as I walked around, and I imagined Washington Avenue in a long tracking shot from a Jim Jarmusch film or as an inspiration for a great tableau by Anselm Keifer. These were easy, care free thoughts for me. I was just a visitor. I could leave whenever I wanted. I've watched many communities that are struggling to keep their downtowns alive start mural projects in hopes of recapturing a little civic pride. The intentions are always good, but sometimes the bright colors and scenes that celebrate the 'good old days' look more ironic than inspirational in the context of empty storefronts and broken concrete. With this in mind, the mural I collaborated on with sixth graders from Ella Darling School in Greenville was meant to look forward not back. The inspiration, for what would later become the "Tree of Dreams" mural, wasn't hard to find. It came on the day we walked downtown to inspect the wall of the Higher Dimensions Church where we were going to paint. Along the way, not more than a block from the wall, in the entryway of an abandoned jewelry store, we saw a small tree struggling to grow from a crack near the door. It had no business growing there and its chances of survival were slim, but of course, it didn't care. That was its home, it couldn't leave, and so it would live there the best it could. Just like these kids, I thought, whose school motto was "Keep Your Head Up and Your Heart Strong" printed between two muscular blue arms emerging from big red hearts. [![][4]][5][![][6]][7] On my last day in Greenville, at the mural dedication, a TV reporter asked me "Why?" "What is the purpose of this mural?" "What are you trying to do?" Put on the defensive, I didn't have a quick answer. The success of our project did not hinge on whether Washington Avenue was revitalized or whether all the kids involved got higher standardized test scores. What I didn't know how to say at the time, but my friend Natalie reminded me of later, was that these murals I've been doing, for almost twenty years now, are not a kind of currency or ad campaign to be converted into something else. They are what you see, and they are evidence or reminders of the experiences we have had in making them a trail of sparks for our memories that we can rediscover when trying to make our way back into time. [1]: http://media.lawrence.com/img/blogs/l... [2]: http://media.lawrence.com/img/blogs/l... [3]: http://www.lawrence.com/news/2007/dec... [4]: http://media.lawrence.com/img/blogs/l... [5]: http://media.lawrence.com/img/blogs/l... [6]: http://media.lawrence.com/img/blogs/l... [7]: http://media.lawrence.com/img/blogs/l...
The 9th Street Pond
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VACANT LOTS - III: The 9th Street Pond [View full strip][1]
[1]: http://media.lawrence.com/img/blogs/l...
Vacant Lots - II : Par - King
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VACANT LOTS - II : Par - King [View full strip][1]
[1]: http://media.lawrence.com/img/blogs/l...
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Sunday Afternoon Along the Levee
**SUNDAY AFTERNOON ALONG THE LEVEE** [View full strip][1]
[1]: http://media.lawrence.com/img/blogs/l...
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