My Art
Leo Segedin | 5/19/2002 | Print this essay
Paper given to the American-Jewish Arts Club
Like most artists, I find it hard to talk about my own work, especially to people who know little about art, so it is a pleasure to be able to talk to fellow artists. As a teacher, I lectured about the Mona Lisa and the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel for years, but probably, as most of you, I’ve always felt that my own paintings should speak for themselves. Words can point to what you should look at and create a context for what you see, but I don’t think that anyone can really communicate in words what works of art communicate any more than they can create in words the taste of a good wine. The experiences of – say - a painted, translucent red - of delicate lines and bold shapes - of dramatic, metaphoric images - are like - well - the tang of garlic in a good, kosher hot dog - if we can imagine such experiences as being more serious - more profound - than pleasurable. They have to be ‘tasted’ to be known. It is not an intellectual process, although some art critics have made their careers trying to describe and explain it. The meaning – the significance - of a painting is in the work itself - in the personal responses to the aesthetic and metaphoric qualities of the image. This does not mean that paintings don’t embody meanings beyond such intrinsic qualities of the paintings. Although paintings can be about any personal experience, I believe that important paintings should be about something important - about life - the human condition - about the world we live in, or, in my case, the world we used to live in – even about art itself. There is something unique about artists who create with passion, who write - or paint - or compose works of art that express the intensely human experiences they share with others – of love and hate - of beauty and ugliness – of nature and society - of divinity and belief – of the imaginings of our mind - of memory - of loss - of mortality and death - all those corny, clichéd sentiments which just happened to be meaningful to us. And it may be that those visions are more true and real to us than the objective truths of science; at least, they touch us in ways that science never can. I would like to think that this is true about me. On the other hand, important subjects don’t necessarily make great paintings. Some of the tritest paintings I’ve seen were about motherhood, brotherhood, the evils of war and oppression and most disturbing, about the Holocaust. But – after having said all that - since I have been asked to talk about me and my paintings – I will say a few words.
Many of my paintings, such as those that were exhibited at my last show at Byron Roche, are of the neighborhood in which I grew up - the West Side of Chicago back in the 1940’s. They are not scenes of particular places; they are not about specific events that occurred in my life. Rather, they are about the feel of the spaces we lived in - the streets and rooms - the back yards – the porches and alleys - transformed by my memory. (N.Y., L. A., Boston spaces feel different) We used to fly the model airplanes we built in those spaces – Spads, Neuports, Fokker D7s , and – during WW II - P40s, P38s, B17s and B24s – as we fantasized about shooting down Messerschmitts and Zeros. We played Relievio and Cops and Robbers in that schoolyard with all the intensity of adult competition. With fear, we confronted the threats of bigger, tougher kids. (At Gregory Grammar School, there was a bully named Tony. I ended up doing his homework so that he would leave my friends and me alone). And - on long walks and on back porches - we discussed with intimate friends the deep, momentous issues of our lives.
Some people have told me that my paintings remind them of their old neighborhoods - of the places where they grew up - of old friends they haven’t seen in years - of pleasurable - or painful - events in their childhood. All that might be there. I remember the golden glow of evening light on building facades and streets - but the neighborhood of my childhood was full of people and the streets in many of those paintings are empty. All the people are gone - moved out - died. Those spaces are still there - in my mind anyway.
Jan came across this line in Doris Grumbach’s book, Life in a Day,
Abandonment leaves few traces behind. But my mind always works hard over the traces, recreating what might have been there, the lives wiped out or moved away, the warm existence of a past lost forever in the cold, unpeopled collapse of the present.
That reminds me of some of my paintings.
Some of the lines in the song, “Hey Kid!”, Michael Smith’s song about my paintings in “Hello Dali!” at Victory Gardens Theater last year, go:
“Here’s who I am, a stranger in my own hometown. Everything’s the same, not a thing hasn’t changed. This is my dream, that all the places we remember, they remember us. That somewhere we are always children…”
Michael Smith is right. Those paintings are about loss - about loneliness - about search. They are about the loss of a loved one – and also the loss of all those people who were part of my life - even those I never knew.
I didn’t start out to be an artist. Although I always liked to draw, I was a practical kid. I knew even when I was 7 years old that art was OK as a hobby, but no way to make a living. I wanted to be a pilot. (I actually flew a plane myself for the first – and only - time when I was 70). By the time I was in high school, I was going to be a chemical engineer, then, an aeronautical engineer, then, a commercial artist. But, when I was 15 years old, in 1942, during a cold, snowy day in December, an artist friend of my Aunt Hannah, named Arthur Polansky, unexpectedly appeared at the door of my family’s apartment, carrying paints, brushes, easels and canvases and said, “Come on! We are going out painting!” He took me to a 2nd floor back porch overlooking the Garfield Park “L” tracks near Independence Blvd. and got permission from the tenants to set up our easels there. We painted for hours, my hands freezing even though I was wearing mittens. That was the first time I painted ‘L’ tracks, brick walls and back porches, and on and off, I’ve been painting them ever since. But I was still a practical kid. I went to a technical high school - became an engineering draftsman. My first job was as draftsman; I taught engineering drawing for the Army Engineers during the Korean War. But I did make art while in high school, (my homeroom teacher was the art teacher) and studied painting (to be an illustrator) while at the University Of Illinois where I got my MFA in Painting in 1950. My graduate thesis painting was a 5’ by 3’ oil painting of an ‘L’ station in the Loop. At Fort Belvoir, I had a studio above the bowling alley and even there, I made a picture of an empty Chicago ‘L’ station – a Christmas card called ‘No-el’. When I was discharged, I decided that I would try to make it as an artist, but instead of moving to N.Y. - which was the center of the art world then - I stayed in Chicago. I realized I couldn’t live off of what I could sell at art fairs, so I became an art teacher, ultimately an art professor at Northeastern Illinois University. I met and married Jan, and for over 41 years, she has kept me on the straight and narrow. She has been an unsparing and invaluable critic of my painting and writing, for which I will always be grateful. Together, we raised two wonderful sons, for which I am also grateful. I continued to paint full time during my summers off and as much as I could while teaching, exhibiting wherever possible. With Jan’s encouragement, I retired from teaching 15 years ago and have been painting full time ever since.
I have painted other subjects. In the 50s, I tried to paint the coast of Maine - the rocks and the surf - but as much as such scenery turned me on, I could never capture its dynamism. I made paintings of the 1968 and 1972 political conventions. During that same period, I also did paintings about the temporality of power - about humanity’s inability to communicate - about depersonalization - about the Holocaust and Viet Nam – paintings with titles like ‘Babel’, ‘Polifiction’, ‘Parts of Man’, ‘Body Parts’ - paintings that most people would probably find too disturbing to hang in their living room, but of which I am still proud. In 1982, I returned to my memories of Chicago and have been painting them ever since.
I am still fascinated by Chicago. I still take the ‘L’ downtown from Evanston where I live. I still stare out of the ‘L’ windows onto back porches - into kitchen windows - down into back yards, streets and alleys. I still respond to the surfaces of these spaces:
Old brick walls - It is not the bricks themselves; it is what happens to the bricks over time. Bricks age differently. Disintegrating bricks are replaced and windows filled with fresh, new brick. Dirt accumulates in different patterns. No two walls are the same.
Worn, patterned wallpaper - the shapes left where paintings and mirrors were hung, - traces of the people who lived there - vestiges – histories – memories.
Scuffed linoleum and varnished floors. Peeling windowsills and door moldings. Battered streets and alleys. Cracked sidewalks. The patterns left on walls by old buildings after they are torn down. The remains of old advertisements on those brick walls. (They are like the palimpsests on old medieval manuscripts)
All this has changed since I was a child. The old brick has been sandblasted; there is fresh mortar between them. It’s hard to see through storm windows and around air conditioners. Back porches are enclosed - or the old, painted, gray railings, replaced with stained wood ones. New buildings are built out of concrete and cinder blocks ….
I was especially fascinated by the quality of light in Chicago – not only sunlight or the cold light of a cloudy day – but also by the different kinds of light - from bedroom and kitchen windows – storefronts - back porches – streets and ‘L’ platforms. Jerusalem and Venice had nothing on Chicago. But the light now is different…. more neon, florescent, halogen.
(I remember when, at night, you could see the Milky Way over Chicago. You could actually see by starlight.)
When I began painting, Chicago was the world I lived in, but today that Chicago exists only in my memory - and memory is always a reconstruction. Every time I paint it, I create it all over again. And now, even these memories have their history. The empty rooms - the streets and sidewalks I paint remind me of the people who once lived and walked there. Gritty side brick and wallpaper embody the passage of time on their surfaces and thus remind me of the passage of my own life. As I look back on my life – my work – what strikes me is how fast time passes - the temporary, fragile quality of all life. (Steven Sondheim wrote in “Bowler Hat”, in Pacific Overtures, “The swallow flying through the sky is not as swift as I am flying through my life”) Children leave home. Illness and accident take away dear friends. Those empty rooms will be filled with others. Tomorrow, other people will be walking on those sidewalks and I will be gone. I try to confront my own mortality. I paint myself as I am today - and as I was before, when - as a child - I fantasized about what I would be as an adult. What did I think I would be at 75 when I was 9? How would I see myself now? Would I be shocked? Regretful? Gratified? Should I have gone to the Art Institute instead of the U. of I.? Should I have moved to N.Y. instead of staying in Chicago? All unanswerable questions. What difference do the possible futures of my past make to me now?
I am still startled when that adolescent kid that I still am in my mind’s eye looks into the morning mirror and sees an old man. I still wonder why old friends I haven’t seen in years have aged so much more than I have. A short time ago, my son, Paul, was mistaken for me. I wondered whether that meant that my son had aged more than I wanted to believe or that I looked younger than I thought (which was OK with me). On the other hand, George Orwell said that at 50, a man had the face he deserved - and the biologist, Midas Dekkers, said, “With every step you take in the direction of the grave, you look less like another and more like yourself…” so this old face must be the real me.
Ultimately, none of this really matters. Everybody grows old - everyone has memories. What really matters is giving those memories an effective, objective form – to make paintings out of them. The most important questions remain - as always - how do I paint those memories and - what do I paint next? After painting for over 50 years, I still feel as though I am just beginning. I have so much to learn and there are so many unrealized images in my mind. And, finally, my need as an artist - as a human being –– is still to leave something behind - and the only special, magical, miraculous things I can acknowledge are children – and art.