Escaping Artist

While I can’t really say I love my job, I do appreciate my co-worker with whom I share a small part of her photo studio. An additional member to the art department, or “creative services,” I am a somewhat odd fit at times among the other fashionable girls who sit in their cubicles and in front of their new Mac’s all day long. I used to joke when I first arrived that they put the less fashion forward employees in the dark photo studio to do their work. A veteran illustrator has an office behind me, though he travels and lectures more than he sits in it, leaving the photographer for company, and my days at work usually pass uneventfully and without the usual work stresses—npr, the constant background to our sporadic conversations, tends to aggravate me more than my job.

Outside our building, located in the heart of the fashion district, is a gold plaque—like the sidewalk stars in Hollywood—of Oscar de la Renta. Talking with a friend of a friend the other night, a graduated fashion designer, I discovered that the company I work for is an important one, and that the books we have been working on these past months are an expensive and treasured resource—who knew? The upstairs of the company looks different from our department, where fabric samples and trend storyboards are propped against the walls. The “second floor,” in office lingo, resembles a scene from The Devil Wears Prada, rolling racks of vendor samples line the walls, and the “assistants,” regular faces in the photo studio, remind me of the movie as well—they are pretty, efficient, and obsessed with fashion.

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I have come to revel in bus trips, and since I still have that west coast love of driving, I enjoy the fact that I can enjoy the road without having to drive myself. The last time I took a bus out of the city it was toward Jersey, this time we drove uptown, past our apartment, past Yankee Stadium, through Connecticut and onwards. The landscape looked colder outside ny state, frozen lakes and rivers drifted by, and houses were covered in snow that has not garnished Gotham in weeks. It feels more American somehow, or less European, to take a bus, and I enjoy the stigma. I have yet to discover exactly why this form of travel is looked down on, but it should not be surprising to find that buses are as surrounded by cultural myth as the road.

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“What kind of class do you want to take? Anything but ballet.”

When I think of the ideal dance class I remember a particular night in San Francisco, a night class that took place while I was studying at a school there. After our “required” classes that lasted all day long, we used to crash the beginning adult classes at night. The teachers were two Russian twins, dancers for SFB, who had enough energy and charisma to bring the best out of weary feet and legs. Male ballet teachers are by far the most “fun,” they indulge in the steps they know best, jumps, turns, and fast (loose) footwork. Women are constrained by being ever attentive to perfect technique and impeccable execution. Without the pressure of our daytime teachers, without the nitpicking of our artistic director, it was the perfect time to experiment. We were brats, flaunting our training for the benefit of the beginners, but we were humbled by the local professionals who came to dance with our twins. It was as democratic as I remember ballet ever being, it was ballet without pretensions, and we were always at our best. It is that kind of class I want to find again.

(a very young Suzanne Farrell with a less youthful Balanchine)

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For me it seems almost typical to look for what is missing in places. My latest images, in the vein of the missing, have revolved around looking for “nature” in the “city,” where there ought to be very little evidence of it. I have been interested in this seemingly cliché idea, however, because I live so near the last “forest” areas of Gotham. Inwood is surrounded by wandering, forest-like paths that are intermixed with recreational parks—baseball diamonds, playgrounds, dog parks—and bounded on one side by the waterfront, with all that riverfronts usually entail. Walking down Broadway everyday I have neighborhood shops on my right, and the inviting gates of Ft. Tryon Park on my left.

Throughout the winter it has been amusing to watch how the dropping leaves of fall, followed by the rain, slush, and snow of February, has changed the landscape of Broadway. My interest in the snow is an interest in how we live, or live without, a presence of nature in the city. The appearance of winter seemed to render useless the outdoor activities that gave a sense of life and community to the streets. When I first visited Inwood last summer children were playing with water guns in the park, older couples sat sweating on the benches lining Broadway, and I imagine all the places I have recently discovered were used with the same enthusiasm. Large flocks of geese have taken over the baseball diamonds, the steps leading to the top of Inwood Hill Park are covered with layers of melting ice, the playgrounds left soggy and empty. Winter effects city life but it becomes integrated as quickly as anything else; salt and rain boots appear on the sidewalks, lost gloves and broken umbrellas become the common trash, and children go sledding instead of playing on the wet swings.

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It is amazing how a question as simple as “what are you working on” can have such a devastating effect. At the height of productivity it always felt as though no matter how much I made, how many hours I worked, it was never quite enough. While it seemed that semesters and deadlines were in disharmony with the rhythm of thinking ideas through—some of us think about the same ideas for years, and even after don’t get much farther than entertaining different facets of those ideas—the pace of life also feels offbeat. Where one was too fast, the other is too slow. Asking J. Wax how his studio work was going along with teaching and traveling, he said good, but slow. I now understand his meaning, just as I have come to appreciate the difference between slow and a standstill; it might take me twice as long to build a body of images, but at least a body is being built.

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