Hands On

This blog is in memory of Mary Newhouse and Elizabeth Murray

My passion for sewing usually lies dormant; its fires only occasionally erupt. Because of this, I've never really mastered the process that turns fabric into couture.

On my very first sewing project, a wrap skirt, I was supposed to cut out facing panels of a very obvious one-sided fabric. Instead, I cut out identical panels, which meant that one panel showed the wrong side. I solved the problem by making the wrong-side skirt panel the inner one under the front wrap panel (where it was barely noticeable), but I've been making impulsive mistakes - and resourcefully compensating for them - ever since.

What started me on this peculiar path was meeting my friend, Alisa, in the seventh grade. I was attending a private school on scholarship, and very intimidated by the rich children who got weekly allowances for clothes. In my family, there were only four seasons of clothes-buying: school, birthday, Christmas, and summer camp.

While they still better off than my family, Alisa's was the first family I met that was handy. They had bought and restored the brownstone in which they lived on the Upper West Side. In Alisa's room, her mother had created a striking window shade out of a Marimekko sheet. In fact, Alisa's mother was an artist who made extraordinarily clever things in her downstairs studio. (Once, she showed us little patches of "turf" made out of ceramics, over which painted trepunto clouds were held by wires.)

Brought up in an atmosphere of craftiness, Alisa was the first person I knew who not only actually wore the clothes she made, but created her own patterns. Heartened by her example, I started to make my own clothes, with varying but general success.

When I went on to college, many of my new friends were agog to learn that I was actually wearing clothes I had made, but it inspired no imitation. (I did get a commission to make a pair of disco pants.)

Bard was a liberal arts college, and I was thinking about an arts degree. I had always been good at drawing, and my first art class with Tom Sullivan was very encouraging. So in the second semester, I made one of those inadvertently fateful decisions and took a class with post-minimalist artist Elizabeth Murray.

In person, Murray was the kind of person that exuded competence. She had that thick and wavy hair we all craved in those days; the fact that it was prematurely salt-and-pepper against her petals-and-cream complexion only made it more dramatic. She wore jeans, hiking boots; a goose down vest over a plaid shirt, the sleeves of which were rolled up to expose strong forearms. Art, as Murray taught it, was very hands on; it began with craft, and went onto vision, destruction, and reconstruction.

The class, for me, started inauspiciously, with my inability to stretch a canvas. Not having enough strength, not paying close enough attention, whatever: My square canvas flapped wings like a manta ray, rocking back and forth on the floor. She came by, glanced at it, said, "That's not right," and moved on.

Next, we had to paint an apple (which I did on a pre-stretched canvas). I fell in love with my realistically rendered macintosh apple, even though I was never able to make it "realistically" sit on the table. Murray commented that my apple hung there in space, searched my face for understanding, and moved on.

Our next assignment was to cut a hole out of the canvas, then paint over our apples and begin again. By this time I was in open rebellion. Art had always been easy, even intuitive for me; it was something for which I'd been praised since childhood. The fact that I was not doing well in an art class, and that it was costing me a fortune in pre-stretched canvases (because I could not stretch one myself) and art supplies (because I would forget to clean my paint and brushes and have to replace them) was both humiliating and enraging.

I can't remember how I managed to finish the class. It was a terrible time for both of us. Murray was a born teacher, and she was suffering for not being able to get through to me.

But in a way, she did. I told her, "This class has taught me that I'm not an artist. I have no vision." She looked at me with intense regret, saying, "There are other things you could do - you could be an illustrator."

Thousands of people each day stroll by Murray's mosaic (pictured above) at the 59th Street Station of the New York Subway system. Murray died in 2007; her New York Times obituary demonstrated what a dedicated and single-minded an artist she was. Yet another obituary, this one in New York Magazine, implied that for all her innovations and talent, she was not taken as seriously as a male painter.

So while to this day I feel the failure implicit in Murray's gentle, hopeful recommendation, it also saved me from a world of hurt.

Fine art is not for the faint-hearted.

Local Heroes

The other day, as I was driving through the town of Red Bank, NJ, I ran into the Cluck-U chicken on his way to work.

I didn't actually run into him, although he frequently rushes into oncoming traffic, begging the classic riddle.*

We waved to each to other like the old friends we are. Once, at my prompting, he had rushed into oncoming traffic to answer my question on where to rent a chicken costume. (At the time, I was working for Successful Meetings, and we always needed stuff like that.)

At the moment, Cluck-U is the only business around here that believes in sending people in costumes out onto the street as brand magnets, but the man in the chicken outfit is part of a long line of mascots that used to patrol their own patch of sidewalk. Baby boomers who visited New York and Atlantic City in the 60s may still remember Mr. Peanut, the legume manque who worked Times Square and the Boardwalk. For those who don't, the humorist S.J. Perelman has immortalized his encounters with the Planters Peanut mascot.

Nowadays, when we think of costumed mascots, we think "Disney." However, Mickey Mouse & Co. tend to stay close to home (and why not, when your home is as a big as a state). Still, I do recall a chance encounter in 2002 between Mickey and the Cremaster Cycle of avant-garde artist, Matthew Barney. It was ugly: Confronted with crashed and mangled cars, baby shoes covered in Vaseline, and a looped film involving grapes being pushed through a slot cut into a Latex sheet (I think), Mickey preferred to stay in a corner - perhaps the only corner in New York's famously cyllindrical Guggenheim Museum. And I think he made the right choice.

The local heroes, like the Cluck-U chicken, also tend to stay close to home - our homes - exhorting us to wave, honk, and accept coupons for discounts from their sponsors.

Next to sports mascots (of which I know next to nothing), they tend to be comestibles. In fact, the last remarkable mascot encounter I remember was a showdown between then-Yankee Tino Martinez and the Hormel Hot Dog, back in the summer of 2001. It was "Tino Martinez Day" at what was then the new Yankee Stadium, and Tino Martinez was accepting an award from the president of Hormel Meat Products. Standing by, as the color guard, was the Hormel Hot Dog mascot. Martinez accepted the award and shook the president's hand, but when the Hot Dog offered his hand, Martinez turned his back and walked away.

"Oh, s**t!" the man in front of me opined. "He dissed the salami!"

A decade later, Martinez is retired, while the Hormel Hot Dog is still at it, putting on his Hot Dog hose one leg at the time.

*In the Cluck-U version, a chicken crosses the road because he is paid by the hour.