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Sometimes I'm right and I can be wrong. My own beliefs are in my song. The butcher, the banker, the drummer and then, makes no difference what group I'm in. I am everyday people! Yeah. Yeah. There is a blue one who can't accept the green one for living with a fat one trying to be a skinny one.

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And different strokes for different folks. And so on and so on and scooby dooby doo-bee. Oh sha sha… We got to live together! I am no better and neither are you. We are the same whatever we do. You love me you hate me you know me and then. You can't figure out the bag l'm in. I am everyday people! Yeah. Yeah. There is a long hair that doesn't like the short hair for being such a rich one that will not help the poor one. And different strokes for different folks. And so on and so on and scooby dooby doo-bee. Oh sha sha. We got to live together! There is a yellow one that won't accept the black one. That won't accept the red one that won't accept the white one. And different strokes for different folks… and so on and so on.

PAGES 39-40

This particular two page frame has a seemingly small role in the “plot” of the sequence.  It is the larger “panorama” that allows us to pull back from the newspaper box and and then move to the TV.  This much is true; but it was also what I regarded as the single most important frame in the whole project.  This was to function as the equivalent of the headstone for our now deceased Adrian Sidney. 



I had spent the previous 38 pages demonstrating ways for us to regard Sidney as misguided and deficient; yet why have we chosen to even focus on him if this is all we are to think of him?   He is supposedly a version of me. (the lesser, we hope)  Now that he is dead, the task that has fallen to me, Gill, is to demonstrate the things that were most interesting within his system of delusional aesthetics.  This was to be his eulogy.  I was trying to understand Sidney’s impulses and, then, to refine them; I then attempted to execute them in as pure a way as possible.  (“See, he’s not so bad!”)  This meant that I had to really “step up” my game.  The variety of textures and elimination of line were at the top of my list of goals.  Like the store sign, this was to be the “Zenith” (or high point) of this particular drawing style.

I would spend more time on this than I had on any other pervious drawing.  There were 6 weeks of days of steady work devoted to this from late October until early December, 1984.  I approached the project with an excessive attention that started to resemble a surgeon’s quest for a sterile operating environment.

Before I describe the work and the content, I want to mention where the impulse to commemorate Sidney in this way came from.  I had been quite moved by Pound’s portrayal of the Mauberley character in the poems of his that I had written my thesis on. Pound had picked him apart in a way that simply overwhelmed me; nevertheless, Pound delved into the origins of Mauberley’s aesthetics; Pound wrote about Mauberley’s influences; he discussed his eventual dissolution and falling out of cultural relevance; he traced the forces that lead to this tragedy and follows them to their sad, sad conclusion (I somethings think of Alex Cox’s portrayal of the pathetic decline of Sid Vicious in “Sid and Nancy”)   AND THEN, after all this - and Mauberley’s death, he composes a final farewell poem in the most eloquent version of a Mauberley style.  In the end Pound regards him as a fallen comrade (albeit a lesser one) He even frames the whole process of commemoration in an allusion to the Elpenor character in the Hades section of “The Odyssey.” Elpenor pleads with Odysseus to bury his abandoned body and to erect a grave marker. Elpenor suggests that it be the oar he used to row among his shipmates.  The whole situation in Pound is quite complex; but suffice it to say Odysseus and Pound initiate a process that is akin to a proper public mourning.  And so too was I saying my own goodbyes to Sidney and this kind of art work.  It was time for me to move on.

Back to this drawing:  In the mid 1970’s my mother decided to take an “advanced” needlepoint class.  Like most WASPy wannabe women my mother produced her share of this stuff.  (It has its roots in showing that one is a woman of leisure or some such thing) But what she had produced previously had been done in that simple one stitch, 45 degree angle style.  The class was to teach my mother 40 (!) new and different stitches.  For convenience purposes, the class had each student create a 1 foot square product that would feature each of these 40 stitches - patchwork quilt style almost.  My Mom’s wound up becoming throw pillows, and I would often look  at the different stitches. Some looked liked intense basket weaving.  Some looked like arrow heads.  Some were outrageously complicated; others were beguilingly simple; but what struck me was the way that the 40 different textures looked when shown side by side. 

What I was trying to do here in this drawing was to find as many ways of producing the equivalent of drawing “stitches” as possible: cross hatching, parallel lines, directional stippling, furry grass like strokes, tiny checker board patterns, checkerboards of solids, checkerboards of directional parallel lines, checkerboards of stippling, nearly black overworked stipling...etc.  You get the idea.  This was too be the drawing equivalent of my mother’s needlepoint pillow. (though this needlepoint model was in no way how I thought of it at the time)

OK.  So what’s the big deal? First, this is not the way I eventually became accustomed to drawing.  To continue with this needlepoint analogy - my work (now and for some time) consists almost entirely of stippled dots, all one texture or the equivalent of the single, simple needlepoint stitch.  I build my textures out of novel combinations of these identical units.  In this particular drawing, I was doing the opposite.  I was varying the kinds of marks that I made on the paper - as well as the style of these marks.  This was how I created texture rather than constructing texture out of a single type of building block. THIS was the Sidney method.  Have a look at the collections of textures from two different styles of drawing. (and pieces of needlepoint)

I also tried to not use heavy outlines around the objects.  And there are a lot of objects.  This made for a somewhat more impressionistic appearance.  Things look “right” only at a certain distance.  This meant that I would have to work in very careful ways.  Back in the era when I used heavy line, I could simply run my cross hatching (or stippling, or whatever) right up to the edge of the clearly demarcated limit of the object. Think of children’s coloring books and coloring “in the lines.”  Instead, I had to rely on lines projected via a light table, or even in some cases with straight edges of masking tape.  This was slow going.

I briefly mentioned that the street scene on page 11 would come up again.  Across the street from the approaching car there is a striped awning and some newspaper boxes.  This was a hastily assembled “cartoon” of a street scene.  Some big ticket items are there to do the heavy lifting; but not much else is fleshed out.  I thought why not take this scene of Sidney’s supposed wider world and really fill it with life like things?  I really wanted to make it seem like a real place.  I have no idea how real this imaginary world seems to others; I am all too aware that it is a Frankenstein assemblage of collected bits and parts; but I wanted to make the Frankenstein world of this frame more “pretty” - or, more to the point, convincing!

In the event that I haven’t made this entirely clear, the place depicted here does NOT exist.  There is no such place; however, just about every detail in it is taken directly from actual Portland Oregon buildings and street scenes.  The Coke sign is from a soda fountain drug store near Mount Tabor.  The chunky stone work is from a building on SW Third. The 75 cent price is from an actual sandwich place (I believe on broadway).  The moldings are like something on the buildings near SW Alder and the Park blocks.  The exterior tile is like that from a convenience store in Eastmoreland.  The curtains are from a restaurant on SW Stark. The TV signs are an amalgam of a TV store on SE Woodstock and the one on W Burnside.  The Burglar bars are from the one on W Burnside.  The Rexall and green stamp display were from another drug store in SE.  The Downtowner newspaper box was ubiquitous.  The USA Today box was an anachronism. They existed in November, 1984 but not in March, 1980.  I clearly remember that my friend Ron Wiesel had just destroyed one of these boxes on NW Everett in a particularly ridiculous car accident.  Those were the standard downtown Portland parking meters.  “On the Miracle Mile” was a rusted out sign that appeared in certain areas of downtown Portland.  That was the standard Portland downtown street lamp.  Vertical blinds were more of a novelty then, and I remember being very pleased with my decision to put them in the second floor windows.  Fallout shelter signs like that were still around.  There was even an actual place that had a chunky wooden door handle like the one on the TV store. 

There really was a Radiant TV; and its awning was striped.  One of my favorite details was the “COLOR” sign, with its multi-textured backgrounds.  Color?  Yes, this was an allusion to “Color” in “Cosmic Comics” by Victor Moscoso.  I was getting ready to set up a similar Moscoso inspired circular plot; but it was also a way of noting that for all its seeming verisimilitude, this and every other panel remained black and white.  I meant for there to a bit of an elegiac tone.  Yes, Sidney was dead; but the drawing sequence itself was coming to an end.  No color; just dreary black and white.  And what is this in the window: the television, the device that will gain primacy and make such slow moving spectacles as this drawing sequence no longer needed. (was it ever needed?)

At the time, I had just purchased my first TV: a 13” color RCA at the Meier and Frank Vereran’s Day sale.   (I even used the experience of TV shopping to collect imagery for the next few pages)  This purchase felt tremendously decadent.  I had lived without the fixture of permanent TV looming over me for years.  The life of the college student was like that back then (or at least the life of the kind of workaholic student I was)  I felt that I was somehow dissolving into the bigger circle of daily life with my new appliance.  Yes, the people who seemed intoxicated by “Dallas” and “Magnum P.I.” appeared a little frivolous to my haughty college student mentality; but these were facts that were unavoidable.  People, myself among them, were seduced by televised imagery every day.  They lost themselves in it; as an artist Sidney would have needed to acknowledge the presence of this new form of “Circe’s craft;” he would also need to show how the appliance itself was bought and sold - integrated into the life of the street scene.

The finished product was meant to be my portrait, in the “Sidney style,” of my own living and breathing Portland. (my actual home at the time)  In this I think I was somewhat successful.   It is meant to be a night time scene; though it is not nearly dark enough.  There are some problematic areas.  I wanted the street to have a kind of river barrier quality to it (you know: Hades, River Styx, etc).  Perhaps, we can imagine Sidney looking at it from the other side of whatever this barrier is.  instead, the street just comes of as an over marked up lower third of the drawing.  Oh well.  A few other things bug me too (the octagonal light pole base most of all!); but I was generally very pleased with how this, my headstone for Sidney, my Elpenor’s oar turned out.

This would later become the basis for the poster that was used for the one showing of this drawing sequence.  The exhibition was part of a larger collaboration at PDXS Gallery.  Ron Wiesel was performing a number of short monologues that he had written.  There was original music, film loops, slide projections, and novel lighting as well. Bob Hicks, The Oregonian’s theater and performance critic wrote some passing dismissive comments about my contributions.  “Callow, collegiate, and maybe sophomoric” were, I think, some of the more central adjectives.  Fair enough.