Living with paintings

What I learned about art from my friend Jack Whitten

Jack Whitten

Perhaps it’s coming a little late in life, but I have begun to slowly realize what a very lucky guy I am.  I was leafing through the Times yesterday when I came across an article about an  exhibition of the work of the artist Jack Whitten at the Hauser & Wirth gallery.  I rented Jack’s loft in the summer of 1969, right after I graduated from West Point.  I had two months leave before I was to report to my first duty station at Ft. Benning, Georgia, and I wanted to spend it in the city, so I called Jack and asked if I could sublet his loft for June and July.

I had met him the year before when I crashed there for awhile with Don McNeil, a friend who was a reporter for the Village Voice.  Don was subletting the loft while Jack and his wife Mary spent the summer in Woodstock.  I stayed with Don for a couple of weeks, and then suddenly, tragically, he drowned in a lake on a weekend when he was visiting friends in upstate New York. 

Jack came back to the city to see about dealing with Don’s effects, which were still in the loft.  It was an odd way to meet someone, after a friend had died.  I remember sitting on the floor of the loft with Jack, going through Don’s reporter’s notebooks and the clips from his Voice articles. Paging through Don’s papers was more than looking back at a life.  It was looking at a world that neither Jack nor I knew. I answered calls from publishers a couple of times when Don wasn’t there.  They were after him to write a book about the “counterculture,” a term that if Don didn’t coin in the Voice, he had become firmly attached to because of the articles he had written about the Diggers and hippie communes and the scene on the Lower East Side.  Part of the magic of what he wrote was how much of that world was in him, and Jack and I just sat there marveling at how richly he captured it.

Jack was older than we were, seemingly much older, but he was probably about 30, having moved to New York from Alabama in 1960.  He was an artist, living and working in a loft on Broome Street.  The area that was only then becoming known as SoHo was still an industrial  zone, bustling with light manufacturing and businesses that collected and sold used clothes and other cloth to be recycled into paper and rags.  The streets were thick with trucks and vans and guys wheeling push-carts and hand-trucks loaded with canvas bags of brass valves and fashion mannequins and boxes of girls’ doll clothing and the other stuff that was being manufactured there.  At night, however, the place was deserted – desolate cobblestone streets lined with dark, empty loading docks and the steel doors of closed-up loft buildings.  There were no streetlights, no open businesses like diners or delis.  Everything was shut down and dark but the Broome Street Bar way over on the corner of West Broadway.  I think there may have been a single art gallery on West Broadway, but at night, it was closed, too.

Jack’s loft was on the second floor of a building just off the corner of Crosby, still in use for light manufacturing. There were factories upstairs: One of them assembled children’s dolls and the other had metal presses and stamping machines that made little trucks and cars for kids. The building was closed at night with the furnace turned off, so Jack had a coal-burning pot-belly stove vented out the back of the building he used for heat in the winter. 

It was not a legal loft.  That is, it was illegal to live in or use for anything other than the light manufacturing it was zoned for.  When I met Jack at the loft the first week of June in ’69, he gave me the tour that was necessary if you were going to live in an illegal loft.  The place had 16-foot ceilings, and there was a 12-foot high wall built about 25 feet into the loft from the street that blocked light from the living portion of the loft behind the wall at night.  The front section was where Jack worked.  He was a painter, and he occasionally made sculptures from large pieces of old wood he carved and polished and adorned with various found objects like nails and screws and bits of ceramic.  There were overhead lights in the front that could be turned on, but only during the day.  Mostly he worked with the natural light that flooded the space from the south-facing windows.  You were never to turn on the front lights at night because building inspectors were known to patrol the neighborhood looking for lofts being lived in by artists and other people looking for cheap rents and lots of space.

In the back of the loft, Jack had built a rudimentary kitchen along one wall – a deep, industrial-size sink and a counter and an old restaurant stove with four burners and a flattop griddle he picked up for 25 bucks over on Third Avenue.  The stove and hot water heater had been hooked up to a gas line a friend had illegally plumbed into the loft, and the electricity was “borrowed” from Con-Ed, because you couldn’t have a residential account for either gas or electric in a manufacturing zone.  You felt you had to smuggle yourself in and out of the place after dark when the building inspectors might be around.  I never saw one, but Jack had made the point clear:  if they were caught living there, he would lose the place and be fined, so I was very, very careful.

King’s wish (Martin Luther’s Dream) 1968

Finished and unfinished paintings hung on the side walls of the front space.  He had an easel and there were cans and tubes of paint on work tables and his brushes hung from nails driven through the pressed-tin walls.  His art was the coolest part of it.  Jack was at that time an abstract expressionist.  My favorite was a work in progress, a canvas he had primed with gesso and then painted with broad, thick strokes, big arm-movements, his brushes loaded with color. Most of the strokes were in shades of orange and yellow, and right in the middle was a single, smaller stroke of electric blue that shone from the painting like a light. 

I remember passing that painting every day as I walked in and out of the loft and wondering how did he do it?  How did he choose those colors?  What made him put that striking slab of blue in that dramatic field of orange and yellow? I don’t think it occurred to me that I was living with Jack’s art.  I slept a few feet from where he made his paintings and carved his sculptures.  They were part of the space like the dining table and chairs were.  The paints and brushes were on display like the plates and cups and saucers stacked on a shelf in the kitchen. It really was a living-working space.  Some of the things were there to be used in daily life, and some of them were used for art.

When I showed up at the Broome Street loft in June, Jack and Mary had driven up to Woodstock with their personal items like clothes and kitchen stuff and had returned to the city, but it was going to take them another day or so to pack up his art gear, so he took me over to another place he had on Lispenard Street a few blocks away just off Canal where I could stay for a couple of nights while they finished with the Broome Street loft.  It was a smaller space on the second floor of a building he used just for work, a single room with a long row of windows facing the street, so it had wonderful light for painting. There was a single bed at one end of the room and a small bathroom and that was it.

A friend of Jack’s was visiting that day, so he walked over with us.  His name was Kenny Dorham, and he was a jazz trumpeter, and not just any trumpeter.  Miles Davis had played second trumpet behind him in Billy Eckstein’s band in the late 40’s, and Kenny had toured in Charlie Parker’s quintet and had played with Thelonious Monk and Sonny Rollins.  In the early 60’s, he had fronted his own band and had recorded albums including the famous “Una Mas” with a very young Tony Williams on drums.  He was, in short, a famous guy who like many jazz musicians at that time had stopped recording because the market for their music had dried up.  He was working as a drug counselor for the city at a half-way house for teenagers in Queens.  He had had years of experience with drugs as a junkie in the 50’s, and he was good with the kids because, as he explained with a chuckle, “you can’t bullshit a bullshitter.” 

Jack took us upstairs and showed me the space and gave me the keys and left to finish packing up his stuff.  Kenny didn’t have anything else to do, so he stayed on, and we walked around the space looking at the paintings Jack had been working on.  It was stifling that day, and we had all the windows open, but it was still too hot, so we turned on a big box fan and stuck it in the middle of the room and sat on the floor in front of it.  Kenny pulled a pint of gin out of his back pocket and took a pull and passed it to me and we sat there drinking. 

“I’m going to tell you a secret, boy,” he said.  Kenny was in his 40’s at that time, but to me he looked like a wizened old prophet of hip:  he had a long, rather sad face, and his goatee was graying, and he had a way of looking at you I had never experienced before. 

“You know what warm gin is good for?” he asked, his eyes flashing with humor and wit.  “No,” I answered, not having a clue where this was going.

“There will come a day in your life when you’re going to need you some warm gin, take my word for it,” he said, passing the bottle.  I took another swig.  “Because you get as old as me, warm gin going to help make you hard.  You may not think so right now, but you going to thank me one day, that’s the truth right there.” 

We sat there on the floor in front of the fan and he told me a hilarious story about one night when he was so stoned, he fell asleep in the middle of playing a note on his trumpet, and a few other stories, too.  I remember sitting there with tears running down my cheeks, he was so funny.  We finished the pint of gin, and he left.  He stopped by the Broome Street loft a couple of times that summer, and we would listen to music on Jack’s quite impressive stereo.  I don’t think he ever played in public again.  Jack called me and gave me the news when Kenny died a few years later.  He said it was kidney disease, probably from the drugs.  He was 48.

Jack Whitten taught me something I’ve never forgotten.  It happened the day he and his wife were leaving for Woodstock when they stopped by the Lispenard place to give me the keys to the loft.  They walked in just as I was finishing a cup of coffee and a bagel I had picked up from a diner on Canal. 

“Did you see the street this morning?” Jack asked.  “It’s incredible.”  He saw that I didn’t have any idea what he was talking about, so he motioned to the window and said, “have a look.”

I leaned out the window and looked up the entire length of Lispenard, a long city block I had just walked down that morning.  I didn’t see a thing.  Jack came up behind me as I turned around.  “Look again and tell me what you see,” he said, joining me at the window. I looked, but nothing caught my eye.  “Look at the garbage cans,” he said, pointing.  They were right there in front of my eyes, and I hadn’t seen that someone had painted every garbage can on the block with neon paint, blue and orange and purple and yellow.  There were maybe 20 cans standing out from the gray streets and sidewalks so brightly you couldn’t miss them.  Except I had.

That was how I learned Jack Whitten’s magic, how he picked those colors in the painting I liked so much.  He saw them.  He saw them in his mind, and then he put them on the canvas, and I think he saw his arm moving in a big, wide arc leaving color behind the brush.  He saw everything before he did it, and he saw it inside himself, and he saw it in color. 

Jack Whitten died in 2018, and the New York Times gave him the kind of obituary he deserved, a long one with photos of some of his paintings and a photo of him in a studio he had later in his life in Tribeca.  But I remember him on Broome Street, before there even was a Tribeca, when he was among the pioneers homesteading in illegal lofts, on the lookout for building inspectors and neon garbage cans, making art in the industrial wasteland of SoHo.

Incredibly my luck continues, as I live once again with art, finished and underway, by Tracy Harris. We live together in her studio, surrounded by her paintings and oil paints and water colors and paint thinner and jars filled with brushes and tin plates used to mix colors and wax and India ink and pens and drawing pencils, all of it waiting for her to see colors in her mind’s eye and layer them on blank canvas with her hands and with her heart.

And so my luck continues.  Once again, I’m learning from a painter, and this time not only about art, but about love.