It's 2019 and I’m in Dublin with my mother and my youngest sister M. but I’m also in Reece Mews, London, where Francis Bacon painted and in my father’s studios in every home he ever lived in: the apartments on 15th Street, West 73rd Street, and West 90th Street; the houses on King Street in Englewood, New Jersey, and Main Street, Greenport, Long Island; his lofts on 35th Street in Manhattan and Jay Street in Brooklyn; and finally his house in Athens, New York. He never set up a studio in the apartment I grew up in on Riverside Drive: looking back, it was an obvious sign that he wasn’t going to stay there.
The trip to Dublin was my mother’s idea. She wanted to visit her great-grandfather’s birthplace and do some genealogy research in Ireland. On our last day together we ended up in Dublin’s Hugh Lane Gallery, where Francis Bacon’s London studio had been painstakingly relocated and reconstructed years after his death in 1992.
“What were Dad’s studios like?” I asked my mother.
“Well, at 15th Street when we got married he had a floor-through apartment with one room for painting. There was an extension in the back that was very cold. He stored paintings there,” she says.
I can’t picture it.
She continues. “When we moved to 90th Street he used a bedroom as his studio. I wish we had never given up that apartment. Eight rooms!”
Bacon’s studio is an unbelievable mess. The original walls are covered with paint splashes. The floors are invisible beneath piles of yellowed newspapers, empty crates of champagne, assorted books, and debris. Bacon seemed to need all that stuff to create from, as if pulling from wreckage (to quote Adrienne Rich’s poem “Diving into the Wreck,” quite literally).
“This mess here around us is rather like my mind; it may be a good image of what goes on inside me, that’s what it’s like, my life is like that.”—Francis Bacon
Born in 1909, Bacon was seventeen years older than my father but not quite of a different generation. This quote, from the Hugh Lane Gallery installation, is itself disordered, stumbling from fragment to fragment.
My father’s studios were messy and cluttered but not nearly as epically overflowing with stuff as Bacon’s. Earle always used rooms in his homes, as did Bacon, and usually kept a simple sawhorse covered with plywood as his table, one easel, a palette covered in cracked paint, countless squashed paint tubes, and tin coffee cans filled with brushes. He tacked postcards of inspirational art works, almost all European old masters, on the walls around him. There were always stretched canvases stacked against the wall, and later large pieces of foam board when he turned to pouring acrylics in abstract patterns.
After leaving our Riverside Drive apartment, Earle moved into a series of ever-larger spaces, as if opening outward. A small studio over a store on Broadway at 80th Street. A tiny apartment on 73rd and Columbus, where my sisters and I slept on fold out chairs in the living room and watched old movies on the tiny black-and-white TV. A whole floor of an office building on 35th Street and 8th Avenue that he divided up into living and working spaces, with concrete floors, exposed pipes, and a stall bathroom with metal doors. Another whole floor in a manufacturing building in DUMBO, with a freight elevator to the front door and views of the Manhattan Bridge.
It’s not clear that living in those lofts was actually legal: I grew up familiar with the vocabulary of rent control and residential zoning. But my father’s spaces were always special. None of my friends’ parents lived in spaces like those and we spread out, roller skating in the huge empty area between living room and kitchen (that’s how I broke my wrist on that concrete floor), eating at a picnic table. And always my father’s paintings hovered over us from the walls, watching.
As we got older, my sisters and I sometimes worked for him as a way of supplementing our allowance. We’d take the subway downtown after school or spend a few hours of a school holiday there—sort of working and sort of just hanging out over instant coffee and chocolate chip cookies (the gooey ones from David’s Cookies at nearby Macy’s). With correction fluid at hand, I poked out letters to the Museum of Modern Art or the Metropolitan Museum of Art on his business stationery, quoting estimates for hundreds of aluminum or chrome or wood frames of such and such a size at this or that cost. Now some of those names I typed back then are reappearing in my research: assistant curators, directors of art galleries, private collectors. Even at the time it was a good gig. And I was aware that he really did it because he liked having company. And he loved his daughters.
When we visited on weekends Earle would show us his newest work and ask, “what do you think?” It was hard to respond because he wanted feedback that was both positive and substantive. Not just “That’s great, Dad!” or “How beautiful!” but something specific and smart, because we were all in the field: working in museums, taking photographs, writing about art.
What did I think? That too was messy — I got stuck between love and loyalty on one side and my sense of myself as a critic on the other. In general, I admired the early abstract works that preceded my existence and felt great affection for the portraits he painted as I grew up. I got more and more impatient with the late work (was that just because I became more impatient with him?) Instead of sketching in pencil and preparing canvases he’d pour metallic latex paint over a foam core board in different patterns and declare it done. He made cut outs of dollar signs and question marks that seemed cliched to me. If back then I was judgey and critical, now I am most impressed that he simply produced so much work. In one sketchbook, from 1997, he wrote an affirmation on the first page:
BE-
NOT PERFECT-
NO ONE IS.
ITS NOT THE
GREATEST IDEA—JUST
MAYBE A VERY GOOD ONE
+ MAYBE A BIT FUNNY
TRUST YOURSELF!
CONSOLIDATE!
My father never really philosophized, so that quote is especially telling— and it circles back to the messy studios I began with. Those studios say “keep trying,” which is the only way to make art, the only way to get good at anything.
In posting this excerpt from my memoir about my father’s art career the only part I revised was the paragraph beginning “what did I think?” (Where should the italics go? What did I think? What did I think?) That is still the sticky part for me— trying to see my father’s life and work clearly (a theme of the last week’s post, about my father’s friend Robert Andrew Parker) through the thicket of research, memory, and emotion. Here are two craft notes I can you offer from this piece:
When in doubt, it’s useful to include other voices: I am grateful to have my father’s own words to quote here, as well as the conversation with my mother.
Don’t forget the tried-and-true compare-and-contrast exercise! The interesting juxtaposition is a classic writing structure that can surprise and delight. My writing classes used to begin with a prompt to put two unexpected pieces of evidence next to each other and describe what happens. I use that strategy here for my father and Bacon, indirectly, and it’s a natural for my post about the Julia Margaret Cameron and Francesca Woodman show in London.
I haven’t included a writing exercise for a while but I’ll include one below. As always, likes and shares and comments much appreciated! And a hearty welcome to new subscribers. You can find my archive of other excerpts here.
Writing exercise: Describe one room or space in a location that matters to your memoir. Describe its features and atmosphere with all your senses, then shift to interpretation: what does that space mean for your project? How is it important? If it isn’t important, it may point you to a location that is. Let it redirect you.
Resources:
Here’s an article about Joshua Charow’s forthcoming book on NYC artists’ lofts that features the creatively overflowing studio space of my friend Jennifer Charles. The cover photo of her loft from above is amazing!
I love the many painting studios. It says a lot about his commitment to his art, his need to keep making it. The Dumbo is of course the best. It reminds me of the Rudy Burckhardt photo (1954) from Brooklyn, looking out the window to Mahattan across the East River, which evokes for me who your father seemed to have been.
Over the years, I've had occasional invitations to visit artists' studios, but I never got round to it. This makes me regret that.