A hundred and fifty years ago Toulouse Lautrec and Degas painted now famous scenes of Parisian nightclubs and bordellos. The feminist Germaine Greer reminded us that Titian, Picasso and many, many other respected artists painted prostitutes as models, and concluded that “Prostitution and painting go hand in hand.” In Bellas Artes in Mexico City, Clemente Orozco painted some of the strongest realities of the world´s oldest profession.

The unromantic reality in Mexico is that prostitution is legal in 13 states. The word “Boystown” along the U.S.—Mexican border refers not to the old Spencer Tracy film about a boys´ orphanage, but to the six or seven Mexican border towns with areas set apart for prostitution, usually places away from the town itself. In México, they´re called “zonas de tolerancia” or “Zona Roja”.

Having grown up in Texas and later having been stationed in the Army in Austin, I knew about the Mexican Boystowns. Years later, after having left Texas, in a used book store I was surprised to find a book with that title. It was full of photos all taken by the ubiquitous cameramen in the bars and clubs there. They quickly develop the pictures and sell them to the cowboys and college kids there as souvenirs. I recently made a series of drawing from the photos and now have made a dozen or so paintings from them, and plan to exhibit them in SMA in July and August.

Of course, these places are far from the glamourous images of the dance halls in Montmartre Lautrec left us (though Boystown clubs always had live music and, sometimes, showgirls), but they are still a gritty human record of a certain time and place.

The painter Ed Osman was one of the original members of our gallery when we opened in 2001 in the patio courtyard of the old Meson de San Jose on Calle Mesones. Ed would sit with his coffee and newspaper at a table in the patio when it was his day to work the gallery. “Ed! We´ve got a desk inside; you´re supposed to be in there! What if somebody wants to buy something?” “I can tell who´ll buy something,” he would say. He couldn´t be persuaded. And he was usually right. If the person lingered inside longer than five minutes, he or she was a real prospect, and Ed got up, and he often sold something.

His plan makes sense. Most gallery-goers absorb all the culture they want that day by making a quick pass around and then out. A small fraction, however will pause to actually look at a painting, look more closely, and then wonder about the piece. Is it skillfully painted? If not, was that on purpose? Who´s the artist? And, of course, the price. (Granted, there are those---women, usually, may I say it—who turn to their spouse: “What do you think, George? I think this matches the drapes.”) By close looking, I mean wondering why the painter painted a face green? Does the painting suggest a story? What is it that makes the picture interesting or different? This is close looking.

I recently read a review of an early painting by Jasper Johns—perhaps the first of the many that he did of the subject. At the bottom of the painting, the reviewer found faintly lettered words which had been painted over and were not clearly visible to the casual viewer (I didn´t notice them at all). As I recall, the words painted over were “hate” and “no”, or others equally negative. The reviewer pointed out that the painting was done soon after Johns had been dumped and betrayed by his friend and lover Robert Rauschenberg. Johns was angry and anguished, as might be expected, but over the words, he painted, of all things, an American flag.

I´m not a fan of Jasper John´s work. Like some other painters, I have wondered what the fuss was about. But by closely reading the picture and by fleshing out the events of the painter´s life at the time, the painting becomes at least more sympathetic. But why an American flag? Two (or maybe more) good reasons come to mind. First, the obvious: any therapist will advise an aggrieved or suffering person to not dwell on the pain. Get your mind on other things, do something different. And, painting a rough image of the flag seems innocuous, but was also a bit audacious, after all, in the contemporary big city art scene of the day. Secondly, he correctly sensed that the poohbahs in charge of the New York art scene were ready for change. The macho, let-it-all-hang-out Abstract Expressionists had run their course; it was time for something new. Why not something more quiet, more banal (with a wink), more reserved? And third, I suspect that Johns was not the kind of painter who could invent new and different means to express his feelings, as did, say, artists such as Pollock, Francis Bacon, or of course, Picasso. Johns painted to impress a coterie of New York poets and critics, and he won his bet. The time was right.

So, thanks to the critic/reviewer who wrote the article. A good job. He read the picture closely and filled in the necessary background. And, like it or not, the American flag rouses childhood memories of security and pride of country in most of us Americans. Better than another top-of-the-voice expression of personal problems, eh?

To sum up: serious art deserves a close look. Figure out why or how the artist made this interesting/beautiful/strange/unusual or happy thing, and make up your own mind.

In part two of this newsletter, I´ll look more closely at the collage attached.

It´s odd that some artists are remembered most for the faces they draw or paint. Think of Daumier´s lawyers and ordinary people in a train car, or the strange inventions of Picasso. Other figure painters - equally accomplished – left us no memorable faces. Who can remember a face from Michelangelo except for maybe his statue of David?

I love faces. After our recent change of houses, as I thumbed through boxes of old drawings, I started to make a collage of some of the faces I found. When that didn´t work well, I tried laying out the sheets and scraps on a bigger surface and after a week or more the thing evolved organically into a 3 x 5 foot canvas with faces pasted all over it.

I had painted the canvas as a mountain landscape in its previous life, but it never quite satisfied. Now it´s the sub-stratum for about 50 drawings. A few are life-size or larger, some are little more than an inch square. Greens and oranges from the old landscape mark pathways through the maze of faces.

The title of the piece is written on the first of six pages pasted across the top: “How to Draw A Face”. Start with a circle, make an egg-shape of it, put the eyes on the mid-line of the egg, etc., etc. -, and you wind up with a face: the standard first step in learning figure drawing. But few of the fifty faces follow the rules. Some are from Goya, Picasso, Daumier, Jose Luis Cuevas, and other non-conformists. Two San Miguel artists are represented. Some drawings originated with me. Some are portraits of other artists that I admire. There’s a face my daughter did when she was five; there´s a de Kooning and a Schiele. All are hand drawn, exaggerations and all.

It was a fun piece to do.