What am I doing sitting on this pile of trash in an empty city lot?
It was a Thursday morning around 9 AM, sometime in the spring-summer of the mid 1970s, a time when I should have been attending Medical Grand Rounds at the hospital. This was a weekly presentation by the medical residents of interesting case reports to the rest of the house staff and attending physicians. It was, and perhaps still is, a weekly ritual, one that I had been attending faithfully for the past 6 years.
So what was I doing sitting on a stack of old mattresses in the middle of an empty city lot? I was drawing the back of a row of dilapidated houses, entranced by the texture and shapes of the scene before me, not knowing I was in the process of discovering the artist that had been tucked away somewhere deep within, a process that would take about 4-5 years. To say it was pure pleasure would be less than true; guilt and insecurity were sitting right beside me that morning. My lines of thought went something like this; “what am I doing sitting out here when I should be at Grand Rounds? This is ridiculous, thinking that I am an artist, or could become one. All I can do is draw small sketches with this Parker 45 fountain pen, shit, I can’t even paint!” And on and on, you get the point.
But, guilt and insecurity were not enough to pull me away, and I found myself spending more Thursday mornings in the city streets with my sketchbook. I carried a small canvas shoulder bag holding my sketchbook, papers, pencils, and always, my faithful Parker 45 fountain pen. Within a few years of that experience I began cutting back on my office hours to create more time for my art.
This is the scene that held so much attraction for me:
and another...
And here is a later watercolor of the complete scene...one of several I painted...could not resist the colors and the textures...especially the texture.
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