Michael Gac Levin’s Rainbow Chamber
I started my time in San Antonio a few days ahead of my family’s arrival. I felt that I needed some time to establish a workday rhythm apart from the rhythms of family life, so that I could more easily weave the last into the first. Our stay was necessarily very short. Just enough time to fit within our kids’ mid-winter school break and not cost Melina and I too much time out of our own classrooms. It was always going to be a sprint, so it felt essential to make every moment count, both in terms of work and time together.
I had decided ahead of time to work on ten small panel paintings for Parts and Labor. Once I arrived and got settled, it quickly became clear to me that on that schedule, I’d need to finish a painting a day to get through all ten. I wasn’t sure I could do it, but I’ve been interested in cultivating the freshness of thought and ease of approach that comes with speed in painting, so it seemed like a good use of a residency. I have a careful streak that’s no friend of my studio work, so this would be a vacation from that.
What I found in the first dead silent days (the sudden absence of small children: total emptiness) is that fast work has a kind of flypaper effect. Or maybe, because this is Texas, a car windshield effect. The need for a new piece every day let me explore little moments of experience without the weight of having to chug through them for days or months. I’d be at work, moving along quickly, and the surface would begin to fill with a menagerie of everything I’d recently passed through, materially and psychically, caught in motion and pressed into two-dimensions. My paintings became about accumulation.
I had also decided in advance to coat my painting surfaces with sand, both to reference sleep and dreaming, and to challenge my brushwork, to prevent any slow work in detail. Once I arrived in San Antonio, I realized there wasn’t really any sand around. What I had brought with me from the East Coast wasn’t going to be enough. But there was limestone, a great big heap of it piled into a pyramid right next door to the house. So I went about grinding that into my panels instead. The surfaces were places of accumulation before the paintings were.
My second night in the house, alone, I woke up around 4am to realize that I could suddenly see through a window I couldn’t see through before. I was so confused by this, not being quite awake at the time. It could have been a hole in the house. It could have been something I just hadn’t noticed before, but that didn’t seem right. A friend of mine had a tree crush part of her house one night. But here, it was that a curtain had fallen. Not a big deal, but I was alone, in a new place, in the night. Not having another person to wake up and talk to about it, I lingered in the uncanny for a long time.
I woke up a few hours later and got out of bed. This was the day before my family was set to arrive. I noticed that the beautiful bouquet of flowers that had been left in a nice carafe in the kitchen was low on water and starting to shed tiny petals. I lifted the carafe to bring it over to the sink. It slipped out of my hand and shattered on the countertop. Bits of broken glass were all over the floor, so I got to work hunting for and collecting every tiny shard, high and low. When I finally finished, I went to make coffee. I grabbed the container of beans and spilled them all over a different countertop, mostly in a corner by the wall, making a little accidental triangle of Felix Gonzales-Torres.
I looked at the beans and saw how much they looked like a hundred tiny little mouths shut up tight. Then I happened to look out the window and saw that a tiny castle had been watching me from the yard next door. It was a birdhouse by a local artist who had made hundreds after retiring from the post office. Because I had a fresh panel waiting for me in the studio for that day’s painting, I went right into painting some of the chaos of the prior hours. No forethought, no commitment except to the direct representation of recent experience. This was where I wanted to be! Painting that feels just like drawing in a sketchbook. The windshield. Accumulation.
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We co-sleep with our kids, so a bed with only me in it feels like too-big clothes. The roominess is nice, but try to walk a few blocks. I dream of nights without being roused by small voices or kicking feet, but the sad truth is that I’m now programmed to wake up several times a night regardless. There was also a My Cousin Vinny aspect. I’m used to Brooklyn sounds when I sleep. Texas quiet occasionally punctured by distant train whistles is not my night music. When my family did arrive, I was back to sleeping poorly for typical reasons. But in those first few days night was just chaos.
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The next day Melina and my kids came. The subsequent week with them was intense and wonderful, and every day of it involved a similarly direct representation of recent experience. Not as many of them were as uncanny, but many of them were similarly powerful. I kept the same pace in my work, only now with many small interruptions, many of which were to accumulate in further paintings.
