Back to Work...

Many of you know that last May, I was supposed to go on a month-long vacation in the southwest—but, on the first night on the road, in a moment of stupidity, I tried to outrun a Tennessee rainstorm. The fall I took in a parking lot led to a long night in two hospitals, a lot of stitches, and (I was to learn later) a fracture of my cervical spine. No big deal, so far. I’m healing well and the worst of the scars are insignificant. I’m treating my neck brace as a dunce cap to remind me that I’m no longer a stupid teenager.

Still stupid, but at least not a teenager.

However, a couple of weeks after my confrontation with mortality, we experienced a more dramatic one. My wife suffered a major stroke. Fortunately, I knew what to do and rushed her to the best hospital in our area. With strokes, one’s best chance of avoiding permanent damage is by initiating treatment within three hours. I got her to the hospital in fifteen to twenty minutes. So, while her first day in the ICU was truly frightening, by the next morning she was much better. Still, they kept her in the hospital for six days. Thanks to their intensive care, she appears to have completely recovered.

I now realize that had I not taken that fall in Tennessee, she might have had her stroke somewhere hundreds of miles from the kind of medical treatments she needed. It was, literally, a lucky break.

So you’ve heard my flimsy excuse for not posting something sooner. Rest assured, I have another excuse up my sleeve.

Instead of writing, I spent last week working on a friend’s book. I copy-edited, designed, and published (through Amazon) Geoffrey Paul Gordon’s delightful baseball book, Pure Gold. The book, in paper and Kindle editions, is scheduled for release on July 17th—not coincidently the day of the All-Star Game—but can be preordered.

So, I no longer have any excuses.

Back to work.

Today’s entry, below, is the latest addition to a work-in-progress (Meetings with Remarkable Men ...and a Few Others) that has been languishing in the luxurious lap of unproductivity.

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Alex Hay

In the mid-sixties I was consumed by the current art scene. I went to NYC as often as possible, visiting galleries and attending ad hoc performances, and sometimes spending the night in the loft of Alex and Debbie Hay (our mutual friend, Bob Schuler, was the reason I was invited).

Their loft, at the intersection of Crosby and Howard Streets, was a classic cast-iron-fronted industrial building that—at the time—bore a small sign near the sidewalk: “AIR.” It stood for “artist in residence,” and was intended to alert the fire department that it was not just an abandoned factory. Their upstairs neighbors included dancers Trisha (née Brown) and Joe Schlicter and, another floor up, sculptor Carl Andre occupied the site of a former foundry. I still have a small pewter ice cream mold, in the form of a peach, from that loft.

I’ve never been fond of eggs but, when Alex offered to make breakfast, one morning, it would have been rude to refuse. He whipped a couple of eggs to frothiness, then scrambled them in brown butter in which he’d toasted some sesame seeds. He slid them over to me, along with some French-press coffee, on the narrow counter that separated his tiny kitchen area from the rest of the loft.

They were delicious.

As I ate them, I noticed a small photo propped-up on the counter to my right. “That’s an original Man Ray!” I exclaimed, “How did you get it?”

He told me that, when he first came to NYC, he had worked in a gallery. The gallery had a retrospective of Ray’s work, and—as no one was paying attention to the small photo—he took it.

The Hays were dancers—at least “dancers” in the sense that the performance artists who participated in Happenings of the day were dancers.

Alex only danced part-time; he was a painter. When I first met him, in 1966, he was at work on Guest Check, a seven-foot tall perfect reproduction of something that anyone who has ever been in a diner or luncheonette would immediately recognize. His work habits were precise to the point of obsession.

First, he made the stretchers: He used redwood and cut deep slots in the mitered corners, so that he could slip in thick triangles of aluminum to prevent twisting. Everything was epoxied together. He then stretched brown linen canvas. After that, he applied gesso. All painters do that, but Alex did it differently. For Guest Check, he left a thin margin of exposed canvas all around the image. That meant he had to know exactly the size and shape that his image would occupy, including the tiny tear-off perforations at the top.

When it was time to paint, he cut the first stencil, duplicating exactly the imperfect printing of the pale green background. He then sprayed a thin layer of lacquer, carefully masking any exposed linen, and building a delicately shaded line across the bottom. He removed the stencil and applied another stencil, precisely cutting all the letters and lines that would be sprayed with indigo-colored lacquer. That stencil even included microscopic dots where the waitress’s pad had transferred bits of carbon paper. When that was dry, he stripped the stencil away and cut a final stencil—for the guest check number, to be sprayed in red. Normal people might think that Alex was carrying attention-to-detail to an unreasonable extreme.

They would be wrong.

I watched Alex approach the apparently finished painting with a small piece of emery cloth, 600 grit. He lightly sanded a few dark blue lines and letters, revealing—almost imperceptibly—the gesso underneath, to simulate the slight under-inking caused by cheap printing.

The man was meticulous. I suspect that my own attention to detail (when I can manage it) comes from watching him at work.

He was a cigar smoker, and since his work was often about things made of paper—things that most people don’t even notice—he decided to make a set of three paintings of the little oval seal from Cuban cigars. To do that, he had to make three identical oval stretchers, about six feet tall. He did it by building a jig of the proper dimensions and scale, cutting redwood into thin strips, steaming them, then bending them to fit and clamping them in place. When cool, he epoxied another layer of redwood and clamped in place. He kept repeating the process until he had enough layers to make a satisfyingly-strong oval stretcher.

Then he did it two more times.

Then, gesso.

Then, the first stencil (for the pale green background).

Then the main stencil of workers on a tobacco plantation in the tropics—to be sprayed in darker green lacquer.

Then he did it all, two more times (including recutting the stencils that could not be reused).

Another time, he did a painting of a blank sheet of paper, torn from a yellow legal pad. I remember it as being large, almost eight feet tall. It was beautiful, but only a practice run for a more demanding piece.

He repeated the entire process of the yellow legal sheet—but not on canvas. He painted on two sides of a huge sheet of heavy rag paper. He then folded it into a classic paper plane, about six feet tall. He then applied a thin layer of epoxy, fine fiberglass matting, and another layer of epoxy. It had to strong enough to stand up on its own. The reinforcements were transparent, so the original image of the legal paper was visible—but the surface was unnaturally shiny. Alex sandblasted the entire paper plane, recreating its perfect matte finish.

Sometime later, I borrowed a Dodge Dart station wagon and headed to the city. I picked up Alex and the paper plane on Crosby, then drove them up to Madison and seventy-fifth. The plane was included in that year’s Whitney Biennale.

I’ve heard that Alex lives somewhere out west now (he’d be in his nineties), and know he was still making art as recently as 2020 (he had a retrospective, in 2021, at Peter Freeman’s gallery). The iron-fronted loft at Crosby and Howard no longer exists. Artists made SOHO so desirable that serious real estate investors moved in and tore much of it down. There’s now a slick glass-fronted building where Alex, Debbie, et al, once lived. Instead of an “AIR” sign, I would expect to see warnings about the number of security systems employed to protect the current wealthy residents.

While I still make those seeded eggs, Alex’s back with a giant paper plane over his shoulder, crossing the drawbridge-like entrance to Marcel Breuer’s Whitney museum, was the last I saw of him.

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