After Hours

After Hours is a journal of Chicago writing and art started in 2000 by Albert DeGenova. Because I tend not to keep up on anything other than national news (not fashion, not best sellers, not pop music), I only recently learned about it and decided to submit, thinking I would like to be on record in a journal strictly of writers connected to Chicago. I submited a piece I wrote about a local artist named Ivan Albright. I first heard about Albright when I was a child because he had a studio in Warrenville, Illinois where I lived for the first nine years of my life — a very parochial ambiance there in that town and in my home, my mother considering the presence of an artist in our small town both noteworthy and a bit suspicious. He must have been as old as my grandparents at that point. Years later I saw his macabre work in the Art Institute of Chicago and was drawn to it. Still later, I decided I would like to write about artists and their muses.

And so I wrote “Ida Sits for Ivan.” Ida Rogers was the model for Albright’s memorable painting “Into this World Came a Soul Called Ida.” It is on permanent exhibit on the second floor near the old Columbus Drive entrance. Albright studied at the Art Institute from 1920 to 1923 and the institute owns several of his paintings.

After Hours is distributed in Chicago area bookstores or can be purchased through the website http://www.afterhourspress.com Being a bit shy and a homebody, I was hesitant to join the reading yesterday, April 2nd. But I ended up being glad I went to get my complimentary copy and to read. It was mostly an older crowd and many of the other readers had been connected with the journal for years. I touched base with poet Pam Miller who years ago was connected with the Feminist Writers Guild, as was I. Al DeGenova welcomed me to the After Hours family. I had never been welcomed into a journal “family” before. I enjoyed the readings, the special video by featured writer Kurt Heintz on the Chicago poetry slam during the AIDS epidemic and also enjoyed looking through the journal at the urban photos, especially those by Greg Kuepfer and Pat Hertel. The illustration below is of the Albright painting that I wrote about: “cells like bugs crawling beneath the surface of the flesh, the rhythm of skin creeping up and down, pulsating energy about to explode.”

Added two years later: the text.

IDA SITS FOR IVAN

Ida Rogers was the model for Ivan Albright’s memorable painting Into the World There Came a Soul Called Ida. She sat for him in his Warrenville, Illinois studio. The painting is on permanent exhibit at the Art Institute of Chicago, where Albright studied from 1920 to 1923.

Flesh

He told me that the flesh one touches might lead one to think about God , if one keeps in mind temporality; that is, the effects of time. Being touched can also cause one’s thoughts to aspire. I knew this from the times my husband touched my body with care and pleasure. But I wondered if Mr. Albright dwelt upon fleshy matters because he was touched so seldom.

He preferred ordinary girls like me, not professionals. I answered his classified advertisement. I needed money for my babies, and my husband agreed that I should try to model. I will not say I dreaded being looked at. Quite the opposite. And I, I could see right through him. I might even say he amused me. Taking off my clothes, exposing my flesh, I found my power. Though he painted my flesh “the color of a corpse drowned six weeks,” I did not protest, since he paid me regularly and on time (His father who painted more agreeably and profitably bestowed an ample allowance upon his sons, allowing him to offer me steady work and reliable compensation). Mr. Albright painted only a square inch every day. Because he was a twin, he strove for detailed distinctions. Carbon copies frightened him, so inch by inch he strove to paint the unique experience seen upon every inch of my body. It was as if he drew a map across my flesh – ruthless, he applied the opposite of makeup — not coverup, but exposure– cells like bugs crawling beneath the surface of the flesh, the rhythm of skin creeping up and down, pulsating energy about to explode. Even in its dissolution and slow diminishment, life is strong and powerful, as his painting proved.

No matter what, you are never the first. As the song goes, “There ain’t no beginning and there ain’t no end.” I soon learned that before me, another had sat for him, had been his muse: younger (only 14), lovelier, perhaps, but who could tell for he painted her as he painted me, –­­­ flesh hanging in folds; unkempt hair; poor slumping posture. Then he left her there in the studio alone while he searched for a door for his painting That Which I Should Have Done I Did Not Do — a drab door, something from a haunted house, which he would use as inspiration to paint a coffin (his painting always invigorated the inanimate, made it more ominous) and all he wanted from the girl then was her hand to add human interest. She posed every Sunday for two years for two hours. And after two years and 208 hours, he still was not finished, and suddenly she wanted her childhood back. She also wanted her hand. She lost patience and stopped coming over the protestations of her stepmother who sold the child’s flesh for her own gain. He made a plaster cast of the girl’s living hand and sent her on her way. The plaster cast of that image of a dismembered hand served him well as he finished his dismal work. His was an alarming hostility and a minute examination of surfaces.

And before the 14-year-old muse, I learned of the gruesome others who had captivated him. He had painted the flesh of the wounded, the walking dead from the Great War. He would peer at a wound and sketch what he saw in his medical sketchbook. It was during those year, I speculate, the idea of a dismembered hand took hold as did the vulnerability of human flesh: mutilated bodies ravaged by war. Capitalists soon commodified the masks that hid the missing faces of soldiers returning from battle, commodified those masks into make-up and a beauty culture for young women – this he could not countenance: bodies, he believed, could not be made over and transformed. He questioned stories of recovery, the possibility of self-improvement. And his sketchbook engendered the vulgarity and pathos of my own vulnerability as he painted it years later in Into the World There Came a Soul Called Ida.

Spirit

I know how to kneel and fold my hands properly in prayer: fingers lacing fingers or fingers pressed together upright. He told me my human body was an inadequate vessel for the vigorous spirit which dwelt within, and so he painted my decaying body instead of my voluptuous one, and so he brushed a subtle glow or aura, an after-image of hues and shapes, a play of pattern surrounding the painted image of my body, and he led me to understand that glow or aura, that after-image (the result of mixing paint) was my soul, my permanent identity. I, however, could not always take him too seriously. I understood all his words with a grain of salt.

Debris surrounded us in his studio, decay, and a stink of rotten fruit and fauna: ripened plums, a pinned butterfly, a dried caterpillar, a vase with dying flowers, musty old hats and gloves. From such jumble, I guess, rose for him a holy order. “Creativity,” he said, “is a dialogue between the transitory and the eternal, between the material manifestations and the original ideal.”

“You,” he told me, “are a Soul called Ida.”

“You,” he told me, “disguise a hidden world.”

And then he said, “I need to see. I need to see beyond human vision. An X-ray may disclose deity and the ghosts of the dearly departed. A microscope may reveal the holy spirit; a telescope, the wonder of the Milky Way. I need to see. I need to see clearly. I need a steady stream of light overhead.” Then he proceeded to blast a hole in the roof of the studio and to paint its walls black. All the while, I sat and waited. At a certain point I stopped listening to his rants and raves. I sometimes thought about quitting my job as his model, but I needed the money.

The Passage of Time

One cannot stave off time with a powder puff, but one can try. I assured myself that I was no prostitute primping as some had presumed to describe me. A vase of dying flowers, like the one he painted on the dressing table, does not posit eternity. I have heard a preacher say that we know by remembering what our souls have forgotten. Remembering defies the passage of time. Remembering posits eternity.

“O Muse, sing to me!” cries the artist. Memory (Mnemosyne), the artist knows, is the mother of nine Greek muses, or put another way, the passage of time engenders what is epical and what is lyrical, what is tragical and what is comical, what is historical . . . rhetorical . . . erotic – Oh! What the dance and what the geometry of stars!

He told me once that his favorite models did not move at all – they barely breathed and he told me that sometimes he would substitute a manikin for his less reliable models and dress it in their clothes and shine a powerful white light on its head, for he declared, “I like cruel light, with cruel light, I can examine the folds of a dress with cruel insistence.” His insistence was even crueler with flesh than with fabric (the spirited rivulets of a hanging skirt) and for flesh, a manikin simply would not do.

And so though I took deep breaths, not shallow ones, I became his muse until time caught up with me. Whereas once I could dismiss his poetic adoration with cruel laughter; whereas once I posed pertly and saucily; whereas once I I cracked my knuckles as well as circus peanuts and threw the shells on the floor to annoy him, I came to learn that as my own flesh aged, it no longer inspired his tolerance nor paradoxically the pocked and sagging flesh he painted.

He went on to other models. When he reached the age of fifty, he married a rich matron who paid the bills and whose money allowed him (as his father’s money had before) to keep all his work, not to have to sell any of it. He sculpted his wife’s head and face in a way that flattered her whose name was Josephine, and the wife, this Josephine, displayed this sculpted head on a table in the hall. She would not allow my likeness in those early paintings to hang anywhere in her home. I read this in a magazine. Evidently, he did not protest. But why should I care? I was paid for my work.

I shut the covers of the magazine and left it in the waiting room when I was called.