NOTE: If you haven’t been following this from the beginning, and if you want to know the full sequence of events, start with the introduction. Click on Archives on the right.
A large energetic golden retriever is digging up daffodil bulbs in front of the Cavendish Pie Shop on Maxwell Avenue. I am watching this mess spill onto the sidewalk when Steve Strether strolls over with his small white dog, Lambert. He wears a beret, and speaks from behind gold wire rim glasses and a graying black beard. We chat for a moment. He offers me a cigar from a box of ‘Dutch Masters’ he is carrying under his arm. I decline the smoke. “These are something else, I just happen to like the box.”
“I can’t smoke any of them at all I’m afraid.”
He is on his way to visit Artie Blemisch, the sculptor who rents space above and to the rear of the Cavendish pie shop 3141 Maxwell Avenue. I first met Steve at one of Lou’s barbecues and he invites me to follow along as he wants to share his interest in Artie’s work.
In fact we both follow Lambert who hurries around to the yard behind the shop where we enter an old wooden building through old-fashioned double doors with huge hinges. The golden retriever rushes in behind us, squeezing through the closing doors with a number of bulbs dangling from its mouth on the ends of their long leaves.
It is dark and damp. I can see nothing at the moment in the warm brown gloom. The smell of oil is stronger than that of the rotting wood, and there is another aroma in the air. There does seem to be a small skylight faintly visible at the far end. I can now see the rafters are at least two stories up and we are facing part of the back wall of the Cavendish.
Steve has disappeared into the brown darkness, but my eyes get used to it, and with the dim cold light from the skylight I see his shape at the foot of a metal stairway and hear him yell up the stairs, ”Do you want any bulbs?”
A voice comes back but it is indecipherable. There is a little more light coming in here and there between boards slanting up the walls. I am close enough to read a sign that has been nailed into the wall as a repair. Gaps between the horizontal boards are visible underneath the chipped painted letters like lines on a writing pad. It says “Michael Faraday, Electricity Specialists”.
Steve tells me we are in an old tobacco barn, now used to park the shop’s van and store assorted boxes, crates and artworks. The Pie Shop’s back door opens into the barn. A large crate is blocking the exit. The stairs over the back door lead to her studio over the pie shop.
Strether and I go up the steel steps with our rhythmical human clunks while the two dogs make a more complicated sound of paw and claw clicking on metal. We jostle each other – the golden retriever, Lambert, Steve and I – all trying to find room for our feet on the small landing in front of Artie’s studio door. In the confusion I have stepped on the retriever’s paw. Some of the bulbs fall out of the retriever’s mouth. We hear something hit the roof of the van parked below, as I apologize and pat his head. Lambert barks in response to the noise and nearly falls off under the rail in growing excitement, only to be held back by his leash. Then the door opens and Artie says:
“I am not planning a party you know!”
The golden retriever starts panting and squeaking with excitement. Artie is wearing a very baggy sweatshirt stained in a network of interpenetrating tide lines. A P.U. logo is barely visible, a pintimento beneath the other marks. Her broad shoulders are accentuated by her tight black jeans, and her hair is pulled back, held in place by a striped railwayman’s cap.
“Artemesia” says Steve gently, “your dog has been digging again.”
“Oh Bounder!” exclaims Artemesia, then addresses the expectant dog in Italian, which I don’t understand. Is she offering a treat? There is no sign of a European accent in her speech until she breaks into Italian. She seems to be bilingual. Steve introduces me. Bounder goes in first. He calms down, and finds a place in the sun under a skylight. Steve’s white terrier keeps at his side going in. Steve sits down on the old leather couch against the wall to the left of the entrance facing the work table. I sit next to Steve and Lambert jumps up to settle in between us.
“How about it?” asks Steve getting out a cigar and offering one to Artie.
“Just don’t go into the other room with that burning weed, you’ll probably ignite the fumes.”
Artie decides to take a smoke. Steve lights up.
You might say Artemisia sculpts paint. In her latest work she uses plaster, cement, stone and various kinds of resins to make soft looking shapes. Forms that toothpaste might make if you squeezed a series of blobs onto the sink instead of your toothbrush. They have a cylindrical body, as if extruded from a huge tube of toothpaste, then they come whirling up to a point at one end. Each point tapers off from its cylinder in a certain way that gives the piece a distinct gesture.
There are three two footers lined up on the work table each about eight to ten inches thick and each in a different primary color, solid blue, red and yellow. They look as if they have beaks pointing at the sky. Artie says she she is going to call these three “Mondrian’s Main Squeeze # 1, #2 and #3.”
Steve points out a fourth on the floor. He observes how these sculptures are reminiscent of oil paint as it comes out of a tube, even to the extent of having slight striations along their lengths as paint will if it is squeezed from a tube with a little crust around the opening.
Steve points out an earlier work hanging on the wall to our left called “Van Rijn’s Track.” It is a wide rectangular relief with exaggerated impasto effects. Artie uses viscous resins in various colors and spreads them in ways that exaggerate the track of thick oil paint brushed on canvas in a single stroke. The resins hold their shape and dry hard, though they seem soft and flowing. It had been shown at Gentileschi’s on P Street, but unlike her other piece “The Guild of St. Luke” this one did not sell. Some of these tracks stick out from the surface in dramatic relief, casting odd shaped shadows in the raking light from the window. Many of the tracks are translucent browns, and some are transparent, others dark and opaque. There is a long furrowed red ochre sweep that comes down from the deep browns on the left and bellies below the frame at the bottom and then ends in a dramatic splatter on the far right of the work.
Artemisia picks up the daffodil bulbs Bounder had brought her, and looking at the sculpture on the floor asks, “See if you can move that thing Steve?” She throws the bulbs on her table.
Steve is compact and has built up his strength over many years of disciplined weight lifting after illness had weakened him years ago. He has told me how he first befriended Artie when they met in Florence. Lambert regularly took him behind the Cavendish on their morning walks, and he happened to walk by as Artie was unloading when she first moved in. Steve has always been interested in art and this gave him added reason to stop and offer help with some heavy pieces of furniture and equipment.
As I contemplate Artie’s new works, I remember Diddlie’s story about Steve’s visits to Artie’s relatives on his travels abroad. Artie sometimes called him her ambassador. He helped Artie’s young nephew out of a scrape with the authorities in England.
The face of a tortoiseshell cat appears above Artie ’s head.
“There’s the Cavendish cat” said Steve.
“Yes it has adopted me, as Bounder did last year.”
The animal is framed by a rectangular opening high on the wall. Perhaps it was for a heating duct at one time. Now it serves as the cat’s corridor between the pie shop’s upper office and the studio. I can only see her head. Her black fur blends into the darkness of the hole and her orangey brown tones stand out clearly. Artie looks up and calls “Sfumato” down but the cat settles in, blinking, but otherwise not moving further.
“Where do you want this one?” Steve asks Artie, standing over the piece on the floor. He puts his cigar down on a cinder block that sticks out of the wall a few inches. He must have done this before. It is partly blackened, and there is ash on the floor underneath, where Lambert has focused his attention.
“On the table with the others” said Artie, “If it will take it.”
“You built it “ said Steve, “You tell me.”
Artie looks underneath to see if it is strong enough. Lambert walks over to check on her activity and gets petted. Bounder then comes over and wedges himself under the bench to share in this affection, so now no one can see what it is like under there. Artie then anounces that the table will hold. Steve takes off his jacket. He breaths in sharply, bends his knees and his upper arms flex, thick as thighs. He lifts the three foot piece onto the table.
“Why is this so heavy” he asks, “the others are hollow.”
“Take another look at it.”
“It has a stone in it! How are you going to get it out?”
“I am not,” said Artimisia. “That one is going to stay translucent so that the stone can be seen, well sort of … I am not going to paint it.”
“No” agreed Steve. “Any reason for a stone in this one?”
“It’s an old piece of mine. It has me preoccupied lately. I chipped it out of granite years ago, before I knew any better.”
“It is a weighty matter alright!” laughed Steve.
“ I really wanted to bury it I suppose … well, not altogether out of sight … it really is galling … but I want to able to look back on it too … I mean it is such a part of my distant past … what could be more ‘past’ than stone?”
“I am considering a title” says Steve”.
She looks back with her mouth slightly open saying “Yeah”
“Dr. Tulp’s Stone;” because it is consistent with your interest in the Dutch School.
“Why are you naming it after Rembrandt’s Dr. Tulp?”
“Nicolaas Tulp Demonstrates the Anatomy of the Arm, 1617” said Steve. “I am thinking of an ironic connection. This old granite is covered with resin yet still discernible if you look closely through to the inside, as an anatomist might during an examination.”
Lambert gives two sharp barks, telling Steve he wants to go out. Sfumato has left her place in the wall. Steve lets Lambert out and we all hear the click and ting as Lambert’s claws hit the metal steps. Then there is a pause when he gets to the bottom, before he starts barking. We follow Artemisia to the doorway and crowd on to the landing to see.
Lambert’s ears and tail move towards and away from each other across his slightly arching back, in his effort both to bark and keep his balance. He is lit in chiaroscuro from the beam of light coming from the skylight. Packets of dog breath propagate in his lungs becoming barks sounding through the barn’s air, and through the planks in the walls, to the air outside. We listen to his barking in amusement while particles of dust show up in the same beam of light. Between his barks we can hear some one from the pie shop is moving the crate in from outside the back door. It is as if Lambert is directing the work or perhaps demanding it be done.
