The Billboard Artist
What I want to say is I’m sorry you died. I saw you this afternoon, that same smiling face from high school, on the cover of a newspaper section. They’d done a big spread on a house you and your husband built in the country, a house that you rushed to finish so you could spend your last days there. From the outside, it looks like a giant black Lego. The deck is shaped like a slice of pie. Inside, it’s mostly air and books, so many books, plus hints of artwork and a minimal amount of minimalist furniture. It’s as if you’d culled life down to its essence—sit, eat, read, create.
What I am in awe of is the life you had. It looks bold and brave, with no shortcuts or timidity. Your bio reads like the character sketch for a literary heroine. The elements: humble beginnings, prestigious art schools, Meatpacking District loft, a life-long love with a handsome sculptor husband, paintings in New York galleries and major museums, solo shows, international shows, Guggenheim and Fulbright awards, a profile in Vogue, fawning critics, a beautiful daughter, and a wild output of work after your cancer diagnosis. A story of glory and tragedy.
What I find interesting is that you died at age 56 and I stopped dying at age 56, which is a fancy way to say I stopped drinking.
What I remember most about our friendship is laughing in a cold car with you after the internship we did together. The car was cold because in those days it took forever for our hand-me-down junkers to warm up. We’d take turns picking each other up after supper, beeping at the curb because cell phones hadn’t been invented yet, then driving to an office building in our small city. Some teacher had arranged for kids interested in advertising to visit a local agency one night a week to learn the trade. We were the only two who signed up. You wanted to be an architect. I wanted to be a writer.
What they called you in the newspaper article was a star of the New York art world.
What I wish to point out is the picture in our high school yearbook of you dressed as a falcon, our school mascot, with a beak on your head and a cape of long strips of cloth draped around your shoulders. You wore this costume during football games because despite becoming a future star of the art world, you were fun and carefree when I knew you. What I want to note about this picture is that you are wearing wings, like an angel, and you are smiling.
What I think blew both of us away was learning about billboards. One night we took a trip to the studio where the advertising people created them. They made the billboards by hand, either painting or printing them, and the images were gigantic up close. We learned that guys pasted them onto the roadside frames like wallpaper. I think of all that work when I drive by digital billboards these days. They flash like TV screens. Others are just vinyl sheets hung like shower curtains. Where’s the art in that?
What I’d like to do is call you and ask if you remember exactly how those billboards got made so I can write an essay about you and me watching those billboards get made.
What I’ve noticed about your paintings is that they are giant and colorful, like billboards. One was 15-feet wide, which is almost the size of you, me and an old car lain together. You needed a full ladder to reach the top of some of your pieces. Your technique involved putting color on one canvas then merging it with another. Sometimes, you let the paint drip between canvases. Or you kissed two of them together. Or poured paint and let fate decide how it would spread. You’re quoted in the press as saying you wanted to show movement and impermanence in your work.
What I can’t figure out is why seeing your happy face in that newspaper hit me so hard. I’d already known you had died and had felt an appropriate amount of sadness when I found out—appropriate for an old friend I hadn’t seen or spoken to in more than 30 years. Isn’t that sad, she was such a nice person, kind of sadness. Now something has burst in me.
What I know is that neither of us went into advertising.
What I envision when I picture us together in that cold car on that winter night in the ‘80s are two girls who waved their dreams in front of each other. We both wanted to turn the thing we loved—art, writing—into our lives; we both may have felt the same excitement at the prospect of the creative life. To drag out this car metaphor, we started on the same road together to see how far our dreams would take us. Your journey, as far as I can see, was bright and full. Mine has had more detours, unpaved stretches, dead ends, and wrong turns.
What makes me the most upset when I look at the newspaper story is the picture of your kitchen with the stools neatly pushed in and a glass of water on the counter, as if someone has just left. You should be sitting on one of those stools, beaming with your sculptor husband. You should have set up the photo shoot. It bothers me that your kitchen, which you likely designed, goes on without you.
What we have in common is that my husband and I are also planning to build a house. This scares me because I’ve seen many couples build their dream houses and the dream turns out to be divorce. Should we build the house anyway? Do new houses always portend sorrow? There will be so many books in my house, too.
What I wondered was whether I was remembering our friendship accurately. Besides the internship, which didn’t last very long, we were mainly school friends. We greeted each other in the halls and whooped it up at the same parties, but we never went to each other’s houses or shared confidences. We fell completely out of touch after graduation. Was I remembering a bond that never existed?
What I did to figure this out was to see if there were any pictures of us together in the yearbook. I was one of the editors, a job the journalism teacher made me take that resulted in there being more pictures of me in the yearbook than my level of popularity warranted. But there wasn’t one of us together. Had you even signed my yearbook?
What every reader of the newspaper article knows is that your unwashed teacup and your slippers are still in your painting studio where you left them.
What I thought made you stand out in my memory was simply that you were so warm and friendly in our rat’s nest of a high school.
What I see is that you did sign my yearbook, way back on page 190, two from the end. The yearbook was called Anthos, which means flower, but the badly drawn cover illustration features a sailboat and sunbeams to reflect the ‘sailing into the future’ theme. Our public school wasn’t by the sea, and I can’t remember a single flower on its grounds. But high school is for wishing big, right?
What I just remembered is that I cancelled my subscription to the newspaper that ran the story of your house, effective the end of the month, so the issue with your smile on it was one of the last I received.
What you wrote, in the white space of an ad for a car repair shop, which sat above the photo of you in the falcon costume, was standard yearbook stuff at first: congrats on college, an inside joke that I don’t remember, and a compliment “Thanks for being my cutest, nicest friend I LOVE YOU FOR IT!” that doesn’t line up at all with the person I remember myself being. But then you drew an arrow to the next page, where you added: “Honey-pie, you deserve the best! I have faith and you have the talent to make it. Good luck again!”
What I cherish most about your story is that it appears you never let go of your art, that you followed your muse until the last moment, leaving incomplete paintings and rags atop paintbrushes in your studio when you died. You germinated your passion and talent until they bloomed into unquestionable success. You didn’t stop being you.
What I’m going to do as soon as possible is visit one of the museums where your paintings hang and stand in the middle of the gallery and clap. Or cry. Something loud. A scene should be made in your honor. A scene should be made to honor artists who don’t give up.
What I miss are the hopeful girls we were then. What I miss is the chance to do it differently.
What I appreciate is that while other people also knew me when I was young and optimistic, you’re the only one who sent me a reminder via a newspaper page, which I’m thinking was your way of putting up a billboard for me.
What’s hard to admit is that I stopped being me. You went big and bold with your artist self, and I got smaller. I wrote, but I also hesitated, measured, and, ultimately, lost faith.
What I hate is that you only got to live in your new house for six months.
What probably made you famous is all that color. In some, the color is blurred, as if you were smudging something out, saying that’s not what I meant. You didn’t seem to be afraid of any color, using sapling green, bottle green, yolk yellow, straw yellow, deep sea blue, pool blue, rose pink, bubble gum pink, traffic cone orange, sherbet orange, periwinkle purple, royal purple, and red and black in all strengths and weaknesses. Did you rush to use every color before you had to leave?
What’s funny about getting a billboard-like message from you in a newspaper is that I stopped drinking after getting a billboard-like message from a newspaper, in the form of a story on high functioning alcoholics that contained a quiz that I used to diagnose myself as a drunk.
What I’m curious about is how you knew I needed to read that yearbook inscription, right now, almost a year after you died?
What I’m figuring out is that you were fearless, and I was fearful and art can only thrive in one of those conditions.
What I’m learning in sobriety is that this is the chance to do it differently. That as long as I’m still deciding who moves the chairs in my kitchen, I can try again.
What I’m starting to think is that some people stay in our subconscious indefinitely, waiting for when we need them.
What I love most about your paintings is the white that forces the color to pause. I see the imprints of snow angels, the shape of a woman, cirrus clouds, snowflakes, and orbs, as if a spirit is making itself known in a photograph.
What I want to say is thank you.