the wasp's dying crawl

Twenty-eight-- perhaps twenty-nine, perhaps thirty years ago, I watched Chris Neal make a painting.

 

The fine arts building, late nights.  Spring?  Or was it summer?  The two of us juked on caffeine from The Coffee Banque, just across the street.  One of four, five pieces I watched him make.  A curious, dusty-looking thing, craggy plaster worked into the canvas for texture.  A bit of Arizona map from the floorboard of Neal's car, embedded in the sky.  Charcoal slashes forming the skull of a cow, marking the ground.  Hooker's green and yellow clay and umber red beneath it all.  A bold, squared-off window into road trips forgotten & unmade.  Those were brilliant, exciting nights.  The room thrumming to Pigface, watching Neal dance around the canvas, a happy parody of Pollack.

(A wasp crawling across the surface of the still-wet piece where it lay on the floor.  Neal, in a snit of inspiration, leaving it there to become part of the work.  The next day, daubing black & yellow & white in an abstracted, dotted line across the wasp's dragway until there are enough individual accumulations of dots for the wasp to echo forward & back across the rosy desert horizon, motion captured by life.  "That'll finish it.")

An old mate held onto that untitled work a long time, a prized piece.  Neal by then having given up art.  Then the painting resided in storage a while.  Then he offered it to me, for safekeeping.  I kept it relatively safe.  Somewhere in the moves, the original wasp had fallen away.  In an emergency change of address, had to de-frame the canvas.  Rolled it for storage, moved into a new place.  Soon as I could, had it re-stretched and framed again.

It dominated my kitchen around nine years.  Mute witness to all my worst cooking.  Then covid arrived.  Lost the studio.  The painting went into storage, again.  Into a garage, for about a year, I guess.  Then into another storage unit, for about five or six months.  We downsized the storage, so it moved into a lesser corrugated metal closet space.  Another year living in the dark.  Then it moved with us, here, to Chicago.  Arrived before us, point of fact.  No room to display it, and besides, I'd fallen out with all the old Auburn crew.  So it lived in my closet.  A year and a third again.  

Today it's in the alley, waiting next to the garbage.

I dunno.  You keep signal fires burning for as long as the signal's good, then you let them gutter.

There were people to whom the painting had meaning.  I was definitely one.