When we first moved to Harrison Street, most of the eighteen rooms were filled with (more or less) tenants. We thought we needed the rents from those people to make the payments, taxes and insurance.  However, the two small rooms at the top of the house that had once been the servants' quarters were not rented when we moved in, and so I made those my studio. 

Sometime in the long ago the rooms had been painted a rosy pink, but now they were only a dirty pink.  I made a "painting room" by painting the larger of the two rooms white, and left the smaller room the dirty pink it was when we moved in. We had an extra bed and put it in the smaller room for guests of which there were none.  I most remember the feeling of aching old lust I sensed in those two rooms on the top floor of Harrison Street, an odor of dead sweat and stale sex long past.  Sometimes in the hot and airless afternoons I would lie on the bed in the dirty pink "guest room," would brood about all the sex this rotting old house had seen, and then go into the so called "studio" room next door (the one I had painted white to cover the pink) and paint pictures of that sex...

After a few months, all of the tenants moved out and we found ways to cover the house expenses ourselves.  I decided I could not stand painting in those little rooms at the top of the house any longer and moved the studio to the large glassed-in porch just off our bedroom on the second floor. There I continued for a year or two mostly to paint small landscapes of the run down Western Addition neighborhood in San Francisco, of similar parts of Oakland, and from of my imagination. 

At first, they were the touch and the texture of the despair of the dying city, that rotting away Western Addition, every vast old house decaying into its foundations, paint peeling, roofs leaking, plaster cracking and falling and every room loaded with the light and stench of stale lust—just like the dirty pink rooms at the top of our house on Harrison Street when we moved in…

In writing now in 2002 of the sources of this work—the aesthetics and the emotions, the visible as well as the invisible life—a group of paintings which meant so much to me then and which still seem to me to be the first “mature” works of my career, it seems best simply to quote from an “essay” which I wrote in 1973.  The occasion was my retrospective at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the purpose to inform the curator about the sources and goals and appearances and facts of my work, and to do this from within the life of the artist rather than from without as is the way of the critic and historian.  The situation was, however, that at the time I had a very important art-world job as Director of the College of the San Francisco Art Institute, a job which seemed to me to preclude speaking to a general public about the very private sources and contents and goals of my work.  So, I invented a person—J. Carlos Jones, a friend of my student years—and wrote his artist’s biography in the form I wanted in order to tell my story.  It should be noted that in writing the talk, I conflated the times in the summer and fall of 1949 after I had graduated from Berkeley and was living in the Western Addition, with the time when we lived on Harrison Street and I actually painted the small landscapes themselves.

The talk itself began…

“It is because it seems so artificial—such a falsehood—and after all, art is only an illusion… anyway, because of that, to tell the story of J. Carlos Jones.”

and ended with

"So Carlos, like art, is a fiction; and his work, like life, is the reflection of a sunlit cloud in an evening pool…"

 But it had been a long time from the J. Carlos Jones of the texture and despair of a dying city, to J. Carlos Jones of a luminous cloud in an evening pool.

A Selection From my 1973 memoir of J. Carlos Jones --

Perhaps the first that I [Fred Martin] remember of his [J. Carlos Jones] works from that time is a landscape drawing which shows not the building where he lived, but the building where he thought he did, with a corner grocery beneath one of those cupola columns that were so popular in the buildings of the 1890's and early 1900's. He was quite interested in those domed tops with their curious nipples, and made many pictures of them. Probably at this time there arose his habit of quick painting with many repetitions, out of the limitations of his finances and thus his materials: cheap watercolors on cheap paper. He was also very deeply interested in the dusty translucencies of dirty windows, peeling paint, cracking timbers, and roofs whose shingles were slowly slipping away. He felt those old, wan lights drifting and flooding behind his eyes, in the shifting screen at the back of his brain.

He made collages also when living in those little rooms; small collages of paper, collages which brought together, he felt, the light, space, air, and the randomness of those times of listening to the Gurreleider in an attic room infested with fleas, of Diebenkorn’s and Corbett’s pictures and how in the latter’s class they drew the crotch view of girls.

He walked up and down the hills of San Francisco in the late afternoon and watched the fog come across the great heaping tenement homes. One of the phrases that always meant a lot to him was "His house has many mansions," and he loved to think of the hills of the city with their myriad windows and rooms drifting in the sky. One building especially, that was about two blocks from his place, impressed him. In after years, he went back once and drew it just before it was torn down. It impressed him because of the labyrinthine floor plan which it must have had, the tangled, pointless corridors, the heaping together of room upon. room. It impressed him also because of the dome, because of the column of bay windows and because of the dark doorway at the base of it all.

One of his ways of working was to make many of something. There were several reasons for that. One of the reasons was that he couldn’t seem ever quite to get things right and so he had to start over. Another of the reasons was that the material in which he worked, watercolor on paper, wasn’t something subject to being emended. He had always to do it over. Another reason was that the point of it all for him, the charge, the flash, came in the doing. The drawing or painting of the city or the clouds was the eating of the body and blood of the world he loved; by drawing or painting he participated in, was one with the things he was making (the art) and the things of which he was making (the city).

And so, he worked in watercolors again and again on an image of the reddish dome against the sky, the dome of that corner apartment with the shadowy doorway between the thighs, a dome rising like a breast or the head of a phallus. Working in watercolors, rather watery ones with the colors of domes and towers and urns, his grandfathers' decaying architectural fantasies pressed against the sky. As time passed he came to paint right out there while walking in the streets themselves. In this way his eyes and hands, the muscles of his arms, the twist of shoulders, the set of hips could actually get into the bursting, shattering landscapes of sun, of noise and of wind. The drawings became more and more active, less and less evidently representational; the lines were more nervous, the forms more indistinguishable and the charge, the blast in the nerves in the brain, the process of doing became much, much more intense.

Sometimes in the evening in the isolation of his studio he would try to paint what it was all about, and began to use sayings in his pictures. He’d always talked a lot anyway, and so now he began to use sayings. As other painters had done before him, giving their message written on papers in the air, he wrote like Ribera or Velasquez or Goya had done on windblown papers in landscapes with low horizons beneath sweeping skies. He wrote what it was all about, and painted pictures of it. But it was all small, like early Corot; it was a stillness  "For wan houses frozen in an infinity of dying amid wan skies."

Occasionally I accompanied him on these walks through town. He showed me the places he liked, the old houses with their wooden imitations of rather frantic late Roman architecture. We came once -- already the place was being torn down making way for the Western Addition redevelopment -- we came once to a place where the building was gone, but the steps and the front porch remained. It had been common at the turn of the century just as it is common today to give apartment houses names, and in those days it had been popular. to have terrazo or mosaic steps. We came upon one where the porch carried the name of the apartment, "Eden Vale," but beyond the porch there was only the falling off of a hill to a valley, beyond which lay only other hills with other old houses. And so, “Eden Vale” opened only further into the dying city. There were flowers scattered there upon the porch, dying flowers and bits of trash, the kind of stuff you find in gutters in the spring. Anyway, Carlos painted it when he got home that night, and the sign of the search and the finding of Eden Vale became a star in his constellation, joining the domes and towers of the late 19th century from a year or two before.

It took a lot of pictures to keep him going and so he made a lot of them. He had a job where lots of scrap lumber turned up, so he painted on the scrap lumber; painted again and again images of the city. Once when seeing a picture of a Tang vase decorated with apple blossoms and thinking about a lost painting of David Park’s, he heard a phrase in the back of his head: "So that this light will ever so fall, even to the final dust," and so he tried to paint his city as if it were made out of that dust with the light forever falling on it.

*

His city had certain topographical features; it had an open square with darkness on both sides, and beyond where the street opened lay some buildings in the last sunshine.

Despite the fact that he was painting by now the least important looking pictures that it was possible to make, he still had those dreams of heroic grandeur, regarded himself still as possibly an art hero. One of our mutual friends, Sam Francis, had gone to Paris after graduation and was slowly actually becoming an art hero. Sam had persuaded a museum director in Basle, that he, Sam, was indeed an art hero and that he knew a lot of other art heroes out here on the West Coast where something marvelous was happening. That was back in the early 50’s. The museum director came out to see and Sam had given him my address. I in turn sent him on to J. Carlos Jones. When he got to Jones’ place, Jones showed him the small pictures of mackerel skies in the late afternoon that he had seen and painted that day. Jones told me about it afterwards. The museum director who had come to find the terrible children of Clyfford Still was mighty disappointed and mighty bewildered. For a while he even doubted our mutual friend Sam.

Carlos had even while in college become aware of the symbolic possibilities of painting and sculpture and had become aware of the way in which unconscious material comes out and says itself. He wanted this city that he painted to have a very profound and important meaning, and he knew what the whiteness was there where the opening was in the square. He wrote it on the back of one of the pictures that he gave me. “That picture is a smear of semen, cast far out into a deserted street, abandoned but glowing in old and empty squares."

*

He continued to walk the streets and draw and found more and more that he couldn’t control his hand -- the burst of light, the roar of streetcars, the automobiles going by -- the whole thing was beyond his control. The drawings became more and more illegible. One building haunted him especially. It was a sort of pyramidal looking one, old and blackish gray. It had things that mattered for him, the kind of columnar set of bay windows capped with a dome, and at the same time it had a pyramidal roof and also a great round window up there in the attic. He thought about the window a great deal and came to recognize what it was up there in the round window in the pyramidal roof that it seemed to him that it is all about. He wrote me a letter then, for we hardly ever saw each other in those days.

The climax of his letter said:

"Up stairs which turned right and up stairs which turned left I trod their radial treads. I walked in order upon their rays which were tangled in the corners of the paneled walls and buried in the dark of halls and landings. I went beneath the broken bulbs, I walked beside the bent brackets from which twisted wires fell. I passed down the silent halls, beyond the empty rooms whose white plaster slowly fell, grain by grain, quietly upon the floors (and if a little bird were to come to that beach of the sea once only in a year, and were to carry from the beach a grain of sand then when that beach were all cleared and in like wise all the other coasts of the world then a day would have gone by in eternity) and I climbed further steps and I held upon the banisters of those flights and I came at last unto the final door the darkest and most overwrought what with its carving and its scaling- and its chasms and its pinnacles and I opened it and passed into its room with the great round window opening out upon the sky and I was encircled and embraced by the enrayed arms, by the golden sun in its antique majesty, by the dim down going redness darkening and darkening to its core, by the entwinement of the passage of time which will not cease until it has been used up in the loving of the woman of the sun whom I love."

He made a series of great round window pictures from the drawings he'd been making in pencil and dabbed onto tissue paper with a mixture of the imitation plaster that's used for thickening up walls. Still trying to et the light, the texture, the dust of the glowing, dying city. In a few I could see the wings that later came to nestle at the crest of the great round window.

*

He told me that finally it began to fade like every art form does, sort of all worked out. He made a few pictures of old buildings in West Oakland almost like citadels that are passing away, already in the distance, pictures of a castle from which one has departed.

Click the image to go to the pictures