Back of 201 Water Street on Plymouth Street, DUMBO, Brooklyn
December 2000
This was another very calm place to paint. Because the weather was so bad, no one was out much. One older German woman stopped by. She was visiting her daughter for Christmas and said that she’d bring her daughter by later to see the painting, which was based on a lovely watercolor of Greta Bridge by John Sell Cotman.
By this point, I was pretty tired of painting in the snow. It was hard being cold all the time, no matter how many clothes I wore or how many chemical handwarmers I secreted in them. Of course, it was my own fault that I was painting in the winter. I wanted to finish a respectable number of the paintings so that the photographs could be in a show at GAle GAtes et al. on January 11. The show was curated by Lauren Ross and was called “Serial Number.” It was about artists who work in series, so showing just one or two paintings wasn’t really an option. When I had told Lauren that I’d show the project, I had thought that I would be further along. But my plans of painting in the summer hadn’t worked out, as I’d had to go to Frankfurt to work to make money instead. For some reason, I mounted the fifteen photographs for the show on aluminum, which was really expensive and looked pretentious. They turned out to be useful as donations to benefit shows, so printing them wasn’t a complete loss. This painting got eaten up by the rust on the wall fairly quickly.