Harlem Window

Harlem Window, 1998
Oil on board, 60 x 36 inches

Terrible photo of an important work... This painting went into the student show at the Royal Academy in Edinburgh and sold within a couple of months of painting it. (For GBP450...). This (paper) photo actually has the shadow of a gallerygoer moving across it at speed, I've had to doctor that out in photoshop. I don't even have the negative - a friend took it when we went to the opening. Its not that I was ignorant of the need to keep records but sometimes life takes a while to catch up with your intentions.

As a little aside, at college I worked almost as hard as I had done at my business, and that's saying something! I would be at my desk writing at about 7.30 am (nice when I had the 3rd floor apartment looking out over the Tay), get to the art school studio at 9.30 or so, work til 7 or 9 pm when they closed the building, then go home and experiment with photoshop until I fell off the chair in the wee hours. Sunday was food shopping and laundry day. Each summer (five in all) I worked for 10 weeks grafting roses in a field 6 days a week 12 hours a day. Try picking potatoes all day and you'll be halfway to the backbreaking nature of the job. With thorns. Kept me fit (I was in my late 30's at the time). Great money (in student terms), raised my yearly wage to about GBP 6,000. Most of the tuition was paid for by the state, but I still have GBP 4500 in loans to pay back. Oh, yeah, and I moved nearly every summer to another apartment, storing my stuff for a few months in between. It was a helluva time.

So, anyway, I was kinda busy with the things I thought were important. Even if I didn't manage great photos. It was one of the most intense and wonderful times of my life, and there seemed to be enough money for a lot of homemade bloody marys.

Why am I posting this terrible picture? Well, its a turning point in my art practice. I went to New York (a guy paid my ticket) for the weekend. It was a bit of a disaster but very useful. The guy lived in Harlem and prowling round the apartment on my own in the middle of the night... as you do when its a disaster... I saw streetlights through some dark, flowered curtains in his bathroom window. The apartment was nice, wood floors, plants etc, but I'd heard so much about Harlem over the years that the comparison between the space inside and outside struck me as extreme. I mean, here I was in my knickers and a few feet away was the dangerous slum of legend...(!) Visually, all that separated the spaces was this bathroom curtain. It made a huge impact.

A few months later I saw, no - recognized what I was seeing - on the airport window as the compression of several situations into one image. Needless to say, curtains and windows occupied my attention as representing the boundary between spaces that were contiguous but perceived to be different.