ART: life after death & the art of don nace STACY ELAINE DACHEUX

 On May 22^nd, Don Nace will present “The Floor” at Ferdon Hall in Piermont, NY, as a fundraiser for Rockland Center for the Arts. 

 “Right now I have enough drawings to cover about 800 sq. ft. of space.” Nace says,  “I want to cover about 2000 sq, ft. It is a perfect trial because I assume those attending would have respect and be gentle when on the floor.  I am curious if there is much damage, and I am curious about the response.” 

I first met Nace in 2007 at his solo art exhibition in Los Angeles, where I worked as an assistant, procuring sales and writing the press releases.

His show was titled “When I Was Brave”— a collection of sketches he had drawn over the years, many of which were done in his notepad on the F train between West 4^th Street and 53^rd while commuting to work.

On the night of his opening, Nace was there with his best friend, David Bunnell.

The two met in 6^th grade.

 “Nace’s family owned a small grocery store and I loved going there with him,” Bunnell tells me, “because his mom would let us take whatever candy we wanted and I loved eating lunch at his house. Mrs. Nace, as I called her, would insist that we sit at the dining room table while she scurried about, frying up chicken and heating canned vegetables in the kitchen, pouring us glasses of milk or orange juice, bringing us cloth napkins. It was like we were little princes waiting to inherit our little kingdoms.”

David Bunnell is now a personal computer pioneer. In 1975, he worked as Vice President of Marketing at MITS in Albuquerque alongside Bill Gates and Paul Allen, introducing Altair 8800—the “first commercially available personal computer.”

Don Nace is now a working artist in New York. His drawings have appeared in Gordon Lish’s The Quarterly and in films such as Julie Taymor’s Across The Universe.

Here they are in 1968: two best friends on the precipice of said kingly inheritances.

Nace is the gentleman to the right.

This picture was taken in Iowa City, Iowa. Bunnell explains, “He was studying art there and I had come from for a SDS [Students for a Democratic Society] Convention. I counted 28 grocery sacks filled with trash in his apartment. I noticed the only things in his refrigerator were a large jar of mayonnaise, half a loaf of white bread, and a quart of milk. He had been living on mayonnaise sandwiches and milk for most of the year so he wouldn’t have to work and could spend more time on his art and drawing, endless doodling in his notebooks.  During this stay several radical students and I slept on the floor in his kitchen after taking out all the garbage. We thought we were on the verge of a revolution. Nace was amused but not really interested in joining in with us.”

At the gallery opening, despite his notoriety, Nace was still nice and accessible. I found his unassuming demeanor refreshing—encouraging.

It was just what I needed to see because I had recently lost confidence in the city. My father had passed away from cancer a year prior, and I felt very insignificant in the grand scheme of things.

Before bed, I rearranged items on the shelves, nervous about how they might fall in the event of an earthquake. I sized up every person on the subway, concerned about bomb attacks. I entered social conversations with great uncertainty, drank too much, and lost interest fairly fast. I focused on the worst —taking notice of how rare it was for people to show genuine curiosity in a discussion, how sometimes “excitement” is often misinterpreted as a weakness—something to exploit.

I often worried about dying.

At nights, I found myself alone, hunched over a canvas — cruising the brush around. I watched art documentaries and read biographies. I learned about Guernica, Picasso’s big political gesture made in the face of destruction, and Rothko’s suicide, his last artistic gesture hanging in the Tate Modern.

But, most importantly, I learned about Lee Krasner and her whole overture—that like life, art too must struggle to stay alive, that the strength of the struggle is always apparent in the quality of the work.

LA Times writer Claudine Esa explains Krasner’s artistic aliveness as a “willingness to trash the old to make room for new growth” which is best personified in her practice of ripping and “destroying old paintings (some of them Pollock’s)” to then reassemble “into arresting collages, which flaunt their bold juxtapositions of disharmonious colors.”

I admire how Krasner’s work emotionally blooms apart and regenerates. I like how Don Nace’s work does a similar thing, in a style and language that is all its own.

As a young adult, Nace suffered from echoes of a traumatic childhood— “I was not a functioning human being.  I was extremely fearful, reclusive, and totally unable to enter into any kind of relationship.  The reason being that my emotions would go completely haywire and I would hide away until things calmed down.”

Nace’s father passed away in 1959. As a kid, Bunnell says, “Nace spent a lot of time taking care of his dad, giving him morphine shots, and otherwise trying to soothe his agony.”  

 “My mother worked from 7 am to 8 pm every day.” Nace adds, “So with permission from the school, I stayed with my father at home while he deteriorated from lung cancer.  As I hovered around his bed, I tried by shear force of will to keep him alive. I would time his breathing to monitor his progress, but I kept forgetting the count.  I prayed, avoided stepping on cracks, and squeezed my brain to conjure up any spiritual power that would save him.  Over the weeks he just turned grayer and grayer.  His scars where they removed his lungs turned stiffer and blacker, until finally they took him away to spend his last days in the hospital.” 

In To The Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf’s character Lily Briscoe laments,“It was a miserable machine, an inefficient machine … the human apparatus for painting or for feeling; it always broke down at the critical moment; heroically, one must force it on.” 

Self-conscious about her creative strengths as an artist, Lily wants desperately to reproduce on canvas what she sees in Mrs. Ramsey, her subject matter, but a certain feeling of ineptitude delays her progress.

Ten years later, Mrs. Ramsey has died, and Lily is finally able to finish the portrait.

After reading To The Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf’s sister, Vanessa Bell, reportedly remarked, “It is almost painful to have her so raised from the dead.”

The character Mrs. Ramsey was based on their mother. She died from rheumatic fever when the two were just children, causing Woolf to suffer her first nervous breakdown.

According to Woolf, “Nothing has really happened until it has been described.”

Nace tells me about how he was cured.

“I was sitting in the psychiatrist’s office in the middle of an emotional burnout, when he told me I was imitating my father’s death over and over again.  I looked at him thinking that was the craziest, dumbest thing I had ever heard when I realized all the pain had gone away.  And it stayed away.”

As I look over Nace’s drawings in black and white, collected here, I am reminded of Krasner’s comment— “Painting in which the inner and the outer man are inseparable, transcends technique, transcends subjects and moves into the realm of the inevitable.”

Her instructor Hans Hoffman believed we are observers of nature, yet she embraced another concept: Jackson Pollock’s declaration— “I am nature.”

In the 1980s, Nace moved to NYC, where he struggled to find work. Many years were spent jumping from job to job, showing his portfolio to galleries, and taking what he could get. Until one day, he met Gordon Lish, former editor of Esquire, famous for editing the works of legends like Raymond Carver among others.

“He came right out of the blue.” Nace tells me.  “I was so naive, or better, Nebraska sand hills uneducated, fresh in NYC from New Mexico when he saw my sketch book and made an appointment for me to see him at Knopf. He proceeded to describe my abilities in such glowing terms that all previous reality ceased to exist … I had never had anyone express anywhere near such appreciation, let alone glorification.  Let alone an editor at Knopf who I later found out was a well-known figure in literature.  Let alone in an office in Midtown Manhattan overlooking the skyline from an office in the Random House building.  That meeting rewired my brain. From that time on with an energy akin to firing up a nuclear reactor, I dedicated myself to drawing.”

Through my research, I discover that Lish, still alive and incredible, does not have access to the Internet. So, if I want an interview, I must mail him a typed set of questions through the post. Accustomed to rejection, I don’t expect a response. Yet, two weeks later, I get one.

I find it somewhat dead-on hilarious that it takes Lish, famous for his terse prose, four words to say what I’ve been trying to express in over a thousand— as artists, we all need that one person to recognize not only our aliveness in art, but also our aliveness in the world.

For me, that person was my father.

After the opening, I spoke with Nace about his death over email— about my overpowering anxiety, doubts, and concerns about not being totally committed to life.

He responded with kindness—

“So sorry, to hear about your father.  My belief is that we start preparing for death when we learn what it is as a kid.  Takes an entire lifetime to get ready.  But we know there are proper times for it.  When it happens too soon we are thrown off track, taken away from the normal world. Can’t explain it to anybody really, I don’t think, so it is natural to avoid social situations where you might have to.   Maybe there is such an intense love for someone too soon gone that you don’t want to have it diluted by the world.  Maybe I am just talking stupid. The curious thing for me was when my friends reached their 50’s and their parents started the decline, something that happened to me 40 years ago.  I can’t say that there was anything profound in how curious it was to observe.   It was just curious.  So thirty years from now the same curious time will happen to you.”

I am reminded of Woolf’s comment, “Nothing has really happened until it has been described.” I think this is why I am writing this article now.

My mother helped care for my father towards the end. I relieved her of these duties when she needed me. My sister provided emotional support as well. There is no doubt that he was loved. Yet, on my father’s deathbed, it was disappointing to see that only one of his siblings came to visit in person. He has seven. His parents never showed up nor did they attend the funeral.

I am sad to reflect on how some people die without ever knowing their own worth—within a family, within society, or within their own craft. My fingers pause above the keys and I think … honestly, I’m not sure I know either, and I’m not sure I ever really will, so maybe this is common.

Maybe it doesn’t matter. Maybe this is what the dialogue of art is about—finding our own self-worth by tearing into the past, ripping it apart, and building something new.

 “‘The Floor’ is a story spread out and hidden away among its own chaos, like all of us.” Nace explains. “The viewer walks onto the floor and lets their eye choose what, if any, drawing it is attracted to. Once they pick that area to investigate, they can continue to unbury drawings until they feel the urge to move on to another section. Once they leave, however, chances are that they will not be able to find that original drawing again.  Especially, if they buried it in the process of their investigation or someone else had followed behind and rearranged the drawings.  In that way the floor is almost alive.  The moments are not repeatable.”

———————————-

Stacy Elaine Dacheux writes articles for Flavorpill with Paris Lia, one of which was mentioned in The New Yorker’s Book Bench. She is also the co-founder of Slack Lust, which you are reading right now. Other publications include: BUST Magazine, Venus Zine, Thuggery & Grace, Versal, and Past Simple. Her short story, “The Sociology of Containers” was recently nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She is also hard at work on her first novel.  

 ** “When I Was Brave” photograph, 2007, courtesy of Don Nace

** “Kingly Inheritances” photograph of Nace & Bunnell, 1968, courtesy of David Bunnell

** “Bird Talk” collage painting, 1955, Lee Krasner

** All black & white sketches shown throughout this piece are by Don Nace. Collected in story form, his book Drawn Out is available for purchase here.

** “The Floor” video was shot by NYC filmmaker/photographer Bill Hayward. All stills of this video were taken as screen grabs.

** “A brief note from Gordon Lish” photograph of the document, dated 2011. Gordon Lish’s Collected Fictions is available from OR Books

** Special thanks to David Bunnell and Don Nace for giving such honest and extensive interviews.

** You can follow Bunnell on Twitter for updates on his interests, tips, & whereabouts.