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07/02/2007: "The Tharroe of Mykonos - An artist’s dream come true"
Failure
One of my most exciting moments as an artist came a little less than a year ago, when I got an e-mail from a World War Two pilot named Chester Lipinski. He proposed to me that I prepare an estimate and proposal for a commemorative bust of another US pilot, Francis Gabreski, for the Air Force Academy in Colorado. I must confess I didn’t recognize the name, but as I researched him on the internet, I became steadily more impressed. I had just seen the movie ‘Pearl Harbor’, and remembered the scenes of the very few American pilots who managed to make it into the air. ‘Gabby’ Gabreski was one of them.
Asked where he’d like to fly afterwards, he said, “Over Germany”. He was sent to the Polish division of the RAF in England, composed of Polish pilots who’d made it across the Channel, and at first, an American by birth, was not accepted. But after a few kills his new comrades began to respect him, and his flying skills only improved. By the end of the war, he emerged as one of America’s top aces, earning respect even from the Germans who had shot him down and captured him after a long manhunt through forests and fields.
His military career didn’t end there. During the Korean conflict, he again became an ace, this time dogfighting with MIGs. After retirement, he went on in civilian life to become president of New York’s Long Island Railroad.
I’ve condensed his story, and maybe even gotten a few things wrong. You can find it easily enough if you want to read more. What turned this into a failure for me was money. I quoted twenty five thousand dollars for a bronze bust and granite base, and no one could find it. I wrote to the White House, and said I thought it might be nice to commemorate someone who had done this much, and was exactly the kind of example that would motivate young pilots at the Academy. I sent this by registered mail, and although the receipt told me the letter got there, I never received a response.
As a Pole, I wanted to honor another Pole, and perhaps somehow balance out all those Polish jokes I used to listen to in high school. I know Lipinski contacted me because I was Polish. But in the end, it doesn’t really matter what your motivation is, just that you have it so you can do your best.
A failure this was, but not one I can accept any responsibility for. I am dismayed at my country for not honoring this man. Sure, it might have been a feather in my cap, but hardly worth it from an economical standpoint, since doing it well is a hell of a lot of work, and most of that twenty five grand would be eaten up by foundry, granite base, and freight costs. This experience has left a bitter taste in my mouth, because I can fail, and I do all the time, but this was failure, of something much bigger than just me.
SUCCESS
In art, one of the things I often stress is responsibility for what happens to you and your artwork. You must create not only the work, but also fertilize the ground into which you’re laying the seed. You have to keep watering it, and be patient, knowing that if you do this, something will eventually grow. You have to pick the terrain and location that is right for what you’re planting. I picked Europe, because I think my kind of sculpture has a chance of growing here, whereas trying to sell lifelike marble statues in the States is like trying to plant spinach in a dry creek bed. It’s not that people won’t buy things like this in the Americas, but on a per capita basis, there’s a lot more of them in Europe, where I have chosen to plant my garden.
And, if complex and time consuming art is something that can only be bought by very rich people, how can you reach those people?
I’ve met a lot of very rich people. I remember once being one of twenty guests at a party thrown by Ron Perelman. I remember his two bodyguards nervously eying anyone who came too close to him. Myself especially, because there was absolutely no reason in the world for me to be there, except that one of the people who was supposed to be there had brought me.
When I was introduced to him and shook his hand, his eyes were elsewhere, and ‘pleased to meet you, Eddie’ were the only words from him to me I was going to hear that evening. If I thought about his ability to change my life by sending what he’d consider insignificant my way for a piece of art, and let that motivate me enough to make some kind of approach, then what I’d hear him say, to one of the bodyguards, was “Could you show this man the door?”
What a difference Europe makes in the behavior of the wealthy towards people like me. You cannot be a prophet in the place you’re from, but think of how much trust people place in a psychiatrist if he only has a Viennese accent. Being American in Europe has just that cachet. You can talk to anyone. And in this way, the ground you seek to grow your career in is that much more fertile.
Going back and forth from Italy to Greece helped me to meet some potentially very helpful people in my artistic career. On my first trip, I went into a jewelry store where Lori, the girl I met on an airplane worked called Ilias Lalaounis. The manager, Tassos Stamoulis, kept calling me David, never got my name right just like Perelman, even when I later went to see him in the Madison Avenue branch of the same store. But he always looked me in the eye and gave me a welcome I will never forget my first day in Mykonos, with a meal, and an introduction to the island’s Municipal Gallery director, a woman named Anita. The time he spent with me seemed to be devoted to finding out something about me that would help him find me people who could make a difference in what I wanted to do. While I hadn’t enough things for a show in the Municipal gallery, Anita in turn introduced me to Spiros, who ran the gallery that I exhibited in from that first trip until now.
Spiros’ gallery was too small for the moebius knot table I brought on a second trip, but he knew someone with a hotel who might want to display it, and I took it there. This was the Tharroe of Mykonos hotel, a growing and ever changing entity that had been moved over after an ancient queen’s tomb was discovered during the initial excavations. It is the only major archaeological site on the island, even if Delos with it’s thousands of artifacts is less than a mile away. Almost anyone else here on this rocky little island of expensive real estate would have bulldozed the tomb out of existence after sifting through it for gold to avoid both the practical and legal delays associated with such a discovery. But not John and Olga, who contacted Greek cultural authorities and moved the location so as not to disturb the site. The gold jewelry they found sits in the town museum, ten years later still not visible to the public.
Thus began a relationship that flourished because of our mutual interest in art, on the philosophies it sometimes represents, and because every time I went to Mykonos I stopped in to see them. A few years ago, John expressed an interest in having me bring ‘Amarilli and Corisca’ to display in the Tharroe. When my show at Vera Docci closed last summer, I had no place to put them, so rather than transporting these enormous and difficult figures twice. I loaded them into the rented truck at the gallery in Italy and with then one and a half year old Leon by my side, drove them straight to Mykonos. As we set them up, I learned something from John. The drama they’re from takes place in Arcadia, Greece, and the name Corisca, in Greek, means ‘the woman who destroys marriages’. Exactly what Corisca does in the Italian opera I got the theme for the piece from.
This winter, I got a call from Olga and John, offering to fly me to Greece to discuss a proposition. Over dinner there, we talked. John was straightforward.
“You come to Mykonos for three, four months and work as an artist in our hotel. We will cover your expenses, rent a house for you, build you a studio, and pay you a salary. You come with your whole family.”
“That’s called an artist in residency,” I said. “It’s what many artists dream of.”
“I think you are a great artist,” said John. “For us, the function of a hotel is to create an atmosphere. Part of that is food, part is hospitality, another part is providing everything clients want, a part is setting, and part is art. Without the art, everything else becomes pretense. You belong here.”
I thought about all the hotels I’d ever stayed in, and what made certain experiences stand out and others fade. In the simplest of places, work by real artists who perhaps had paid for a room with a painting, made luxury places into a parodies of dee luxe if they didn’t have any real art. I stayed in a five hundred dollar a night place in Milan, with prints of paintings on the walls. I remember it only because of its pretentiousness and the astonishing cost for something that fake. I could imagine their cooks spitting into the soup.
So, naturally, I accepted. Today I find myself in a spacious studio, working from 5:30 AM until around noon, when it gets so hot you just can’t(48 Centigrade, don’t even know what that is Fahrenheit, but it’s hot), and then swimming in clear blue seas after a nap in our air conditioned apartment. I go back to the studio at around six, and chip away until around eight.
Sometimes, I find myself talking to the Tharroe’s guests about sculpture, or Greece, or about why I’m here. Most are shocked when I tell them I’m the hotel’s resident sculptor, and then they say this is probably the only hotel in the world with that among the things they offer. Funny, but I get the impression that it might even make them pay more attention to how good the food is.
