Interlude

Jim Fenzel

“Interlude: New York City”

Thoughts on my paintings for a show at the Arts Center of Yates County. January 4 to February 4, 2023

As I walked home after dropping my kids at school, a verse from a song I’d heard many times struck me:

“On that erstwhile May morning

I took the six downtown to Spring

And I was writing something elegiac

That I never learned to sing

But I think it was this song

Just four years premature

And I remember crossing out the line

-‘All is fair in love and war’ “

(Henry Jamison, Real Peach, 2017)

Jamison’s reference to the New York City subway drew me in; however, the line “But I think it was this song/ Just four years premature…” reverberated. There are paintings I’ve begun, which I then abandoned, unsatisfied. Perhaps my style wasn’t right, or the execution wasn’t there, or I just wasn’t ready to paint it, and so the idea sits dormant. The painting was premature.

As I pondered Jamison’s lines, I was simultaneously contemplating my approach for an upcoming show titled “Interlude,” and in that moment, previous concepts were revived. The strongest urge was to depict memories from a city we lived in for a decade. The “Interludes” would be pauses within the bustle of city life. On the subway platform, waiting at the crosswalk, elevated in the tram between Manhattan and Roosevelt Island, in limbo.

My hope is something literate and narrative comes across in these pieces. 

Both Charles Baudelaire in the eighteen-hundreds and Colson Whitehead in the twenty-first century (as well as others) have looked at the solidity of one’s memories in an ever-changing urban landscape.

In “The Swan,” Baudelaire’s narrator is recollecting. He is in the new Carousel but picturing the old. “Old Paris is no more,” he laments, and his “memories are heavier than rocks.” And Whitehead speaks specifically about New York:

“No matter how long you have been here, you are a New Yorker the first time you say, That used to be Munsey’s, or That used to be the Tic Toc Lounge. That before the internet café plugged itself in, you got your shoes resoled in the mom-and-pop operation that used to be there. You are a New Yorker when what was there before is more real and solid than what is here now.”

Memories are individual. Your New York is not mine; mine is not yours. 

These paintings, in general, are set in modern day, but influenced by memory. The above originates explicitly from a walk I took during the morning rush hour in 2018. I painted it four years and a global pandemic later.

On that summer walk from the Upper East Side to Flatiron and back, I pushed a stroller. It’s a prop that’s out of place in midtown. I was no businessperson briskly headed to the office or holding a conference call in the palm of my hand. I was a stranger watching the cabs and private SUVs shuttle the well-heeled, urgent people as I followed their subordinates afoot. 

These paintings depict my New York. Present-day adjacent, mixed with memories. This taxi I paint is a Ford Crown Vic because that’s how I picture New York cabs even though Hurricane Sandy flooded the fleet in 2012, so it is not a Crown Vic you’ll see charging up Park Ave today, nor was it even in 2018 when I captured the memory.