About Men in the Park

MEN IN THE PARK

Sometime in the 1990s I came across a box that I had carried with me for many years. The box sat in the back of a closet amongst old drawings and paintings. Across the top was written DRAWINGS ’59. I opened it, and inside were some drawings on yellowish paper and a painting that looked like it was painted by some Cubist painter. I took out the drawings; the glow of time had ripened the paper and matured the ink. In what I thought were marks of a battle, I discovered the lines of a space. I had captured a time when men played in the park.

I was attending art school in 1959 under the spell of a great teacher and artist, Mr. Jepson. Everybody admired Jepson, we all talked like him, and we all drew like him. I knew I had to find my own markings, my own lines. So at lunch break, I would take my drawing box and paper, a bag with my lunch, and a collection of popsicle sticks and go to the park.

McArthur Park, or Westlake Park as it was once known, is near downtown Los Angeles. The center of it is a lake, just the right size to stroll around or rent a boat and drift along with the swans and ducks. With my box and lunch I would walk around the lake, past the men and women feeding pigeons, to a grove of palm trees. Under the trees sat rows of picnic tables with men of all ages, shapes, and colors playing checkers, chess, cards, and dominoes; talking, yelling, laughing, spending their time together in the park. I would find a place to sit, eat my lunch, then whittle a point on a popsicle stick, dip it in ink and start to draw.

I dropped out of art school in the beginning of the summer of 1960 and rented a studio in an old building at the east end of Hollywood Boulevard. My studio was on the second floor, which also housed three other studios, one of which was rented by a young actor by the name of Dennis Hopper. Dennis was better known for his photography than acting. He had rented a studio because he had begun experimenting with painting. He was a protégé of the painter Emerson Wolfer, and I had been a student of Wolfer.

I had started a painting based on one of the drawings of “Men In the Park." I was obsessed with Cézanne. Reproductions of his paintings covered my walls. Dennis was discovering Jackson Pollack. He had a canvas stretched on the floor and paint pots with paint dripping over sticks. Color swirled over the canvas, respecting no edge, merging onto the floor into a trail of footprints leading out his door, one path to the bathroom, the other to my studio door where he would call to me, “Hey man, will you come take a look?” I would go over to his studio and he would ask me what I thought. I would look and say something like, “ I think Jackson has already gone there Dennis,” and he would look at me with this hurt look, and then stomp over to my studio, look at the painting that I was laboring on and remark, “Man, I think you are in the wrong century.”

Steven Oshatz