Isabel Samaras - On Tender Hooks

WHEN WE CAN TAKE GREEN FROM GRASS, BLUE FROM HEAVEN, AND RED FROM BLOOD, WE HAVE ALREADY AN ENCHANTERS POWER - UPON ONE PLANE; AND THE DESIRE TO WIELD THAT POWER IN THE WORLD EXTERNAL TO OUR MIND AWAKES.

J. R. R. Tolkien, On Fairy-Stories in The Tolkien Reader

ISABEL SAMARAS

The sound of a car engine wakes me up and I sit bolt upright in bed to look outside. The bed is shoved against the window so I can see out without even getting up. The yellow streetlight shines fizzily down on a bright-orange Gremlin that has just pulled up onto the front lawn of our next-door neighbors house (the churchy people with two Dobermans). It is the ugliest car I have ever seen. The drivers door pops open and out steps Mark Hamill! Luke Skywalker! (Ive seen Star Wars about seventy-three times.) Mark Hamill is standing on my neighbors front lawn! I press my nose and hands to the cold window glass

And shock myself awake. I sit bolt upright and immediately look out the window. Its still nighttime, but theres no orange Gremlin on the neighbors lawn. My bedside clock radio is still softly playing because I have left it on to help me fall asleep. The DJ announces, And now a new song from David Soul. Hutch? The song begins, Dont give up on us, baby. Holy crap! Hutch is singing to me! He doesnt want me to give up my crush on Starsky. He wants me to keep watching the show!

The next morning, I carefully examine the neighbors grass for tire treads, not quite willing to believe it was just a dream. It seemed more real than reality. What is reality?

ARE YOU GONNA BE AN ARTIST WHEN YOU GROW UP? AN ARTIST? YES, ABSOLUTELY. GROW UP? HMMM. STILL WAITING.

I always wanted to draw, to make things; I loved to read, and TV was awesome. They werent just characters and storiessometimes they were companions who seemed as real as anything else. Sci-fi showed me there were alternate realities, places and times where things could be different. Fate and history werent boring straight linesthey were flexible and alive. They could be changed. On TV, Catwoman and Batman never seemed to get together, but who says they never could? In the movies, Zira has to die so her supersmart chimp baby can live, but on some other Planet of the Apes, in a different reality, maybe they could snuggle happily ever after. So whats real?

My mom used to make paper dolls for me, creating something magic out of markers and paper. That desireto make something out of nothingbegan like a spark that Ive carried inside forever.

If youre supposed to be an artist, youre supposed to go to art school, so I did. It was only after Id been at Parsons in NYC for a couple of years that I realized Id never really considered anything but art school. What if I was actually supposed to be an archeologist or an oceanographer? But art school and NYC won, and I surprised myself by graduating with a BFA with honors, and falling in love with a Canadian named Marcos.

My passing obsession with sea life left me with sketchbooks full of fish drawings, which helped me snag my first job illustrating a Japanese seafood cookbook, which in turn funded a month in Italy. And when I got back I didnt want to be an illustrator anymore; I only wanted to paint. A job at Franklin Furnace, an alternative art space in Tribeca, made that possible.

Back in those days I used to paint big, symbolist canvases that usually featured red-haired girls in some kind of peril. (She was under the sea being circled by sharks; she was bound up in a churchlike setting surrounded by robed figures; she was a zombie, splattered with blood. She looked just like me.) There was a lot of anxiety tied up in these images.

A trip to a Spanish Harlem junk shop one day changed everything. I found a stash of old tin lunch boxes, mostly adorned with simple plaid and paisley patterns or Love Is naked cartoon children. I immediately sanded off the existing images on one of them and primed the entire box for painting. Now was my chance to create something Id always wanted to seea lunch box celebrating the forbidden love of Batman and Catwoman! It was the most fun painting Id ever done.

The next week, I took the subway back up to Spanish Harlem and bought all the tin lunch boxes they had, packing them home in a big green garbage bag. I liked how the boxes were things, that they connected to my childhood, that theyd had a life before they became paintings. Then I got to work: the Lone Ranger frolicked with Tonto, Morticia schooled Gomez in the art of submission, the entire cast of Gilligans Island got busy. I wasnt making them as art; I was making them for me.

Shortly after that, I heard that a curator named Pam Sommers was having an erotic art show at her East Village gallery. I thought, What the heck? and found a friend to shoot slides of my lunch boxes. I nervously showed the slides to Pam, who looked at them in silence. When she got up and left the room, I thought, Okay, well, thats thatit was worth a shot. But she came back with a contract. Bring em all, she said. It was my first show and the beginning of my career as a painter.

I never expected or intended to leave New York City: I was born there, returned for college, and planned to leave only in a pine box. I was one of those New Yorkers who pitied people who didnt live there. Trips to other cities were invariably confusing (How odd! People actually seem happy to be here! Dont they realize theyre not in New York?), but it did seem that, if one got far enough away, the hypnotrance of New-York-is-the-center-of-the-universe-I-must-live-in-New-York could be broken.

It was on one of those little get away from New York head-clearing trips, when Marcos and I were shacked up in a small beach house on a little Greek island with a goat, a cat, and a bunch of fleas, that it suddenly occurred to us that there were other places in the worldwe could do more than just vacation in them, we could even live in them! We decided to move to San Francisco, the most distant frontier we could think of and a place we navely thought might be a bit like our Greek island.

We drove cross-country in our beater 64 Chevy Malibu, stopping at Graceland, the Devils Rope Museum, and whatever else caught our eye until we made it to the West Coast. Turns out you cant really shack up with goats in a beach house here, but on the plus side: no fleas! What San Francisco definitely had was a fun, casual art scene with lots of little art spaces, some of which came and went pretty quickly. It felt so completely different from New York: everything was lively and friendly and open (though we learned to eat earlier, since they rolled up the sidewalks around ten oclock at night).

I found I wanted to paint on something besides lunch boxes, which had too many surfaces and were starting to feel restrictive. When a friend suggested old TV trays, I felt like a cartoon lightbulb had lit up over my head. Of course! Readily available at the Salvation Army around the corner, they reminded me of dinners at my grandparents, they were self-framing (thrifty!), and they had the smooth, smooth tin painting surface Id become spoiled by.

About this time, I thought it would be fun to reference some old masters in my work. I was reading in Julian Barness A History of the World in 101/2 Chapters about Gricaults painting