Central Park, 1976

I have always wondered what inspires artists.  Never having been any good at drawing or painting myself, I have always admired the extraordinary achievements of those who can. And I don't just mean the great names we find in art galleries, but the ordinary folk who devote their spare time to the craft. I may lack the skills, but I also lack the patience it must take to get the lines right or the pigments just so. And anyway, what gets them going?

I had been chatting about this with my mate Freddo during our hilarious visit to the Guggenheim Museum in New York. I had pushed his wheelchair up 5th Avenue from Times Square in the driving rain - no cab would take us - stopping only to empty his urine bag at a kerbside drain.

We were drenched when we arrived and attempted to dry off in the ground floor cafe. We were the only ones there, and  we took full advantage of the free coffee refills. And good coffee it was too, the aroma was tonic enough on it own.  Sated and less soaked we took the lift to the top floor and began our descent of the magnificent spiral corridor that gives the museum special charm. Our earnest intent was to take in the exhibits in a leisurely stroll.

That was until we noticed a bright orange stream running ahead of us down the slope. Both of us quickly realised what had happened. I had failed to fully close the tap on Freddo's urine bag. The medicine for his dodgy kidney turned his urine this colour. Luckily the appalling weather meant there were few other art lovers about, so I ducked down and secured the tap. Bingeing coffee, we realised, had not been such a good idea. We had to speed up and get well ahead of the offending stream before anyone could pin the blame on us. We dare not spend much time examining individual exhibits. I kept an eye over my shoulder because each time we did stop the stream threatened to catch us with us.

We soon had the giggles and our desire for a cultural experience took second place to a desire to quit the scene.  

Once outside, where the rain had stopped, we chuckled a lot as we made our way up to Central Park North where friends Ralph and Rachael had invited us for tea.  

And that was where the artist's inspiration thing really took over. Our straight-laced English friends were not impressed that we could not identify the paintings we had most enjoyed.  I dare not speak of the inauspicious manner of our escape from the Guggenheim, so I quickly reversed the events of the day and said we had been so wet and cold on the way down that we had decided a second visit would be required in better weather. We had hurried to the ground floor and the cafe to warm ourselves. We complimented the museum on the generosity of its coffee.

"Such a pity. What a wasted excursion," said Rachael."Perhaps you'd like to see my latest efforts. At least you won't be able to make comparisons with real artists!"

It turned out that she had been painting the nearby entrance to Central Park for more than year, ever since she and her husband had come to New York to take posts at New York University. On each side of the living room window there were two portraits of exactly the scene you could see from the window. One was very precise and realistic, almost like a photograph. The other was more of a close-up. in a fauvist style using strong colours to accentuate figures entering the park.

And behind us on the wall directly opposite the window was a large vista of the park, done in the stye of Lowry, full of 'matchstick' people making their way into the park from all directions.

Rachael was evidently a more than competent artist, but she had never exhibited.

"I am more of what Le Douanier Rouseau called a 'Sunday painter'," she explained. "But I try my hand at all the different 'isms', with varying degrees of success."

Taking hold of Freddo's wheelchair she led us through the apartment the corridor of which was strewn with images of what could be seen from their living room window. She must have had a lifetime of Sundays. There were slight variations in angle, it was true, but she had depicted the entrance in all weathers and seasons at different times of day and night, and in so many different styles. There was something obsessive about her vision.

"Did you never venture out into the park to paint," asked Freddo, baffled by the limited scope of her view.

"Oh no, far too dangerous," she replied quickly.

"It's almost as bad as the metro," cut in her husband."You make yourself vulnerable if it's clear you are a stranger. And stopping for any length of time in the Park is asking for trouble. Rachael is far safer painting at home."

It seemed rather sad that this most respectable and sophisticated English couple should opt for so sheltered a life.  

"Don't you use the metro for work?" I asked.

"Good heavens, no," said Ralph. "We have an excellent concierge who calls us a cab whenever we go out. We haven't walked the streets since we got here. Never. The streets aren’t safe, some have even collapsed into the subway. How you've managed to walk from one end of Manhattan to the other without being mugged is nothing short of a miracle these day. I suppose seeing a Black cripple in the wheelchair puts them off."

Freddo looked a little put out by Ralph's insensitivity, and I did not know what to say. Then Freddo saved the day.

"So Rachael, where are all these other pictures of Central Park you're been keeping hidden. There must be more, surely. I'd love to see your Cubist version."

Rachael chuckled."I have had a go, but I don't think it would pass muster."
She led as back along the corridor to a room we had yet to enter.

It was long large room with a set of three windows shrouded in thick, colourful 'William Morris' curtains. There was no furniture, just stacks of canvasses and boards of different sizes leaning against all the walls.

"Fff.. or goodness sake!" exclaimed Freddo, just managing to stifle an expletive.
"There must be hundreds of them."

"Let's have a look at some, then" said I, drawing back the curtain next to me.

"Oh don't!" cried Rachael, backing into the doorway and switching on the overhead light.

"We can't do justice to your work without the benefit of daylight." said Freddo, reaching up to pull back the middle curtain.

Rachael uttered a a shrill cry and disappeared into the corridor as I walked over and pulled back the third curtain. What they revealed was an astonishing array of windows on floor upon floor of an enormous tenement building on the other side of the road from their apartment block.

"Wow!" said Freddo, moving closer to the windows. "What a view."

"Talk about all human life is there," said I fascinated by the range of images that presented themselves at each of the opposing windows.

All thought of Rachael's canvasses was forgotten. Here was a panorama to take your breath away. We had been granted instant access to the lives of who knows how many people. We could see into 20 or 30 homes, few of which had lace curtains or curtains at all, and if we stood back none of them could see that we were watching.

Ralph appeared in the doorway.

"I'm afraid Rachael is rather... indisposed,"he started." She's gone to lie down for a while."

"I do hope we haven't upset her,"I asked.

"Well, it was the curtains, you see," he said, "The were kept drawn for a purpose."

"But why?," asked Freddo. "There are more than enough scenes out there to satisfy all the artists in the world."

"You don't have to tell me," said Ralph, pointedly avoiding the windows as he stood by the doorway. He bent down and began turning over the stack of canvassed nearest the door.  They depicted the entrance to Central Park, at dawn, at dusk, at midday and midnight. Another pile showed pretty much the same scene under snow and in brilliant sunshine. There was no doubt Rachael had a good eye and a sure hand.

"Why did she never look out these windows and paint what she saw?" I asked.

"Don't ask," he replied quickly

"But there are kitchen's and living rooms and bedrooms on display at all hours of day and night, and in all seasons." I said. "And so many different characters to capture. I could sit here and watch them for hours.""

"It may satisfy your voyeuristic tendencies," he said, looking darkly towards the windows. "Please close the curtains, and I'll explain everything."

Reluctantly we shut off the living tableau of bi-centennial New York life and returned to the living room with Ralph.

"That room used to be Rachael's studio," said Ralph. "She had it all set up, not for the view but for the light the windows provided.  There were no curtains then.  She would sketch at the window here, then paint what she had sketched from life. And gradually she built up quite a selection. She called it 'Visits to Central Park'.

"One day we went to visit a small gallery owned by Harry Marston, one of my colleagues in the law department at the university. She got into conversation with him and told him about her "Sunday painting". He expressed an interest and said that his friend Arias Schlechter was curating an exhibition of home-based - a polite way of saying 'amateur' - artists called 'Viewing Manhattan'.  He asked to see her work, so we invited him up to her studio for coffee one morning.

"He was very impressed with her paintings and sketches but announced that she was no 'Naïf' and so would not fit the criteria Schlechter had determined for his exhibition. Having complimented her on her disciplined approach to reworking the same scene, he turned to the windows and, like you, immediately demanded to know why she was not producing narrative paintings based on the stories being acted out under her nose.

"Rachel said she thought it was both prurient and unethical to depict peoples lives without their fore-knowledge.'Nonsense!' retorted Harry. "That's what you are doing anyway. Did you get permission from all those passersby and joggers and dog walkers that appear in your portraits in the park?'

"It turned into a good natured debate about the ethics of the painter's eye, and Harry insisted that she stand by the window with him and devise stories dramatising what she could see. It was a bit of harmless fun, but Rachael was hooked."

"After Harry left she turned her easel at an angle and began to sketch images of the tenement block. There was no definition in it other than the merest suggestion of what lay beyond the windows, and no people."

Ralph stopped, and looked troubled.

He asked if we recalled a shooting on the New York subway sometime ago when a man had shot dead a police officer, two subway staff, and five passengers, and then escaped capture during the rush-hour. He said a  photo-fit image of the alleged perpetrator had been on every news bulletin and newspaper for days, and in the entrances to every subway station for months.

And then, on the very first day that Rachael turned her attention to the tenement who should she see staring back at her, almost exactly level with her studio window, was a big black guy, the spitting image, she insisted, of the missing perpetrator. It gave her quite a turn. She was convinced he had seen her, and would be able to work out where she lived.

"It was devil of a job to convince her otherwise," said Ralph. "There are no black residents in this building and security is good, so I was able to reassure her. But she got vey jumpy on the streets, especially after we witnessed a nasty mugging involving a knife and a black youth right outside.

"I'm afraid she became a bit racist, and quite paranoid about going out. She started going to therapy, and what was their advice but - 'Get back on the horse'.

"And so she did. For a while she would not go in the room without me but when I came home, we'd have a cocktail and I would sit with her at the easel while she sketched for an hour.

"After a while she got her confidence back and spent whole days in there. She began to create stories by removing the window frames from the picture and run  together people and things that were happening in different rooms, different apartments, different floors even.

"It was fascinating. Until the day I came home and found her quivering under the bedclothes. She was convinced she had witnessed a murder."

"Not the same black villain again?" Freddo asked.

“No, no," answered Ralph. "In fact I do not know if there was even a murder. She had been quite literally tracing some domestic violence, except that it was happening in different apartments. She'd seen a young man striking a young woman in one kitchen, an older woman lashing out at an elderly man in a wheelchair in another, and a teenager hitting his younger brother in a bedroom.  She was trying to make sense of it all when she looked out the window and saw a man with a huge knife plunging it over and over again into the back of somebody whose age and gender she could not determine.

"She dialled 911 and told them which floor it was on, but when the police turned up here they said they had found no trace of a body or blood in any of the apartments on that floor. They were quite heavy with her about calling out the police under false pretences, and when they looked at her sketches they just suggested she mind her own business and do something better with her time ad her talents."

"She was beside herself when I got home, and asked me to move her easel into the living room. The next day she got me to measure up for the curtains, and we got someone in to put them up. Only then would she go back into the room to store her Central Park efforts.

"We have never been sure what she saw, or if indeed she saw anything. She has barely left the apartment since. I am quite worried about her reaction to your opening of the curtains."

"We are really sorry, Ralph," I began.”We didn't know."

"We couldn't know" added Freddo, unhelpfully

"Well, and I am sorry, but I think you should go now."

As we made for the door, Ralph reminded us to ask the concierge to order us a cab. We asked him to pass on our apologies to Rachael and he put his hand on my arm.

"Oh, would you like to choose one of her paintings?"

"Next time, perhaps,” I said Freddo, knowing full well that he and I had as much intention of returning as we had of revisiting the Guggenheim.