At the National Portrait Gallery

Dreams of My Grandfather

By David Houston
Junto Staff Writer Bio
Now treading the last waters of consciousness, the figures from
Dreamland poised around me like players in a game of Red light Green
light, ready to resume, waiting for my attention to shift a little more.

On a silent cue, we all exhale and take up the Play again. I am in a
theatre, or club. It looks  like  a fancy house from the 1840's that has
seen better days, slightly frayed red damask walls, gas light fixtures.

Upstairs everything is smaller, the ceiling only as high as a man can
reach, like in early times. I am expected somewhere downstairs, but I'm
not sure where, I am not familiar with this place, still discovering it.

There is a sense of foreboding, anticipation. I go out onto a balcony
that wraps around three stories of the lobby. There is light, activity,
I hears voices. I go down. There, around a long table sits my Grandfather
and, on his right, Ben Franklin, and then James Madison, and perhaps eight
or nine others.

I'm so distracted trying to keep acting normally and process "Ben Franklin"?  "People from a different centuries?"  I don't register who the rest are. My Grandfather welcomes me very warmly
like a much favored grandchild. I feel about eight years old in his company. I am a little taken back because I never knew him in this life; he died before I was born.

There is a large document on the table, parchment, they are planning something. There is one of those moments where it is silently and quickly translated from unknown to known, but only the vague outlines. I'm asked what I think.

"Yes, yes" I silently ascent, although I have no clear idea to what. Inside I am busy on two
tracks. One, that we might still be involved with this world, even planning new things for this world after we die  It hardly seems worth it, to call it dying, that I am so warmly favoured by my Grandfather, really that he even knows me.

He was always reported to be formidable, distant from my Father, who in turn was reserved, distant from me. I just assumed that I would never be accepted into the fold on that side of the family.

This dream, this encounter really, was a right of passage for me, a rite of acceptance. Rather shaky ground to base this on I know but my only other contact was putting a cotton beard
on his portrait at Christmastime.
                                                                  
When we went to see the painting on a trip back to Washington with the family, something told me it was venturing too far into the past, or was untoward to move the memory of his painting to such a public place. I couldn't really tell, and anyway couldn't see the harm. We finally located where the painting was hung, it was in the National Portrait Gallery. It was done when he was Secretary of Agriculture in President Wilson's Cabinet.

Anyway when we located the gallery and turned the corner, there we were met by an entire blank wall of milky plastic taped off all around, floor walls and ceiling. The gallery  was undergoing
renovation. In the Art of Memory, the technique for remembering things by placing them in a familiar place or temple, it is perhaps untoward or at least disruptive to go back and see that the skeleton of your memories is completely reordered.

I had the same feeling when I went back near my college, and was opening lots of old doors. Well, again, what's the harm, when was I going to be back again anyway now that I live in California? I headed over. Half way there the road was completely blocked by a pile of dirt ten feet high. I think they must have taken out the bridge, or something to go to such measures. I turned
back, I didn't go around the other way.
Washington is great for places that stay the same year in and year out. The National Gallery, where it is always the same temperature and humidity as well, hit me full force, seeming to neatly
gather up all the visits going back to when I was 12, and in such a way that I was re-seeing everything with eyes of a now 40-year-old.

At 12, it was "my" collection and I took it for granted that like the movies that came to town two months after they opened in New York, a little behind. Now there were Masterpieces looming from every wall. I got Stendhal Syndrome. Embarrassing, I thought it was fictive, an
affectation or an artifact from a more refined time of fainting couches and smelling salts.

Stendhal Syndrome, overcome by an excess of beauty, turns out to be about as much fun as car sickness. Like a carnival ride going too fast my stomach got queasy and the power started to drain from every limb. I had to get out of there, fast. Literally shielding my eyes from an entire roomful  of Velasquez on the way, I found my way to a side door and sat down. There beside me was the date the building was erected. MCMXL, 1940, only seven years older than I.

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David Houston Shudders His Bug

David Houston is a Junto Staff Photographer

Lily Pulitzer Pink Stuff and Dave

A Christmas Gift For It

By David Houston

Junto Staff Writer
My late mother was a great gift giver, great in a special way. She didn't so much hit the bulls-eye, as simply knock the target down. Her last present to me was a pair of pink Madras Bermuda shorts with a pink polo shirt. Truly stunning!

Before that I was gifted with what I called the poodle pelt sweater (no poodles were harmed); it was made in a giant criss cross puffy cable knit pattern, each puff about the size and texture of a teacup poodle. It inhabited its own spot in the left field of aesthetics, not so-bad-it's-good, not camp, too ugly to be gay, a stand alone item, very alone.

One Christmas she sent an apricot colored sweater. Hmmmm. I was wearing it to a Robert Raushenberg/Tricia Brown event and took it off. At the end of the piece, which involved dancers climbing around on a big web, they brought out a pile of used cloths and there was some kind of audience participation bit. My sweater got caught up in it and was never seen again, somewhat to my relief because I knew I'd wear the thing,
telling myself it was somehow 'subversive' to mess with people's expectation.

Anyway when I told Robert, thinking it was funny how involved I'd gotten, he apologized up and down and invited me to his loft for dinner. While at the table, I noticed a groove in the molding about half an inch from the floor. A minute later a turtle came out from behind a side-boy and very, very slowly made it's way across six feet of open area and disappeared behind a chair. Twenty minutes later it made the return
trip. And then back again, over and over all evening.

Eventually I had to ask about it, the turtle. 'Oh, he's blind. That's where he lives now. His shell has worn that groove in the baseboard.'

In my memory the turtle is paired with the beaver in the Central Park Zoo that made a dam endlessly. It was terrible place run on the notion that if it were a children's zoo it was OK to have 'children's size' enclosures for the animals.

So the result was one beaver in a seven foot wide concrete pool with one piece of wood, a piece of a branch about a foot long that he would take out of the water, carefully
arrange, take back into the water, return, arrange 'next' to the ghost of itself, back in the water, arrange again and so on until he had a dam you could almost see, and all with only one piece of wood.

OK,back to my mother. I thought of her recently when I got a little loose at a Sunday-Go-to-Meeting clothing store the other day and became the owner of a pair of pistachio- coloured shoes. I got them to go to a costume ball. The Art Deco Society has different Twenties, Thirties and
Forties dress up events, and you'd be surprised that the guys are straight and the girls are detail perfect.

It's kind of spooky, actually,the hair everything. They look like people I knew who would be 95 years old today. I am sort of the walker for one of my friends who became my daughter's play Auntie.

That's how I end up at these things. Having
lived through it once, that is, come home from school to a stack of invitations to dances where, guess what 'Dad' has hired an orchestra that sounds like Mitch Miller, and it's now 1964.

I'm not that taken by the scene. Perhaps it shows and contributes to the looks I get, equal parts bewilderment and consternation. I've sometimes wondered if there isn't a special catalog for moms, filled with screamingly 'off' presents: lilac chenille bathrobes with gigantic poofs, shirts with huge grating plaid patterns, pointy grapefruit spoons to confuse the young, gravy boats for the vegetarians, the list goes on....

Fellini of Fotographs I: David Houston

How It's Done

By David Houston

Staff Writer/Photographer

Initially I had to learn lighting in order to take decent slides of my
sculpture, a sort of miniature stage lighting, really. In broad , even
light they looked plain, they lost expression and in hard or clear light
they became almost unreadable, like corn beef hash or something.

I worked in terracotta from models with a group for twenty years and then by myself on longer poses, partly so I could do multiple figures. The models were from the Model Guild, and few of them were art students so
you would see what the popular mind thought an 'artistic' pose should be without the overlay of art school brainwashing....

I mean teaching. The best models were dancers and actors because they knew to stay in character, that the pose was interior too.

One of the things that make the pictures stand out is that it is the same hand doing the background painting, make-up, costumes and lighting. At the same time, what makes them so much fun is the collaboration, being the 'mirror' for the models, creating a setting and then encouraging and praising [and pampering plus a little white lying] until sort a dance starts.

We usually shoot for three hours so I end in a flop sweat. From my own experience in dance I know how important it is to get a flow going so I use all 'yes's' and keep shooting rather than critique or correct to get what I want. Another side of this is that it sounds so much better to say 'Isn't she great!?' than, 'Aren't I great? Much easier to promote, in other words.

You would be surprised how small the sets can be, only eight or ten feet wide. Also the level of detail is very low because once things are shrunk down to picture size all the little and not so little flaws disappear. And lighting effects are even funkier: a branch in front of the light, water tossed on a mirror, light bounced off crunched up
mylar, exhaling on the lens to steam it up -- anything goes.

I use all hot lights because I like the look of stage lighting, performance photography, film noir and old MGM glamour lighting. Most of the photography you see day to day is brightly lit, soft and round and all
about focus and detail. I want to make pictures that take longer to see, that draw you in.

The early work is 35 mm, then I got a Hasselblad medium format and also a Contax 645 [same size film but more frames which are rectangular instead of square]. I also use a Canon digital which is remarkably good.

At a show last August, I set up a studio at the gallery and brought costumes and props and shot portraits at the opening. I would like to do more of that partly because of the value portraits hold for people. When we had the big fire in '91 and three thousand homes burned, people's photographs were the thing mentioned over and over as
the only thing they missed.

(David Houston, a Junto staff writer and photographer, lives and works in Oakland, California).

Fellini of Fotographs II: David Houston

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