A while ago, I contacted Carol LeWitt to arrange a convenient time to visit Sol’s studio in Chester, CT. I had never visited it in all the years since Sol took leave of us in 2007.
She asked me if I wanted to work in it. I didn’t know that there was such a possibility and I said, “Sure, I would love to!”
Carol said I could come any time. We settled on dates in September, 2024.
Now on the other side of this residency, I can say that my experience there was unlike any other I have ever had.
I had originally inquired about merely visiting because I was sure that some kind of penetrating energy existed in the space and I wanted to feel that. But doing my work in the studio tapped an extraordinary energy exchange I could never have anticipated.
The project I designed for the residency involved reconciling and combining the work I did in the past with the work I was doing in the present. I think that my idea would have suited Sol’s art-making paradigm.
In the last decade, I did a group of 70-72 inch square drawings. Three of them were exhibited: one in California; one in Connecticut; and one in DC, which was purchased for the lobby of a luxury apartment building on Connecticut Avenue in the district. One remains in storage.
The photographs I had taken of the drawings were enlarged to 24 inches square and printed on archival photograph paper. Each had an 8-inch all-around margin where I could draw. I intended to embellish the printed photographs with added lines or color and place images in the margins by tracing stencils inscribed on vellum or tracing around templates I had cut out, a long time ago.
Let the truth be told that I was so aware of how much time these drawings would take to make that I did the first one at home and also started the second one.
When I arrived at Sol’s studio and began to unload my materials, I caught myself being of one mind: to do my work. I wasn’t star-struck upon entering Sol’s space. Maybe the reason was that Carol helped me carry the plastic storage boxes holding my pencils and pens and my electric pencil sharpener. In doing so, she had leveled the field. She had removed the idea of the untouchable quality that could be attached to Sol’s studio. She said: “Everything is meant to be used.” I took that to mean the furniture. I was not going to move things around. I was not going to touch his pencils, his paints or the drawings and photographs hung everywhere with tacks or staples. The studio is a museum. His studio was as he had left it. With some minor adjustments for the purpose of preservation; for instance, the notes, postcards, photos, and pieces of paper on his bulletin board were taken down and a huge 15 foot long photograph of how they were originally positioned replaced them. The picture is quite amazing; it gives the impression everything that mattered to him was still there.
When I left my own studio, I swept everything off my drawing table and put it into a shoe box, thinking that I would need whatever tools I had already used to make the first drawing and the entire series of six drawings I had made before that. Having no fear, I dumped the pencils and pens in the shoebox onto Sol’s large table. Sol had done gouaches here.
He used more than one surface for doing his gouaches. I could imagine when he would paint one after the other in different sizes. On more than one working surface. He would have been standing.
I had to pull his wooden drawing chair up to the table in order to work. I was sitting in his chair.
Every morning, I started working after breakfast. Normally, at home, I would begin at noon or so. Already three hours were added to my workday.
Everyday after leaving the studio, I would do stretches, have dinner with Carol and friends or by myself, watch the sequel series to Sex in the City, and go to sleep.
By the fourth day, I was getting tired. The drawings were going so well. I had hung the finished one on the painting wall on the first day.
And then on the third day, I hung the second one. The content of the imagery at the top of the second drawing took time to put together. It was not symmetrical, then symmetrical, as I built up from the middle; then I finally said to myself, let go… measure this part, place the stencil of the lily blossom on the paper and draw it and I did and it was pink and red and black.
I would sometimes open the door in front of me to feel the still warm air and hear the birds. That third day, a hawk pushed off the roof with such force, the loud sound triggered me to look up. It landed on a high branch of one of the beech trees. The hawk rested there and then flew away just as I looked down again. I wondered if Sol had come to visit…
The third drawing was different from the first two. Coloring in the shapes already presented by the formal drawing pictured was the only course I could take; no more lines were necessary. How to color in the shapes posed challenges. I realized that the kind of hatching I had used in the original lines had to be imitated. And that’s what I did; in four layers within each shape.
Because the third drawing was so active in the middle, I knew that I had to choose the images for the margins that were black and simple to solidify and emphasize the center. When finished, the drawing seemed weirdly anthropomorphic. I was happy when it went up on the wall. The completion of the project was in sight. Only one more drawing to do.
The last drawing I started on the Friday, the fifth day of my week in Chester. I did the central section, putting a single line right in the center of the wider silver lines depicted in the photo. It was as if I were making a map. At times, the direction I was to go was unclear, but I somehow always made the right decision.
The music that had been playing from my phone had been jazz for the whole week. I switched it to classical so that my mind could slow down. I continued on the drawing by tracing one of the templates in the bottom margin. But it was late. Time to stop. I had two more days of the weekend to go. I was in good shape.
On Saturday morning, I finished the bottom margins and started to trace the shapes along the sides of the photograph. It was noon. I had to get out for a while so I took the path to town in back of the studio.
Lots of people were walking down the sidewalk. Lots of people were eating lunch and chatting at tables set up in front of restaurants. I decided to buy dinner at one of them where I had eaten years ago. Sol’s work was on every wall. I sat at the bar while the food I ordered was prepared. Soon, it came; I put it in my bag. On the way back, I took a detour into the Chester Gallery and wound up buying a small Richard Ziemann print. With dinner and new art in hand, I returned to the studio.
Carol and her companion and I went to a dance performance at Yale Saturday evening. We left at 6:15. On the way in, we were facing west on the highway. We could see the sunset. It was one of the most spectacularly colorful ones I have ever seen.
On Sunday, with classical music playing, and welling up with exuberance over finishing my project, I tackled the last major section of the fourth and last drawing. The memory of the sunset the night before had stayed with me. The colors were the spectrum. The spectrum was Sol’s palette. I had been staring at examples of it for the entire week.
So I chose a stencil of two lilies and their shadow, turned it on its side, measured to center it and traced it on the top of the page. I dove into the shape with a color of slate grey as had been reflected by clouds I remembered seeing and worked my way up through an ideational sun and the atmosphere around it to a purple finish. All that remained was to draw the final ruled black border around the outside edges of the drawing and the handdrawn pencil line, which somehow documented the area between the most engaging and least drawn-on parts of the drawing.
I signed and dated it and hung it on the wall with the others. And as I was doing so, I examined its left edge for some reason, and numbers that Sol had written on the homosote jumped out at me. He must have been figuring out the span needed to evenly hang three 41-inch drawings next to each other with 15-inch borders on either end.
A fitting discovery after completing a test of determination that was my week in Sol’s studio. How extremely grateful I am that it happened.
copyright 2024 Lyn Horton
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