I begin these stories in the same way most people do. They begin during my college years. Yes, these years are pivotal in many respects for most artists. And somehow the arts and the time spent in colleges and Universities are closely intertwined But I believe that the real path into the world of art begins much earlier,….in childhood. College and any form of higher education does little but solidify that which occurs early in life. At least that is how I perceive what happened to me.
I have written a good deal about my childhood view of things, and of what one day became an art career, and I’m sure if you look around you will find a lot of material on my early years. Here, however, I am focusing on the world I experienced when in school and immediately afterwards.
I am only making this point so that you do not confuse what I say about art in my college years and beyond with the more important reality one experiences at the true origination of the spirit of one’s life in the arts.
Like any artist, I started out working in a variety of materials. in school, I did a number of bad paintings, then fairly quickly moved on to bad sculpture. I explored a number of disparate ideas, attitudes and possibilities as well.
After I graduated from the University of New Mexico with a double major in Art and English, I got a truck and a camper and took off for the great unknown. Traveling mostly around the western part of the US, I looked at magnificent vistas until I was sick to death of them, wandered around aimlessly, occasionally looking at or meeting women and when I had to. I would get a job that I was qualified for: mowing lawns, painting houses or doing the best manual labor anyone had ever seen at the time.
This was in the early 1970’s.
After my year or so of traveling, I felt lost and rootless. Just the idea of coming to a stop and staying in one place made me nervous. Up until that point, I always had every option open. No commitment at all was the name of the game. To land in one place seemed very risky. However, if you want to make art that means you have to be grounded, at least to some degree.
Following the lead of a friend I’d known since childhood, I settled in the country near Denton. Texas. I was still under the sway of nature-loving hippies. I decided being in the country and being isolated was necessary for my artistic temperament.
I had planned to go back and get my masters, and I assumed I would teach, since as far as I knew, universities were the only breeding grounds for artists that still existed. I even started taking courses at North Texas State in Denton.
Then I made the mistake of listening to people who were older and wiser than I was.
“Kid,” he said, “the teaching jobs are all gone now .... there are not enough art students to keep everyone of us employed.” This was said by a knowledgeable, tenured professor. I listened to him and decided to quit my own pursuit of knowledge, at least the academic kind.
Meanwhile the only artist I had made friends with at the University of New Mexico went on to get his masters, taught at a very good school, made connections that got him into major shows and New York art galleries, and he had a successful career.
I instead got a job via my cousin in a very good Dallas, Texas contemporary art gallery. My cousin was gay, and he lived with the man who had started the gallery. I guess that knowing the right people and having the necessary connections counts more than plain old ordinary knowledge. It certainly didn’t hurt.
Mowing lawns had been a big step forward in my career as an artist but working in a really good art gallery was in a class all its own.
Since I was giving up on the prospect of an academic career, I decided to spend the money I had set aside for graduate school on tools. At that time, I mainly bought wood working tools as wood was the material with which I was most familiar.
So, soon the decision was made; I would set up a studio and make the things I wanted to make. It was that simple.
I set up my first studio in the slums of Dallas and worked at night on my art. During the daytime hours, I would work at the gallery, and I would also go into the homes and businesses of the wealthy and deliver artwork to those who could afford it. I was meeting the crème de la crème of Dallas society but with little or no fanfare.
What I saw, based on my situation was that in the wealthy areas of Dallas, the men, and especially the women looked immaculate and healthy, while in the slums, where I lived, many of the women (and men) were missing some if not all of their teeth . They got around while missing hands or arms and sometimes legs and feet. Generally, my neighbors looked quite dirty, fairly beat up, and unkempt. There was a dire need for more personal groomers in that neighborhood.
Eventually though, after the novelty wore off, I got tired of leading this double life, so I took a short vacation, and I traveled the familiar road to Albuquerque, New Mexico, and my intentions were to think long and hard about what I wanted to do next. I struggled with that question as I visited a number of people I had known since first going to the University.
I also met a sculptor who made some amazing things out of wood, and I immediately wanted to know everything about how he put his work together. His name was Julian Harr, and I wanted to spend some time with someone I took as a professional artist. Julian was simply set up in a workspace, living cheap, and working at his art. Sound familiar? Since the big question for me was “what do I do next?” the idea of simply emulating someone else whose lifestyle made sense to me seemed like a pretty good answer. I decided to move back to Albuquerque and abandoned the Dallas art scene.
During the year or so I spent in Dallas, I did make some art. I worked with glass and mirrors and old wood. I was excited about the artwork I was doing and felt it had a lot of potential. It dealt with a lot of optical illusions, and I had always been interested in illusion, magic and the like.
However, many of my hopes and dreams failed to materialize while I lived in Dallas. The people at the gallery never proclaimed me one of the world’s greatest living artists as I would have liked them to. In fact, they never saw anything I made, and had no idea that I aspired to be an artist. I was not at all confident in my own abilities, and I could not get comfortable with the idea of approaching people to ask them to look at the artwork I was making. I assumed that no matter what I accomplished, the people at the gallery would always see me as someone who they could ask to move art from one place to another, or as a person who could build a crate if necessary. I could see nothing that I could do that would change any of that.
However, in the university, no one had even posed the question, “How are you going to survive in the hostile world of art?” or “Realistically, will you be able to continue to make your art when you leave this school?”
In the university system, “Art” was seen as a rarefied experience, and it was exalted as something that was in many ways outside of the world of everyday life. Dallas exposed me to the gallery system and to the people in it. Art was much less theoretical when I left. I had met a number of “successful” artists and realized Art did not exist only in the universities but was rather hidden in plain sight.
There was much to absorb. I was on my path, and it was time to move on.The change was to be both mental and emotional and it was life altering. I found myself striving to come to grips with all that was happening to me. I began to hang out with Julian, help him with his work, and soon I considered him my mentor.
Once back in Albuquerque, I set up a much better studio than I had in the slums of Dallas. I continued to buy tools every chance I got and working at my art had become my new passion. It was now at the center of my life. I was once again making things and exploring ideas and that kept me motivated. I also stayed very busy doing odd jobs to stay afloat. In addition, I lived right in my shop/ studio (a dilapidated cabinet shop) to save money.
Hanging out with Julian Harr was exciting in many, many, ways. He was an outsized individual with an out sized personality. Learning happened spontaneously. And not only did I pick up some much-needed wood working skills, but Julian taught me everything someone should not do if they want to continue being an artist for any length of time.
Julian had a rich girlfriend who had bought him some expensive and wonderful tools and he had promised to build her a house. For some reason, he never quite got around to building the house. Instead, he drank a lot of beer, partied a fair amount, and hung out with some other very good artists…. including his friend John Wenger, who taught art at UNM and was a wonderful painter.
At that time, Julian talked incessantly about a theory he had which may well have solved all the great mysteries of the universe. He was well versed in a number of esoteric ideas and was constantly probing those ideas and questioning his (and my) thinking. The theory he was propounding at that time seemed to have a great deal to do with evolution.
His obsession with his theories may have played a part in his failure to build the promised house …..as he was much too busy thinking and talking to do menial tasks like earn a living or fulfil promises. His subsequent estrangement from his rich girlfriend was a faite accompli. She had stopped sending him money about the time I arrived on the scene, which was aggravating, and not all that helpful for Julian. Every so often he would sell something he had made which helped to keep him afloat and moving forward. Then, Julian got invited to be in a major sculpture show at the Santa Fe Museum, and he became even more obsessed with his ideas and a belief that he could persuade others by way of his artwork.
However, with his new lack of funding, Julian made a fateful decision. To make this big sculpture for the museum show he needed a lot of materials. Materials cost money and he had little or none of that.
Fortunately, there was a pawn shop nearby and it was a short walk which was also good, as Julian had no vehicle. He soon developed the habit of pawning his tools to raise enough money to buy more materials. This happened not just once, but quite often over a period of months. When money showed up, the tools might come out of hock until it was necessary to hock them again. However, a deadline was looming, and as the important museum show grew ever closer, that took precedence over everything else. So, it was as if Julian was both creating and destroying in one glorious climax.
As I remember it, after a large part of the sculpture was put together and a lot of the sanding was done, there was a point that Julian decided he needed small wooden balls to complete his masterpiece. In fact, he needed a massive amount of them. He bought all he could, and his tools continued to be hocked. The sculpture that was nearing completion was huge, with many intricate individual pieces interwoven into it. Julian worked feverishly into the night gluing ball after ball to the piece. All of the significant areas were covered and just before he was due to head for Santa Fe with his piece, he worked for three days straight without a break. He was gluing wooden balls right up until the end.
The installation at the museum was extremely exciting. I was there pacing back and forth, and probably acting more nervous than the artist. The museum staff did everything, so I couldn’t stay busy doing mindless tasks and there was nothing left to do.
There was, however, a lot of good artwork to see. And right in the middle, of it all, front and center was Julian Harr’s masterpiece with the wooden balls covering absolutely everything.
The opening came and went and there was much exaltation. Many important people were there, and Julian was full of high spirits and high expectations. I cannot remember how long the show was up, nor much about the aftermath of the opening. But I do remember having vivid dreams around that time, and a pervading sense of impending doom.
The ending of Julian Harr’s time in Albuquerque was a bit anticlimactic. Julian literally had no money and no tools, and the prospects he had imagined for his big sculpture at the Santa Fe Museum failed to materialize. He looked out over his barren studio and decided to pack up his artwork, both finished and unfinished and head for San Francisco. His days in New Mexico had been spent, and there was little else he could do. In San Francisco a number of his artist friends awaited his arrival. I suppose the rich girlfriend who was evidently homeless, had Julian just where she needed him…. So, perhaps the house got built after all. I will never know.
Right before he left, he handed me a wad of pawn tickets. I never saw him again.
At the time my supply of money was also somewhat diminished, but I did manage to acquire some of his hocked tools which I still have today.
Julian left, and I went back to work. It was soon after my reacquaintance with Albuquerque that I was invited to be in a show at an artist-run space in Santa Fe. Since I had only recently settled in and had little new work ready for exhibition, I showed what I had put together in Dallas thinking that perhaps, my moment had come. However, my work drew no crowds, in fact I rarely saw anyone in the gallery, and I was immediately dismissed by a critic in the local paper with a single line: “Haddaway’s work is also much ado about nothing, he seems to care more about his titles than the actual work,” was the dismissive line.
Things did not look promising.
Photos:
Above: Ed Haddaway, Dream Child and the Virgin, early work
Below: Ed Haddaway, Old Fashioned Pyramid Case, early work
Julian Harr Sculpture
