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Part of this, for the time being, all-consuming show is filling a four foot by seven foot display case. A place for ephemera related to the “Witness” show. I could fill ten of those cases with my father’s sketch books but there is only one.

I snuck a few mug shot flyers out of the office when I worked for the cops in 1976 so I’ll show those. They used a transparent overlay system back then called “Identikits” to construct what perpetrators might look like. This kind of mustache, this kind of smile, a wide range for goofy haircuts. Some of the suspects are pretty Frankenstein-like.

I saved the newspaper clipping from the time the District Attorney bought my sketch of Arthur Shawcross. And I’ve been cutting out the Crimestopper page since the Times Union was around. My sister, Amy, saved a few articles about my father that describe him out there in all four seasons sketching the Can of Worms construction project. And there’s a 1970 letter from my father to my brother who was serving time in an Ohio prison for a a minor pot infraction. The letter is precious for a number of reasons. I recommend it.

When my brother, Mark, was up last he talked about his reaction to my latest batch of drawings. I liked what he said and I asked if he could write it down.

“Looking at my brother Paul’s paintings, based on mug shots, always brings up a mix of thoughts and feelings for me ranging from artistic appreciation to memories of personal experience. They’re all portraits of real, and various people who are sharing a certain exceptional experience. They’ve just been arrested, stopped suddenly in the tracks of a free life, and are being transitioned to captivity. They’re all entitled to the presumption of innocence. But it’s a hugely degrading experience. They’re now prisoners, about to be put in a cage. Yet for me Paul’s paintings expose their dignity, their humanity – their emotions: of fear, sadness, embarrassment, defiance, anger, or resignation.

For some this is their first arrest. For others it may be another of many. But they were all innocent children once. They all have families, most probably have families that really care about them. I did when I was arrested in 1970. It was a cold February night and I felt free enough to leave my college dorm with a couple of friends and walk to a distant ball field to smoke a joint. We were looking forward to returning to the dorm to listen to “Let It Bleed,” The Rolling Stones album that just had come out. Then the cops came around a corner, with guns drawn, and in that instant I lost my freedom.

I was handcuffed, forced into a patrol car, then fingerprinted, photographed, and locked up. Paul’s paintings capture people at this border moment, when they’re told to stand at a wall and how to hold their head. They’re portraits but not in the usual circumstances, and I see the dignity in all of them, as I’m reminded of my own experience.”

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First Friday in September. Gallery night out. We started with the show at R Gallery on College Avenue. Mitch Goldstein’s large scale abstract photograms made from small objects. Both were artfully displayed in the front room. The back room was surround projections from Nancy Bernardo. She creates intentional and accidental glitches by manipulating the scanner bed while digitizing and then layering the results in moving pictures.

“Under Pressure,” Rochester Contemporary‘s new show features work by four printmakers, very unusual printmakers. They push the boundaries of printmaking big time. We spent quite a bit of time talking to Michael DeLucia about his high tech process for making low tech contact camera-less prints and 3d cork sculptures. They were beautiful and the more questions you ask about the work the more engaging they became.

Mizin Shin (photo above) really wowed us in the Lab Space. That space has been transformed as never before with her B&W silkscreen and woodblock prints.

We finished our night at Roc Brewery where A.R. Stone’s early aerial photos of downtown Rochester were on display. Stone’s great great grandson was on hand to talk about the prints that were handed down from his grandmother. He told us how she accidentally broke the glass negatives so we were looking at the only surviving prints. The Brewery crafted a beer named after Stoney for the evening.

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Peggi spotted this sign on the road to Mexico. Mexico, New York over near Oswego at the western end of Lake Ontario. We were in the back seat of Jeff and Mary Kaye’s car traveling up to Watertown to buy organic maple syrup and I was doing something on my iPad. I’m thankful Peggi spotted it. It’s a beauty.

It seemed like a long ways to go to buy maple syrup but when Jeff asked if we wanted to ride along we said, “Sure.” They used to belong to some sort of food co-op and they liked the syrup so they called the number on their empty container. Jeff called the guy again when we were close to town and had us meet him at the Sunoco Station on Rt. 81.

He was with his girlfriend but she never got out of the car. They looked like they might be Native Americans. He dropped his receipt book when he got out of the car and he bent over in slow motion to pick it up. He told us he doesn’t get out in the woods anymore because he had a downhill skiing accident. He buys most of his syrup from others but no synthetic defoamers or formaldehyde pellets are used in the trees. I wished he hadn’t told us that. It’s the last thing I would have thought of. And added that a rabbi had just been up to his warehouse so his syrup was kosher too.

We made the deal and Jeff put the containers in the trunk. It felt like a drug deal but it all went smoothly. We came back through Sodus in time to have dinner at El Rincón.

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We got a message from the woman who bought our old house that our former neighbor, Sparky, was in the hospital. Apparently he had a stroke. He had just stopped down here a couple of weeks ago and he looked so good we were thinking he had stumbled on the fountain of youth.

I’ve probably namedropped Sparky in these pages more than anyone else. Ours is such an unlikely association. We lived next door to each other for twenty six years and our first morning there the woman he was married to for a short time rang our bell with a pot of coffee in her hand. Her first words were, “We’re so glad you’re not niggers.”

We stayed away from them for years. They divorced, she left and we’d talk to Sparky over the fence. He collected junk and fixed things. He gave a us a mower that he found on the street and repaired. I started sneaking photos of him. Little did I know at the time that he loved it when you took his photo.

He played guitar and liked country music. He burned garbage in a barrel behind his garage. He told us he shot a sewer rat out front. He blew our minds and we became intrigued with his every backyard activity. Before we moved, I had keys to his garage and his shed.

We stopped up to see him in the hospital. He’s doing physical therapy but he is in rough shape. We made a card for him with this photo on it.

Listen to Sparky’s Shed by Invisible Idiot (Margaret Explosion)

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