Well friends
After some nine years of this project I have decided to put an end to this work.

You see, a few months ago, after the Bank moved into the building and the Flat Iron Artists Association was secretly hatched, during that time when the studios were undergoing their face lifts. When the halls were painted in the dead of night and posters (that had lined the walls for years 'guerilla style') were taken down. When we rose one morning to find everyone had been issued an 81/2 x 11 space in which to place an image... during that particular time STILL I went on jotting things down.


Things like how I STIILL thought painting was dead at least here in my neck of the woods...
and how these tiny images of floating pears, cartoon dresses, bland interiors crammed with home furnishings don't help matters. STILL I wrote on....
....about how a perfectly good show like The Artist's Project was ruined by a few from the FIAA
with painting kits from the dollar store. And how that shows' review written up in the Chicago Reader likened the show to the local outdoor neighborhood art fest.
And how perhaps taking their cue FROM this very review they did just that, placed their art in a tent, on the streets, during the neighborhood block party with a banner that read 'The Flat...etc .'
But....stilll......
...I wrote on....
....about how it was that this place never really a hot bed of creativity rather like 'the circus that broke down and stayed....' still it WAS interesting....for awhile. And in that freaky way. Way back in the 1990s.

But a few days ago while writing, with the first strains of the Stealth Bombers flying overhead ( Chicago's Air and Water Show) I began to imagine those thousands of folk gathered at the lake front....
submerged from the waist down,arms akimbo,gazing up at the heavens, perhaps one hand shielding their eyes, mouths open maybe drooling drunk with patriotic fervor...and thought I Have Had Enough...I will end the chronicling of the goings on here......because THERE IS VERY LITTLE GOING ON... now that the shopkeepers mentality has set in. And the little windows have all been cut into the halls' walls and the tiny paintings set on floating walls with price tags for anyone to see. It is a public building. And here comes that sound again....
" But folks there... is very.......little .... " and in the horrible roar of the approaching aircraft, I imagine some villagers on the other side of the world, hearing the same sound, seeing the same deadly shapes
in the skies over Iraq, Afghanistan and how they must feel, suddenly. Shit cold with fear.... NOT standing there but running for their goddamn lives along a pock marked Euphrates valley, children and the elderly in tow for some hollowed out tree trunk shelter and then the wait.

After awhile, I imagine too the new comers to the building with their good solid work...the brilliantly colored screaming heads, the WA-AP striped paintings and a few others. And no one to write about them, their work .And I thought about her in Studio 201 pursuing graduate studies in art education, closing her doors for now. How she once commented that there was no expression here only repetition. What sells is what gets repainted.
And good ole 'whats his name' on the third floor who I have known all these years. His small beautiful hand held drawings
..with their inscriptions on the reverse...there he goes now, stumbling across the six corner intersection in uniform. Living on a security guards wages, refusing to compromise ....but ....but...here comes that buzzing growing building to a shrieking roar sound.

Sound then.... it is what activates a dozen car alarms on the avenue, now it shakes the panes on all the little windows. It is the cause of everyone's ooooohs and ahhhhhs.....

But its well past my time here.

Its ended. Now comes the hard part....the rewriting,revisions;in short the editing.

The Flat Iron Years 1999- 2008
A work in progress