After museum on Friday, I waited for all the students to leave before asking Frank to have dinner along with Rebekha. Happy that he said yes. I always love walking w Frank back to his home downtown from the Museum or the Park as we had done countless times over the years. Went picked up the car from garage. Knew better than parking at the MET which would charge an arm and a leg. I knew the ride downtown would be the only time we would have together. Ines said they no longer go out much. A few minutes together were what I long for beyond the zoom classes and occasion emails of the past 2 COVID years. Thankful for Friday's traffic rush hours, I would crawl down 5th ave from 86th street x-town to 2nd ave stretching time as long as possible. I drove up from the parking garage ito the front of the museum to pick him up in front of the MET. It was the 2nd time. The first was a year ago when he came out to look at the paintings and we also met at the museum. Both times, he waited for me in his usual wide brim hat w the shoulder pack and the light color springtime outfit. I never had a car when I was living in NYC so this would be purely a NJ experience of a man driving a large hybrid SUV crossing B&T to the MET picking up the greatest living painter. I quickly cleared up the front seat to remove any trace of evidence from being uber driver to 2 tween kids who feel absolutely entitled of making messes in the car. Frank settled in the car as if he had done a million times before. It was as if there had been no distance between us since Han, Isabelle and Oliver. At dinner he talked and laughed w them as if he already knew them thru me. To him, I am still the same person he once knew as reflected in what he saw in the paintings.
It was yesterday that we had cleaned out the DUMBO studio together to close out our 7 years of painting in the same studio: 3 in DUMBO & 4 in Chelsea. I remember my conversation with Rebekha right before we moved at the bodega down the street from the studio about our pending separation and the need to have a new context. She listened and nodded to my youthful need to show that she had understood but w sadness in her eyes. The year before, I saw how happy Frank was when he called Rebekha to tell her that we would stay together for another year. But isn't 7 years a milestone for a marriage to continue or not? We tried, didn't we? To stay together. All the meetings we had trying to find a new space to stay in DUMBO while the current space would soon expire to become someone else's condo bedrooms. Xena was travelling the world, Ines was busy w her next steps, Mike was ready to move on. David and I were the only ones who were left. I had already met Han. The current context was closing. Before 9/11, I remember all the nights by the Riverboat under the bridge after I had quit TIAA and was living in the studio worrying when the breakup would happen and felt lost w a lot of fears. Future then felt so uncertain. The family that Xena had envisioned was full when we were together but empty when we weren't. All the memories from the time we spent painting in Cornwall, Ireland, Scotland and France. The salons and painting shows that we had. Things would have been different if we had accepted the offer to buy the 26th street Chelsea studio @$135K/2000 sq ft. But I was scared to commit typical to my immature and fearful self. But was it? Who knew about time passing and the evolution of the self? No ones. After 3 yrs @ASL, my instinct then was only to continue to be w Frank and to begin my journey of opening up the pictorial space via a mutual community of shared creation and connection to universal consciousness in search for the Real. W my selling the Brooklyn Heights's co-opt that i had owned for 8 years previously while studying MBA @NYU, purchasing a physical space to create a lasting entity was not the context I was looking. I was not thinking in economic terms at that point in time: at 20 I had said no to my family in order to continue studying art and sculpture and at 30 I was nurturing my instinct to develop a spiritual/artistic space to survive against the onslaught of the rise of virtualism from the web and the internet. It was to paint or not and not about buying a property to last forever.
Driving down 5th ave amids the crazy mid-town traffic, Frank mentioned again about Cezanne and Pissarro and the time that they had spent painting together.
We talked as if we were continuing the conversation that we had left off from a year ago, or was it 15 years ago, may be 28 years ago? It felt timelessness w ease and normal.
Frank always talked about the next step just as Vit, his teacher had also told him. Frank always made me think that he knows that I know it as well. I felt it.
Frank has set the bench mark and points the way forward for what's next.
I dropped him off at 2nd ave and 6th.
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