Found Objects: The West Hollywood Years

M Y   A R T — I was reminded today, on another blog, of the found objects I have always accumulated in my lifetime. I can't help it, my father did the same thing. After he retired from the service, he worked in Manhattan and with the two-hour drive, each way, and the fact he drove a pickup truck most of the time, he often came home with unbelievable stuff. Once he came home with a brand new lounge chair, still in the box, which apparently had fallen out the back of the tractor trailer! There was no name on the box for a store, so we kept it. He came home once with a dozen different women's shoes, the left shoes only. Apparently they were used in a window display and then discarded but he found them attractive and gave them to my mother who just looked at him, and without missing a beat told him they weren't her size. They ended up being nailed to the wall in the garage and in his workshop, becoming objets d'artes. I come by my talents the old-fashioned way—I inherited them, lol.

This leather cap was found in the middle of Santa Monica Blvd one night between 4am and 6am. I left a club around 3am in Hollywood, and walked home to my apartment all the way to West Hollywood near the Whisky-a-Go-Go on Sunset Blvd, finding this cap, a pair of pants, a shirt, a dinner jacket, a pair of boots and a box of socks along the way. They were all in different areas of town. Who knows what the story was for any of them? I put each item of clothing on over my 'other' clothes, and by the time I got home I was deliriously happy. And just plain delirious, if truth be told. I still have the dinner jacket and the leather cap, although that was the last time I wore either one of them.

This drawing dates to that period, 1981. The Saran Wrap covering has been on the drawing since new, and I won't ever take it off. That's the best I could do to 'frame' it and protect it at the time, and speaks volumes about my life then. And now.