80’s paintings

PAUL DODD PAINTINGS FROM THE 1980S

In the eighties I had a painting studio in our garage, one of those free standing wooden structures, set back from our 1917, four-square, city house. Built on a slab, the garage was not deep enough for a sixties era automobile so a previous owner had bumped out the lower half of the back end. I ran electricity out there and I put in an extra window, something I found on the street. It gave me more light and a pretty good view of Sparky’s backyard.

I was using mostly acrylic house paint, mis-mixed colors that I bought at Mayers Hardware on Winton for a dollar a pint. I painted on cardboard or plywood that I found on the street. A series of ten “World Leaders” sold at the Pyramid before I had a chance to properly photograph them. My Arthur Shawcross painting got some notoriety. The Sparky paintings were on plywood. And I painted on the back of big sheets of billboard paper that I got from Dave Mahoney’s father. He worked at the billboard company on Park Avenue. The Paper Faces, a Buffalo band that we played with quite a bit, used to hang pieces of billboards behind them when they performed. I just turned the paper over to the white side and painted on it.

I did a series of paintings for a Personal Effects record release party at the Warehouse and a series of Guinness Book of World Record paintings for a Pyramid Arts Center show. And later, a series of paintings of members of my extended family at their workplace for “The City” show at Pyramid Art Gallery.

ARTHUR SHAWCROSS 1989

COMMUNITY ICONS 1989

In 1989 I painted sixteen “Community Icons” for a show at Club Zero on Saint Paul Boulevard. Kathy Russo, who went on to marry Spaulding Grey, curated this show. She was a director at Pyramid Arts Center at the time. The Icons were based on real people in the Rochester Community but were painted as archetypes, the foundation of any city.

I was hopping parking meters out in front of Scorgie’s when I landed off balance, on one leg. It felt like I had jammed my leg up into my hip. I had never been to a chiropractor but I found one near my home in the city, on the corner of Cedarwood and Culver. Gary Seidel showed me how to free my sacroeiliac, which had locked up. He was also a musician, a trombone player, and he had a collection of African masks on his wall.

I liked the punk, bad boy, Mad Magazine, character that Armand Schaubroeck represented. His billboard, that hung over the expressway in the late sixties, was heroic.”Help Keep America Beautiful, Let it Grow.” And his tv commercials for the great House of Guitars are legendary.

Walter S. Taylor, founder of Bully Hill Winery, painted and designed eye-catching labels  for his winery. When Coca-Cola bought the nearby Taylor Wine Company, Walter was prohibited from using his family name on his product so he crossed it off after doing so. According to his NYT obituary he was found in contempt for pugnaciously violating the order. He become a quadriplegic after a van accident in 1990. I sent him a 8×10 print of my painting of him and he sent me this thank you letter.

Dick Storms opened his first Record Archive shop in the mid seventies, next door to Village Green Book Store on Monroe Avenue. I put an ad on their bulletin board when we first moved back here. I was looking for a band to play with. Kevin Patrick and Gary Trainer called me and New Math was formed. Dick started his own record label, Archive Records, and he put two singles out by our band, Hi-Techs. He is a renowned garage sale hound and ran a cool shop called Weird Furniture for many years.

In the mid seventies Susan Plunkett was one of the owners of Hoosier Bill‘s, a restaurant on Monroe Avenue, down where the Bug Jar is now. She started her own restaurant, a health food place, in the old firehouse where the food co-op was. She called it Jazzberry’s. She booked bands in there and eventually moved uptown on East Avenue. We did some work for her, the big banner she hung outside when Dizzy Gillespie played there. My parents went to that show.

I first met Martin behind the counter at Midtown Records where we decided to put a band together. Martin bought a bass for our first rehearsal, an instrument he had never played before. We called the band Hi-Techs. We have been friends ever since. He is shown here at a surprise party that was thrown for him at a house he was rehabbing on York Street. The guests all hid in the dark waiting for him to come home and he was about an hour late. Someone had taken him out for a drink after work. I find him eccentric.

I absolutely love Chuck Cuminale‘s lyrics for his bands, Colorblind James & The White Caps, Colorblind James Experience and Colorblind James & The Death Valley Boys. They read as pure poetry to me. That’s the great Ken Frank, on bass guitar, featured in silhouette to the right of Chuck.

Hi Fi Alphabet
by Colorblind James
I saw the monster from the bay
I saw him raise his ugly head
We spoke for about a half an hour
I don’t recall a thing we said
“Jack’s Bloody Shadow” is a bar
It’s next door to the “Broken Ghost”
That’s up the street from “What a Cage”
I don’t remember on what coast
Lil’ miss was married yesterday to some bohemian die hard twerp
He didn’t bother to get dressed
It wasn’t even in a church
His family chipped in for a gift, all tied with ribbon in a knot
It’s what they’ve always wanted, yes: a cubist cemetery plot
He said, “I finally wrote my book
It’s called “The Hi Fi Alphabet””
I asked him what it was about
He hasn’t figured that out yet

I would like to have picked Peggi Fournier for this one. Because I was in a band I had a hard time picking a musician, a pick that wouldn’t slight someone else so I picked someone who had already left town. Pee Wee Elis, James Brown’s musical director, sax player and the co-writer of hits like “Cold Sweat” and the anthem, “Say It Loud – I’m Black and I’m Proud,” attended Madison High School in Rochester while playing professionally with Ron Carter, Chuck Mangione and Cheryl Laurro’s father. In later years he worked with Van Morrison.

Jim Hughes married Peggi and me after we had been living together for three years. I remember him trying to approach the typical prenuptial topics with us. Although I grew up Catholic I had left the church. My parents had left too and Jim Hughes, a minister at the downtown Presbyterian Church, was a friend of theirs, a religious rebel. He helped craft a sweet ceremony.

I liked Mayor Tom Ryan but the development of the Hyatt Hotel in downtown Rochester was a fiasco. He is shown here cutting the ribbon on a development that started and stalled for many years.

Steve Dollar is and was in the Hunter Thompson/Lester Bangs mold. He tells it like it is according to him and I respect that immensely. We were lucky to have him in town as a music critic for the Democrat & Chronicle. Robert Meyerowitz, who wrote for City at the same time, is seen standing near the edge of the pool. The pool is in Dick Storms backyard on Meigs. Dick had a party there and some of us were in the pool. Someone yelled, “Come on Steve, get in the pool.” I put that lyric in “Silver Fingernails,” one of the songs we wrote for the Planetarium gig.

Silver Fingernails by Personal Effects 1987

Anybody remember the “Smiley Lady?” Probably not. She used to walk around town in a skirt and mismatched socks while talking, to herself, all the while smiling. “The Balloon Man,” another street person at that time, sold balloons for booze.

When I was in New Math, practicing in the Cox Building on Saint Paul, we would stop by Scorgie’s for beer. One night he took us down to the basement he was rehabbing. He had plans that included an indoor putting green and bar. We encouraged him to book bands. He was the quintessential, old school, tavern owner. I liked him a lot and loved his place.

Garth Fagan, whose dance troupe practices in the old CYO auditorium downtown, is a world-wide treasure. We used to see Garth Fagan at all the reggae shows that came to town.

These next two, “the Librarian” and “The Yoga Teacher” were not shown in the the 1989 show. I can’t remember why at this point.

Seems like we have always known Ashley. Years can go by, and they do yet, there she is, at all the cool shows, sometimes with a wig. She works at the library in our old neighborhood

Suzanne, some people called her “Gypsy,” lived on Vermont Street so we could walk to the yoga classes she taught in the living room of her apartment. It was my first experience with yoga and I liked her hands-on approach. Suzanne had perfect posture and that only exaggerated her full head of blond hair which flowed down to her butt.

Only one of the Community Icons sold, The Preacher. It is now in the collection of Rome Celli.

THE CITY 1989 PYRAMID ART CENTER

From Rochester Democrat & Chronicle – Written by John Worden If one were to look for the heart of this expansive exhibit of work, it might well be found in the ten large acrylic paintings by Paul Dodd, one of the three artists whose work physically dominate the gallery space. Mr. Dodd comes from a family with roots in Rochester reaching back at least three generations on both sides. Biographical information and diagrams of his family tree accompany the works, affectionate, whimsical portraits of each grandfather, and several of his aunts and uncles. Of one set of grandparents he writes, ‘they had a house built on Burlington Avenue and lived there the rest of their lives.’ There is a resemblance in these portraits to a convention in daguerreotype portraiture, in which the sitter chose to have his image taken with the implements of his trade in hand, a harkening back to values of self-reliance and usefulness which are perhaps more characteristic of an earlier age: an aunt is shown in her role of ‘nurse at St. Mary’s Hospital,’ an uncle who “spent most of his time at Hawkeye on St. Pau( Street.” Another uncle who ‘worked for the old Standard Brewery’ is depicted with some bottles of the long-gone but once essentially Rochester brands of Topper Beer and Standard Ale behind him. There is something rather comforting in the benign gaze of Dodd’s relatives and in the short litany of place and product names, a quiet sense of hometown pride, that seems to belong in any artistic portrait of this city.

As I remember it there was “call for entry” for the Pyramid Arts Center show entitled “The City.” I think John Warden was the director at the time and the Pyramid was in a great big loft space in the Village Gate. I submitted an idea for depicting my relatives, one member from each of the extended families, at work in the city of Rochester. The idea was accepted.

My paintings were done on the back of sheets of billboard paper (54″ wide by “60” high) and I used acrylic house paint, stuff I bought on the mis-mixed table at Meyer’s Hardware for a dollar a pint. I photographed the locations of my relative’s place of employment as it looked at the time of the show and mounted the photos next to the paintings. You can sort of see the photos in the picture above.

My grandfather on my mother’s side, Raymond Tierney Sr., was a dynamo. He opened a store with two of his brothers on North Street right where it meets Hudson Avenue. It was the largest grocery store in the city. He became the president of the New York Grocers Association. He was also a butcher and he opened his own stores on South Avenue and then Clinton Avenue where the India House store is today.

Ray Tierney Jr. was my godfather. He owned the Super Duper at 12 Corners in Brighton as well as Super Dupers on Mount Hope and Monroe Avenue. Stock boys called him “High Pockets” because he wore his pants well above his waist. I worked at the Monroe Avenue store, right next door to Uncle John’s Pancake House and across from Pittsford Plaza, during high school. My mother, brothers and sisters all worked at the stores. And Peggi worked there while she was looking for a teaching job.

I used to think Ed Kolb was a tv repair man because he used to to fix our tv when it went on the fritz. He was a machinist at Wilmot Castle on the west side. They made all those shiny instruments that surrounded you when sat in a dentist’s chair.

Jack Williams was our insurance agent until he retired. We always felt like we were in good hands.

Helen Sullivan was my godmother. She met her husband in Saint Mary’s hospital where he was being treated for a farm accident. They married and lived on a farm on Seneca Lake near Dundee.

My father worked for Kodak for thirty five years and I got the sense that they treated him right there. He was hired as a mechanical engineer but worked as a design engineer. He really enjoyed his work but then he enjoyed everything he did.

My Uncle Bill Koval worked for the village of Fairport but I wasn’t ever sure what he did. I asked my father if his sister, Jean, worked anywhere before she married Bill. He told me she worked for Rochester Telephone. Once their children left home she drove a school bus and really enjoyed that.

Back in the day Genesee had some serious competition from Topper and Standard Dry Ale. Jerry Austin worked as salesman for Standard. He was a real estate agent in later years and sold us out house on Hall street for twenty thousand. He called it a “starter house” but we lived there for twenty seven years.

Ann Oliver was the only one of my aunts and uncles not living in the Rochester area. She married Bob from Niagara Falls and they lived there. Before she married she taught grade school at Midvale.

Leo Dodd Sr., my father’s father, was a bootlegger during Prohibition and when that finally ended he and a partner opened the Munich Bar on the west side. When World War II broke out they quickly changed the name of the place to the Dodd Miller Tavern.

From Rochester Democrat & Chronicle – Written by John Worden

If one were to look for the heart of this expansive exhibit of work, it might well be found in the ten large acrylic paintings by Paul Dodd, one of the three artists whose work physically dominate the gallery space. Mr. Dodd comes from a family with roots in Rochester reaching back at least three generations on both sides. Biographical information and diagrams of his family tree accompany the works, affectionate, whimsical portraits of each grandfather, and several of his aunts and uncles. Of one set of grandparents he writes, ‘they had a house built on Burlington Avenue and lived there the rest of their lives.’

There is a resemblance in these portraits to a convention in daguerreotype portraiture, in which the sitter chose to have his image taken with the implements of his trade in hand, a harkening back to values of self-reliance and usefulness which are perhaps more characteristic of an earlier age: an aunt is shown in her role of ‘nurse at St. Mary’s Hospital,’ an uncle who “spent most of his time at Hawkeye on St. Pau( Street.” Another uncle who ‘worked for the old Standard Brewery’ is depicted with some bottles of the long-gone but once essentially Rochester brands of Topper Beer and Standard Ale behind him. There is something rather comforting in the benign gaze of Dodd’s relatives and in the short litany of place and product names, a quiet sense of hometown pride, that seems to belong in any artistic portrait of this city.

WORLD RECORD HOLDERS

This series of Guinness World Record Holders was painted in 1989 for a show at Pyramid Arts Center. As I remember they had just moved to their new location in Villages Gate.

WORLD LEADERS 1987