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Dan Kennedy (2:17)

Use the code Moth welcome to the Moth Podcast. I'm Dan Kennedy. The Moth features true stories and by now you know that they're told live without notes. All of the stories on the podcast are taken from our ongoing storytelling series here in New York, also in Los Angeles, Chicago and Detroit. And from our tour shows across the country, visit the moth.org the story you're about to hear by Jonathan Santa was recorded live at a Moth MainStage show in 2003. And the theme of that night was Blue in the stories about Smoke.

Jonathan Santlifer (2:57)

Hi. I've always considered myself lucky. I had dreamed of being an artist from the time I was a little kid. And this was a fabricated dream because I had no idea what that meant. But I sort of put it into action. And I went to art school and graduate art school and came out with a degree in painting and rented a place in Hoboken. This is long before Hoboken was fashionable. The way I can tell you this is I rented this place, which was a little building attached to Pablo's towing station, and the rats were bigger than my cat. And this is true. I had never seen. The first rat I saw was dead, and it's still terrified me. But there was good and bad news about Hoboken. One of the bad things was that it was very difficult to get curators and art dealers to come to see your work, of course. But when you got them, they were trapped. And this is what happened. I somehow persuaded a Whitney Museum curator to come to my studio, and she did. And she came after work and she was starving, so I cooked dinner for her and we drank a bottle of wine, and sometime around midnight, she said, I'm going to put you in a show. I don't know if it was the dinner or the hour or the wine or what it was. And she did. It was an incredibly lucky stroke. So I was in the show and from that, you know, because everything is contextual, especially in New York. I got a gallery and then I was having shows, and then I was being reviewed, and then I was selling my work and I was living this dream that I had absolutely no idea what the dream really was, but it was great. I was more amazed probably than anyone in 1989. I'll tell you how lucky I was. I had a show in la. Doesn't sound. Sounds like I'm really bragging, but I had a show in LA and I had a show in New York, and that work was going to come together and go to a show in Chicago. And it was planned, and the gallery in Chicago was very big. I didn't want this show. I should say I had. I just didn't want it for many reasons. And I kept putting it off and changing the date. In any case, it was happening and the gallery Dealer in Chicago said to me that he wanted my newest paintings. He didn't want paintings that had sort of been used and somehow soiled in LA and New York. So I said, okay. I had five or six paintings in my studio that were wet and just finished. And my assistant and I made crates. You've probably seen artists know this. You make crates with an airspace so that the paint doesn't smudge. They were wet paintings, and so I sent them off. This was five years of work coming from LA and New York and my studio and I went to Chicago. I flew into Chicago for the opening, and it was snowing when the plane touched down. And by the time my opening happened, by the time it was coming to be, it was a major snowstorm. So there were me, the gallery dealer, his wife, and a couple of other people. And it was, you know, it was a really jolly night. We were sitting around 5,000 square feet, five years of work, you know, nobody there. So it was already not my dream opening. And I couldn't wait to get out of Chicago. I wanted to leave the next morning, but the airport was snowed in, so I didn't get to leave until late in the day. I got home, and I remember almost the precise time I came back to New York. I came into my loft and I did that thing which I always do for company As I turn the television on. It was about 11:15, and the 11:00 news was on, and I was unpacking, and I wasn't. You know, when the television's on for company, it's just sort of there. And I'm sort of listening and not really listening, but I'm hearing this guy say something about a fire raging out of control in Chicago. And just as he's saying this, the phone in my studio, which is on the other end of my loft, is ringing. And it took me, you know, like 10 steps as those words were sinking in. I was hearing the guy on television talk about the fire. And the phone's ringing, and it's 11:30 at night. And so by the time I picked up the phone, I knew it. And indeed, it was my dealer in Chicago, who was crying, standing in front of the gallery building burning down. And there was this moment where I could hear the sirens on television and the sirens through the phone. It was like stereo. And I actually don't remember anything past the news of the fire on the phone. What I remember was looking up at the walls of my studio, and all painters know this. You know, when you make a painting, how paint Splashes around the edges, and you create ghosts. I had not a single painting in my studio. I had ghosts everywhere, you know, edges of paintings. I did shaped paintings, so they were these baroque shapes and white spaces. So I kind of stood there looking at them. And I don't remember if I said goodbye or what I did. I somehow. I don't remember the rest of the night. I went to sleep. I know I went to sleep because I was awakened in the morning by another phone call. And it was a reporter from the Chicago newspaper. And he said, so what does it feel like to lose five years of work? That's not the bad part. The bad part is what I said. I don't know where it came from. I said, this is true. I said, I want it to be hot in Chicago, but not the toast of the town. You know, I don't know. And that became a banner in the newspaper. So I should say that two minutes after that, another reporter called and said, I've just been speaking to a woman who lost some work in another gallery in that building. And she said, it's like losing her children. And I said, well, she obviously doesn't have children. She sent me, and this is true, she sent me hate mail for a year. For a year. But I didn't, you know, I didn't mean to be a smart ass. I didn't mean to be callous. These were just things that fell out of my mouth. I was kind of numb. About three or four days later, I got two FedEx packages delivered at the same time. And the first one I opened up was from my friend in Chicago. And he had sent me a video. I put it in the television. And the video, what he had thought I would want to see. And I've never really figured this out. He had filmed every news station of the fire so that it was 15 minutes of the building up, down, up, down, up, down, you know, And I'm watching this, and I open the second FedEx package. You all should have friends like this, right? I open the second package, and it is from another friend in Chicago who has traipsed through the rubble of the fire, which was a block long, and has found. Managed to find a piece of my constructed painting. A piece of it. I open it up, the thing tumbles onto my lap with ashes all over. I'm watching the building burning down, and I lost it. I mean, that. That's when it was real. And I actually cried. For the next few months. I did a really bad thing. I tried to replicate my own paintings don't ever do this. I felt like a fake. I felt like I didn't know how to paint. I kept looking for the blueprints. I'd look at some of the pictures and then I'd try and do them. And it was horrible. But I am lucky. And at the same time, I got an invitation to go to the American Academy in Rome and be a visiting artist. And I said, and I remember them saying, do you want to go? I said, I'm there, I'm there. And a few months later, me and my wife and my young daughter went to Rome for six months. And I got this amazing studio, you know, in the American Academy on the fourth floor overlooking Chastevry and all this stuff. And I would. I started smoking again and I didn't want to be a bad influence on my daughter. So I would sit at the window, you know, like blowing the smoke out the window. I drank coffee and Rome is like the best place to be depressed. I mean, I just. And every morning I would go to church and look at paintings. And what I started doing was making replications of Renaissance masters. I had never done this in art school. I always thought it was really a ridiculous thing to do. But I started doing these elaborate drawings. And I would work on them for three or four days, sometimes a week. And at the end of that week, or three days or four days, I'd rip them up. And sometimes I'd rip them up and paste them down and start a new drawing. But I had no fear of destroying my work. And for some reason it felt great to rip up my drawings by myself. And I did this for quite a while anyhow. The other thing I did in Rome was I started a novel where I had the hubris to do this. I mean, I was just like this. I don't know what I was. I was numb and I couldn't paint well. And I started this novel. And the novel was about a mid career, middle aged New York depressed artist. Guess who that was. And I wrote on this, I thought it was Proust. I. I mean, I had visions. This was the great American novel. Anyhow, when I got back to New York, I read these hundred or so pages and I thought, oh my God, this guy is so horrible. And I decided to kill him on the page. Which is exactly what I do is wonder. And I think now that it was the most cathartic thing I did. I wrote like a seven page death scene where I killed this guy. Totally painless, you know, the guy had a physical description almost exactly like Me, he had, I think, more hair, but other than that, he was just like me. And I started the book again. I threw those pages away, totally threw them away after I killed him. And I decided I would create a character totally unlike me. So the character became a woman. I made her tall, made her rich, and I gave her my dream apartment. Even she has the penthouse in the Sanremo Towers on Central park west, which I had been in a couple of times. And I wanted that apartment. And the novel became a thriller about a serial killer in the New York art world. And I started killing off dealers and critics. And it was just, it was a ball, you know, I realized at a certain point that I had to kill an artist, otherwise I'd get in trouble. So I did. But anyhow, for the next five years, I struggled every day with my painting, trying to figure out my painting and. And I wrote this novel. At night I didn't sleep much at all. I'm not a sleeper, but I really didn't sleep. And at the end of five years, I decided to have an exhibition of my new work which was totally different than the work I had been known for. I was known as a sort of constructed abstract painter. And here I was doing figurative work. My show was not received well. The critics and curators who had supported me acted as if I had betrayed them. And it was so weird. I remember one critic, friend, frenemy, saying to me that, you know, he just thought. He thought that I had just lost it as an artist. And I said to him, you know, I was never a card carrying abstract painter. I was just a painter, you know, give me a break. Anyhow, it actually flattened me for the next two years. And during that time, so I didn't show, I kept painting. And I finished my novel as well as painting. And I decided to give it another shot. And the amazing, most amazing thing was that I sold the novel and that the novel, after two years, the novel hit the bookstores as my show opened and the critics liked my work. I think it's cause. Well, partially because the book was hitting the store, but also, I think because they had a new label for me, they could figure me out. You know, I was that artist who'd lost his work, who wrote the novel, who now is doing art about art. And, you know, so it kind of, it kind of worked. And now it's a little bit later, like a year later, and I'm still painting and I'm pretty happy with my painting, but I'm gonna break that label again. I'm afraid those critics, who cares? And I have finished my second novel, which is set for publication. And so, you know, I think about it and it's not like I would recommend a fire, but it totally changed my life in the most amazing way. And I'm serious about this. I mean, I think, you know, when you, you do something and you get, you get approval for it and you're sort of successful, why change it? You know, I would have been making those paintings forever. I would have, I think, just been doing that. And instead I got a second art career. Not as good, but I got a second art career and I got this writing career, which is just astonishing to me. So I guess you could say, and I agree totally, that I do feel lucky. So thank you.