My father died 24 years ago today, something I wrote about at decomP in a piece titled "PaintWriteDeathLifeArt (Sketches from a life in art)," and while it all seems so long ago, it remains as raw as ever. Should you want to read the piece, you can do so here, and should you want a sneak peek, there's some excerpt below. Thanks!
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1.
My father Michael Tanzer was a lot of things. Painter. Teacher. Activist. Raconteur. Filmmaker. New Yorker. High-school dropout. Tough guy. He was also a man who had regrets, someone who died much too young from a twisted form of cancer, an artist who never quite achieved what he hoped to, and a guy who never cried, not until the end anyway.
2.
When my father was growing up he worked a string of jobs in an effort to bring home additional money for his family, everything from making false teeth - which his boss cleaned with used Q-tips from home - to delivering hats. My father also briefly worked for IBM after he dropped out of high school, but that job proved to be too confining - he had to wear a tie, answer to a boss, work set hours - and after it didn’t pan out I don’t know that he ever worked nine-to-five again the rest of the life.
His love was art and he would talk with awe about discovering the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in part because it exposed him to a world outside the claustrophobic confines of his Bronx neighborhood, but also because once there he had found a home. My father also found his way back to school because of art, studying with the legendary teacher Frank Reilly. Reilly had learned to teach in the figurative style at the equally legendary Art Students League before breaking away to form his own school. My dad attended Reilly’s school for one year before embarking on a life in art that would find him showing and selling work for the next forty years.
During that time my dad opened a frame shop; ran a tattoo parlor; earned a college and Masters degree; taught in every possible place one can imagine, including prison - a class called Art as a Weapon; and created all sorts of amazing paintings, sculptures, etchings, and screen prints. He also dreamed of covering the city of Binghamton, NY where I grew-up in murals, and while he painted them when ever and wherever he could - from the wall in the waiting room of Binghamton General Hospital to an alcove in the Security Mutual Insurance Building downtown - he never did get the opportunity to finish the job.
He also never quite achieved the level of recognition he sought, something that wore on him as the years went on, the rejections becoming tortuous, his struggles to make money a palpable stressor. Some of that was his style certainly, but there was also marketing himself and his work, something he could never quite figure out how to do. Family responsibilities were an issue as well and he more then once spoke to my younger brother and I about how his grudging admiration for a family friend who seemed to have little compunction putting his work in front of his children. My mother though will also say that there’s more to this, that he was never comfortable with who he was, and that he was too conflicted about his life to fully grow and fully liberate his creativity. Because of this, his work then was not all it might have been, and his success, or lack thereof, a by-product of these conflicts.