12/18/2021 #45

Ashcan School, Boxing, Urban Sketching, Salinas, Charles Wong, I-Hotel, Meredith Talusan, Andrew Garfield, Ashcan School (the band), and Lloyiso's cover of "Blackbird."

Dec 19, 2021

Beneath the Hype: Memory & Art

I’m replacing “Update” today with a combined “Flashback” and “Art” section, and throwing in a few photos for good measure.

George Bellows (American, 1882-1925) - Stag at Sharkey's - 1922.1133 - Cleveland Museum of Art (Public Domain image).

When I was a kid, my father, home from his travels in the merchant marines, brought me a book on oil painting. This was in the 1950s. What I remember most about that book was its focus on the art of the “Ashcan School.” I didn’t know what the Ashcan School was. I was five or six years old at that time. But I was impressed by the way the skilled artists portrayed rainy New York streets, people riding on subways, all the urban, working-class scenes, and the grimy yet somehow beautiful world of poor urban neighborhoods.

Back then, we lived in a California beach town and tourist haven. Even in our post-war cheap-but-well-built housing, it was hard to think of ourselves as working class. Everyone was just so glad to be there in that sunny neighborhood—so relieved that World War II was over.

But I was born in San Francisco and still remembered vividly the streets of Chinatown and climbing the dark, creaking stairs to my parents’ walk-up flat in an old tenement above Woolworth’s. I remembered the dim apartments inhabited by my godfather, Gonzalo, and his neighbors—old, single Filipino guys like him.

San Francisco Chinatown neighborhood where I first lived. Digital sketch by Jean Vengua.

San Francisco Chinatown Tong Assoc. building. Ink on sketchpaper. By Jean Vengua. 1990s.

When I encountered the Ashcan School again in my World Book Encyclopedia, and saw George Bellows’ painting “Stag at Sharkeys,” I could relate to it because one of the first memories I have is of being taken to a boxing match somewhere in downtown San Francisco when I was around four years old. Seriously—you could do that back then—bring your 4-year-old daughter to a boxing match. Fortunately, we were not close enough to the ring to receive the full bloody brunt of it. What I remember is the excitement of the crowd—mostly men—the shouting, the cigar smoke, and the pure drama of two guys duking it out under a spotlight in a darkened auditorium.

I used to think this event occurred at the “Olympic Club,” but after looking at historical photos, I realized the Olympic was way too upscale for what I witnessed. Now, because I remember looking down from tiered seats, I think the fight took place either at Winterland, which was once a boxing venue, or at Garibaldi Hall on Broadway, which was sold to a Filipino organization, the Caballeros de Dimas-Alang, in the 1940s.

After my parents moved out of San Francisco, they bought a small post-war home in Santa Cruz. We purchased our first TV, an “Admiral,” and when my dad was on leave from the merchant marines, I would still hang out with him and watch the fights on television, all of us (sometimes even my mom) commenting animatedly on jabs, missed shots, and knockouts. That was a good memory.

I lived in that beach town most of my life (except for a decade in Berkeley), and for the last six years or so, I’ve been living in Monterey. Santa Cruz and Monterey are both tourist towns, capitalizing on the beautiful coastal environment. I can hardly imagine living anywhere else. But sometimes the emphasis, here, on “beauty” gets a little cloying.

As an artist living in Monterey, one can’t escape the dominance of plein-air landscape painting, shoved in your face every 20 paces, it seems (especially if you’re in Carmel-by-the-Sea). I love the beauty of this area, don’t get me wrong, but maybe because of boxing, and because the Ashcan School perspective was etched into my youthful brain, visually—there’s always been part of me that keeps looking behind the tourist hype for the brutal, and sometimes beautiful, truth of the mundane, the unglorified.