How to Paint Yourself into the Chelsea

One day, Bradley, a young painter with long, wavy blond hair tucked under a beat-up red trucker hat, installed himself before an easel in the hotel lobby. On a round canvas, he began to sketch out the outlines of the lobby: the seating area with its couches and chairs to the left, the magazine stands to the right, beyond these the check-in desk with the mailboxes behind it and the slant of the staircase above. Then he began to paint, filling in the bright yellow of the walls, the gleaming white marble of the floor, and then, in intricate detail, to reproduce, in miniature, the various paintings—the Philip Taaffe, the Larry Rivers, the Joe Andoe—that hung from the walls. He came back day after day, working for several hours each day. His work was painstaking, with an eye to detail.

People are constantly trying various scams to get into the Chelsea: representing themselves as great artists, or saying that they are going to write a book or do a photo essay about the Chelsea, or maybe that they are going to do some renovation work around the hotel for free. Most will attempt to flatter or bribe the owner Stanley Bard in some way—he’s the only one who can let you in—though others, lacking creativity, simply barricade themselves in the rooms they’ve rented temporarily and refuse to come out.

So Bradley’s aim was immediately apparent to all: he intended to paint his way into the Chelsea. And I must admit, it did seem like a pretty good way to ingratiate oneself with Stanley, as he does indeed pride himself on being a patron of the arts. Better than writing him a poem, that’s for sure. To paraphrase the Beat poet Gregory Corso, another old Chelsea resident: the painter can trade a canvas for the rent, but the poet always has to pay.

After a week, I thought it looked like the painting was nearing completion, but then Bradley decided to people the canvas with the various bohemian denizens of the Chelsea. He painted in the familiar lobby sitters, each in their favorite chairs: Darrell the poet; Michael the painter, his trusty cell phone in hand; Vincent, with his pug, Rudolf, in his lap; and good old Stormé, the drag king and Stonewall veteran, smiling broadly, in uncommonly high spirits. Behind the desk he stationed Stanley, generous and welcoming, alongside his right-hand man, Jerry the manager, ready to give you the best room in the house at a moment’s notice and a reasonable price.

At this point I was able to form a definite opinion of the undertaking. The round canvas was undeniably a mistake: too cutesy and affected. The Artistic Kiss of Death. Hard to recover from that. Still, given that handicap, I thought Bradley had made a gallant attempt. He had done a good job from the standpoint of realism: there was nothing obviously distorted in or omitted from the picture. His most glaring mistake was one of emphasis: the colors were too bright and sunny and failed to capture the gloom of the old hotel I know and love. The people too, were a bit too cheerful for New York. Everything, from the shape to the colors, to the characters, contributed to form an overly rosy—or perhaps sunny—vision of hotel life. There was nothing of the dark side of the Chelsea, nothing of failure or frustrated ambition, nothing of bitterness or simmering rage, nothing of madness. (He should have painted the Umpire—that famously eccentric lobbysitter—standing right there in the middle of it all, defiantly giving the world the finger.) What Bradley had painted was essentially a cartoon Chelsea.

Well, I thought, it’s not finished yet. Maybe he’ll mute the colors. Or maybe he’s counting on the canvas accumulating grime over the years until it more fully captures the moldering essence of the Chelsea.

A week went by. The painting seemed finished, but Bradley was reluctant to leave his post in the lobby. Perhaps Stanley had yet to offer him an affordable room. And then, apparently to extend his stay, Bradley began to paint another little circle in the bottom right hand corner of the canvas. As he filled in the circle, it became apparent that he was painting another miniature version of the lobby. Soon he had the mini-painting standing on its own mini-easel, and then he began to paint himself, the back of his head—the long hair, the trucker hat, a quarter of his face—sitting before the mini-painting on the mini-easel. Bradley was literally painting himself into the Chelsea. Within the mini-painting he painted an even smaller painting on a smaller easel, and so on, ad infinitum.

This utterly destroyed the last vestige of the painting’s integrity. But with that vestige went something else—call it the painting’s pretentiousness. I saw now that Bradley had captured the true essence of the Chelsea: a sublime artistic statement had emerged epiphenomenally from the base dross of the paint and canvas, as a soul emerges from a body. The denizens of the lobby no longer appeared simply cheerful but rather more like they had overindulged in Zoloft—the medication concealing the true pain festering beneath the surface. And the patina that I had hoped would accumulate with age had also manifested more quickly than I would have thought possible, the yellow taking on the aspect of aged parchment, the gloom and discoloration growing and spreading outward, almost as if the process of oxidation itself had been expedited by the degenerative air of the Chelsea. Bradley had sat in the Chelsea lobby long enough for the building’s energy to touch him, and his mind had become sufficiently warped to produce a work of real power.

So is Bradley a true artist or a con artist? And does he merit a place in the Chelsea? Well, I’m not the one who gets to choose. Stanley will no doubt be pleased by what is, on the surface at least, a glowing rendition of the Chelsea. And although he won’t be impressed by a street artist’s chicanery, he knows better than anyone that most successful artists do tend to have a touch of the charlatan about them. I predict that cold, hard cash will be the deciding factor.