Joseph Santore

The Frayed Rope

I looked at the painting yesterday, trying to make sense of what it was I was doing back then. It's over thirty-six years ago.

In the mid 1980s, I became aware of Vanitas painting, mainly Dutch Still Lifes from the 17th Century. In 1985, I also went to Italy with my wife Annie and we traveled around in the north. In Pisa, behind the Leaning Tower, there's a cemetery called the Camposanto.

During the Second World War, the cemetery was accidentally fire bombed by allied planes. The great fresco, The Triumph of Death, was severely damaged. Miraculously, the painting was removed, restored, and installed inside on the walls of a great room. The fresco is gigantic, and it depicts the fall of man, making clear that death is waiting in the wings for everyone. The painting had a great effect on me, and I'm still thinking about it and writing about it today.

When I returned from the trip, all that I had seen was in my head and began to find its way into my work. The Frayed Rope was painted in Chinatown where I lived for seventeen years and made all the large paintings. All these paintings were made facing in the same direction, and the space and hallway became a kind of stage set for me. The room had an old and decaying metal ceiling that fascinated me, as well as the pipes and electric BX wire and fixtures up there.

The whole thing began very late, or I should say in the middle of the night, in my studio. I used to stay up late and draw in almost a semi-conscious state, usually with dirty turpentine on pieces of paper laying on the floor.

There was a large grey bag hanging against one of the walls filled with shiny red cloth. One night my cats came running through the studio crashing into everything and somehow knocked into something, jangling the bag, which released the red cloth that poured down like a waterfall of blood. Because of the silky texture, it made a distinct sound. I can still hear it.

The next day I began to make small studies and then a rough painting on paper. Things took off from there but there was no major plan, design or drawing for the whole thing. Why it all turned mostly red I don't remember. The skeleton was in the studio, I had already used it in two or three other paintings.

While studying Vanitas painting and early still life painting going back to the Romans, I discovered the work of Juan Sanchez Cotan 1561-1627, a painter who liked to hang things with strings in his still lifes: fruit, vegetables, and dead birds mostly. I began hanging things from the ceiling in my studio, all sorts of things, from my work boots, to garlic, crabs, and plastic bags. The plastic bags are translucent, and all the shops in Chinatown used them. I was fascinated by them, especially when they had stuff inside them.

The model sitting at the table with her feet up is the same woman who posed in the Yellow painting. Ginny was her name and she was young and beautiful and had red hair. The thin woman peaking around the corner on the left is Louisa, an Italian woman who posed for me many times.

The idea of peeking around the corner, or seeing something that we can't see, is something that has been on my mind for a long time.

The young guy up on top of the crawl space was a friend of mine’s nephew, who was going to NYU at the time. He liked it up there and I really enjoyed painting him, especially his large hands gripping the wall. The cat was named Roulette, she actually posed for the painting. I would put her there and she would fall asleep. The pink sneakers were Annie's sneakers. The gray bag hanging from the ceiling is the one with the red cloth that started the whole thing, and now that I'm writing about it probably turned the whole room red.

I don't remember why I included the crabs, but obviously they're cooked because of the color change. I sold crabs when I was a kid along the Industrial Highway near the airport in Philadelphia. I worked for a friend of mine's grandfather who had a crab shack. I would get up at 5:00 every morning and my friend and I would drive south in an old rickety truck, down to Rock Hall, Maryland, or St. Michaels, or Dover Delaware and pick up a truck load of crabs. We’d drive back up to Philly to the shack and work all day selling them before wrapping up in the evening and delivering what was left to bars in South Philadelphia.

I've always been fascinated by crabs, and know how to cook them. My father loved crabs, and would wait for me to come to the place they rented at the shore in South Jersey so that we could go to the fish store and buy a couple dozen live crabs that he would pick one by one. I know how to put them to sleep by rubbing their bellies. My kids loved to see me do that. Why they're in the painting is a good question.

The pink mattress was in the hallway, I still have that red bathrobe, and where that large black fish came from I have no idea. Everything in the painting was painted from life, it was all in my studio.