Meeting my grandfather through his art

The family history edition.

Hi there, 

Welcome to the second issue of Pockmark. I want to say the only reason I didn’t send this out earlier is that I spilled Lemon LaCroix all over my laptop, but it’s not. I’m soon to embark on some big life changes, which tend to be the kind of thing that make me anxious. I’ve been looking for a healthy distraction, and recently, that’s come in the form of movies. 

Last week I watched Erik Skjoldbjærg’s 2001 adaptation of Prozac Nation, based on the 1994 autobiography of Elizabeth Wurtzel, who passed away last year. The film—which should come with a trigger warning for former emo kids—explores the depressed adolescence of a college student who goes to Harvard on a journalism scholarship. The movie had me in tears. It made me feel like reaching out, knowing “Lizzie,” the protagonist, would have her hands stuffed in her pockets and back turned away. It reminded me a little bit of my past self, too. Like Lizzie, I entered college with a romanticized dream of writing music criticism for Rolling Stone, and approached my writing like my life depended on it, as a way to avoid problems at home and in my relationships, past and present. 

While I’m happy to say I’ve grown a lot since college, I occasionally regress to the habit of burning myself out into shriveled ashes to avoid parts of my world I don’t want to think about. In this case, it’s the pandemic, moving, and the impending last day of my job. 

While this coping mechanism isn’t as healthy as watching movies, one positive outcome of my workaholism is this newsletter. Today, it’s going to start with an art history lesson that I think my blood-related subscribers, in particular, might enjoy. 

Meeting my grandfather through his artwork. 

I remember the sound of the motor boat pulling us up to that wooden dock, where I walked delicately to avoid letting splinters enter the sides of my sandals. We climbed up a twisting, concrete driveway once poured by exploited Caribbean labor. It was hot, humid, a little rainy, and I traversed around that mountain for what felt like forever. I was in Tortola—the biggest of the British Virgin Islands—on vacation with my family. We were on our way to see a house that my grandfather built in 1971.

When we arrived at the peak, the house was the only thing in view: three sprawling hexagonal rooftops, and a front door a few steps below driveway level. My dad walked right down and knocked, shamelessly, while I shrieked in the background. A nice British woman answered the door, and let my dad in to explore the living room, where I imagine he once spent hours drinking beers and playing backgammon. I hung around outside and admired the view. 

Exterior of the Tortola house in the 1970’s.

Original interior of the house. Yes, I would like these woven chairs in my apartment.

I never got to meet my grandfather on my dad’s side, but everyone always tells me I would have loved him. Marvin Pockros was a self-taught pianist who refused to read sheet music, a formally-trained architect who dropped out of school before receiving his degree, an exacting watercolorist, a cultural Renaissance man, a jokester, and an overall Cool Guy. 

Growing up in a house full of his paintings, I always knew he was an artist, but it wasn’t until I stood in front of that cliffside home the summer before I started college that I truly understood the breadth of his abilities. As the only person in my immediate family who has pursued a creative career, excavating the talents rooted in the branches of my family tree has been part of a kind of self-discovery process. Since I’ve been back at my parent’s house over the past two months surrounded by old photos, artwork, and little entertainment, I decided to pursue some archival research about my grandfather. This has involved reading old local newspaper clippings, looking through slide film, and interviewing my family members in an attempt to pull information from the depths of their memories. 

I’ve always loved art in its many forms: the process of creating it, but also the way that a consumer’s interpretations and derived emotions often constitute its significance. My fascination with art metastasizes when I have a direct connection to the artist. In this first piece I’m going to discuss, I also have a connection to the subject.

AmeriCorps shack in Big Stone Gap, Virginia.

The little boy sitting on the porch with the spindly spider legs here is my uncle, Mark, who was living in this shack while working for AmeriCorps (his means of escaping the Vietnam War draft). In Big Stone Gap, Virginia—the town that apparently inspired an eponymous 1970’s film featuring Whoopi Goldberg—Mark played baseball, pumped water from a well, and organized impoverished communities “like Obama,” as he describes it. My grandfather took a photo of this scene, then painted it based on the shot; the process for all his watercolors. 

When I first saw this painting, I assumed Mark was looking down at his cellphone. Then I remembered it was 1967. 

35mm film photo of the USSR in 1962.

Painting from photos, my grandfather obviously had an eye for capturing a moment. People always ask me how or why I got into photography—my first foray into storytelling—and I honestly could never figure out the impetus. At risk of sounding self-indulgent, I’d like to think it’s an impulse. 

Marvin took the photo above on a trip to Soviet Russia in 1962, before the fall of the Iron Curtain. It’s a shame this one never ended up in paint because the primary colors here are incredible, if I do say so myself. 

The ripped rough draft of Square Deal Market hanging in my brother’s old room.  

I, like my parents, can be a bit of a perfectionist. But the all-time champ of American perfectionism goes to Marvin Pockros, who trashed this incredible painting of a convenience store. If you look closely at this photo, you can see the line where he cut the piece in half. Apparently, he tried to spray it with a preservant, ultimately discoloring it (see the darker lines above the slice). So he did what any perfectionist would do, and started over. 

After my grandfather died, my dad retrieved the painting from his trash folder and put it back together. The final version, which won second place in the 1985 Annual Juried Exhibit of the Palm Beach Watercolor Society, hangs on a wall in my aunt and uncle’s house outside Washington, D.C. 

My grandfather Marvin standing next to the final draft of Square Deal Market at the 1985 Palm Beach Watercolor Society exhibition.

I learned about this exhibition in an art review in Boca Raton News titled “Technically competent works worth a look”—a headline that could have seriously used a copywriter. In what is a particularly monotone critique of a show where apparently “no new ground is broken” and “no exciting departures are in evidence,” the critic describes Marvin’s painting Square Deal Market as “a realist rendition of the textures of a wooden wall.” 

I have to agree; most of my grandfather’s paintings are quite photographic. My other uncle, Perry, who has done some of his own artwork, told me about Marvin’s process. Before he began painting, my grandfather would sketch out his pieces lightly with pencil. Then in watercolor—a medium some say is the hardest to get right—he’d work from dark to light colors, using rubber cement to block out white space. 

I think Square Deal Market—finished and unfinished—is great, but probably worth noting that Marvin was the president of the Palm Beach Watercolor Society, which seems suss. From what I understand, this organization was basically a forum for white people to show off their retirement hobby. In another review I read in the Sun-Sentinel, a former Madison Ave advertising executive said he spent all night painting so he could golf all day. Sounds about right. 

One of the best things about the Palm Beach Watercolor Society might be its website, which looks like it hasn’t been updated since my grandfather participated in that competition. 

There are a lot more paintings I could talk about here: Peruvian weavers in sepia tones, suburban homes in Key West, crabbing docks in Sag Harbour, and a topless portrait of one of Marvin’s girlfriends, Joanie—a piece my mom banned from our household.

So I’ll end with my favorite painting, which neither my dad nor uncles really know much about, leaving it up to my interpretation. 

View with Laundry hanging in the hallway to my parent’s kitchen.

The only thing I know about the piece above—called View with Laundry—is that the apartment building pictured is possibly in Clifton or Over-the-Rhine: neighborhoods in Cincinnati, Ohio, where my dad and his brothers grew up. 

I think it's the clothes that draw me to this one. Those plaid bell bottoms make me want to throw on some clogs and smoke a pipe on a purple couch in a carpeted basement, while Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours hums in the background. My boyfriend would wear the pink jeans, paired with a suede sandal that wraps around each big toe like the shoes on a live nativity version of Jesus.  

Beyond the retro garb, I love how this picture is a little slice of ordinary life. In the 1970’s, there was nothing exceptional about clothing hanging to dry on a line. I imagine my grandfather going for an afternoon walk, smoking one of 20 cigarettes he’d have that day, not thinking much of the photo he took. After developing the roll, perhaps this one stood out to him. Maybe he too admired the brightly colored pants his neighbors wore. Or maybe it was the shadows, or the foreground-background contrast. Whatever his reason for selecting it, there’s something he saw in this image that made him think it was worth painting, and something I see that makes me agree. 

I’ve always had this weird inkling that the creative gene in my family skipped a generation somehow; that my urge to make things didn’t just fall out of the sky. I often emphasize my less desirable traits in the story I tell myself about myself, so this discovery was a bit of a breakthrough in my self-acceptance. In writing this, I learned a lot about my grandfather’s taste, manner, and unique peculiarities, and in the process, got a little closer to discovering my own. 

Now, moving on to my current recommendations, which have nothing at all to do with earnest topics like self-discovery. 

1. Surface Magazine’s daily newsletter. I’ve been reading this for about a year now and it never disappoints. It’s great for people who are into art, design, and fascinating discoveries loosely related to those things. It will give you headlines you didn’t think you wanted. For example, “The teenger who threw a child from Tate Modern’s balcony faces at least 15 years in prison.”

2. This short quarantine era sequel to Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s novel Fleischman is in Trouble. She is such an incredibly vivid and dynamic writer. If you like this piece of fiction, you’ll probably also enjoy her profiles, which borrow a lot of literary elements. 

3. This zine by Molly Young (the flower presser, for those who read my previous issue), also written in quarantine. It’s a quick distraction from the chaos that you could smash in one evening. A deft combination of thorough historical research and Young’s insanely humorous writing style, I call it the E! News of the Victorian era. Topics include, but are not limited to, pubic hair spray and $50,000 custom perfume.

4. This Longreads piece about a writer’s feelings leading up to and following a labiaplasty, and an interesting discussion of feminism.  

5. This Instagram account, which has me bookmarking all of its posts in a daydream-fueled endeavor to style the interior of my apartment with seashell-shaped chairs. 

6. Design Home, a game that I, unfortunately, play almost every day. It lets you outfit imaginary bedrooms and kitchens in far away places like Bali or the floor of a sunken ship. My chief complaints are that you cannot move the furniture around from its designated location, and the lifestyles of the people you’re designing for are fiercely unrealistic. Prompts instruct you to “design a magazine editor’s beachside villa in the Bahamas.” Like yeah right, she makes $15/hour and is in debt from her out-of-pocket healthcare costs.  

7. This geometric planner for $34 plus shipping and handling, which I plan to buy in an effort to get organized—something that has never come naturally to me. I wasn’t one of those kids who rolled around a loose paper backpack in elementary school, but I’ve definitely had to work hard over the years to keep my things in order. I figure if I spend this much money on bounded paper, I have to use it. 

8. Anything designed by Alex Proba, a designer who I discovered at the (now closed) Clinton Hill coffee shop-meets-furniture store, Relationships. I’ve never purchased anything from Proba because her stuff is mostly out of my price range, but isn’t it all so beautiful? I am a sucker for the millennial aesthetic. 

9. These sunglasses I’ve been wearing while I drive around my parent’s neighborhood singing Haim songs at the top of my lungs. I imagine I look like this orange I drew when I wear them.

   

10. These naturally-colored jelly sandals made of hemp plastic. I cannot speak to their comfort, as I have yet to purchase them, but they are undeniably cute. 

Okay, that’s all for now. I hope you enjoyed this. I’m off to exciting adventures, which I hope to tell you more about in my next issue. Stay tuned! (my favorite jargony email sign off). 

-Alana