Category Archives: Arts and Music

Feeling It

Capital Region artist David Drake doesn’t start with a plan, but goes wherever his pencil and brush strokes take him

By Stephen Leon

One of David H. Drake’s Facebook friends, commenting on a painting of his, posted: “What feeling did you want to evoke in this?? I see frenzy and chaos.”

Good luck trying to get Drake to offer specific motivations and intentions for his artwork.

“It really isn’t an issue of intention,” he replied on the thread. “It is not about intending … It’s more about what is there and what I can do with it.”

He might have just left it at that, and probably wishes he had.

“It started out as a sort of exercise in improvisation that evolved into something very landscapish … at least to my sense,” wrote Drake, a resident of Catskill, New York, who has an upcoming show in Hudson. “I very much like the chaotic feeling that comes from all the apparent indecision and ambiguity … but I also like the resolution that comes as its final state evolved out of what were just squiggles and patience!!! (Oh God … I am talking artspeak … Please ignore this.)”

In a recent interview, Drake refrained from such elaborations, talking more about the process of making his paintings and pencil drawings, and less about his intentions or any meanings hidden behind the lines and squiggles and stenciled forms that populate his work. The lines and squiggles sometimes stand on their own with no apparent representation, although they can morph into objects that look recognizable, like fish. Sometimes, especially on the larger painted canvasses infused with oranges, yellows, and greens, you might see stenciled insects such as bees or moths (he makes little distinction between the two) or larger animals that might be cows or buffalo. One painting features stenciled images of doors and windows, as well as some lines of text, but the cumulative effect is ambiguous—as he seems to prefer.

One pencil drawing does appear to be an overhead representation of a couple of houses, driveways, and streets in a residential neighborhood, as the forms become apparent between otherwise ambiguous sets of back-and-forth pencil strokes. Drake allows that this might be the neighborhood he grew up in, or his interpretation of it, which he arrived at because he had done a series of drawings of nothing in particular, and suddenly they reminded him of his childhood house.

“People ask, ‘What were you looking for?’” he says. “As Picasso said, I don’t show you what I’m looking for. I show you what I found.”

***

David Drake was born in Miami, Florida, but grew up in suburban Cleveland. As a kid, he had a fair amount of exposure to the arts; his grandparents took him to the opera when he was 10, and there were plenty of public-school trips to art and natural-history museums, and classical-music concerts.

He didn’t take an art class until he was a senior in high school. Until then, he says, he had not been a good student, but was inspired by his art teacher; “she was very supportive” … and he found “it was something I really liked doing.”

“In some odd way,” he adds, “I think I picked art because it wasn’t going to be easy for me.”

He went on to study at the Cleveland Institute of Art, where he completed the five-year program that included having his own studio on campus during the fifth year, where he fulfilled the requirement to create a show for public viewing and faculty critique at the end of the year.

While earning his degree in printmaking, Drake had a couple of other significant experiences in college. He learned how to wait tables and bartend, skills that carried him through the financial ups and downs of life as an artist (currently he bartends at the restaurant Rive Gauche Bistro in Athens). And he met the woman who would become the first of his three wives.

They married and moved to Ireland, where she was promised a job in her field (ceramics); when that didn’t pan out as expected, they moved back to the States, but the disruption put enough stress on the relationship that they divorced after three years—although they remain friends to this day.

Drake moved to Chicago in 1980, where he met his second wife, with whom he was soon raising a family of three children. But they, too, divorced, in 1989.

They were living at the time in Vermont, where Drake stayed until 2004—even though he found the artistic climate there surprisingly frustrating, largely because of what he describes as New Yorkers’ two-tiered tastes in art.

“If it doesn’t have a barn or a covered bridge,” he says, the weekending New Yorkers aren’t going to buy it; they buy their “real” art in New York City, and the quaint stuff up in Vermont.

In 2008, Drake met the woman who would become his greatest inspiration in life and art, Enid Advocate.

Their years together “probably were the most productive years of my life,” he says. “She was the one person where I felt truly comfortable … if she was sitting in my studio and I was working.”

“She was an unabashed cheerleader for me at the time,” he continues, and she had “an incredible visual sense for someone who had no formal training.”

Enid and David lived together for five years and decided to get married in 2013. Then one day in 2014, she went to see a doctor because she wasn’t feeling well. After that, Drake says, “each day’s news was worse than the last.” She died three weeks later.

“She always saw the best in me,” he remembers wistfully. “I would not be here without her.”

***

One of Drake’s mentors once told him “not to draw the line until you see it.”

But Drake prefers not to plan; rather, to improvise, to start something before he knows what it’s going to be.

“Be present to do something,” he says, “but go in with as little of a plan as possible.”

He elaborates, musing that his approach to art also can apply to life. “I think of it as a way of mapping things, and how we map things largely determines the landscape we will work in and with, the limit of the landscape we will create. The minimizing of plan is a matter of being open and receptive. …The will is still certainly at work—I want to create—but one needs to recognize all the much larger things that are at work. … All in all, it is a pretty good metaphor for life, especially if life chooses to cooperate.”

Having studied printmaking in college, Drake says, “I don’t think like a painter. I think like a printmaker.”

And printmaking is more a drawing process than a painting process, which “makes what I generally do different from what painters generally do … I really like the process of drawing.”

He likes when other artists leave clues to their thought processes, and he does it too—like when he decides to move a line that he has drawn in pencil, creating a sense of motion because you can still see the pale shadow of the old line. “You can erase a line, but it leaves a ghost.”

The content of his paintings and drawings, he says, are “always ambiguous in my mind.” In the interview, he talks about drawing as a way of interpreting the world, and the importance of “feeling” what you are drawing as it comes to life in whatever form. So the art is not about what it represents, but what it feels like.

He mentions the philosopher Susanne Langer, who wrote, among other things, that “art is the articulation of feeling.”

Asked what would be the best compliment someone could make about his work, Drake pauses for a moment, then answers:

“When somebody wants one of my pieces, because they like what it represents to them, they like what I’m doing, that they appreciate how I look at the world.”

***

David Drake will have a show from June 16 to July 8 at the Davis-Orton Gallery in Hudson, featuring roughly ten of his pencil drawings, and two larger, painted canvases.

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The controversy over the song “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” hasn’t stopped Albany’s Patricia Dalton Fennell from defending it—or recording it

By Stephen Leon

December 28, 2017

The phone call was from a producer for the HLN news network (a spinoff of CNN). She had tracked down Albany producer-vocalist, health consultant and chronic-illness expert Patricia Dalton Fennell, and wanted to know if she would do an interview on the subject of “Baby It’s Cold Outside,” the popular 1944 song Fennell recently recorded with jazz trumpeter Chris Pasin on a CD of the same name.

At first, Fennell was at ease with the idea, and with the producer, Virginia Moubray, who pitched it. “The setup was simple,” she says, “and the directions were good, and the producer was really easy to work with. Her questions were intelligent, and neutral.”

To do the “live” interview with HLN’s Across America host Carol Costello, Fennell met with a crew in a studio on the 14th floor of a building on Albany’s Pearl Street. There, with the lights trained on her face, cameras rolling, microphones on, and Costello’s questions coming in from L.A. through Fennell’s earpiece, suddenly Fennell felt a little less comfortable.

“I felt like I was in Germany,” she laughs, “and I had been very, very bad.”

And in fact, Fennell had been bad—that is, of you agree with many critics of the classic Christmas song, whose lyrics, they argue, describe and/or promote date rape. The annual chorus of voices condemning the song and calling for its removal from playlists grew louder this year after a cascade of sexual-harassment and assault allegations against powerful men in culture and politics. To such critics, making a new recording of “Baby, It’s Cold Outside” in the year of the “silence breakers” was a very bad idea indeed—so much so that at one point in the interview, Costello asked pointedly, “Why did you do it?”

Fennell is no stranger to the issue of sexual misconduct, having provided assessment and treatment for sex offenders, victims, and families in situations involving incest, assault, and school-based sex crimes.

And she is intimately familiar with the lyrics of the song, which she does not see as offensive. But the theme of the interview, as stated in its promotional tagline, was, “‘Baby, It’s Cold Outside’: Christmas classic, or sexual-assault anthem?”

Fennell immediately set the record straight on the first half of the question. “I said, it is a classic whether we want it to be or not. It’s one of the most recorded Christmas songs of all-time.”

“That said,” she continues, look at “the original intent of the tune, the context in which it was written. … In its time, the song bordered on a liberation theme. Look at the majority at the lyrics. Remember, this is 1944. The country is at war. The men are away. … This is the time of Katharine Hepburn and Bette Davis, and strong women. If you look at the lyric, she’s concerned—not about having sex with him—she’s concerned with what the neighbors will think. And she’s the one who dropped by.”

Written by Frank Loesser—who performed it for years at parties with his wife, Lynn Garland—the song is a call-and-response duet in which the “mouse” (usually sung by a woman) decides it’s time to end a date at the apartment of the “wolf” (usually a man) and go home. As she continues to protest, he piles on the excuses why she should stay: it’s cold, it’s snowing, no cabs are running, she might catch pneumonia. For her part, she never says she wouldn’t like to stay, or that the man’s advances are unwanted; her lines are mostly about society’s, and her family’s, expectations (“My father will be pacing the floor”; “My maiden aunt’s mind is vicious”; and so on).

Fennell makes it clear that she thinks rape and sexual assault are crimes and serious problems in our culture, but she disagrees with those who insist that “Baby” is, to quote a description often seen on social media, “rapey.”

“She [the mouse] dropped by. She wanted to see this person. This person now is making advances. And she is telling him she doesn’t want to stay, because, ‘What will people think of me?’ By and large, the norms of the time, informed by our ethnic and religious backgrounds, were that women were not supposed to have sex outside of marriage, women were not supposed to want sex, and they weren’t supposed to enjoy sex.”

“The mouse … may or may have come to this man’s home because she was looking for sex, but he was making his intentions known. Her responses are not that she does not want to have sexual congress; her responses are, what will the neighbors think if she does?”

“I’m not hearing her say, ‘You’re a jackass, I’m gone.’ “

One thing the mouse does say halfway through the song is the line, “Say, what’s in this drink?” For many critics, this is the point of no return; the wolf has slipped her a roofie so he can have his way with her, and how can we have that on the radio in 2017?

Fennell’s initial reaction: “I’m making the assumption that what was slipped into people’s drinks in the 1940s is not what I had to be concerned about in the ’70s and ’80s.”

For what it’s worth, the powerful sedative Rohypnol (one of the most notorious date-rape drugs) was introduced by the pharmaceutical company Roche in the early 1970s. According to Merriam Webster, the first known use of the slang term “roofie” was in 1994.

That doesn’t mean drugging someone’s drink couldn’t have happened in the ’40s, but as defenders of “Baby” periodically remind us, our language and idiomatic expressions also have evolved since then. This usage may be rare today, but in the ’40s, it was common to say something like “Say, what’s in my drink”—to feign blaming the alcohol—when the speaker was offering too much information (like a suspect blurting out evidence to a cop) or falling (like the mouse?) for a romantic seduction.

Finally, there’s the repetition—the mouse repeatedly says she has to leave, the wolf repeatedly begs her to stay (“She’s says ‘no’ like a hundred times,” says one Twitter critic), undermining the idea that “no means no.”

“It’s a conceit of the structure of the tune,” Fennell answers. “Repetition is structure. This is a story.”

During the HLN interview, host Costello played two different versions of the song. “One of them was one of the original recordings, and it was a standard, pleasant, simple read, back-and-forth. No big drama,” says Fennell. “The second one she played, it sounded like the people, the male especially, were very aggressive. It definitely was not people being nice.”

But if Costello thought she was driving home her point, Fennell was about to throw her a curveball. Costello had not listened to the Pasin-Fennell recording before the interview—and so did not know that the pair had reversed the traditional male and female roles.

Whichever gender assumes the roles of “wolf” and “mouse” (and the song has been performed every which way), Fennell maintains that the historical context of “Baby, It’s Cold Outside”—with its themes of patriarchal society’s expectations, women’s reputations, and women’s sexual freedom—should not be overlooked.

“That said,” she concludes, “times have changed. Some would argue we have lost ground. I believe it’s important to take what’s available from 1944 and build on it. Make people look at the power imbalance. And not just women’s roles, but men’s roles too.”

The album Baby, It’s Cold Outside, recorded by Chris Pasin and Friends, is at No. 45 and is this week’s “biggest gainer” on the JazzWeek jazz chart.

This post also appears on the website of Albany Health Management Associates, Inc.