There was this artist who lived in a convalescent tower near the bar I tended in coal country PA who claimed he had works in many of the major museums in the world, including MoMA and The Tate Modern, but was now forced to survive off subsidies from the PA Lottery (“Benefitting Older Pennsylvanians”).
He drank a bottle of red wine most nights, chipping away at his long-standing tab against the huge abstract high up on the wall. When he moved on to Campari and gin, he’d slam his fist on the bar, cursing city council for failing us, for not understanding “the importance of culture” and would throw his read copies of The New Yorker at me, challenging me to educate myself out of this town.
He commissioned my first piece of paid prose, an introduction to a catalogue of nude charcoal drawings, and over the next decade, while writing his biography, I realized most of his stories were true.
As Allen Ginsberg howls of seeing the best minds of his generation destroyed by madness, starving, hysterical, naked, searching the Negro streets at dawn searching for an angry fix, Edward Meneeley sketches them.
Meneeley shows us hunger in the eyes, the mouth and the loins; madness in the menacing lines emitted from the model's consciousness; hysteria within the chaotic contrast of emotion and analysis, erections and deflations of ego.
It takes the discerning eye of an artist such as Meneeley to reflect the mirror image of our naked selves unmasked by the cosmetic backdrop of society. Herein rests the sensuality and the vulnerability of true feeling.
For more than 50 years, Meneeley has been compiling a case study of desperate subjects ranging from those wanted by the law to ambitious, career-driven American role models. Some drawings represent single session explosions of character while others represent an evolving relationship over years of expressive scrutiny.
Special thanks to Wayne Adams for serving as Executive Producer of this project.
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