Tyler Alpern, Gallery 5

This painting celebrates the late Makiko Narumi.

At benefit home concert the promising young contralto electrified the room when at one point she performed an animated, flirtatious vocal improvisation using only one vowel that shifted through the gamut of emotions. A curious and enchanted cat kept interrupting much to the amusement of Makiko. Makiko had flashing eyes, and a captivating star quality that was also had a strong visual component. It was a night I'd never forget and I knew right then I would have to paint her. I memorized her gesturing with one hand and occasionally leaning on the arm of the couch for support with the other. Little did anyone know then that her posture in her pose hinted at the illness in her foot that would soon take her life. The dress is similar to the lace collar and floral print she wore that magical night but with a nod to Ray Aghayan. The furniture arrangement are as they were at Betty Wiess's home, though the details have all been made up. Clarinetist Dick Waller who organized the event for the Aspen Music Festival is depicted as well. Both portraits were done from memory and I am pleased with the likenesses. When Makiko died, I finally saw a photo of her and only decided to sharpen her chin in the painting. In the background is the ever changing "ahhhh" of her playful vocalise.

I was sitting on the floor just to the right of the image and feel so lucky to have witnessed Makiko sing from such a close vantage point. There is even a recording made that same magical night floating around the internet, but alas not this song. Dick Waller 's sweater is actually inspired by a gift from my boyfriend at the time David Cohen. My aesthetic and love of pattern is very clear in this piece which was repainted and reimagined in 2019 mostly by eliminating aspects of artist Weiss's home and incorporating the text. Hunt down the original online if you are curious. The interlacing of all the blue and hot red brushstrokes give the painting and over all iridescent purple in person that digital reproduction can't capture.

My dad's comment on this painting means a lot to me, "I was there with you that night but no one enjoys your level of compassion, powers of observation and appreciation for interesting life experiences. Again, I want to grow up and be more Tyleresque.‬"

Click on painting to enlarge.

No People Like Show People

Red Fish Tenderly

Pan

Now underneath the painting
"Friends of Dorothy,
 

Like Gertrude and Alice

Cocktails

Portrait in Red

Goodbye Daphne

Fragile as a House of Cards

Another painting of the Maroon Bells at Aspen where I grew up. The magnificent massive mountians seem so permanent and their beauty awesome and sublime. Yet they was spoiled with the stroke of a pen in remote urban office, and other pristine Colorado peaks were leveled by short sighted state governers.

The landscape is painted on a collage of cards that collapse from stable rows as the image moves down. Not on ly a comment on the fragility of the natural environment, but also on our ability to recognize the value of and preserve the unspoiled beauty that surrounds us. In this sad case, the goverment has covered up this magnificent veiw with fake rocks and plastic outhouses that could have been placed nearby out ot the view plane instead of in the forground of this magnificent backdrop! What makes sense on paper in Washington, is an absurd travesty in application on the once glorious site.

Pyramid Peak and the Maroon Bells from Aspen Highlands in Colorado where I grew up. Almost this exact view was once used in a "Ski Utah" ad. This painting was a turning point for me, when I taught myself something about how to use organic pattern in unifying ways.

Spinning North.

Just as star trails reveal the rotation of the Earth in the night sky, the day time sky is spinning too, as sensed perhaps by the rooted, stable trees. Jet trails crisscross in the sky above.

The brushstrokes of the sky echoes the original painting beneath this new composition. The actual inspiration for this piece is taken from Art Nouveau peacock motifs. I am charmed by the stylized artifice of the natural world in Art Nouveau. Here pine needle clumps from my world substitute for the pattern of the guady tail feathers.

Off trail in Buckingham Park/Joder Ranch, what you see, not in a singlar view, but if you too spin like the earth. The sky is north, the mountains are west, the forground ridge is looking soulth and the white rocks are from the ridge east.

Pardon Me Miss Garland...

Dishing about celebrities over a game of cards... Judy Garland, Jackie O, Maria Callas, Kathleen Battle, Truman Capote, Princess Margaret...

Chasing Amelia.

An ardent fan plots Amelia Erhart's course over Cape Cod in order to catch a glimpse of her flyover.

At the Far, Far End

Another painting remembering the summer I was "capo" at the Peggy Guggenheim Collection working for Philip Rylands. and with Sharon Hecker and other budding art historians. Lying in dunes at the very far end of the Lido in Venice. References to Casimiro, Davide, Marino, Rudolfo, Manuele and a few others. I remember them all in vivid details and the profound, formative influence that adventure had on my life going forward. So many stories, intense romances, yearning, discovery, exotic excursions, secrets, lessons and pain; my version of "Call Me by Your Name."

Painted right after I got back from Italy in 1989 when all those adventures were fresh in my mind and later revised with text in 2022/3.  It was a very tough time, when gay men were not only marginalized but vilified and despised.  To find each other we had to go to way out of the way places where no one else would go, like the far, far end of the beach.  Or to meet by stealing secret glances and returning long gazes.   I had to meet one lover at 3am and we'e walk the streets until dawn stealing kisses in shadows if neither of us had a private place to go.  There was always the fear of catching AIDS too.  But being found out for them meant more than losing a job, it meant losing a career and family.   We had to be so discreet. Italy in the 80s was how I imagined America in the 50s. So scary, but also romantic, because those secret rendezvous meant so much because we risked so much.  

Discression was a must - at the time, the city had no gay bars, Venice was very closeted. My predecessor had been fired for being gay, and gay ex-pats were sometimes kicked out of town. Lonely and feeling randy, one night I told myself that, "I've read Tennessee Williams and know how this all works." So I marched myself down to Piazza San Marco, and with my eyes wide open I saw a whole new world of cruising happening in front of everyone in the most public of spaces. It had always been going on but I had never noticed it before. What an education and adventure that summer was. So many stories. It does not matter if you understand the many references or meaning of the text, the content of the scene is obvious. The text eludes to my memories but really functions to evoke the myrial of experiences anyone has when they take extended travel abroad. Zanzare, if you have not guessed, is the Italian word for mosquitos. The z's and zanare are the buzz of tousands of those pests trapped in my room by the jealous girlfirend of my lover that forced me to flee and spend the night in cramped bathtub my last night in Venice. It would be 10 years later in Paris before I would see handsome Mr. di Crescenzo again. At first I could never remember his unsual first name, Casimiro, so would refer to him as Tiramisu. After all these years I still owe him a little something. Cosi...

So Marino, the one in the sunglasses looking over the dunes, was very Catholic and his partner was often off taking care of his mother.  Their apartment was like the apartment in La Cage aux Folles - after they de -gayed it for the conservative visiting parents.  The living room was just 2 severe antique wood benches and a 6 foot crucifix and flowing white gauze drapes.   The word "Vasca" is written on the painting.   He was making me dinner my last night I would be able to see him, or he me, and he asked me in Italian to shake out the crumbs from the table cloth in the "vasca" before setting the table.  I whipped out my dictionary to look up what "vasca" meant in English (bathtub) and he asked me where do we shake out tablecloths in America.   I said we only use them for special occasions, and he answered me in the most Italian way possible, "Every meal is a special occasion."

 Rudolfo is the older gentleman cruising me.  But the painting is mostly a tribute to lover Casimiro who was engaged to someone who was affliated with the museum.   Casimiro called me on the phone to invite me to see "Women on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown"  I couldn't figure out why he was asking me, I didn't even think he really knew who I was.   Anyway when his knee touched mine during the movie, I found out why.   We always made love to his favorite album, Billie Holiday's "Lady in Satin".  He insisted I tell no one, which I honored.  However figured it out, said nothing but tortured me with an open window, bright lights to attract thousands of mosquitos in my room for my last miserable night in Venice and send me fleeing to the small Italian bathtub to spend a miserable sleepless uncomfortable night.

When I got home to America there arrived an angry, desperate letter from Casimiro telling me his fiance knew, she was going to out him to his family, and he blamed me.   So I wrote him back, heartbroken, to protest my innocence.  But being 1989, his letter to me took a few weeks to arrive and my letter back would take the same, and then back and forth over months.  It was gut wrenching, slow motion, terrible end to such a beautiful affair, one of the most romantic of my whole life.  Manuele was the young waiter who I had to meet at 3am when he got of work and spend the nights in the shadows with, who I met, my first night learning to cruise in public when I decided I would try what I had read in Tennessee Williams and had always been happening all around me, but I was oblivious until I changed my gaze and attention..  He had a fake fiancee as a cover just like Casimiro.  All of that referenced in the text and imagery of painting and more.

For Casimiro. He knows what and why.

And thanks to dear sweet Matt Patrick who did me an unforgettable kindness when he made a big gesture to buy this in order to save me a great embarrassment.