Gimme Shelter: Studio tour

I was hanging out with artist Gavin Ziegler in his studio on North Ferry Road one afternoon last week. We were talking about one of the sources of his inspiration, when he said, “Things that are gone. And are going.”

The studio itself, next to Black Cat Books and around the corner from the Reporter’s office, is itself a tribute to the past. It looks like a garage or gas station, which it was in former lives. The connection is deepened by the artist’s devotion to his perfectly restored 1970 GMC Sierra Grande pickup parked inside.

Near the front door, next to the floor-to-ceiling glass garage doors, Mr. Ziegler pointed out some framed photos hanging on the wall.

One showed the studio as a single-room Socony Gas Station from 1917, with a certain Mr. McDermott staring gloomily out of the past next to a single pump. Another photo showed the station transformed — slightly — into Johnny Rocks Auto Body.

There’s a framed bill for work on the wall from August 1, 1929, listing, “4 parts of coils and labor: $1.75. Change 2 tires: $1.00.”

“Imagine that,” Gavin said, in the soft tones of Tennessee, where he was born and raised.

Someone else would have kept the old bill in a drawer and brought it out for the amusement of guests. But the artist had it framed and given pride of place on the wall. The past isn’t just preserved here, it’s meditated on. Another Southerner, William Faulkner, wrote something that has been repeated to the point of cliché: “The past isn’t dead. It isn’t even past.”

It’s good to remember that one of the characteristics of a cliché is it has to contain elements of the truth.

A topic of conversation that has bubbled to the top here lately has been preserving physical links to the past. First it was St. Gabriel’s Chapel, with a smarmy lawyer at a Planning Board meeting taking the position that demolishing it would be the equivalent of bulldozing a garden shed. Not long after that it was learned that one of the oldest houses on the Island had been razed with no more review than a building department permit.

Maybe the past really is dead in some quarters.

On a high table was a work of art that had been returned to Gavin by a client from Michigan whose house burned down. One of the valuables saved was this mixed media piece by Gavin. The client had asked if he could restore it. “It smelled like it had been smoked,” Gavin said.

Seen from 10 feet away, it appears to be a finely patterned textile in soft shades of blue stretched on a wood frame. Coming closer, it begins to reveal itself as blue circles and multi-colored diamonds. But when you’re close enough to touch it — “Go ahead, it’s meant to be touched” — you see it’s made of pennies fixed to the wood, illuminated by hundreds of coats of blue paint. The diamonds are formed by the spaces between the coins.

But the piece is more than a “find-the-figure-hidden-in-the-picture” trick.

“Each penny is made different by all the hands that used them,” Gavin said. He then added that pennies, it’s been reported, are on the way out, rejected by vending machines and toll booths and, some say (including prominent economists) they should be retired.

Besides working in the mixed media category, Gavin also does photography, bronze sculptures and makes high-quality furniture, milling his own wood in a shop at the back of the studio. “Sometimes I’m doing them all at the same time,” he said.

Like most artists, he lets his work come to him, with the idea that, as he said, “half of choice is chance.”

Most of his choices — and luck — have been successful. His work is seen in museums, galleries and public spaces worldwide, as well as in private collections of people with instantly recognizable names.

He pulled another piece from a stack leaning against the table. It used the same technique as the penny painting, but substituted hundreds of keys for the coins. “Everyone has keys,” Gavin said, running a hand over the surface. “I’ve seen homeless people with keys.”

I mentioned that our front door has a keyboard to punch in a code so we no longer use a key.

“They might be on the way out,” Gavin said. “People are opening their houses with their phones.”

Ideas are inescapable as a source of his art, but the object itself is the meaning, and every interpretation can be a correct one. “I don’t want to shove anything down anyone’s throat,” he said.

His view of what his work means is not quite the same as voiced by Tristan Tzara, father of Dadaism, that “any work of art that can be understood is the product of journalism,” but that’s close enough.

Still, the incorporation into his art of pennies, keys, or beautifully intricate, and now defunct, stock certificates, are working examples of the old folk witticism that you never know what the past will bring.

The light in the studio shifted a bit, but it remained brightly lit. The glass and light play tricks, Gavin said.

“During the day, people can look in and see me working, but I can’t see them,” he said. “At night it’s the opposite. I can see out but people can’t see me.”

There are some Islanders who might swear they’ve seen a ghost, he said. One night people walking across the street came closer to put their hands on the glass to peer inside and when the artist walked up to look back at them they ran in terror.

They weren’t expecting something they at first thought they had understood.