My Roommate's Sweater

Watercolor and gouache on board. 2024. JD

In summer 1978 I went to Amsterdam with the intention of printing a book. I had spent the previous winter on the then-remote island of Santorini, in the tiny village of Oia (population less than 300) on the northern tip of the collapsed cone of the ancient volcano. Exotic, but isolated. While there, I had produced a series of drawings focused on organic process and wanted to experiment with these ideas by creating an edition of etchings accompanied by a theoretical text. I had heard there was a state-supported letterpress shop in Amsterdam, the Drukhuis where, for a per diem fee, one could use the type and equipment. In addition, there was a government-funded graphic arts print shop with etching equipment, also available for use for a daily fee. With these opportunities in view, I came to the Dutch capital where I knew no one at all except the friend of a friend with whom I had corresponded a few weeks earlier.

My arrival in Amsterdam had not been planned in any detail beyond fixing the day. I had gotten on a train in Turin the night before, having been let off at the station by a recently met acquaintance, scion of a French aristocratic family who, with his American wife, had established a prestigious gallery in Athens. Under their sponsorship and in their company I had travelled to an art fair in Italy and was now ready to make my way to the Netherlands. The gallerist was shocked when I said I was getting on a train to go to Amsterdam to print a book and make a life. He could not quite believe it. Especially as I had very little money and almost no contacts.

On arrival, I purchased a street map and walked from the Central Station through the residential area of the center of the city. Finally, after showing the written address on an envelope to a random passerby, I found the door and bell of the friend of a friend to whom I had written about my planned arrival. A handsome young gay man, he lived in a beautiful set of rooms looking onto a lush, nearly formal, garden with abundant blooms. A grand piano was placed by the French doors, flowers in a shapely vase were on a side table, and the whole scene was an absolutely perfect Dutch interior.

He took one look at me, with my unruly hair, flowered skirt, striped sailor shirt, lace-up boots, and heavy bag. No way I could stay with him. Out of the question. He immediately made a brief phone call, after which he sent me around the corner to the house of a mutual friend, a woman also from a significant Dutch family with flaming red hair and fondness for jazz piano music. Keith Jarrett tunes wafted throughout the cozy rooms. She was an artist, and her beautiful house was also in the Centrum. Within an hour of our meeting, we had tea in her garden, with little cakes, and she invited me to stay a few days while I found a place to live and she went out of town to Montreux or some other jazz festival venue. My Dutch friend in California had long been among her favorites and his pursuit of psychic instruction in the flourishing new age community in the Bay Area resonated profoundly with her own investigations of spirits and otherworldly beings in her artwork. In the months that followed, she was a steady, though intermittent, presence in the social networks I established.

Within a few days, following up on a single lead on a nearly-bare bulletin board, I managed to secure a room in a house in the East edge of the city. The apartment building was on a tram line and the cars ran right under my window, but I didn’t care. I was in Amsterdam and embarked on my printing project, full of determination. The tram, bicycles, and other features of the picturesque city were all part of the adventure. My two roommates were very different types. One, whose family had some connection to the apartment, had flat platinum blonde hair and features that appeared to have been drawn by a single hair brush. Her face could have been painted by Holbein or Rembrandt, it was so perfectly fair, fine, and classically Netherlandish in its color and features. Her name, Yolande, was equally antique and appropriate, and I was intrigued by the sullen sphinx-like quality of her reserve. She barely spoke to me. But she had an excess of material belongings and given the challenges of the climate, was kind enough to offer me this sweater. The colors were wrong for her, she acknowledged. The red and black yarns were tightly knit and the wool was perfect against the chill and damp. I had found out very soon that summer in Amsterdam was about the same as winter in San Francisco. Sunshine was in short supply and drizzling rain was a constant presence.

The other roommate, Lies, was tall, strong, fearless and generally good natured in a practical off-hand way. Working as a flight attendant, she was enrolled in a program studying international law, at which, in due time, she succeeded admirably rising in various NGO’s and eventually finding a role in politics as a member of the Dutch Parliament. Neither of us could have known that then, but in retrospect, her forthright attitude prefigured her capacities to negotiate those systems and social complexities. She was more available than Yolande, and we struck up a sort of friendship which led, in a few months, to our squatting a house together. Another story.

But in the meantime, I proceeded with the printing. The graphic arts shop had its own culture, of course, and the habitual participants were well-known to each other. My arrival was without any introduction to the group. I simply showed up in the office one day, paid my fee, was shown around, and began to work. The studio manager informed me that summer break was almost upon them and that there were only a few weeks left in which the shop would be open. From the first of August, it would be closed until autumn. This was mid-July. Fully aware that time was short, I was highly organized and focused. I brought my stack of damped paper, wrapped in plastic in a stiff portfolio, set it up by the press, and got to work. I didn’t hesitate and I didn’t attempt to integrate into the social life of the shop.

The project, titled Experience of the Medium, was a conceptual and procedural one. I had a single zinc etching plate and I was going to use it as a “field” for experiment. The structure of the work was clear: I would begin by printing the plate and any of the “noise” that was part of its grain and somewhat distressed surface. Then, I would do one thing after another, in sequence, creating an “event” and making marks that were the record of actions simply left on the plate. Thus a scratch, bit of acid, some random aquatint blotches and burnished spots would be all that “happened” to the plate. Each of these elements had a name, a term attached to it, and the discussion of the relationship of these terms across the sequence of “events” on the plate would be the foundation of the text to be composed and printed later. All of this was very clear to me and I went to work in earnest, printing an edition of twelve copies of the plate on succeeding days. To the young Dutch artists in the shop, I seemed to be printing a blank plate. They were baffled by the sight of this industrious visitor printing systematically while producing an image that was nothing but incidental scratches and marks.

Among the studio denizens was one particularly striking young woman. She had the porcelain perfect features of a cinema star, bright blue-green eyes, blond hair curled to perfection, and teeth that were just short of perfect, still being straightened by a retainer she sometimes wore. I was dazzled by her beauty. Simply that. I didn’t dare look at her for fear of staring, but I did make a couple of shy overtures in the form of a smile in her direction. She was working on a print of a tree with elaborate bark and much detail. I knew that print, having seen it done endless numbers of times. The detailed tree, the barking dog, and the screaming woman are clichés of art school print shops, like archetypes that stream through the collective consciousness of the social groups.

Towards the end of the two weeks in which I was struggling to finish my edition, this woman appeared one afternoon in a pair of pink satin capri pants. This was just too much for my reserve. I was so smitten and so in thrall that I had to speak to her. I was pulling the final prints from my distressed plate, carefully wiping and re-inking. I was completely convinced of the validity of my conceptual project, but it was, after all, not fully self-evident to everyone else. I think they must have talked about me when I left in the afternoons, leaving my prints on the drying racks, the sheets of impressions of incidental marks, carefully produced, but without recognizable substance. But on this day, as the window in which encounters might occur was closing, I took all of my courage and initiated a verbal exchange. I went up to where she sat at the work table, her proof spread before her, etching needle in hand as she drew through the ground on her plate. “It’s beautiful,” I said, indicating her print. She paused, hesitating just long enough to let me know I was intruding and also that I had no social standing on which to make an approach. Then, she looked at me briefly, barely meeting my eye. “Yes, it is a lot of work what I do.” She barely paused and returned to her task.

That was it. I had been summarily dismissed.

And the sweater? It has stayed with me, the gift of pale Yolande, who vanished into whatever life she pursued. Lies and I became friends enough to participate in a group squatting action where I learned that the terms of occupancy for the state-owned apartments were that you had to have a key to the door, lace curtains at the window, and a way to boil water before the police arrived. We learned to change a lock in under three minutes, since the time between alarm and arrival was short. Because these were state-owned units, the other tenants preferred they be occupied by young Dutch people rather than stand empty vulnerable to vagrants. The protocols were well-established, and so we obtained a place to live rent-free during the months in which I remained. Winter set in, bitter cold, and we had no central heating or hot running water, but I managed. Lies was largely absent, spending time in the relative ease of her boyfriend’s flat. But I managed to finish my project, after a bout in the letterpress shop that had its own amusing aspects, and through the kind interventions of the man in charge, was able to sell copies of the work to several major Dutch museums. I never saw the woman with the pink pants again, though sometimes I think she wafts through scenes I watched in European independent cinema, a dazzling figure, suffused with light.

The red and black yarn, still strong, intact, and vivid, connects me viscerally with those episodes. Though I rarely wear the sweater now, touching it provides a sense of the warmth it offered, a comfort in those cold days and many scenes and circumstances. Oddly, the sweater had so few style features that it does not appear dated. Nothing about the way it looks suggests fashion from half a century ago. Curious to imagine something could so escape the effects of aging, avoid registering historical distance in material form. Even more interesting to realize that objects age at different rates, rather than in a uniform temporal frame, progressing along vectors of different scales and speeds. Whatever made me think time was a unified construct, homogenous in its behaviors?