1970's Boston Maps

J.Hilburn

When I got the email about "Home, Style & Beauty Night" here at the Lofts of Perkins Park, I didn't expect there would be much there for me. However, when I walked into the building and saw a rack of premium men's dress shirts, I realized how wrong I might have been. Within 5 minutes, Jennifer, a representative of J.Hilburn (a network of custom clothing makers with one right in my building) was taking my measurements. My first shirt should be here in a few weeks. I went with the swatches on the left, my initials on the cuff in the style on the top right, dark purple stitching, and black buttons.

Cigar Self-Portrait -- AT LARGE

Perhaps the only artwork on this blog that is un-officially "at large." This is the last known photograph.

The first year of the five-year architecture program at RPI is basically art school. You get introduced to concepts like "surface" and "threshold" (the juxtaposition of interior and exterior space), and paths of movement through open spaces. (People used to ask me if I was going to do "commercial or residential" and the reality is that decision probably would not come until at least the final year of the program so I used to say that I planned on doing out-houses as a joke.) In our studio classes we would dive through the garbage and make sculptures out of cans and sticks and other "abstract" things. Around halloween we were working on a series of charcoal drawings and were given the assignment to draw a "haunted self-portrait." I am a huge fan of the Sopranos and had the idea to do me smoking a cigar. I was proud of it so I paid $184 to have it framed in a little shop in downtown Troy, New York. At the time I thought I got ripped off big-time, but it was actually a pretty reasonable price.

It hung on the walls of my room at the fraternity house and a few apartments for several years along with a Cuban cigar shipping crate I found at an architectural salvage store outside of Albany and a little collage of cigar wrappers I made and put into a cheap frame from Target. After moving back to the Boston area I proceeded to have 5 apartments in 6 years so I downsized my inventory of stuff pretty quickly. In transition I had the idea to "lend" my paraphernalia to a cigar shop called Churchills in the Millennium Hotel in the Faneuil Hall section of downtown Boston. When they went out of business I guess someone forgot to call me. By the time I caught wind of it everything had been auctioned off or given away and the windows boarded up. When I walked inside after reaching the owner on his cell and arranging a time to swing by there were only a few items left leaning against the walls and on the floor which included my little collage, but not the portrait or the shipping crate. The owner wasn't sure if I was going to blow my stack and felt kind of bad so he gave me a little sketch of Castle Island in South Boston in a wooden frame badly damaged by all the cigar fumes over the years and I took my little collage.

Now that the FBI got to the bottom of the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum heist maybe they can help me out. If you or anyone you know has the artwork titled "Cigar Self-Portrait" or have information that might lead to its whereabouts, and happen to read this ... I hope you think it looks nice. I always thought the smoke blended with the shadow on my cheek in a weird way and considered trying to fix it at one point.

Faneuil Street Restoration

BEFORE

AFTER

BEFORE

AFTER

Edna Hibel

Edna Hibel (1917-2014) was a commercially successful artist best known for her mother and child paintings. She was married to Tod Plotkin, my great uncle on my father's side. She moved from Brookline, Massachusetts to Florida in 1968. The Hibel Museum of Art, founded in 1977 in Palm Beach and now housed on Florida Atlantic University’s Jupiter campus, has more than 2,000 original paintings, sculptures and porcelain works. She credited her fourth-grade math teacher with launching her career as an artist in a 1974 interview with the Boston Globe. “I guess I was adding and subtracting too quickly. Anyway, I’d have my work done before the others and I probably became fidgety. That’s when my teacher gave me a small box of watercolors to hold my attention.”

Harold Plotkin '94 +P

Harold Plotkin (1912-1995) was an artist and businessman who lived on Greystone Beech in Marblehead, Massachusetts and vacationed in York, Maine. He began in business as an executive with Plotkin Brothers, a women's specialty shop in the Back Bay and became head of marketing at Sweetheart Plastics (now part of Dart Container, the Solo Cup company).  A graduate of Colby College, he was editor of the comic magazine White Mule and co-author-producer of the musical comedy Moon Madness (which in 1934 featured in its prophetic plot a landing on the moon). He authored Shore Road to Ogunquit in 1969, a poetry book with photographs by Ernst Halberstadt. For many years he was active in Boston civic affairs as a member of the development committee for the Prudential Center, as an officer of the Boston Convention Bureau, and as a member of the Massachusetts Senate Art Committee under Billy Bulger. (I took the picture below in the State House where there is a mirror with a plaque in his memory.) He became president of the Back Bay Association in 1951 and founded the Boston Arts Festival. He was also a member of the Boston Yacht Club and the University Club in Boston. He also happened to be my father's father, "Poppa" as I knew him (sounds a bit more like "Pupp-ah" here in Greater Boston), and a man to whom I have been linked through my personality and interests more than any other relative. The "+P" refers to his loving wife Priscilla who helped him with this painting and has helped me learn more about Poppa, a man with whom I only shared a very short time.

I wrote the following as part of a high school writing assignment 20 years ago in 1995; Poppa and I would spread out oil pastels all over the carpet and draw together for hours. Although we never wrote together we shared a love of poetry and shared the final products. The time we spent together incubated and revealed a lifelong gift of creativity within me. Before sunset he would hold my hand as I walked barefoot over the rocky beach at the dead end of the street. All of the fist-sized rocks that covered the small beach were so smooth I couldn’t fit enough of the best ones into my pocket. Years later I would place those very stones on the headstone of his grave. Occasionally I would sleep over for the weekend and stay in the loft on a small twin size mattress that sits on a giant windowsill of the window that replaced nearly the whole wall. It overlooks a placid but vivacious pond in the midst of the gray condo complexes. Even after poppa called “goodnight” upstairs to the loft, I would stay up for many more hours and watch the rippled pond water in the celestial glow of the moonlight. The longer I stared, the more sense I made of life. The loft doubled as Poppa’s painting studio and at the time of his death a nearly finished work rested on the easel. It hangs in my living room today.

FrameWorks

My go-to frame shop has usually been Michael's just because of all their promotions. However, I brought in a pair of smaller pieces and the clerk told me they don't touch pieces under a foot. He suggested I try FrameWorks just around the corner in Burlington. It turns out the pricing is fairly consistent and they did such a nice job that I have now returned on multiple occasions.

When the clerk at FrameWorks told me about a class they run where they let you frame your own picture, I dismissed it at first. I had two pictures framed on my last two trips to trips. Each time the clerk picked out a sample that was very clearly the right match for one piece and I picked out a frame that struck them the same way about the other piece. Although the clerk indicated that the design I selected worked in a surprising way and that they might not have thought to suggest it. It dawned on me later that I really enjoyed it and that class might be pretty neat so I do plan on doing it.

Sometimes the manufacturer will make subtle changes to update their custom frame designs and thus the sample can be a bit different than what comes out on the artwork. This occurred on one of the two pieces from each of the last two trips. As soon as the frames made it from the manufacturer to the FrameWorks shop, the clerk called me right away, texted me pictures of the frame next to the piece, and even went as far as to check with the warehouse to see if any of the old stock was available. Each time we decided it was best to move forward with the frame that came in instead of going in another direction. As it turns out, those changes will validate whether the spirit of the frame design and the piece are in harmony.