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Message: <br /><br /> If you are having trouble reading this email, you may view this article online at: http://www.jweekly.com/34247/full/34247/son-of-the-city-artist-spends-a-lifetime-painting-scenes-of-urban-america/ <br /><br /> <b>Son of the city: Artist spends a lifetime painting scenes of urban America</b> <br /> Thursday, January 31, 2008 | by <p>joe eskenazi </p> <br /><br /><p>With each descending step into Maury Lapp’s Santa Rosa basement studio, the temperature seems to slip five degrees and time seems to slip back five decades. <br /><br /> Atop the staircase is a striking black and white photograph snapped by Imogene Cunningham of a 27-year-old Lapp, paintbrush in hand, staring earnestly into the lens. Within a few steps, one has passed several of Lapp’s enthralling, somewhat ethereal cityscapes of urban scenes long since faded into memory: Skyscrapers and housing tracts give way to Jazz Era street scenes populated by men with fedoras and wide lapels bobbing and weaving around cars with running boards. <br /><br /> Lapp, 82, is a sturdily-built man with a subtly paint-splattered gray sweatshirt, a snow-white goatee and the forceful voice and cadence of a much younger man. An exhibition of his recent work opens Feb. 7 at George Krevsky Gallery in San Francisco. <br /><br /> Lapp glances at the scene surrounding him. Paint-drenched palates lie on cluttered tables next to what seem to be several works in progress. In a corner room, hundreds — if not thousands — of Lapp’s paintings are stacked in cupboards, shelves and old wine boxes. <br /><br /> “I don’t know,” he answers emphatically when asked how many paintings are crammed into every last inch of available floor and wall space. “I don’t want to know.” Cityscapes of San Francisco’s North Beach lie next to works depicting the north of Italy — which, in turn, lie atop a portrait of a factory in Lynchburg, Va. <br /><br /> “It’s chaotic,” admits Lapp (who nonetheless manages to know exactly where every painting he wants to display is located, even without the slightest semblance of an organizational system). <br /><br /> Sometimes he’ll pluck one of those paintings out of the pile and work on it anew. Oftentimes he’ll paint and repaint the same city scene a dozen or more times, varying the size of the portrait from the dimensions of a Cracker Jack box to one “too big to fit in my car.” He likens the repetition to Thelonious Monk playing “Straight No Chaser” a bit differently each time, for decades and decades. <br /><br /> “I’d like to think I’m still learning,” says the longtime Santa Rosa Junior College instructor with a smile. “I’m not at all a pompous ass about what I do.” <br /><br /> Lapp’s artistic career — and he has had scores of exhibitions since his first in 1950 — started unpretentiously as well. He recalls hunching over huge pieces of brown butcher paper in his parents’ Chicago apartment, fervently grinding crayons down to the nub. <br /><br /> The Lapps were Lithuanian Jewish immigrants, and Maury grew up in the extremely Jewish Lawndale District on the city’s west side. His older brother, Rudy, was a childhood friend of Saul Bellow. Childhood nostalgia for Maury is equal parts painting classes at the Jewish People’s Institute (where Rudy was a counselor) and May Day marches where fellow attendees waved signs decrying fascism or demanding the release of the Scottsboro Boys. <br /><br /> Lapp’s Jewishness may be most evident in the favorite subject of his six-decade career: the city. Like the majority of Jews in the first half of 20th-century America, Lapp grew up in a big city. To be Jewish was to be a city boy and, for Lapp, cities aren’t just collections of buildings but living entities, “the repositories of culture.” <br /><br /> In the same way, the dozens of Lapp paintings hanging on every wall in his home are not just portraits of New York, Chicago, San Francisco, or perhaps most memorably, Weehawken, N.J. Not unlike a chance glimpse through the windows of a downtown train at passengers who will soon (and forever) speed away, they’re a fleeting glimpse into another world and countless other lives, frozen in time. <br /><br /> Take the Weehawken portrait (of which a giant version will grace the Krevsky show). While the unmistakable towers of Manhattan crest through the clouds and fog in the distance, the foreground is occupied with oily representations of broken-down piers, train tracks to nowhere and foreboding warehouses. It’s a dour painting and yet, at the same time, it beckons the viewer to wonder what’s in those warehouses or marvel at the vegetation dotting this dilapidated landscape in the fleeting light of sunset. <br /><br /> “This was from a photograph taken in the 1940s,” he says of the Weehawken paintings. <br /><br /> “But I like to think that when I paint from a photograph, I’m breathing life into it. It’s my own flavor. I’m doing my own interpretation.” <br /><br /> But doesn’t that get tedious after a dozen images? <br /><br /> Lapp chuckles: Far from it.<br /><br /> “I love the quote of Samuel Beckett — ‘Try. Fail. Try again. Fail better.’ I think that’s pretty good.”<br /><br /> <br><br /><br /> <b>“Poetic Imagery”</b> by Maury Lapp will be on exhibit Feb. 7 to March 15 at George Krevsky Gallery, 77 Geary St., S.F. A preview reception with the artist will be held 5:30 p.m. Feb. 7. Information: (415) 397-9748. <br /><br /> </p> <p> </p>

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