`It looks like a slow night at the corral,” says Victor Shyman, as he surveys his art gallery at Pipers Alley on Chicago’s North Side.
It’s early evening and Victor is wearing paint-stained jeans, a blue sweatshirt and white hightop sneakers with the shoelaces untied. He’s eating a roast beef sandwich and chugging water from a huge plastic jug-something Victor says will help flush out a nasty virus he’s got.
Dozens of curious passersby walk casually up to the windows of Victor’s gallery and stare blankly inside.
What they see is a mind-boggling mishmash of mostly unstretched canvases tacked to walls and stacked on the floor. A few paintings are strewn about like leaves tossed in a stiff wind.
There are canvases painted with vaguely Keith Haring-like figures and Georgia O’Keeffe-like flowers, and others that mimic Van Gogh and Monet-style works. Some could be very, very loosely described as abstract expressionist, surrealistic or naive.
But most of the paintings-some of which are on wood and glass-are practically indescribable, beyond saying that they contain a lot of brightly colored shapes and whimsical lines.
Minutes pass, then an hour or two. Nobody walks into the gallery. But Victor isn’t fazed. He’s bullish on his own art career, so much so that he’s taking a novel approach: renting out high-profile commercial space to sell his own creations.
“Most people don’t come in,” Victor, 32, says calmly. “But most people don’t go into the Art Institute. It’s rare that a person really likes art.”
Victor-everybody calls him Vic-isn’t your stereotype of a tormented, full-of-himself young artist. Sure, Vic sometimes talks in circles, has problems making sense and speaks in wondrous platitudes.
But Vic is as nice a guy as you’d ever want to meet. He smiles often, never raises his voice, is well-mannered and doesn’t cop an attitude. I’ll go ahead and say it right now so you don’t get confused: I like Vic and I want him to succeed.
Vic could be labeled one of those anti-art artists, though some people say Vic is no artist at all. He’s a blue-collar guy with a paintbrush, a regular Joe who paints simply because he likes doing it more than anything else.
To Vic, color is the content. Symbols mean nothing. And everything else-form, technique-is a bunch of hogwash.
“None of these paintings have any meaning whatsoever,” says Vic. “That’s the beauty of them. They can be meaningful to an individual who looks at them, but otherwise they have no meaning.”
Growing up on the North Side, Vic says he never had a burning desire to paint, never had a favorite artist, didn’t visit museums-though he says he always admired the drawings in Heavy Metal magazine-and doesn’t remember any specific burst of inspiration.
Vic’s dad was a lingerie salesman who Vic says didn’t give a hoot about art. But Vic somehow found himself drawing as a kid, and sometime later he vaguely decided he wanted to be an artist.
Vic studied painting, drawing and design for a year at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign but dropped out because it was “really, really boring.” He then hit the road, traveling to Israel and Germany for a year.
Vic carried a couple of photographs with him-of his father and brother-and sketched them over and over again, 30 or 40 hours at a crack. He never worked with anybody else, never bounced ideas off other artists.
But something clicked.
“They were the best things I ever did,” Vic says. “It was there that I got some pretty grandiose ideas. I thought I could be a great artist . . . It was that attitude that got me where I am today, not that I am anywhere today.”
Vic wound up back in Chicago, and after forays into commercial art and animation failed, he took jobs as a pastry chef, bicycle messenger, steel salesman, waiter, in-line skating instructor-anything-to pay the rent. And he hawked his paintings on the side.
Maybe you saw Vic. He was that short, stocky guy several years ago who planted himself outside the Chicago Board of Trade and the Chicago Mercantile Exchange holding those huge canvases.
Vic sold a dozen paintings that way, and also made a few bucks sketching portraits on the street. He also tried half-heartedly over the years to get his stuff into galleries, but got universally rejected.
So late last year, Vic rented out a small storefront on Broadway near Buckingham Place to display his paintings. That’s where I first spotted Vic: hunched with a paintbrush over a canvas, sleeping on the floor or staring into space.
Vic says that sales there stunk, so he decided to try a more high-profile venue: the first floor of Pipers Alley at Wells Street and North Avenue. The complex has plenty of pedestrian traffic in the evenings because it houses several movie theaters as well as the popular play “Tony and Tina’s Wedding.”
Vic says he got a cut-rate deal on the rent because his contract says the landlord can boot him out any time he finds a long-term tenant. So far, it has paid off. Vic says he’s selling enough art to survive.
“I’m doing all right,” he says. “When the weather gets warmer, I’ll do even better. When the weather is warm, people want to be out buying things.”
Tough racket
Art professionals agree that it’s tough for young artists to make it in Chicago or anywhere else. Artists often have to go to great lengths to get their work “seen.”
Ann Wiens, editor of New Art Examiner, a Chicago-based magazine, says that last year a group of struggling Chicago artists who had just moved to New York City rented a truck, parked it in the middle of the gallery district, and hung their works inside the truck on the art season’s opening day.
Other artists hang their pieces in bars and restaurants, and several not-for-profit groups in Chicago exhibit the work of “emerging” or “outsider” artists.
But generally, there are too many artists and not enough space. So many art professionals give Vic high fives for his chutzpah.
“Just the act of doing it, I support,” says Joel Leib, owner of the Ten in One Gallery in Wicker Park. “The artist is taking the initiative. He’s taking the bull by the horns. It shows a lot of guts.”
But Leib and other gallery owners and critics wonder whether Vic couldn’t crack the official art scene because of the tight market or because his art just doesn’t cut the mustard.
Leib hasn’t seen Vic’s works, so he doesn’t know. Wiens has, and she wasn’t too impressed. She said that Vic’s works are “pictures”-meaning they have a strictly decorative value-rather than “art,” which she defines as contributing to the “contemporary art discourse.”
“There are a lot of people who like Harlequin romances, but they are not great literature,” Wiens says. “There is nothing wrong with that. There is nothing wrong with pictures. It is a problem only when people talk about all art as if there is no differentiation or different levels.”
Vic has no time for critics, gallery owners and other art professionals who he says put themselves above everybody else, judging other people’s work and everything. He sees himself as a sort of Ross Perot of painting, taking his stuff directly to the people.
“It doesn’t interest me to have my art work in galleries,” Vic says. “I don’t want to rely on other people’s opinions. I obviously have talent. Otherwise, I wouldn’t be able to sell paintings.”
Vic says the key to his art is “putting colors together. It’s matching colors to have a nice effect.”
Ask Vic if he has a unique artistic vision and he chuckles. Ask him if he is expressing something profound in his pieces and he’ll say flatly, “I’m not trying to do anything.”
How does Vic work? What’s his creative process? Vic says it’s simple: “I put down that color. And I’m under pressure now. I’m thinking, `What am I going to put next?’ “
But Vic does bring a certain practicality to his craft. He doesn’t spend too much time on any one piece because it’s not cost-effective. He rarely bargains on the price, which ranges from next to nothing to a grand or more. And he varies the colors in each work as much as possible.
“Some colors appeal to certain people, and there are so many colors here that somebody will like something,” says Vic, who works primarily in acrylic. “But I don’t think that my paintings are the end-all of end-all.”
Art of selling
It’s getting late when a young man in a nicely tailored suit finally walks into Vic’s two-room gallery, which doubles as his studio and is decorated with a couple of folding chairs, a table, a few high-powered lamps and a framed photograph of his yoga master. Vic is heavily into meditation.
“You like those paintings?” Vic asks the man, who is eyeballing several particular pieces.
“Yes. That one is beautiful,” he answers.
“Thanks. I can’t believe no one has bought it,” Vic says. “You want to buy it?”
“I’m thinking about it.”
Bingo. Vic shifts into high gear. He asks the man what colors he likes and what his price range is. Where does he want to hang the painting? What are the colors of the walls in his apartment?
Vic tells the man that the one he likes costs a grand. And the guy doesn’t flinch. He takes one of Vic’s business cards and says convincingly that he’ll bring back his significant other to check it out.
Then a fashionably dressed couple walk into Vic’s gallery and are drawn like magnets to a gigantic canvas filled with greens, reds and blues.
The couple tell Vic they have an entire wall to fill. They want one custom made to match the colors of their couch and rug. Can Vic do it? You bet, he tells them, as he quickly pours some acrylic paint on a canvas to give them a rough idea of what it would look like.
“Everything I do is kind of good, so it wouldn’t be a disaster,” Vic tells them. “Just don’t be too picky with me.”
The couple then leaf though an album of photographs of Vic’s paintings. “They’re good,” the man says. “But the truth is, I like that one in there. That is a piece of art.”
Vic and the couple move back in front of the gigantic canvas and they begin talking price. But the couple clearly want to think about it a bit longer.
As the couple head slowly toward the door, the man asks Vic whether it would be a good investment to buy the huge painting.
“I don’t think that’s important,” Vic says. “I’m not into that. If I do become famous, then it will be considered one of Vic’s best.”
The man turns away, satisfied.
