A stroke of fashion: Hill District artist uses clothing for canvas
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The Black Beauty Lounge in the Hill District is jammed with people tapping to jazz, laughing, smoking -- and sometimes setting down their beers to buy a paint-splashed dress inside the bar.
Annie O'Neill, Post-Gazette photosArtist Jorge Myers is known for his colorful pieces on canvas and dramatic collages from found objects. He has now started using clothing and accessories, such as shoes, for his canvas.
Click photo for larger image.
Jorge Myers' colorful clothing hangs on the walls, prompting some women to make an impulse buy from a bar stool.
"Make me an offer," Mr. Myers said during a recent Friday before customers gave him $75 for a red bustier and skirt and $100 for a black dress with a beaded neckline.
Up and down Centre and Wylie avenues, everyone knows him as Jorge or George, the folk artist, the clothing painter, the one-man beautification crew. People thought he was either crazy or a genius when he began cleaning up abandoned buildings in 1999, boarding up the windows and doors with wood, plastering them with his paintings, fashioning collages out of old horseshoes, a rusting pitchfork, a refrigerator grill.
But the buildings he decorated were razed to make way for senior housing and other developments.
Mr. Myers needed a new canvas.
He began staring at people.
Why not paint their clothing?
That was the inspiration for his "Why Not" clothing line. "Why not be different?" asked Mr. Myers, who certainly doesn't look like everyone else, with his long flowing braids poking out of a black Jamaican cap streaked with yellow and green paint.
To listen to Jorge talk about his art and clothing designs and see his painting technique click image to a multimedia presentation.He buys clothes on sale during the off season and decorates them with splashes of acrylic paint.
His folk art caught the eye of Michele Goodman, who is holding a one-man show of his clothing, paintings and collages from noon to 6 p.m. Saturday at her studio on 124 S. Highland Ave., East Liberty.
"He is so childlike. He's a gift," says Ms. Goodman, a fashion and etiquette consultant. "I think he is surprising himself with all the new things he is coming up with."
Ms. Goodman also is his agent, who puts price tags on his work, something he has avoided. "He doesn't like to talk about money and price."
Yet the boyish 48-year-old has to think about money to support his eight children, four of whom live with him in his Hill District apartment. And he has a big motivation to earn money -- staying out of Family Division of Allegheny County Common Pleas Court.
Mr. Myers had the scare of his life when he was hauled away to Allegheny County Jail from Aug. 26 to Sept. 15 last year for being behind in child support.
He spent 20 days in jail, the most terrifying moments of his life, until family members paid the money he owed in child support.
"You can't show fear," the soft-spoken artist says of jail. "You gotta act tough, but you aren't."
(That was his second brush with the law. In 2002, he was arrested in an abandoned building after an encounter with police. Although Mr. Myers denied that he had done anything wrong, he was found guilty of a summary offense, which carried no jail time.)
He came home from jail last year so traumatized that he let the parrot and other birds he owned out of their cages and set them free.
But his time in jail, where he was robbed of his artists' colors and could draw only with a black pencil, was a wake-up call to get moving selling art -- or to find another profession.
"As an artist, sometimes we feel selfish. As long as I create, one day I am gonna be something. It doesn't work like that. Art is my business. If I don't produce, this is where I am going to end up."
"You don't go to jail when you are 47. If you don't have it figured out by now, forget about it," says Mr. Myers, who previously custom-painted cars.
He painted clothing furiously, perfecting the process he has been experimenting with since 1999, the year his beloved grandmother Mae Ester Brown died of cancer. He was so angry at her death that he went to his apartment and started throwing paint. His friend told him it was abstract art. He began creating hundreds of paintings and collages.
Myers paints some of his pieces with thousands of dots. He originally started using dots on a piece to pay tribute to the 280,000 people that died in the Tsunami last year. He took three months to paint a purse with 280,000 dots.
Click photo for larger image.
Jorge Meyers says he has different techniques to throwing paint so he can create different effects.
Click photo for larger image.
Then he moved onto painting clothing, but at first it made the fabric too stiff. Then he tried painting dots, Braille-like patterns that snaked down pant legs and crawled across tops.
He painted many butterflies, his symbol for women, the gender he cherishes, having been raised in the Hill District with his five sisters, two brothers, a mother and grandmother. There were five Georges in his extended family, so he renamed himself Jorge when he was in seventh grade.
Mr. Myers, a 1976 graduate of the former Fifth Avenue High School, also found inspiration in world affairs, making a tsunami purse with 280,000 dots, representing lives lost.
Mr. Myers changed his technique to throwing paint when he was invited to be a part of a fashion show at the Rivers Club, benefiting Naomi's Place, this spring. He had pressure to finish 40 outfits in three days. Not only was it faster, customers liked it better. "Men like it," says Ms. Goodman. "If you can get men to like something in fashion, it is a big deal."
Likening himself to a baseball pitcher, he tosses the paint, an underhand curve for a deep curve, an overhand curve for a straighter curve. Streaks of paint land on the bedspread, on the door, the walls.
His friend Raycina Peoples, who loves the bright colors, gives him advice on how to display the clothing on the walls of the Black Beauty. Pointing to a gold lame tank, she tells him, "Put some red silk panties under it."
Mr. Myers says he has better luck selling his clothes in hip-hop clubs in New York and Washington, D.C., and on the Internet at www.artbyjorge.com. But the man who calls himself "a glorified junkman with an art degree in the community" says he loves displaying his clothing and paintings in the Hill District. Art, he says, should not be just for the Saturday night gallery crowd.
"You don't expect to see art in a bar," he says. "You don't expect to see clothing in a bar. You don't expect people to buy clothes in bar. The amazing thing is that they do buy it."
Roberta Cole, the owner of the Black Beauty Lounge, has always given Mr. Myers the freedom to display whatever moved him, whether it was a clingy paint-kissed dress one day, a painting with a rusted roller skate the next.
"There was a time I never knew what I was going to see next," she says with a laugh. "His eyes are different than ours."
First Published June 14, 2006 12:00 am
