MEMOIR

Bill was born in Poland in the late 1930’s. His childhood was difficult, to say the least. When Bill was 4 years old he was given an injection of antibiotics at an army field station. A few days later, Bill had well-entrenched gangrene over the majority of his left butt cheek. They amputated a small section of his backside.

My mother’s brother commands respect. You worry what Bill thinks about you, and you alter your personality when he is in town. Bill terrifies you, but what scares you more is how much you want to impress him.

My whole life, I have aspired to the image of my Uncle Bill, but I always seem to fall short. Bill is distinguished and mature while I am crude and rowdy. Bill’s life story is full of romance and intrigue, while mine holds neither. Bill knows everything, while I know very little.

When I was five years old my parents were having our basement remodeled into a new bedroom. The contractor that my mom used was less than reputable and putting materials away tended to slip his mind. Because of the buzz saws and hammers neglected by Joe “the hash smoking moron”, my basement was turned into a standing deathtrap. I was young, didn’t know any better and slipped off of a makeshift ladder composed of toolboxes and pillows. I landed on a razor sharp piece of metal siding and needed eighteen stitches up my left ass cheek.

Bill and I share a common wound. We both experienced roughly the same injury during our childhoods. The only difference is that Bill’s story is exciting and holds an air of depth and perseverance, while mine simply outlines my foolishness. I am like him, but lacking a crucial facet of the complex system of intrigue that is William “Bill” Hochhausen.

Bill is very good at what he does. He showed great talent from a young age, and flourished in college. He was accepted to Yale University to study painting and after completing his undergraduate degree he was accepted to The Cooper Union, a highly prestigious art school in New York’s East Village. Now he teaches at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn.

Bill knows how to do everything. He is an accomplished artist, craftsman and academic. He used to tell a joke to his drawing class about his teacher and friend, Al Blaustein, a widely known contemporary painter who recently passed away.

“Al and I both know everything, we just know different stuff”, he would say.

Irony aside, Bill really does know a great deal. He can draw, build or talk about nearly anything that comes to your mind – and you can bet that it will be good. Bill is always looking for “a good project”, and some three decades ago he started one of the more major projects of his life.

Thirty years ago Bill bought a moderate sized plot of land in Central Vermont. Most of the acreage is old logging land, but nonetheless it is incredibly beautiful. With the help of my grandparents and mother, Bill built a two room cabin on a large slab of slate. The cabin has no electricity, or running water. My family and I (Bill included) have visited the cabin for one or two weeks every summer since I was four.

On one of the aforementioned trips I brought along a friend of mine, Yohan Mehary. Yohan and I had been friends since grade school and we had been having a lot of fun together on the trip. A vast expanse of forest is about the most exciting thing to a couple of eleven year olds and we took full advantage of it. Rural Vermont is incredible in the summer: Topless mountains covered in an abundance of dense, fern green vegetation. Yohan and I did just about everything there was to do. We went on long hikes on the old, weather beaten logging trails that were then overgrown in places with waist high grass. We swam in excess of three hours a day, and when our skin became too pruny to bear, we went looking for something else to do.

We went to Bill complaining of boredom. He gave us each a hatchet and told us that we could chop down any tree we wanted. Being young boys we were very excited at the prospect of sharp objects and destruction, and we ran off before Bill could say another word.

When Bill saw what we had done I thought he was going to explode. I mean, I had never seen him so mad. I had never seen anyone so mad.

“Those  were my favorite trees.”

I don’t say anything. I’m practically shitting myself I’m so scared.

“On top of the fact that you didn’t even finish the job.”

I’m still petrified and can’t seem to utter a response.

“You can’t do shit like this!”

Bill terrifies me. Bill confuses me. He tells me one thing and then expects another. Despite my fear of him, Bill is the motivating force behind my artistic endeavors.

I began making art seriously two years ago. I was staying with Bill for that summer’s modified trip to Vermont. Like all of the trips before it we started at Bill’s house in Pomona, NY. My parents couldn’t come that year because of work, and my sister was staying in Montreal for the summer, so it was just me and Bill. I had never been alone with Bill for an extended period of time and it would be a gross understatement to say that I was excruciatingly nervous.

Bill picked me up and we enjoyed an amazingly awkward car ride, of some forty-five minutes, before arriving at Bill’s house. It was late when we got there so he showed me my room. I went to bed thinking about how much this trip was going to suck.

The next day I realized that there  wasn’t much of anything for me to do around Bill’s house that wasn’t just work in disguise. We had five days before we were to leave for Vermont and Bill had to finish a wood carving for a show. Having nothing more exciting to do, I watched Bill work.

I was amazed by his attention to detail and the way that he controlled his chisels. My interest must have been apparent because it wasn’t long before Bill asked me if I wanted to give it a try.

“Sure… I guess,” was my timid reply.

“C’mon over here and take a seat.”

Bill coached me through carving a curve into a piece of scrap wood. He steadied my hand as I jerkily plowed a razor sharp chisel through a triangular piece of two by four. It felt amazing. I had never felt such control and such precision before. No person would ever imagine such a mundane activity to feel so good.

Over the next couple of days I sat and carved alongside Bill. For the first time I felt comfortable around him. I was still terrified that I would do something worthy of summoning his monstrous wrath, but at the same time it was easier to ignore that possibility while I was occupied with my work. When I started to get bored of  the sculptural carving Bill introduced me to woodblock printing. It was easy for me to get started, and fall in love with woodcuts because the process is essentially the same as linoleum block printing, which I had been doing all of last year in my art class.

Both processes are reductive block-printing processes. This means that the plate, linoleum or wood is carved to create an image. The material that is carved away prints as negative space and the part that is left as positive. Once the plate is carved, ink is rolled on to it and it is either run through a printing press or printed by hand on to thin paper.

Woodcuts are incredibly time-intensive, and it takes a certain kind of patience to be able to dedicate oneself to them. I began to realize that I have at least some degree of that patience.

I sat and diligently composed (with a large stick of graphite) and carved images of hands in various positions. I soon realized that the human hand was a poor motif of choice as it is one of the hardest images to draw, but nonetheless I pressed on. I started off with a diagonal carving knife and began to understand and use a variety of wood cutting gouges. A new world was opened to me: one of v-cut molded metal and the deep wounds to go along with it.

The rest of the week flew by and I was hooked on woodcuts. I thought of things in different terms. Everything I saw was transformed into what it would look like if I was going to carve it.

Bill’s support transformed my life and got me hooked on art. I no longer feared Bill as much, but instead there loomed a new fear, that I would not be able to succeed in the field that Bill had introduced me to. Over the past few years I managed to convert this fear into a makeshift form of perseverance and concentration and as I did I began to realize why I never lived up to the image of Bill. I was never satisfied comparing myself to Bill simply because I am not Bill. I am not Bill. For some reason this simple, and utterly apparent concept never occurred to me.

Sitting, propped against my duffel bag in JFK airport, waiting for my flight to Chicago which will in turn connect me with a flight to SFO I come to a series of powerful realizations, each building on the last.

Growing up in a war-torn country makes it hard for your childhood to not appear intriguing. Bill knows more than me because he has been living for nearly seventy years and I am just reaching adulthood. And Bill’s chopped up ass doesn’t show anything about his perseverance. All it shows is that he, just like me, was injured as a child. We were both dropped in to situations, and the situations affected us. My injury may have been more self-inflicted, but Bill did plenty of stupid shit when he was a kid. A story is recalled to my mind regarding Bill, an open window and a ledge some three stories off the ground. The more I think about it the more I realize how alike Bill and I actually are. Maybe if I had come to this realization ten years ago I wouldn’t have spent the better part of my childhood in inexplicable fear.