It can be difficult to find one’s way in Northeast Minneapolis’ labyrinthine Northrup King Building, an old seed-warehouse-made-creative-center housing more than 130 artists’ studios. But on a recent Saturday night, painter Patrick Pryor was hosting an event and had kindly started a trail of flower petals out by the front entrance that led to his studio on the second floor.
The crowd assembled there was impressive for both its attractiveness and broad age range. A couple of middle-aged women, sleekly dressed in black blouses and slacks, squatted side-by-side on leather stools, chatting and sipping complimentary cherry martinis. A young mother carried her swaddled newborn through the crowd, bouncing him while surveying Pryor’s collection of paintings. A forty-something woman stopped by to discuss Pryor’s work. She explained that she had purchased one of Pryor’s paintings in 2005. “It looked like that,” she said in her Russian accent, pointing to a gestural rendering of black vines painted over a flat, seafoam green surface. “It could be blood platelets; it could be cherries,” suggested another attendee of the curious red fruit that hung from these painted stalks. In any case, said the woman, she and her husband have been fielding invitations from Pryor ever since.
Another attendee, Karin Olson, a marketing consultant, described herself as a fan of Pryor’s. Her affinity was understandable; Pryor’s art strikes the eye as playful and cartoonish, with allusions to winding foliage and bulbous ladybugs. Having made this point clear, however, Olson quickly segued to another topic: As of late, she said, she has been recruiting fabulous Twin Citians to host parties for her client, Level Vodka. In fact, according to Olson, it was she who had initiated this event by offering up free liquor to Pryor and his fashionable guests. (An alternative to reaching her target market through advertising, she said.)
Since this was Pryor’s eleventh such “Music Sketch,” an event that combines improvisational piano and painting, the occasion might have happened even without sponsorship, as it has every time before. After a couple hours of mingling over stiff drinks—Level Vodka with grapefruit juice, Level Vodka with rosemary—fifty or so partygoers were told the main attraction was about to get under way. Filing out of Pryor’s studio, everyone followed yet another flower-petal path to a larger room upstairs. A grand piano and blank, six-by-ten-foot canvas awaited. The Level Vodka bar staff, dressed entirely in black, was there, too, pouring generously into plastic cups.
As with prior Music Sketches, Pryor invited his friend James Tyler O’Neill, a pianist, to provide accompaniment to his live-action painting. The structure of the exercise was explained like this: “Basically, I play an hour or so on the piano, and Patrick paints,” said the no-nonsense O’Neill. If an onlooker hadn’t yet noticed the thirty-three-year-old Pryor’s super-friendly, down-home style, matched by his wide, child-like smile and rosy cheeks, he certainly would now. Speaking over some hullabaloo, Pryor made a short, breathy speech concerning a recent incident in which Washington Post reporter Gene Weingarten recruited virtuoso violinist Joshua Bell to play in a metro station during morning rush hour. As it turned out, commuters hardly noticed the superstar. In his indignant chronicle of the experiment, Weingarten gave an account of a child who demonstrated interest in Bell’s playing, only to be yanked along by a hurried parent. Pryor spoke passionately, albeit a bit clumsily, of this remarkable episode before vowing, with signature earnestness, to indulge that inner child within everyone present.
Taking a drink from his cherry martini, O’Neill took his seat at the piano and started to play.
At first, his riffs were as unimposing as Philip Glass’s theater music—the ideal soundtrack for an uninterrupted workday. O’Neill’s benign overture found Pryor blotting yellow and green paint on the canvas and then pulling it westward in long, serpentine streaks, creating what appeared to be a gothic dragon. Several minutes later, Pryor’s use of fire-engine red seemed to inspire O’Neill’s aggressive, staccato playing. Soon after, smooth jazz ushered in primary blue.
An audience cannot be expected to behave perfectly under such festive circumstances. Over time, O’Neill’s simple melodies found percussive backbone in the constant crashing of the revelers’ emptied cups as well as the polyphonic ring of someone’s cell phone, which was answered in this instance by the tall, glassy-eyed blonde woman sitting at the center of the crowd, followed by the beat of her high heels rat-a-tat-tatting across the hardwood floor, as she exited for a private conversation.
As for the painting, in early moments, its swirls and billows resembled that of Vincent van Gogh’s. He might have stopped there and had something. But the exercise continued for another forty-five minutes. During this time, the amount of black- and flesh-colored acrylic squirted and dripped across the canvas was about equal to the amount of Level Vodka in everyone’s guts. Pryor’s messy mural ended up looking like a Jackson Pollock, if anything at all.
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