San Francisco Chronicle - (Sunday)
The Artist’s Life
The Artist’s Life is a recurring feature that spotlights the people who help make up the rich tapestry of the Bay Area’s cultural life.
Our series of profiles continues with the Madrone Art Bar’s Spike Krouse.
On Friday, conceptual artist Mike Spike Krouse will begin stenciling the words “No More Mean People” to cover the wall behind Divisadero Touchless Car Wash. He has a deadline of April 15 but will have to knock off early because his shift starts at 6 p.m. at Madrone Art Bar.
There is just one block between the site of his commission and the site of his job, but that constitutes a long commute for Krouse. His art studio is in the attic on the third floor of Madrone, and he lives on the second floor with his two daughters and their giant English mastiff, Lenny.
With this setup he can always do two things at once. When he is tending bar, he can work on the rotating exhibition schedule at Madrone. He can also set up an easel and draw when it is slow, which he does on Tuesday nights, when he brings in an art model and hosts a salon. Whatever he is doing, he is always watching his daughters, making 20 or 30 trips up and down a steep set of stairs.
“There are times when I am bartending and I have to run upstairs and make dinner,” Krouse says. “The balance of work, family and art is all right here.”
His preoccupation with the neighborhood was evident in a recent project in which he photographed the scene at the Arco gas station across Fell Street at the same time every day for a year, from the vantage point of the bay window in his parlor.
Then he reduced the 365 images to a billboard and rented space at the Union 76 station on the far side of Divisadero. Now he could see his artwork from the same bay window. But he wasn’t finished. He then photographed the Arco station again.
“Same image,” he says, “only this time with the billboard in the image.” He’s ready to show that too, only it is too big for the gallery wall at Madrone and too big for the billboard at the 76 station.
He also did an installation one block in the other direction. On the wall behind a street tree, he affixed 100 little trees made of foam to look just like it. On the branches of the tree he placed 1,000 little “tree fresheners” to enhance the aroma at Hayes and Divisadero.
The man likes repetition. “I always have,” he says. “It’s the same with bartending. You have already created the drink in your head. Now you just have to execute it.”
For the Touchless project, the words “No More Mean People” will be stenciled 290 times. To prepare for it, Krouse did a test run inside Madrone, stenciling the phrase “More Love Less Hate” on the wall 248 times, which is all that would fit.
From his position either behind the bar while tending or in front of it while curating exhibits, he stared at those words 30 days straight.
“I did not go insane with the overload of it,” he says, proudly, “and it was well received by thousands of customers.”
Krouse describes himself as “an artist by nature and a bartender mutually.” He’s been doing both since he was 21 and is 48 now, though he no longer works six nights a week, as he did while in graduate school at the San Francisco Art Institute. His nights are Tuesday and Friday, unless somebody doesn’t show or the crowds overwhelm the staff. Then he can be downstairs in a minute. Lenny can watch the girls.
Madrone Lounge was already a corner bar when he bought it in 2008, taking a 15-year lease on the building, an 1886 Victorian with scalloped shingles and oval windows.
Krouse elevated it from a lounge to an art bar, and though there are other bars that show art, none that he knows of are art bars by name. Seven of the nine bartenders on staff are working artists .
“I don’t think a lot of people have put as much thought into
what we’re showing and how we’re showing it,” he says. “You have to have a love of the art to be able to curate it, and you have to understand the artist to be able to appreciate it and to go out and find it.”
One of his most clever exhibitions was one that found him. A few years ago, rock show photographer Dan Dion came in to show Krouse the work of a mysterious artist named Sawyer Forbes, who photographed gloves on the street.
Krouse did the show, and on its last night a hooded vandal came in, took four or five pictures off the wall and slammed them to the floor, apparently disgusted by the pretentiousness of the artist. A video was leaked to KGO-TV, which aired it. But it was a hoax. Dion had taken the photographs of the gloves and Krouse had sent in the vandal. It was all cooked up across the bar.
“It was a conceptual piece,” Krouse says. “There is no Sawyer Forbes.”
If there had been, he would have been paid a stipend, as are all artists whose work is shown at Madrone. If things sell, the artists get 100 percent. You won’t find that deal anywhere else.
“As an artist, I know how much work goes into it,” Krouse says. “A good gallery owner helps grow the artist’s career. I don’t do that. But I do give opportunities to a lot of artists who have not been able to find a gallery.”
Unless there is a band or DJ, there is neither cover charge nor drink minimum. On a Friday night, 400 or 500 people might come in the front door at the corner and pass by the art on their way out the back door, never spending anything at the bar, though they might buy a piece of art.
Last year, a street photographer named Vivian Scholl took a picture of Krouse’s blue 1970 Camaro, parked at Baker and Hayes streets. She posted it to her Instagram feed @parkedportraits, which Krouse noticed after the car was stolen.
He never got his classic Camaro back, but Scholl has a show at Madrone opening in May.
Lots of people visit Madrone, even the faculty and administrators at Creative Arts Charter School, who were sharing a booth on a Thursday afternoon, while the school rock band was setting up to play on the sidewalk as part of the Divisadero Art Walk.
The next one is in June, and by then Krouse’s mural will be part of the tour. Sponsored by Art on Site and paid for by San Francisco Beautiful, “No More Mean People” will be 32 feet tall and 80 feet long, on the west side of an old apartment building on Oak Street.
The mural will be permanent but visible for only a few years. An apartment complex has been approved to replace the Touchless Car Wash and its attached Shell station. Even the Madrone site could be developed. Krouse is down to five years on his lease.
“I try to keep worry out of my life and do what I do,” he says. “I feel like I have contributed a lot and would like to continue, but who knows what will happen in five years.”