Model Citizen is a painting of Bridie, Ella’s younger sister.

I’ve painted Bridie at least 5 times now. Each of the works have been decent but it’s always been a struggle to paint her the way I know her and the way I see her. Difficult because although I know her, I really don’t know her very well at all. A large part of my work is dependent on understanding and reading the people I paint: their tells and mannerisms. Their physical and personal idiosyncrasies. And she is very hard to read. Still, this is the first painting that I’ve made of her that I looked at and thought “Oh, that’s Bridie.”

I know that I write and talk about my work: This painting is made up of watercolor, gouache and pen and ink. It’s large (for a watercolor) at 22″ x 30″.  Yet I know also that I talk about my work without really talking about it: What I was thinking, what I was planning, what I was hoping for, and most importantly, exactly how I go about it. That’s on purpose. I’m not that attached to my work; I can’t really afford to be because the more attached you are to what you’re doing, the more difficult it is to improve. In any endeavor as soon as you’re too pleased with yourself, you’ve already started your decline whether you realize it or not. Moreover since I’ve yet to see anyone doing what I’m doing with the medium I’m not very keen to divulge my methodology. I will say this though: There is a lot involved in getting a watercolor to look that simple and clean. This painting was more difficult than the end result looks. It was very time consuming in a different way than the painting I made of Ella and I’m unsure why. My works in general are really starting to eat up my time. For a long time that wasn’t the case. In 2008 I made twenty-six works. It’s already halfway through August this year and I’ve only made seven. I think that’s just because I’m much more selective about what I paint and I just care a lot more about my craft. I’ve decided to pursue quality as opposed to years of pursuing quantity. I spent years making work just to make work or to keep dealers happy.

The way in which I take joy in my work has changed. When I was younger I took joy in the accolades that people heaped my way. I used to enjoy drenching myself in kudos. It’s very different now. The joy in my work comes more from seeing the reactions of those that I paint. It’s a messed up world and everyone has real trials and tribulations, so it’s nice to brighten someones day and outlook even if it’s through something as small as a painting. The problem for me with my painting is that I see it all the time, so it doesn’t have much impact on me anymore. My work will never appeal to me the way it does to other people, which is a shame. It’ll never have the same effect, that’s the way it works. I mean, of course there are moments when I finish something when I sort of marvel at it and sort of stun myself. This work is a classic example. When I finished it, I just sat and stared at it for a few days. Just sitting quietly looking it over. Unfortunately though, that feeling of amazement rarely lasts long. Soon enough I’ll end up looking at it while thinking and seeing so many ways in which it could have been better. Or thinking that I could have painted her to a higher standard, or more fittingly. Happens every single time and with every single work. My work challenges me. It challenges me in ways I expect and that I understand and can relate to, but it doesn’t amaze me. I’m not sure it should in order for me to continue to improve.

Image: Keinyo White Ltd©®

‘I’ve always thought money was an excellent tool for getting people to take you seriously.’-Damien Hirst

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The RISD Illustration Building or ISB (as it was known to Illustration majors) was a multi-storied brick building that sat on the bottom of a hill. At the intersection of S.Main and Waterman St., along the river, right across from downtown Providence. I hear they’ve got better facilities in a different location now, but back in the day that’s where it was and that place was a straight shithole. It was a shithole that sat right on the canal, which at that point in time was being ripped up, expanded and redone. So it was basically a shithole sitting on a non-stop construction zone with all the noise and mayhem that involves. For a school that was running (then) at least 25-30k a year in tuition, there was absolutely no excuse for it to be in the state it was in. I think the illustration majors back then had hands-down the worst facilities out of all the majors. The sculptors and the glass-dept didn’t fare much better but at least they had an amazing foundry-type space to work in and they’d get some truly wack bands like ‘Ski Mask and The Bucket Men’ in there along with way too much booze. We didn’t have that going for us over at the ISB. That place was a weird no-mans land; it was like the Chernobyl of RISD. Nobody went in there unless they were an Illustration major, or professor, or they had to. This thing had 4 floors, the top floor being an immense, spacious sort of attic. A large open area of high, slanted ceilings and exposed wood beams split into two rooms of equal size. The stairwell came up right between both. From there you either turned right and headed towards to room that faced downtown Providence (that had good light) or left to the other (which had crap light). The ISB had no fire escapes of any kind. No sprinklers. In addition, that top level had a wooden floor that must’ve had about 20+ years worth of dried oil paint and turpentine worked into it. Factor in anywhere from 20-30 students at any given time painting in there with oils, turps and paint rags, as well as professors who liked to smoke, and it was a recipe for disaster. The place was a total tinderbox and looking back on it, I’m really amazed there wasn’t a complete catastrophe of some kind.

That 4th floor was where I had my first oil painting classes. My professor was a guy named Bill Drew. A short, gregarious no nonsense instructor, but really, an amicable guy. I liked Bill drew, he was a pragmatist. The very first class I’m in there working on a portrait of one of the models. I remember it clearly: oil on gessoed paper. After working his way around the class, Bill gets to me, and this is the conversation we have:
Bill: “So this is interesting. I like what you’re working on.”
Me: ‘Really? Thanks.’
Bill: “Yeah. You know it reminds me of Francis Bacon.”
Me: ‘Who’s that?’
Bill: “You don’t know who Francis Bacon is? The painter?”
Me: ‘No…..did he make a lot of money?’
Bill: “(laughter) I like you kid.”

That was my introduction to Francis Bacon. I looked him up not long after that and studied him furiously in the RISD library. I liked Bacon’s work as soon as I saw it. Phenomenal painter. Ogre on the booze. Weird style. A  Brit with the brush who made paintings that were oddly violent and serene at the same time. Vibrant and beautiful colors. As it turns out he did make a lot of money. Like, a crap-ton of money.

Which brings me to the point of my post: The notion that artists (painters for the sake of this argument) somehow don’t care about money. I don’t know when or where this highly romanticized notion got started, but wow, what a load of trash. We care about money. You cannot show me a well-known or successful painter who doesn’t care about money. We care about it. I know it’s of interest to me. I’m not in this game just to make pretty shit to hang on walls. You know why I got into painting? I got into it for a variety of reasons: Because I suspected I had a bit of talent for it, was passionate about it, loved the act of it as well as the history behind it. And once I found out how much people could sell paintings for I was hooked. Sure most of those guys were dead and buried before they could enjoy what they earned but I didn’t care. By the time the 70′s rolled around there were plenty of rich artists out there that were still alive. I was like: “No. For real? You can sell paintings for how much money??”

So I don’t know if people really believe this idea because they think it’s true, or because they want to believe in the myth of the artist somehow doing his or her thing because they have a pure spirit and are some how ‘above’ the mundane materialism of the everyday world. Smoke and mirrors man. I hate to be the bearer of bad tidings, but all you have to down is take a walk down art history to see that his has never really been the case. Take Vasari’s ‘Lives of the artists.’ Amazing book. Read it and you won’t believe some of the backstabbing, double-crossing, and general shenanigans that went on amongst the Renaissance artists over getting coin and projects from the Pope for money and prestige. From the frescoes doled out between Michelangelo and Raphael, to the rivalry and drama between Bernini and Borromini over architecture projects. Although I guess those last two are technically Baroque artists, not Renaissance. I’m generalizing but my gist is: You think they didn’t care about money?

Reubens built his fortune on his work, working his way up to becoming an ambassador/emissary for Charles I. Velazquez lobbied and worked his ass off to become the court painter for Philip IV. David became the painter to Napolean. Rembrandt undertook “The Nightwatch” because it was a commission that brought money and renown. And if I’m not mistaken, he was already wealthy by then.

John Singer Sargent made his fortune painting the rich and the upper echelon of American society. Dali became so enamored with making money that he sold restaurant napkins that he’d autogrpahed as original works (so the rumor goes). Everyone knows Picasso. The only thing Schiele thought about more than money and prestige was naked women. Rothko agreed to the commission for the Seagram’s murals why? Because it paid an astronomical sum of money at the time. Rauschenberg fought hard to change the system of how auction houses paid artists after they made sales of earlier works. Warhol quipped “ Being good in business is the most fascinating kind of art. Making money is art and working is art and good business is the best art.” Mark Kostabi (whom I consider to be a hack more than an artist because, frankly, his ‘paintings’ are total dogshit) had a virtual assembly line of people making his paintings while he sat on his ass and banked checks. Murakami has branched out into seemingly everything and Damien Hirst is worth hundreds of million of pounds. You don’t acquire that kind of wealth without monitoring your cash closely and spending a fair amount of time angling to score more of it. You think he doesn’t care about his money? That he’s somehow above it? You can see where this is going.

See, we care about money and we don’t care. We hold those two dichotomous thoughts at the same time. We want money. Not because we really want things. Most of the ones I know don’t give too much of a crap about that kind of stuff. We want freedom. Artists are like everybody else.  We want to be free to do whatever the hell we want. In this world the only way to have total freedom is to go off the grid and live as a hermit or a monk. Or to be such a genius at self-sufficiency that you’re a candidate for The Discovery Chanel. The only way if you’re on the grid is to have money, or power, or preferably, both. So that’s why artists care about cash. That’s why art and cash are very closely linked. In having and possessing it we have the freedom and the latitude to do what we want. To paint what we want, how we want, when we want, where we want. Because that, to an artist, is worth more than all the money in the world if they’re serious about their craft. It’s a necessary evil. Like the CIA or Boba Fett.

The power of painting and the worth of it lies not only in what you can see, but also in the intangibles. The myth of what goes into the final result, which has been built up over history. People like painting both because of the talent on display, but also on the basis of the myth behind the work. Why? Because it is nice to believe that there may be people that are out there making truly incredible things just for the sake of making them. That they’re not motivated by the same dull, ever-shifting materialistic cravings a lot of the world seems driven by. It has to be that way, because from any other angle it doesn’t make sense. You ask yourself “Why the hell would this person base his or her entire life on making something that might not ever earn a dime, unless they truly believed in something greater than money and making it?” That’s the nebulous area that art makes its outrageous figures on. Picture this instead of the usual sophistic gallery-opening double-talk: A gallery agent points out a work at an opening and is overheard saying” Actually, this guy paints totally for the money. He’s a total whore for the dollars. The guy makes so much work for sale so fast we have to tell him to slow down because he’s flooding the market. Get this: The dude cranks them out in his shed while watching reruns of the original Charlies Angels. Did I mention he loves Miller Lite?”

Not nearly the same mystery and appeal, even though it might be true and the work is still what it is.

So my point I guess is that the notion that artists don’t care about money is a lie. But the system is totally rigged and it’s a lie that has to be reinforced and perpetuated in order for the people within it to actually make any. Weird I know but that’s the nature of the beast. There are brilliant painters out there who are completely unknown and who completely do not care about money whatsoever. I’m sure there are. It’s just that those guys are riding a train that I’ve no interest in boarding, towards a destination that I have even less interest in visiting.

Image: Francis Bacon©®

‘Nothing in this world can take the place of persistence. Talent will not; nothing is more common than unsuccessful people with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb.’-Calvin Coolidge

‘Perhaps when we find ourselves wanting everything, it is because we are dangerously close to wanting nothing.’-Sylvia Plath

I finished this work a few days ago. This was a semi-demanding painting, although demanding in a completely different way from the painting I made of Ella at the beginning of the year. That painting was a challenge because I knew it was going to be large and how would I convey what I wanted to convey about Ella? This one was demanding because I knew what I wanted to convey, but I was wondering how exactly I was going to get through all the detail involved. So it wasn’t so much technically or artistically demanding as it was physically challenging. This painting gave me some serious mental and eye fatigue. I could only work for brief periods of time on the difficult areas. The strain of staring and painting all the tiny details just wore out my eyes. I didn’t think I’d ever finish that necklace, it just seemed to go on and on and on. One of the things I like most about the work is her right arm. I’m also pleased that I managed to paint all the tiny details well without making a total hash of it in a difficult medium like watercolor.

‘Roaring 20′ is a portrait of Julia, a friend of mine. An art major, we catch up every now and then and have a talk. I use that term liberally, because mostly our conversations consist of me nagging her incessantly about how she plans to be successful as an artist. What steps she might be taking now to ensure that happens, instead of waiting until she’s finished her degree like I did and almost everyone else in art school usually does. What I try to convey to her is that I think she has talent and can go somewhere with it, while at the same time letting her know that nothing happens if you don’t take the planning of your success seriously. It’s not like it’s gonna fall out of the sky. I’d like for her to consider those kinds of things and maybe avoid some of the prolonged pitfalls, setbacks and distress that I’ve experienced. I’m amazed she still talks to me I nag her so much. It’s obviously a far different era than when Picasso, Jeff Koons or Julian Schnabel got rich running the show. Damien Hirst changed things completely last year when he bypassed his dealers to take his work straight to the public via auction and made a killing. The man made over 100 million dollars during a recession.The hustle is always shifting and we often discuss the kinds of things that can make ones career move forward, or set it back.

Be on point otherwise it’s pointless.

Speaking of steps forward: I mentioned on FB that I’d entered that Washington Post online competition and gotten selected as one of the 10 finalists. You can see the finalists as they come up here.  I got notified that I was chosen as a finalist but then there was a bit of a question over the eligibility of my entry since I don’t live in D.C. full-time. After they discussed it with their legal department and the Post contacted me again there were only two things I felt: justified and elated.  My state of mind over my work is far different from when I was younger or even five or six years ago. I have a real strong sense that what I’m making is good. Solid. Still the art world is a strange beast where portraiture and watercolor get so overlooked you know? There are no bells or whistles to it. No shock value. I’m not sawing animals in half and encasing them in formaldehyde. No paintings on broken plates on canvas. I’m not setting people on fire before booting them off the Brooklyn Bridge as my magnum opus: ‘Gore meets Kierkegaard: An Auditory Excursion Into The Relativity of Global Warming On The Human Condition.’ Stuff like that. My work is simple, straightforward. Excellent. But in the art world that’s often just not enough to take you places. You need help to get you over the hurdles and that has always been a nagging thorn in the side of my artistic career. Your career in art is strictly who you know. Talent often has very little to do with it in the overall scheme of things, in the big picture. If you’ve got it that’s a plus not a prerequisite. You have to know the right people or have the right sort of people take you seriously. Otherwise you’re just going to spin your wheels and get quite disillusioned in the process. Take it from someone who knows firsthand. So, while my works have always been truly appreciated by my peers, the people around me, and my contemporaries, it has taken a long time to find any sort of favor with the people who could really make it go somewhere. Who could get my career started on the roads towards the upper echelons. That’s due to certain factors I’ve already mentioned plus a good portion that rests solely on my shoulders: Pure ego and youthful naivete coupled with some serious laziness for years. Then the amount of  time it took to find my own voice and artistic way of doing things. I always worked hard when it came to the work, but I didn’t always work hard in the other ways you need to work hard. In the art world that’s a luxury few can afford because that world is all about networking, consistency in networking, presentation and the gift of gab. Laziness and complacency cost you. At any rate those days are long over. Diligence and accountability are my modern mantras and I consider my work exceptional. There are days where even I don’t know how I’m doing it. It’s just coming from some other point and place and what keeps coming just comes forward stronger and better each time.

The Post selection and interview are a big deal to me because it is precisely the type of thing that can move your career to a completely different level. Even the PR from being selected as a finalist is pretty outstanding. To buy that same kind of PR or ad space within the Post would cost thousands upon thousands of dollars. It’s recognition from one of the most recognizable entities in the entire United States. It’s recognition from my hometown. It’s recognition of my work. That’s beneficial to me because it’s really difficult to stay focused at times. Over the years that I’ve been working I’ve had so many broken promises and sludged through so much repeated disappointment. I mean so much that even my wife doesn’t really want to hear about gallery opportunities anymore. You know that says something because she’s believed in me from the start. She was thrilled about The Post opportunity. But galleries? Lol man she doesn’t trust anything that comes out of any gallery dealers mouth anytime, anywhere. They could tell us the sky is blue and she’d still tell them they’re full of shit and I don’t blame her. I think she is well within her right considering some of the unbelievable stuff we’ve been through over the years involving my career. A lot of stress and an even greater number of setbacks. That takes a toll no matter strong your self-belief. It takes a toll on your confidence, your path, your state of mind, your finances, your relationship. Some days I feel like I’ve been taking the most circuitous route to success that is humanly possible. No one is given anything for free in life and the world doesn’t owe any of us anything. Still, there are days when I think of my work and I sort of look at it and think “Man. I may not be owed anything, but surely it’s worth something more than where it currently stands.” That’s the part that often confuses me, because I’m not asking for favors. I’d like things to go forward on the merit of what is, what is right in front of the eyes of people who could help it to go forward. Not because I’m worth it, but because the work is worth it. Am I making any sense?

I don’t know if this press from this interview is something that will actually go a great deal towards furthering my career. It may or it may not, there’s just no true way of knowing. I certainly hope it does because I have goals left that I’d like to achieve. Just to see if I can achieve them, if they can be done. My overriding goal has always been to get my work into The Hirshhorn somehow. To establish more connections and contacts back in DC and the US.  To get off the Feast-or-Famine rollercoaster and ease the toll that that takes on my wife. Or it might simply end up as being a nice interview. Either way I plan to make this absolute most out of the opportunity  with the Washington Post. I plan to be the best that I can be. I’m really glad I was selected as a finalist because it has gone a way towards restoring my belief that at some point, if your diligence and talent are great enough, they will be recognized. It may not be at a time that is ideal or that you would prefer, but it can happen.

Image: ‘Roaring 20′, Keinyo White Ltd©®

‘Life shrinks or expands in proportion to one’s courage.’-Anais Nin

I started to write this post and it got so massive that I had to split it in two. This is the first half and it’s still too long. There might be too much information in what comes next. TMI. Don’t say I didn’t warn you:

I read yesterday about a major retrospective of the work of Yves Klein happening at the Hirshhorn in my home of D.C. If you’ve never seen his work and you have the chance to go, you should go. If you’re anywhere near D.C., you should go. It will be worth it. I’ve seen his work in person and his paintings have to be seen to be believed. The work I saw was a simple blue canvas, maybe 2 x 3 feet, if that. But it was the most beautiful and vibrant blue I’ve ever seen in any painting anywhere. Just a canvas full of that blue. It’s amazing, that blue. You can’t get it in pictures or words. You have to go and see it. I promise you it will be worth whatever trip you have to take in order to get there.

Sitting all the way down here in Christchurch reading that really messed with me. Brought a lot of thoughts to mind, a flood of emotions. I’ve had such a change in thoughts and outlook over the last year, as I close out my 30′s. I know I’m going to cop all the old mid-life crisis jokes and a ton of other nonsense for putting that out there. I don’t mind. People are going to say what they’re going to say. You’re just deluding yourself if you think you have some control over it. At some we all stop and take serious stock of what we’re doing and how we’re doing it. This is my point.

The game is life and the game is out there. Everyone plays it differently, but everyone has to play by the same basic rules and there are only two: everyone gets dealt a hand to play and the house always wins in the end. It’s going to play out whether or not you admit certain truths to yourself. I figure the sooner I do that the sooner I can get back to trying to figure the angles. So I’m going through something. I wouldn’t describe it as a crisis because I don’t feel frenetic or harried, or the need to start over. I’m on a slow burner. The thing that freaks me out though is that I never thought I’d be thinking and experiencing such a wide range before the age of 40. I figured I had at least another 5-6 years before getting into any of that, and at least another 10 or so before it really hit the fan.

I never liked that term mid-life crisis. It always seemed male-specific and equated sudden immaturity and life failure.  It always implied that somehow you’d gotten everything wrong to that point. That you didn’t have yourself together and you somehow needed to start over. To me a mid-life crisis is nothing more than spending a ton of time scaling a mountain and reaching the summit only to look out over the horizon and see you might have spent that time scaling the wrong one. Then you think “Fuck. The really important one is all the way over there. How am I possibly going to get down and get over there? Do I have enough time before the sun goes down? Do I have enough energy? At this point am I even properly equipped to give it another go?”  It seems impossible to start over or summit that other peak because you’ve put all of your planning and prep into this one. Sometimes even if you have scaled the right one you can get all the way up there with the magnificent view and still realize that’s it’s bitterly cold and lonely as hell on that bitch and that maybe you sacrificed too much. That’s where people freak out. Everybody makes their own choice at that point after weighing their options. Some people decide to chance the other peak. Some people are happy to have achieved the one they’re on even if it’s not necessarily the right one. Some can’t believe they’ve spent so much time on the wrong one and sit dejected in the snow and ice waiting to snap out of it. Some sit there hoping someone else is going to come along and fix all of it. And some people decide the fastest way back down is to just throw themselves off the mountain all together. Any of those options might be the best one for that person. You can’t judge another persons life and tell them what the hell they should be doing once they’ve gotten up there. But we’re all human so we all hold and love our petty little judgments I guess.

Anyway I’m not the man I was. I’m young at heart but no longer a young man. I don’t have the appeal that I had in my late 20′s-early 30′s. That good mix of physical beauty and horsepower. My wit has an acidic ring to it and I have days where I seem to have no sense of humor at all. That’s okay. You start to lose your courage and your willingness to try new things. Fear and hesitancy creep in like a pervasive mist. Well, for me that’s not exactly true, but I still feel like a candy-ass for not having made it anywhere in Judo after 4 years. Those injuries from training and the recovery that comes along with it take a lot longer to roll around. I have less energy; that may be a side effect of two young kids and not so much my age. At this point, I can’t tell. Physically I’m in the best condition I’ve ever been in, a level I couldn’t have dreamt up in my 20′s. But I still feel older, grayer and I can’t seem to sleep through the night without having to get up and take a piss. My Doc is concerned and wants to have tests run. It’s got me worried. At night I rarely sleep anymore and when I do, it’s restless at best. As soon as I lie down the thoughts rain down hard: Where am I going? How much time is left? What do I want to do with it? You’re going to die and when you do, where will you go? That’s the game. Play or get played, and a big part of my playing and thinking lately revolves around the discovery of happiness and family/community.

Happiness. It’s taken me a long long time to find that and I spent good chunks of my life up until recently without it. The thing I’ve discovered about happiness is that it’s a lot like raising children: you have to protect it, nurture it. And you have to fight hard and constantly to prevent it from being spoiled and/or ruined by the world at large. It’s fragile man. Because the world will tell you that you should have it, but it won’t tell you how to get it most of the time. What it puts forward is often nonsense that the pursuit of which will do nothing more than lead you further and further away from it: Money. Objects. Notions of how you ‘should’ live. All of that is predicated on someone else’s notion of what happiness is, and a lot of the time it’s motivated by money and percentage points.

People will rain on your happiness. It’s often inadvertent, but I’ve also seen some cruel and malicious mofos who do it on purpose. Sometimes that just can’t be helped, and sometimes we have to sacrifice a bit of our own in order to help our fellow man. It’s what makes for a decent person. But it’s also knowing that some people are content to live in misery because it’s easier to do that than to get off ones ass and try to change some stuff. Like they say: There are people who’d rather sit in shit than let the world see them work a shovel.

Conservation of my energy and emotional clarity is part of my happiness. Kids and marriage have taught me that you if you try to fight every battle you’re just going to get done up. I adore my kids but I swear sometimes they seem to be such vampires that they make Nosferatu look like he’s playing in the minors.  You can pile on the love and attention but at times it’s just not enough. They’re kids so it comes with the territory, but I realize that if I want to maintain any sanity I can’t cave to every emotional requirement. Maybe that’s selfish but between my marriage, my kids, my work, and my clients I’ve only got so much energy to go around in a 24 hour period. We all do. Work, play, and love smarter, not necessarily harder. I’ve tried that road of giving in to every demand and I’ve also tried going to war over everything and neither worked very well. These days I ask myself what I’m really prepared to battle over, because to battle over everything is to only do disservice to oneself. Sometimes the right move is just to step back, save your energy and manpower, and consolidate your position. Smoke and mirrors man, smoke and mirrors.

And I don’t know how I discovered or stumbled into my own level of happiness. I really have no idea and if you offered me a million bucks to put it on paper I still couldn’t come up with it. I’m not trying to say I’ve got it all figured out or that there are things that I no longer need to figure out, or that there are no more days where I’m overrun with misery. I still have envy, jealousy. I still have rage and disappointment. I’m still a pretty crap spouse on a lot of levels. Of course there are situations around me that I have difficulty with. That frustrate the hell out of me: Like, why can’t I seem to get one day without people raging or arguing in my house?  Or why does my life seem sometimes only to be one big, long, drawn-out interval of school homework and school lunches? Or trying to get over that male-dominated notion that as a man somehow I’ve done it all wrong because I don’t have a million in my bank account. Stuff like that. But inside, with myself, for the first time I am happy.  I’m not implying that I can cover all the angles, just that I know myself a bit more, and the more I know, the more I’m at peace with what I know, whether it be the good or the bad. I don’t why that is, but it is. I spent a lot of my life at war with myself. There were two dudes in there battling daily. One guy just wanted peace and the other didn’t know what he wanted other than chaos. I guess that second guy turned out like anyone who witnesses too much carnage: he saw constant mayhem, played too big a part in the destruction of a lot of things, and got so burned out that all he wanted was peace also. Everybody on one page.

I can’t put my happiness into concrete terms: that it’s because I do X or Y. The X’s and Y’s are just byproducts. The levity lies deep within. Hidden from concrete, tangible terms, and that might be the best part about it. If I could put it into words they would ruin it. Like taking a hatchet to a Unicorn.

Image: Yves Klein©®

‘Know thy self, know thy enemy. A thousand battles, a thousand victories.’ -Sun Tzu

Sometimes the greatest wisdom lies in knowing when the very enemy is thyself. I saw a movie about the life of Gauguin. Not a very good one by any stretch of the imagination, and still I felt bad for the guy. Actually, I feel bad for a lot of the great painters: Van Gogh, Gauguin, Lautrec, Rothko, Pollock, Basquiat. Not the for the reasons you might think. The ironic part is that I feel bad for them because they sacrificed everything towards their art, and the cost was too high. I think the romantic notion of the tortured artist slaving away for his/her craft at the expense of all else is just that: romantic. It doesn’t operate at all with reality, it doesn’t make for a very full life. The worthwhile part doesn’t come until far later when everyone is dead and the passage of time and opinion can change the merits of what was produced. One thing the passage of time has taught me is that life is often hard without any outside input, and sometimes it’s just hard because we’re choosing to make it that way through our actions and perceptions alone.  I look at these guys and think they were quite brave. Certainly extraordinary painters, but they seemed to make some things so much more difficult than they needed to be. I don’t get artists like Gauguin and Pollock because they ran roughshod over seemingly everyone who gave a crap about them in their pursuit of painting. I guess I don’t understand the lack of perspective on that one. Rothko and Basquiat I don’t get at all. At ALL. They both had everything any decent painter lived for and they still couldn’t get it together. I understand there may have been a lot of self-induced pressure to work, but by that point they had gobs of money, and there was certainly no one pointing a gun to their heads making them pick up the brush. You’ve earned your living. Don’t want to do it? So don’t. Walk away. People say Basquiat had a lot of pressure as a black artist working in the elitist white contemporary art world. Give me a break. Jesse Owens, Jackie Robinson. Both had a hell of a lot more pressure on them than Jean-Michel ever saw in even his wildest heroin-induced dreams, with far less income. I didn’t see them shooting speedballs.

Cut from a different cloth I guess.

For me art is one persons reflection or take on the human condition. My sense of the human condition is predicated on our interaction both with our world as well as the relationships we form with those within it. So if you’re sacrificing any sense of normal, worthwhile, decent interaction in whatever form (your family, your relationship, your friends, your lovers, parenting your children, your working relationship with collectors who have stood by you), just to be off painting, what is the point? What you are painting and presenting them becomes a singular, solitary reflection of your take of the world. All of which is fine. It’s just that I’d like more interaction with what I’m trying to do and the world at large. The whole notion of it being the artists lot to slave away in torture, anxiety and solitude in order to produce work worthwhile is a romantic load of bollocks. Visions and callings are for monks and martyrs, an artist is neither.

I don’t want my art to consist of tons of self-imposed solitary confinement and worry. I’d like my lifetime to have more substance and weight to it. To have much much more than just art to it. To be full of colorful people, characters and memories (currently getting very little of any of those, but alas. Another post). Anyway, I always, always admired the painters with loads of talent and innovation who had their shit together: Twombly, Reubens, Jasper Johns. Yoshitomo Nara and Murakami. Even Julian Schnabel. They worked hard and worked steadily. Amassed fortunes and just generally went about their business. It’s not about the money, it’s that they didn’t give up or alter their voice in the pursuit of it, and more importantly, they didn’t go around the bend because they got frightened by the pressures that came with the very success they’d wanted in the first place. That’s the path I’d like my work to follow.

People often ask me about the nature of my work. Questions: Why the single, solitary figure? Why portraiture? Why not the entire figure, or more than one figure/person in the work? Why the white background?

Answers: Those are things that I might get to in time. Who knows? But I like portraiture and I favor it because people interest me. The interaction I have with the people that I paint interests me. Ultimately, the human condition interests me. That’s not to say I don’t find other things of interest; this is specifically about my work. I like to paint people alone and absorbed in a thought or moment because I can identify with that frame of mind very strongly. I think everyone can.

People see one figure and my work strikes them of isolation. There is an element of that present in it but mostly I’m very preoccupied with that Buddhist notion of infinite time and space within a single given moment. That the mind makes everything, all opposites. But if you hold no mind and no thought then the concept of time doesn’t exist, thus one moment and a thousand lifetimes exist as the same thing and in the same moment. So while my work is often about one person at first glance, it is also about myriad possibilities. I see that person occupied by their own mind, their own head-space in that single moment. That moment for them can consist of galaxies of thought. Everything from the trivial to the difficult and meaningful.  Current situations, dilemmas, other people, how they’re posing for me, what they think of it. That space in that single moment is crowded. Isolated, but not isolated, if that makes any sense. So my paintings are no longer really about isolation, because they’re about the correlation between the model and their own frame of mind, as well as the correlation between the model and myself. The works are loaded with weight in that regard. Because it’s not just the person, it’s what I think about and how I see the person and if you listen deeply that speaks volumes. In everything that I do there are two people involved and two people reflected and manifested: the model, and myself. Every work speaks about that dynamic, that relationship.

The white background is my own take on watercolor. The problem with watercolor as a contemporary art form is that a lot of the work done in the medium looks tired and stale. I’m not interested in making works that have to make sense, that do what the medium is ‘supposed’ to do.The white backgrounds are an indication of me making the work solely for myself. I put in what the image needs, for me. No more, no less. It’s the difference between painting and illustration. In illustration, everything has to make sense. In illustrating it’s all about using your own talent in the pursuit of the vision according to the client. In painting, it only has to make sense to me. That’s protecting my talent for myself.  In my painting the only vision I pursue is my own. That’s how I keep going, that’s how I don’t burn out. My personal work is just that, personal.

Image: Keinyo White Ltd. ©®

I recently had a Museum of Contemporary Art from a major U.S. city invite me to do some work with them. It is a great honor and definitely something I always wanted to accomplish during my career. So to achieve it right before 40 is, for me, extraordinary. In a lot of ways I feel like I’m at the crossroads as a painter. I’m in this space where I can truly reach people with my work which is such a nice place to be. In the last few months I’ve had so many people both known and unknown tell me what my work means to them and why. It’s really humbling. Unexpected.

I start to think maybe that’s all I really need. Maybe that’s the whole point in and of itself. Just present something sincere that people can explore and enjoy. Concise, succinct. That instant transmission from when I finish a work to when people see it for the first time: that’s the purpose, that’s what art is.  And all of the extraneous needs built up in the modern art-world of what’s ‘art’ and what’s not: the elitist shows, the sycophants, what’s dead or not dead or ‘in the moment’ is just chaff. My work, the people who enjoy it. That’s it. That and a couple of trustworthy dealers/galleries who really believe in me and what I’m trying to do, where I’m going. The last part of that equation might be the most difficult. Because finding a good, reputable dealer is insanely difficult. In the last 5 years or so I have been really fortunate when it comes to the people who show/rep me. Before then it was like 50 miles of bad road. There were so many flakes, jackasses and downright shady people. The people I had to put up with when I was starting out? Well let’s just say I’ve seen pimps with more ethics. At least they just took their cut up front and you knew what the arrangements were from the start.  I’ve known and still do know way too many artists who ended up at the shit end of bad business ethics. Having their work sold and not being paid, having it sold without their consent, having it stolen, damaged, or not sent back.

Part of the problem is that galleries base their business on a subjective and intangible luxury product, which means basically the majority of them hardly generate income. Make money. As a result, dealers stack their roster with too many artists just to sell and make ends meet. Usually what that means is that if you’re not selling well you don’t get pushed no matter how good your work may be. When that happens it becomes difficult to separate the pretenders from the contenders. To know who’s legit and who’s just full of it. Personally I end up taking everything with a grain of salt. For example: I’ve got this dealer down here in the city who really likes my work. Every time I go in to see him and to show him new work I’ve made the guy is over the moon. This guy, right? He tells me that I don’t even know my own potential (I’m pretty sure that I do), and he’s going on about how with my level of work, I could easily be making $90-100k a year. It’s pretty hard for me to get excited. I just cannot take him seriously. It doesn’t mean that I don’t put forward what is required of me, it just means that I don’t give much weight to his predictions. You need a dealer who’s going to believe in what you’re doing. If you’re not careful a lot of them can inadvertently destroy an artists sense of confidence and self-belief. So you’ve got to be resolute. No looking sideways, no turning back. Go forward. Because they can give you a lot of uncertainty and/or negatives without trying to or even realizing it. They’ll put forward questions like: “What are you working on? Have you thought about this? Or that? Do you make this? Why? Why not? You need to work larger or it won’t sell. You need to work smaller or it won’t sell. Do you work in (insert name of medium here)? ” And if you’re an artist of color it gets crazier: “Why don’t you paint more black people? Why don’t you paint more white people?” on and on. I had a dealer recently suggest I go to some life drawing classes even though I was so far ahead of his figurative artists that they couldn’t see me with a telescope. Things like that.

It can really mess with your head. The unspoken implication is that dealers/galleries are on the lookout for the next interesting thing. Yet at the same time, they don’t want to take risks. They don’t want to venture on an unknown or work that might be technically excellent but seem passé. So how does that work? They want the new great unknown from the solid bet, but how you become the solid bet is never explained. It’s just a big grey area that seems for the most part to be composed of hearsay, perception, timing, and random luck. The machinations of the art world can make a bad day at NASDAQ look formulaic, organized, and contrived. It’s almost as if talent and skill level don’t even factor in and that alone can break an artist or send them around the bend.

The artist-gallery relationship is a skewed one that often keeps the majority of people who supply it (artists) poor and broke. And it is exacerbated by art-schools who keep churning out these young kids teaching them that this is the way to go as an artist. “Get a gallery, show show show, kid. Look at Picasso. Just roll out with that grad school diploma, show, and the money is going to come pouring in; Venice Biennial, here we come. You’re RICH bitch!” Granted that does happen. But only for about 0.2% of the population of artists who are fresh out of school. No one is really telling a lot of these kids the real story. Like, hey: One gallery can’t make you as an artist unless you fall in with  a blue-chip dealer that’s going to back you. Or stuff like: “Are you sure you want to be perceived as being at the height of your powers when you’re still in your 20′s as a painter? Or, “What if it takes an additional 5 years (and that’s optimistic) to get into the Whitney? What’s the plan for eating during that period of time?” Most don’t think about that so the dealers wield a lot of influence. The dealers are the gatekeepers, and without them it’s extremely difficult to move up. To gain access to grants, museums, collectors who have money. Contacts that can further your career, or take your career into other possibilities and opportunities. Most know it and that’s why artists are content to endure sometimes unfavorable situations in order to get repped. Work hard, meet the show criteria, help cover the cost of your opening, and then give up half your profit to your dealer. Then lose a third of what’s left after that to the tax man. Then take out your cost of living. Even if you’re selling paintings for $100k, after all of that you’re looking at a profit margin of $30k +change if you’re lucky. If you’re not living in a major city. You’re telling me that’s not skewed?

It is a very hard cycle. You need a will of steel and a ton of resolve. I’ve had more success than a lot of artists will ever have. I have great, ethical, people representing and showing my work and it’s still not easy.

Image: Keinyo White Ltd. ©®

I think a lot of dads in families feel really marginalized. Like once the kids are in there and life piles on you suddenly fall so far down the list of importance to that you’re just shouting from the bottom of a well. But that’s all of our fault because as a western society we’ve done that to ourselves. We’ve devalued the worth of fathers. The worth of mothers is pretty exalted, but the worth of a man in a child’s life isn’t esteemed very highly if you ask me. Where’s the reference? Where are the examples in the media? You can’t find any. Take television for example: you can find 50+ examples of amazing female parents but the fathers are usually dipshits, abusers, halfwits, deadbeats, clueless or a clown. Some times I feel like God help you if you screw up Mothers Day, but for Fathers Day just pick up a pair of cheap socks and a tie so garish a blind man wouldn’t wear it and you’re ready to roll. That kind of thing.

The thing that sucks sometimes from my perspective as a man/father/parent is that at times it can seem like no one takes your needs seriously, whatever they may be. At least for me, that’s how it seems in my own little family. Like the only time I get taken seriously around our house is when I’m handing out the discipline. But other than that, my wants seems to be a continual sort of joke/laughing matter. What I do for a living or have to offer seems to have little impact.  My wife likes to say how she would like to spend more time with our daughters and not work as much. I can certainly understand and relate to the not working so much part as her job is filled with stress. But spending more time with our daughters? Honestly if she had to do it everyday, 4-5 times a week, she’d lose her mind. The amount of stress and mental drainage that comes with looking after two kids after school day in and day out? Forget it. It’s an idyllic scenario that in reality a lot of people just aren’t cut out for. You need miles upon miles of patience and where our children are concerned, she doesn’t have it. It’s not an insult, it’s just the truth.

Quite honestly sometimes the expectations seem simply unattainable. Case in point: I’m trying to finish up a book project. I’m down to the last 2 illustrations which is huge because it’s been a large project consisting of making 21 paintings from scratch. There’s been a lot, a lot, of financial pressure from every direction to get this thing done. I’m dead tired and didn’t have much of a weekend because

a. I was up early on Saturday having to hand out lectures to crying screaming kids who decided to have a meltdown, and

b. I was up at 6:30a.m. on Sunday in order to help my oldest do her first triathlon because the race briefing was at 8:30 a.m.

Monday, was back to the grind. Then Cross-Country day rolls around over at the school. That morning, the girls roll out of bed in the foulest moods you can imagine. Envision Napoleon right after his loss at Waterloo + Hitler hearing he’d just lost the 6th Army at Stalingrad meets Oscar the Grouch, you’d almost be there. Anyway my wife had planned to go so I wasn’t going to go. I walked them to school trying to alleviate their fears, get home and my wife then asks me if I am going to watch Cross Country because she has a work meeting. The youngest starts at 10:40, the oldest at noon. I’m the one picking them up from school at 3, so if I go that’s an entire work day down the toilet.

Here’s the thing:

It really bugs me that because I’m a painter and an illustrator and have flexible hours that somehow my work just isn’t important. People always assume I can just drop it on a dime because I don’t have a boss looming over me or I might be working from home. It’s like it doesn’t have value because it’s art. It’s not quantifiable. And I work goddamn hard. Hard at painting and hard at parenting. It annoys me how people can’t see the worth in things sometimes simply because what you do can’t be judged by a series of tickboxes. Some days, that’s the nature of art. Some days I feel like saying “Well gee, I don’t know. How long should it take to make a painting? Please, enlighten me.”  If Michelangelo were alive today I can just see how his Twitter feeds would read:

9:00 a.m.: Met with Pope. He’s not happy, says Sistine Chapel should be finished already. Threatened me with excommunication.
10:00 a.m.: In Chapel now. Had coffee and climbed up on scaffolding, started painting. Cold as hell in here.
12:00 p.m.: Worked for a few hours. Had to repaint the finger of God. David not going well. Epic fail.
1:26 p.m.: Had lunch. Onion soup + bread. Saw Raphael in the corridor bragging about some fresco he’s working on. What a douche.
3:40 p.m.: Worked some more. Colors muddy. Pope came in. His holiness is still riding my ass.
4:22 p.m.: Still working. Back is killing me!
6:17 p.m.: Wtf I can’t see shit by candlelight.
7:01 p.m.: Pope again. @^!!*#%&!!!! How does an old fart get around so much???? F%*K off Pope!!!!

And maybe that’s not how it is, but sometimes it definitely feels that way. It wouldn’t bother me so much if I didn’t have to deal with the second issue which is this: The lost day of work means that I have to find another one in there somewhere. Which means it’ll take another day for this book to get finished, which means it will take longer to be paid. Which means there’s going to be more financial pressure and I’m going to get jammed up. And I am really, really tired of being jammed up. Because that is what I meant by the unattainable expectations. I am really tired of having the expectation to produce fine daughters coupled with sustaining a career and making money come in. Of hearing “Dad my homework isn’t done” one minute along with “Is the book done?,” the next. I am only one person. One human trying to hold it down. So sometimes people need to lighten up and make some allowances that not only are there going to be moments where everything does not get done, but there are going to be moments where even the the things that do get done might not get done to a point which they find satisfactory and that’s just the way it is. The constant doing is burning me out. It is burning me out as an painter, it is burning me out as a person. Not working and raising kids would be hard enough. But to raise the kids and then have that added pressure of not only earning an income but not letting your business fall to pieces at the same time is hard man. Really hard. Also to do all that and be in a household where you can feel marginalized and unheard is totally demoralizing sometimes.

That kind of thing after long enough just makes you want out. You figure it can’t be any harder than it already is. Like, if my marriage imploded and I was living by myself in a one room flat with a hot stove, but still had plenty of access to my kids, how much harder could that really be than what I’m dealing with day in and day out right now? Would my living conditions be worse? Absolutely. Would I miss not being with the girls every day? Yes. Would I have long long spells of loneliness? Certainly. But would I also feel that I’m not potentially subject to an aneurysm at any given moment due to the pressure and stress? Would I have time to myself to do whatever the hell I wanted whenever I wanted? Would I be more relaxed? And in being more relaxed would that make me a healthier, happier, and saner person? And would that in turn make me an even better parent to my children? A better alternative than this ragged, sleep-deprived stressed out human being they now know?

Quite possibly.

Look, I’m not saying that I’m considering that as a serious alternative. It doesn’t have anything to do with not wanting to be a parent, or breaking up my marriage. It doesn’t have to do with being able to do whatever the hell I want. I’m about to enter the second half of my life and it has everything to do with being a happier human being. A rational and compassionate one. An appreciated one. A sane one who is not a constant live wire.  And being a more illuminating, calming and decent person to those around me by proxy. That is what the second phase of my life is going to be about. Money and stress go get fucked, you don’t factor in.

Image: Keinyo White Ltd©®

Sterling Gray was a long time friend of my pops. He was a large and gregarious guy who used to come up catch up with my father and us in DC.  Nicknamed ‘Bear’ by those who knew him, he was a real old school throwback to the black southern gentleman with a boisterous, deafening laugh that was infectious. He and my pops were real tight and whenever Sterling was in town it was guaranteed rowdiness and laughter. Good times and good stories. One of the highest appellate judges in his state, he had a son along with a gorgeous wife. He had money, influence, power within his community and his work environment. Looking from the outside the guy had all his shit together in a life that had it all. You know what I’m saying? The Midas touch live and in person.

I was around 16 or 17 then. My parents had made their visiting tour of splitsville a long road back and my sis and I were living with my pops and my stepmoms. My father was working way up in one of the largest and most prestigious legal firms in Washington D.C. making money hand over fist; gobs of it. The house we were living in was beyond amazing. So far beyond that it bordered on ridiculous. Situated in an affluent N.W. neighborhood of Washington DC it had 3 levels, 4 bathrooms, and 5 or 6 bedrooms depending on how you laid it out. My bedroom was more incredible than anything any teenager should legally be allowed to live in. It had a separate entrance and sat out over a wooded area of Rock Creek Park. Those woods put me at ease. When winter would roll through I’d stare out, watch the snow fall. As it stacked up on the trees in the quiet of night I gained respite and peace from my fears. I used to sit in that room and draw away whatever troubles I had: my parents divorce, trepidation over impending college. High school bullshit and drama. What my future held for me.

It’s winter that year and all of a sudden my pops wasn’t himself. If you hadn’t known him you would never be able to tell. But one night I knew. He was different, preoccupied. His mind was elsewhere. I knew he’d been talking to Sterling Gray on the phone a lot lately. A lot. Often at late hours in the night. It went on like that for a little while, back and forth. Then one day, just like that, my pops was different.

I don’t remember who told me what happened and I guess it’s not important at this point.

Since I’d seen him last Sterling’s perfect life had unraveled something awful. He’d been indicted on charges of bribery and was looking at being arrested along with possible jail time. You can imagine the scale and fallout of something like that if you’re a high ranking appellate judge. The charges were, as far as I know, unsubstantiated and circumstantial. No hard evidence produced and he was a black high-ranking judge married to a white woman in a state not traditionally known for outstanding racial tolerance. The pressure took its toll. His marriage fell apart. From what my pops told me, there were a lot of decent ways and procedures to deal with those kinds of charges according to a person of his stature within the community. Ways and procedures that did not include showing up at his mansion in the late night hours with camera crews in tow to arrest him. You have that happen to you and even if you’re cleared of the charges your career as a judge is effectively over. He made bail. I guess he had a scheduled court date and appearance for the laying of charges, but that day never came around. It never came around because before it could Sterling Gray took a loaded shotgun and used it to murder his estranged wife before killing himself.

Not too long after that, not too long after that winter evening when my father seemed different, things for him changed a lot. He resigned from the elite law firm and the luxuries that came with it. He walked away from the money. It wasn’t too long after Sterling’s suicide that he started talking to that Vietnam vet that I mentioned in that post a while back. He changed a lot of things. Years later we came upon the subject and I asked him why. He told me that he looked at Sterling and realized that he was headed down the same road. Not the same circumstances, but the same road. Working this high-pressure job for money and accolades in order to maintain a life that wasn’t healthy. Not talking, and not talking about Vietnam. Bottled emotions and stress. He said that he became certain that if he kept going he’d end up in the grave just like his friend.

I’ve been thinking a lot about Sterling Gray lately, as I get on in years. Back then I didn’t think that much of it, I was too far removed and I was really more concerned about my father. But these days I look back on it and I realize that situation and end result held a slew of life lessons that wouldn’t reveal themselves to me until I was wise enough to see them. Because I learned a lot from both Sterling and my father.

From Sterling I learned how the life you think you may want, getting it, might be the worst thing to ever befall you in the long run. I learned the dangers of propping up a certain life at the expense of oneself and the dangers of what we will go through in order to maintain the illusion. The danger of placing too much emphasis on how others may perceive us and giving too much consideration to what they may think of how we live our lives. Unyielding attachment to anything no matter how trivial can ruin a life.

From my father I learned the ability to take stock of where one is going with his or her life. To really look at it and decide whether or not if it is of benefit. Whether it will ultimately lead to something beneficial or detrimental in terms of your longevity, sense of peace, purpose, and your state of mind. That your soul is worth a lot more than money in the bank. And I learned a deeper level of courage from his willingness to walk away from the bells and whistles in order to seek something better, to address where he needed help and to seek it out.

It’s a valuable lesson.

Image: Robert Motherwell©®™

“You are the bows from which your children as living arrows are sent forth.”-Kahlil Gibran

Warning: Bad parenting ahead.

Here’s some backstory, just so you know how I was feeling when this all went down. I’ve been solo-parenting for the past couple of days, with my daughters not necessarily making it easy. On top of that, I had Judo training that left me even more bashed than it usually does. I got put to work with a white belt who used to train with us, but hasn’t done any training at all in over a year. That pretty much says it all. In fact, I’m pretty sure that training with white belts is its own special kind of hell. Like if you’re a terrible person, you go down to the fifth circle of hell and instead of demons there’s about a thousand Judo white belts packed into a tiny room who spend eternity dumping you at terrible angles with horribly timed throws. That was last night. I get home, the two girls are STILL up even though it’s going on 10p.m.!  They have school in the morning and I now know the morning might be a bitch-fest because they’re tired.

Now I’m beat up and in pain, it’s getting late, and I’m crabby.

Cue up the bad parenting: So the morning rolls around, right? Going smoothly until we hit the breakfast table. The girls are at the table eating. Somehow the topic gets on the 9yr. olds upcoming camping trip. She asks if I can go, to which I reply that I can’t because I’ve got a project due that I’m behind on (which is true) and I’ve got to work. Well fuck-a-doodle-doo if this conversation doesn’t descend into a big tear-fest about how I promised I was going to go on the last school camp and didn’t (also because I had to work). At this point, I’m pretty annoyed because I do a lot of cool stuff with my daughters. I’m usually there after school, insanely patient and affectionate. I’m there for homework, losing sleep to help console them through nightmares, listening to the giant sucking sound of earnings leaving my wallet. I work my ass-off to make money when I’m not looking after them. So the last thing I want thrown my way this morning is how I’m deadbeat-promise-breaker dad who doesn’t live up to anything with his kids. I wasn’t having an iota of it. So I’m trying to explain the concept of how we need to work to make money for those occasional necessities like, I don’t know, FOOD AND SHELTER. Meanwhile the 5yr old is milling about the table aggravating the 9yr old further by standing right in her sisters personal space even though she’s heard the heated discussion and should be sitting down and eating. So I ask the 5yr old 3 times nicely, to sit down and have her breakfast because there’s not much time before school. 3 times! I swear she is moving slower than a tortoise in a tar pit.

So that’s when galaxies collide.

Next thing you know I feel like I’m in a bad Michael Bay movie because there’s this plastic plate flying across the kitchen, and skipping off the floor at her feet. The guy that’s throwing it looks like me. Like, a LOT like me, but there’s no way it could be me. Except it was me. The girls, they look dejected. Not scared (because the plate didn’t even come close to them), but just totally let down. The 5yr old goes to the table and starts eating quietly. The 9yr old has huge tears in her eyes, and I feel beyond terrible. You can’t even describe it. Like I’ve just been frollicking through the Black Forest kicking kittens in the ass with Hitler.

It’s times like that that’ll certainly make you question your parenting skill set. I don’t know about you but it’s times like those that you wonder ‘What exactly is the point of trying to be a great parent?’ Is it because it’ll make them great people in the future? Horseshit. There’s no guarantees on that one and I’ve know more than my fair share of people whos parents went to great lengths to give them everything and they still turned out fucked up or just couldn’t get it together.

Since her divorce my sis has been raising her three kids on her own. She’s just an amazing mom, an amazing woman and I don’t know how she does it while holding down a full time job. She works her ass off for those kids and they are great kids, my niece and nephews. Their father, he doesn’t have much to do with them anymore, isn’t in the picture all that much. My sis, she breaks her ass for these kids and here’s the kicker: These kids still think their dad is the most amazing guy. Dude is hardly around, my sis is putting in the long hours, doing the school runs, making sure they have clothing, shelter, food, unconditional love. The whole 9. And the dad STILL carries the same amount of weight as her in the kids minds.

I have mornings like this one where I add that up with my sisters situation and you’re kind of like ‘What’s it all for?’ Is the point to be a mostly good parent but a bit of shitty one every now and then? Because if you grant your kids everything then they grow up not understanding the value of anything least of all hard work. Grant them nothing and chances are they’ll grow up just not feeling valued, trying to overcompensate for that vacuum for a long time.

There days where you do get extremely aggravated. As a parent you feel like you are fully committed to being the best you can be for these little people and some days you’re getting straight garbage in return. You realize that hey, not only are these little people not taking into consideration anything I am putting forth for them in this moment, they literally do not give a shit. They’re so wrapped up in -insert name of random toy/person/pony/cartoon character here – that they do not give a crap. I could be standing here sweating my ass off  trying to defuse a block of Semtex and this kid would still be warbling on about Ben 10 or Mushi Monsters. And when you’re earnestly trying to put forth some life lessons that might help them in the future, that can be REALLY frustrating. You end up thinking “Whoa. This kid is just not hearing a word I’m saying. Why am I bothering? I might as well just sit down, drink bourbon and smoke Kool Menthols while watching some Ben 10 with them. Shit is same same.”

So I guess the point is to just do the best you can in any given moment, and sometimes that moment means coming up short. They do vex you. They test you constantly, like Vietcong checking the perimeter wire. You get mad and rage and then you settle down and realize later that they’re just little people and that’s how they operate at this age and level. You realize that it is totally unreasonable to expect anything far beyond that. Certainly not to expect them to be rational and thinking people. I mean, seriously, a lot of  adults I know are totally irrational and immature people prone to histrionics. And those fools are grown. How can  you expect anything more from your children? Most of the adults on this planet aren’t functioning and yet we often expect it of our children. Seen from that angle it makes the kids look like the only people who really have their shit together.

Usually once you realize that again you feel like rubbish; like you’re a totally terrible parent for going bananas, or going on a rant, or getting really angry. Maybe deep down you know that’s not true but is still doesn’t lessen the crappy feeling you temporarily have in your heart because the last thing your kids saw before they went to bed or out the door to school was you pissed off at them. And as a parent that’s something I try to avoid at all costs because in my heart I don’t want that to be the last thing they associate me with if something were to happen.

Never leave angry.

Image: Keinyo White Ltd©®

“Creativity takes courage.” -Henri Matisse

So here’s that painting I was talking about. The one where I went above and beyond the call of duty. You can see a larger version of it here. I’ve been painting Ella for a while now. About 5 years. It had been a bit of time since I last saw her; the last painting I made of here before this one was 2007.  Since then I hadn’t really seen her. She’s off to uni soon, moving away. So I asked her to come in so we could collaborate on something before she left. I don’t know why I make such amazing work of Ella and her sister Bridie, but I just do. I decided to stop questioning it, and just accept it. The thing I noticed after not seeing her for that span of time was how beautiful she was. I’d watched her go from being a little kid to becoming a real and true young woman about to embark on a journey with her entire life ahead of her. I thought that was amazing and I was hoping for it to be reflected in the work. Still, as beautiful as she is I don’t think she really understands what it is to be painted by me. What it is worth. I think she will when she’s older and looks back, but at the present she still takes it for granted; indicative of her age, I suppose.

Last year was a real up and down year painting-wise. I’m not sure most people would be able to tell from looking at the work made. But I knew. That’s not to say that any of the work was terrible, but they were real hit-or-miss. Some things were exceptional, and some were middle of the road, at best. Indicative of my state of mind during that year I suppose; a real fucking roller-coaster.

I put up that bit about the painting being amazing because it is amazing, and I am okay with stating that aloud. The reproduction online doesn’t do it any real justice at all. You really have to see it to see how good it is, for a few reasons. First: The size because it’s a large painting  for a watercolor. You can’t get that from looking at it on a screen. But the dimensions are roughly- 22″ x 30,” so it’s big. And to keep a painting of that size that pristine while using a medium like watercolor took some doing. Second: The vibrancy of the color, and third: the detail, man. That hair was every bit as difficult as it looks. So much effort.

No errors. No mistakes.

A friend asked me why I thought so much and so highly about this painting. What really set it apart in my mind? I decided to sit down and really think that one over because I thought it was a good, thorough question. This painting made me understand something about myself and what I thought I knew about painting. That the percentage of what I really thought I knew about it or my potential within it was extremely small. Dry cognition, surface level understanding of the life of the thing itself. And this painting dug, digs, deeper in all aspects: size, use of color, composition, drawing ability, attention to detail, patience. Sense of purpose.

In Judo they often say that reaching Shodan (Black Belt) merely marks the beginning of ones journey within the discipline. I never used to understand that point. I always figured after you sweat and bleed and get broken so much to attain something, how can what you achieve just be the beginning of the journey? But this painting made me understand that point with real clarity. It made me feel like I’ve been painting for 17+ years just to make this work. Just to start making work of this caliber and level. If Judo has done it’s part to help me to overcome large aspects of my own ego, this painting has done the same for my sense of competition. This painting is the bridge between a younger man constantly trying to prove himself, and an older man secure enough in himself mentally and physically to know that he no longer needs to do so. He can choose to if he wants, but he doesn’t need to.

And I’ve been needing to for so long. I’ve filled my life up trying to prove myself to myself and to others. Sometimes with things that are very arduous.  Training training training. Flogging myself and pushing myself without rest. But I don’t have to prove anything. I’ve said this before, by at the end of the day I know that I am one of the best people out there doing what I do; in the top percentile. You can go anywhere and stack my figurative work up against any figurative artist anywhere, from any era. That has taken so long to settle and sink in, that realization. And once you know inside that you are that good at one singular thing, what do you have to prove? Zero.

This painting has made me want to slow down to honor that. To not degrade the talent or myself or the gift by making anything less.

Image: Keinyo White Ltd. ©®