Monday, November 25, 2013

Making Faces







Faces. Nothing causes me to procrastinate like the task of painting faces. It's not the blank canvas that intimidates me. It's the one with half sketched in figures, ready for fleshing out. The dread of getting started can stall me for hours, days. Painting faces is what I am specifically not doing as I write this blog.

Faces are intimidating almost by design. Anything that can be thought, said or felt is reinforced (or contradicted) by a dense vocabulary of facial expressions. Many great works of art derive their power simply by accurately re-staging these fugitive gestures. The eyes alone are capable of articulating emotions as well as language can do, and most of us are born with the ability to decode those looks intuitively. In explaining the difficulty autistic people have with processing facial expressions, one activist for Autism Awareness describes the pain of looking another person in the eye as equivalent to having his hands held in a fire. No one needs to be told how powerful eye-contact can be. Even animals share this language of looks with us, which is why you can't fake bravery when trying to stare down a mean dog, for instance. They're not just smelling your fear, self-doubt is written all over your face.

For some artists, painting the figure comes considerably easier than for me. The pressure to correctly depict the human face is the most daunting challenge I subject myself to on a regular basis. I need to know I'm at the top of my game before I can even begin to work. This involves being properly caffeinated, which means just enough to feel fully awake, but not enough to make my hand unsteady. I also need to have recently eaten, since there is no worse distraction than hunger. Intoxicants are out of the question as they erode judgement and make hours of re-painting inevitable. Of course the lighting has to be just right, but so does the music (if any), and even the smell of the room is critical, which usually means attending to that damn cat box in the far corner of the basement, and then selecting the right incense. Seasonal considerations apply. Amber is good in the fall, but not lavender. Did I mention tea? I like the herbal kind that claim to focus the mind. I'm guessing those claims are a load of crap, but I'm willing to chance it. If all this sounds a little O.C.D., I'm fine with that. Most of us have our successes propped against some neurosis or other. Mine just happens to be over-preparation of my my work environment, but when I get it right I can disappear completely into the rabbit hole of creative experimentation for whole days without even knowing I've been away.

When an artist draws, paints, or in some other way manipulates materials in attempt to depict something accurately, we call that rendering. To render something is to create a representation of it. Another definition of rendering is to melt down, extract and purify. Rendering is also the word used for the process of breaking down animal carcasses into the components of skin, fat, bone and protein for "reuse." Artists understand how closely related these definitions are. In order to draw something correctly, we first have to break it down into intersecting planes, angles and curves, and then we have to recreate those relationships one by one on a flat, blank surface.

It's no secret that I use a projector to help me rough in my compositions from images I've worked up digitally.  I'm fine with people knowing that. My work has about it the sense of accumulated iterations, one of which is digital composition. Many of my source images have had a previous life before I acquired them, and the echo of that prior purpose is what helps give my paintings context. Even the original photography I work from is staged in a way to interact with these appropriated images. A fair amount of improvisation and reworking can happen at any point in the process, with the final painting being just the most recent instance of a palimpsest of ideas. But regardless of the combined-media origins of my paintings, there are still dozens of hours of good old fashioned rendering that go into making my figures "convincing." I may white-out a face two or three times, starting from scratch each time, until I am happy.

But what does it mean to get a face right? Those who study faces quickly learn there is more deviation than norm. Relaying that deviation faithfully is what helps convince the viewer that an image is realistic. Even the most beautiful faces are "out of true" with traditional notions of idealized beauty. There is not a face out there where one eye isn't higher than the other, or the nose slightly bent to one side. Ears are often the least match-y things that make up the human countenance. If you see a face that looks perfectly symmetrical it will somehow look wrong. It's the minute deviations in symmetry that make a face seem believable.

Recently I was painting a face where the nose was a little off center. Just slightly. Something you would never notice in real life about the model I had photographed. I kept trying to center it, but it never looked right. Finally I stopped resisting what was in front of me and put it down as closely to what I was seeing as possible. I remembered a drawing instructor back in college who was watching me in a figure-drawing class. He wasn't looking at what I was drawing, just watching me draw. Finally he said, "you spend too much time drawing and not enough time looking." I'm sure he said that ten thousand times in his career, but it was so perfectly right for me at that moment, and it still is.

Later that day a friend stopped by to chat and I showed him the painting. He said, "Dude, that girl is super hot but she's kind of creeping me out because of the way she's staring." This wasn't exactly what I was going for. It wasn't the whole effect anyway, but it did let me know I'd gotten the nose right. In fairness to my friend, if he had seen the painting on the wall of my gallery he would have put more effort into a context-appropriate response. Still I was happy for the bluntness of it. It helped break that spell you fall under when you're deeply immersed in your work and you're thinking it's doing one thing - usually something heady, but you're missing something much more ordinary. 

When I think a painting is done I'll usually post an image of it on my Facebook artist's page just to get some reactions. My favorite thing lately is the way their facial-recognition software kicks in and that little floating box pops up over the faces in my paintings and asks me to tag my "friends." I realize how tawdry it is to allow yourself to be flattered by computers, but I still find it amazing that an accumulation of brush strokes that I put together can be blended in a such a way that even algorithms are tricked into interacting with them. It's a powerful and seductive thing to portray the human form, if even just reasonably well, and it raises questions for me about the moral responsibility of the artist. The context in which the art is received by its public is informed by social values, norms and expectations. Most artists possess some awareness of this dynamic, or at least they pretend to. I'm certain the ethical stakes aren't any higher for figurative artists than abstract or conceptual or what-have-you, but because humans are also animals, we are programmed to respond to representations of our kind in ways that are visceral, not just intellectual. That's what sometimes creeps ME out now that I'm edging further and further into figurative art, but it's also what makes it more fun than I've had in forever.


Semi-Transparent, acrylic on canvas, 2013

Monday, September 2, 2013

Perfectly Lost



I'm laying in a tub watching clouds through a little skylight while listening to Brian Eno streaming on a nearby stereo. I have no idea where I am, or very little anyway. I know I'm at the end of a winding country highway somewhere outside of Paonia, Colorado. But I've never been here before, and Paonia is just a funny sounding name I have no associations with. I haven't even looked at a map today to see where it is.

Depending on what Brian Eno piece you happen to be listening to in the tub, you may come to notice that it sounds exactly the same whether your ears are above the water or below.

We started out this morning in Gunnison, Colorado, did some hiking near Crested Butte, then took the Kebler Pass seasonal road through the largest stand of mature aspen trees in the state. At some point on the switchbacks in and out of a canyon carved by the North Fork of the Gunnison river, I began to lose my sense of direction. One moment the sun would be in my eyes, the next it would swing around behind my left shoulder and reappear over my right. None of this much mattered since Kae was doing the navigating, still, by the time we got to our rental house I had no solid sense of where I was.

North Fork of the Gunnison river, Elk Mountains Wilderness, CO.

I've always liked that bumper sticker that says, "Not All Who Wander Are Lost," though I usually make sure my own wanderings include lots of detailed maps. For me, the urge to map one's experience is really just a desire for greater context, a way to know the world more thoroughly. At least that's what I tell myself. By contrast, I know plenty of people who don't bother with maps and never know which way north is - and they couldn't care less. I imagine that their sense of the layout of the world is informed by a personal narrative unencumbered by literal space. Indeed, there are other ways to map the land than with birds-eye schematic approximations of topography. Among indigenous Australians there is a tradition of "songlines." These are navigational song-maps which are sung while crossing vast stretches of the continent's interior. The words of the songs detail landmarks and watering holes as the landscape unfolds before the singer. Even the contour of the melody is intended to describe the lay of the land.

A different sort of verbal mapping helped me explore the limestone caves of central Kentucky when I was a teenager. There were lots of stories about these caves circulating among the more outdoorsy kids at school, but no one I knew had ever been in them. My brother and I had hiked the creek below them plenty of times and knew exactly where to look on the cliffs above for the vegetation that nearly crowded shut the mouths of these wet caves. We'd done some research and knew that wet caves were more inherently stable than dry caves, so while the constant flow of water presented its own challenges, we knew the cave would not collapse on us.  Finally, together with my brother and a couple of buddies, I worked up just enough nerve to chance a trip inside the fabled Chrisman Cave. I  had obtained a hand-drawn map of the cave from some kid's older brother who was in college. It contained a couple of squiggly branching shapes with the words "vestibule" and "chimney," which we knew were words used by professional cave explorers, and so our map seemed legitimate to us. It turned out to be accurate enough to not get us killed, but over subsequent visits to the cave we found that keeping elaborate verbal descriptions was way more useful than trying to picture it. This is how I still remember it: "At the far end of the vestibule look for a small opening down near the floor, about ten feet across and three feet high in the center. Water will be trickling out of this opening. Crawl into it. After about 20 yards the ceiling will come down to less than two feet. You will have to shimmy through a series of very tight spots for the next 200 feet. Wear long pants and a long sleeved shirt, since the floor of the cave is covered with gravel. You will also be in one to two inches of water. Pay close attention to the ceiling. You are looking for a chimney that will give you passage to the upper reaches of the cave. The chimney is a narrow slit that you will be able to stand up in. It widens as it ascends, so you will have to work yourself into the corners to find enough hand/footholds to scramble up the forty or so feet to the next level of the cave. At this point you will be able to stand mostly upright while exploring several winding passages, but mind the floor, as there are several more chimneys coming up..." And so on and so forth. Every time we explored the cave we stayed in there until we were exhausted or freaked out, and each time our descriptions got a little better, yet every time we tried to draw it, we could never agree on how it should look. We explored Chrisman Cave many times but never knew who Chrisman was, and the cave wasn't on any maps.

It turns out the name Paonia is an intentional misspelling of the Latin name for the peony flowers which were brought here by the area's first white settlers. At a loss for a better name to describe their new home, the word "Paeonia" was submitted as the official place name in 1902 when the town was incorporated. But in a draconian effort to enforce simplicity and clarity, the U.S. Postal service decided to approve the name only if the silent "e" were dropped. Hence, Paonia.

Twenty minutes into my soak the water has gone lukewarm and Brian Eno is still nowhere near wrapping up his musical thought.  Out the other window in the bathroom I can see clouds piling up on the horizon in various hues of gray. The view overhead through the skylight is still just wisps of white against the late summer blue. Two versions of the same sky. Two different stories, depending on cropping.  At the moment, I'm content with the blue depiction of the sky overhead, and it occurs to me that lying here is as good a way as any to begin my acquaintance with a place. You've got to start somewhere. Besides, at some point tonight I'll certainly get the maps out.


Tuesday, August 13, 2013

I'd like you to come to my party if you're not too busy picking dead leaves off stuff in your garden



So I'm in this art show called Corpus Exuberis with my friends in Pangloss Gravitron at the Emmanuel Gallery in Denver. The show will be up for almost two months, so we decided to have a party there this Thursday (August 15),  just because. It'll be sort of like a second opening. Or a pre-closing.  I'm proud to say the show is pretty darn good and worth seeing all on its own, yet I'd much rather have you come see it while I'm there.

But here's the thing: I wasn't going to tell you about this party. I was hoping you'd hear about it from somebody really cool, or read about it in WestWord, and that would make you want to join us. Then just today I was talking with Meagen, who's also in the show, and she admitted she hasn't been telling people either, out of a similar over-cautiousness about burning her friends out with too many event requests. So here we are just hoping people will somehow get the idea that our party is the happening place to be, but we're not promoting it because no one wants to be a burden to their friends. You see, I know your inbox is jammed up with a lot of requests to attend cool events by cool people all over town. I know this because I'm on a lot of the same lists that you are, and my Facebook calendar is overflowing with "maybes."  But I've just recently realized the "maybe" box mostly gets checked by friends who really have no intention of coming to your event. These people genuinely like you, and support your efforts, and they want you to know that. But they're not coming. They're picking dead leaves off their tomato plants, because that's another thing that really has to get done.

Let's all just admit we're a little burned out by the flood of social media event requests. I'm glad I get them. It's good to know what's going on, and at the last minute I might just like to show up to that barbecue fundraiser at that guy's house down in Castle Rock who I only met once. But in the meantime, I'm trying to take it easy on my own friends, so much so that it turns out I haven't sent one email out to my list this year. Not one. I'm afraid my hesitance to add to the social noise has distanced me somewhat from the people who are genuinely interested in what I've been up to. It's tricky stuff, navigating the intricacies of social etiquette with such a blunt and invasive technology. But now I'm putting it out there. This is the show I'd like you to come see. It's in two days. A whole bunch of your friends will probably be there. Plus, even if you came to the opening there will be some surprises. Meagen now has an audio component to her installation, I've added a hacked Talking View-Master to the show, and Tracy has made much progress towards the completion of her live painting "Tracing Grace."


Tracy will also demonstrate and invite others to test the effects of the prototypes built in support of "Grace's Law" (above) in the back courtyard of Emmanuel Gallery.  Documentation of levels of exuberance before, during, and after use will continue throughout the night. Plus we'll have live tunes by Amber Hamilton and Beer provided by Cannonball Creek Brewing Company.

Details are Here. Please join us if you're not doing some other thing.

Monday, August 12, 2013

Trail Etiquette



Every Sunday, the multi-use trails in Colorado are clogged with all sorts of weekend adventurers, from bird watchers to horseback riders, and each group simply tolerates the others. Horseback riders don't much like dog walkers. Fly-fishers and bird watchers dislike anyone who talks. And everyone wishes the mountain bikers were on some other course, including all the mountain bikers. Over the years I've flirted with membership in most of these tribes (except fly-fishing), and I can vouch that each has it's own rationale for why it should own the right of way, yet somehow we all manage to share the trails, and sometimes even a couple of beers back at the parking lot.

Because I hike all over the state, often by myself, I've made a lot of amateur psychographic observations about these user groups. In terms of general sociability, horseback riders rank up at the top. They are way chattier and kinder-spirited than all other trail users. Possibly this is because the horse is doing all the work, leaving riders free to socialize. The more physically demanding sports like mountain biking are at the anti-social end of the scale. But I give bikers a pass on the friendliness test, since most of them are riding at the extreme edge of their own abilities (regardless of skill level) and therefore are just barely in control of what they are doing. They've got both eyes glued to a spot about three feet ahead of their front tire, and may not even notice that you've pasted yourself uncomfortably against a rock wall in order to let them by. They rarely say hello, but they always thank you if they notice you scurrying off the trail to get out of their way.

By far, the most anti-social group I've ever encountered are the trail runners. I'm talking the "elite athlete" kind. The wild-eyed, sweat-glazed, barely-dressed men and women training for Iron Man type competitions. The kind that don't wear earbuds because they stopped needing workout mixes years ago. You might wonder how many of these people there can be out there. Well, I can tell you that their numbers are way over-represented in and around Boulder on any given Sunday.

I've tried trail running a few times and know it is grueling and that the last thing you need is to keep running into people and dogs and kids shambling around ahead of you on the trail, especially the chatty inattentive ones. Trail runners are focused on staying in the zone, which means keeping their heart-rates up and their brains basted in endorphins, all the while dodging roots and rocks. It's serious business. The "thousand yard stare" on their faces isn't the same kind you use on a city street when you pass a stranger but feel obliged not to interact, instead pretending there is something impossibly interesting just up ahead. The trail runner stare is ghostly and unselfconscious. If these athletes pass you without responding to your "good morning," and it makes you feel crappy and invisible, it isn't personal. The "F-U" they seem to radiate isn't for you specifically. Far from it, they are just trying to be alone, while going fast, in public, and you are simply an obstacle.

Usually when you meet someone on a trail there's a neutral moment of interpersonal positioning where each of you has to quickly decide whether or not to say hello. First you smile. If the other person smiles back, you're safe to venture a "good morning" or a simple "hey there." Whoever is more outgoing or socially dominant usually makes this move first. It's not a conversation. It's simply a kind way of acknowledging the other person, putting them at ease, and letting them know you think they're okay. Even dogs do it. When dogs meet on the trail, one will often raise its tail and begin wagging. Seeing this signal, the other dog will do the same (if all goes well). Even if they pass each other quickly with little subsequent interaction, the message was sent, received, and responded to in-kind. A simple dog hello.

After the first couple of trail runners passed me today without returning my morning salutations, I decided to do a little experiment. I greeted each person I met in exactly the same way. I looked them in the eye and simply said hello, in a friendly, but not unctuous manner. Even if they passed me from behind I did this. Then I inventoried the reactions. 14 of 20 trail runners did not respond. The six who did were surprisingly enthusiastic. I passed an additional 11 hikers, all responded in-kind. I even lucked out and saw three horseback riders, and as if to prove my point, all three launched into some story about seeing a bear cross the highway way up ahead and how one of the horses stopped in its tracks and refused to go any further so they had to turn around and ride this here trail we were on and did I know where it came out…? 

At the end of the day, my gripe about trail etiquette may be entirely inconsequential. I know this. I know it's everybody's right to not reciprocate social niceties, and to practice one's chosen sport interaction-free. If that's your choice, hooray for you. But I can't help thinking that each infinitesimal act of kindness (or its inverse) has to amount to something bigger. The same way the moon's pull on individual water molecules is immeasurable, but add up a few quadrillion, and you've got a tide.

On the way to the trailhead this morning some guy was tailgating me. I was going 52 in a 50 mph zone, so I figured he should pass me or just back off. Finally I stuck my arm out the window and waved him back with as much force as I could put into the gesture. It worked. He dropped back 3 car lengths, then 5, then 10. A few minutes later when I turned into the South Mesa Trail parking lot I noticed him take the turn also. As he got out of his car I made a mental note of what he looked like. Bald 40-ish white guy. Backpack. Hiking alone. Inevitably, an hour later we came upon each other from two separate trails that intersected. I gave him a wave. The friendly kind this time. He stuck his hand up in response. His wave said "sorry I tailgated you," mine said "no worries dude." His wave quickly added, "Enjoy your hike." Mine seconded, "You too." Our waves did all this in about one second, without aid of spoken language, and with neither of us breaking stride. I was already enjoying my hike, but just then it got a little bit better. Enough that I could feel the difference.

Saturday, August 3, 2013

Break It To Make It

Hacked and modded Talking View-Master.

In the world of "Hacks & Mods," my efforts are rather unsophisticated. In case these words haven't made an appearance on your buzz-word radar yet, they refer to the practice of hacking, modifying, and sometimes "circuit bending" existing electronic hardware (usually off-the-shelf consumer stuff) in attempt to improve, or completely change the intended use of an item. While most of the hack & mod crowd are weekend hobbyists and seekers of whiz-bang novelty, there is a strident political stance to the efforts of many of the more advanced and experimental practitioners. You don't have to poke around their sites for very long before you notice a certain "anti-establishment" tone to a lot of the posts. Hacks are shared freely in an deliberate attempt to undermine the corporate control of technology and to democratize the re-engineered results. These folks believe strongly in freeing up technology and giving creative control to the little guy. Never mind most of us little guys wouldn't know what to do with that creative control. Program a Roomba to fetch a martini?  

Somewhere along this continuum between science fair tinkerers and revolutionary super nerds, you'll find a growing crowd of artists who practice hacking and modding. My own projects have centered on store-bought toys that were "re-imagined" or commandeered for alternative uses. This sort of re-contextualizing of objects is an extension of the kind of thinking that goes into my paintings. A couple of years ago I did a piece for Dana Cain's Love Show that involved a talking plush toy that I modded to read Craigslist "Missed Connections" in a monotone computer voice to gallery visitors.

Lonesome Bear reads Craigslist personals to gallery visitors


My latest project involves an old Talking View-Master that I found in a junk shop on Colfax. It came with a set of reels, which included a 3-D tour of the first Apollo moon landing in 1969. To my delight, when I got home I discovered it still works. Each Talking View-Master reel comes with a tiny clear plastic record attached, which spins at 78 RPM, containing a separate recorded message for each of the slides on the reel. When the user presses a button, a stylus engages the record, and the message plays over a tinny speaker inside the viewer.


 Record is clear so that light may pass through to slides.

I had this thing for over a year before it occurred to me that I should punk it. I began to imagine the bland 70's audio narration set to a spacey dub track. So I began trying to figure out how to digitize the sound on the little records, then "re-mix" it with a hi quality stereo audio track, and finally get it back onto the Talking View-Master. The thing was going to need a digital audio player, some decent headphones, and a reengineered front panel. The result is what you see here.


Before and after

I hollowed out the View-Master of all it's unnecessary hardware, this included the motor, stylus and speaker assembly. When modding, you often have to decide whether or not to permanently disable a feature or function in order to accommodate some new use. This decision can sometimes border on the philosophical, like whether or not to spray-paint some sad old piece of furniture that came down through your family. In my case, I needed room inside the View-Master to embed a digital audio player, some circuitry for the headphones and a charging mechanism. This meant my lovely 40 year old toy would lose much of its pure vintage charm, and all of its antique value. Fortunately, you can still find Talking View-Masters on Ebay. And for those of you lucky enough to already have one, its value just increased by some infinitesimal amount since I just removed mine from the available pool of functioning antique toys! So be it.

This tweaked View-Master now joins the suite of space exploration-related artworks that I've been creating over the past several years. It will be available for playing at the Pangloss Gravitron party at Emmanuel Gallery on August 15th, and during the Artist's Talk on August 29th.

If you don't make it to the show, here is a link to the audio remix I did of the View-Master moon-landing narration. Enjoy.

Wednesday, July 24, 2013

Holding Pattern - repost



1980.

Right after college I had a job as a security guard on the graveyard shift at The Fayette Shopping Mall in Lexington Kentucky. With my B.A. in art, this was the best I could do at the time. I suspected it was possibly the worst job ever, but didn't have much to compare it to. One night, just before Christmas, I found a bottle of Wild Turkey Kentucky bourbon in my mail cubby in the security office at the mall. A little tag said Merry Xmas, from the management. I made it about halfway through that shift without touching it.

One of my most dreaded obligations as a mall cop was investigating cars that had been left overnight in the parking lot. Usually these cars were parked way off in the darkest stretches of the lot, near the railroad tracks. They often contained people having sex. It was my duty to ask them to move along. If the cars were empty I was supposed to affix a giant day-glo sticker that read PARKING VIOLATION to the driver's side window. I discovered right away that people having drunk sex in a mall parking lot in Kentucky are not super welcoming to a kid with a badge, a flashlight and a can of mace. Certain that they had better weapons than I did, I took to doing this part of my job as the sun was coming up, when most of the cars were gone.

One night after a midnight showing of Rocky Horror at the cineplex, I found a bag of weed on the floor near the theater exit doors. I made a gift of it to the guys who ran the cleaning service, who I knew to be stoners. In return, I enlisted their help with my parking lot woes. They had a large vacuum sweeper truck which was used every night to scrub trash off the lot. This truck had lights all over it and the vacuum motor was insanely loud. The cleaning guys were in the habit of sweeping the lot at a troublingly high speed, probably because they were bored out of their skulls. That's where I got the idea to have them use their truck to gently intimidate anyone they might happen upon in a parked car. They took to this task with relish. It was as if I had just given them a promotion. Needless to say my trouble with parkers went away pretty quickly.

About half of my nightly rounds took place outside the mall. This involved creeping around the dumpsters in the loading bays behind all the stores with my mag light. After being startled out of my wits a couple of times by dumpster divers, I took to finding ways to make enough noise that the mall's nocturnal fringe dwellers would have a chance to scatter, and I could avoid confrontation altogether. Around this same time, inexplicably, a saxophone showed up in the Mall's lost and found. After weeks of eying it and hoping no one would claim it, I decided to borrow the horn. I bought a fresh pack of reeds, certain I could teach myself to play. I really wanted to be in a band, and this was back when everyone was adding horns to their rock bands. So I took to playing the borrowed horn at work, figuring I could use it both as a warning device on my rounds, and to stave off the mind-numbing dullness of being alone and awake in a mall at night.

My supervisor surprised me one night when I was sitting in the information kiosk practicing scales. He never said a thing about the horn, but that was likely because I had some goods on him that he was eager for me never to mention. One night I'd gotten to work a little early and caught him having sex with the manager from the Orange Julius on the black vinyl couch in the security office. He'd swung his one free hand at me as if to bat me away. I left quickly, but took the time to re-lock the door on my way out. I went and sat in my car until exactly midnight. When I re-entered the office to start my shift they were gone. I propped the office door open to air it out. I don't know if it needed airing out because I wasn't breathing through my nose. I wasn't taking chances. The Orange Julius lady never looked me in the eye after that, and I never said a thing to anyone. I enjoyed thinking my chances were pretty good at landing the next open slot on the day shift. That was until I was caught with the horn, and knew I'd been trumped.

The night I found my holiday gift of bourbon the skies opened up with a deluge that was weeks overdue - the kind of rain that stalls cars in underpasses and makes traffic lights blink red. I needed to start my rounds, but stood in the doorway waiting for the downpour to let up, feeling stuck, in more ways than one. I had recently admitted to myself that I was hopelessly trapped in some sort of holding pattern, without enough velocity to escape. Most of my friends from school had found jobs elsewhere or moved back home with their parents, while I stayed behind in the small college town and tried to imagine how to be an artist. I had spent a year at the mall and only had a folder of bad poetry and some rudimentary horn skills to show for my effort. Not to mention a reputation at the mall as an utter freak show. By day, I was attempting to carry on making paintings, exactly like I had just spent four years doing in school, but the handful I managed to complete looked exactly like an amalgam of my former professor's work.  Discouraged, I took to translating rock lyrics into french, a language I'd studied for three years but knew I'd never travel enough to really use. By the time I finished translating all the lyrics for Supertramp's "Breakfast in America" I knew something had to change. I had set my sights somewhat randomly on Chicago, and had pinned all my hopes on moving there to pursue the life-creative. I'd only visited the city twice before, and had no friends there, but was certain I wanted to live there. I knew the city would wake me up, if I could just scrape up enough money to get there. In preparation, I had already started dressing like an artist. I was wearing intentionally ironic suits from thrift stores. I stopped listening to Supertramp and Genesis in favor of Talking Heads and Patti Smith. If I wasn't yet an artist, I was damn sure going to do a good impersonation of one. There's some wisdom in the cliché, "fake it till you make it," and that was as close as I came to having a strategy.

The rain never did let up, and I knew it wasn't going to. Not that night. So I twisted off the cap on the bourbon, took a big gulp, stashed it back in my mail cubby, then headed out on my rounds. After all, I was 22 years old, and in charge of the entire Fayette Mall in Lexington Kentucky. I had a flashlight, a can of mace, it was raining, and I had a saxophone. I knew what to do.

Friday, May 17, 2013

Fake Friends

Some of us (myself included) aren't doing our homework.

I've been on Facebook for seven years now, and in that time I've managed to get connected to 370 friends.  Call me old fashioned, but I figure I should at least know someone - or know of them - if I'm going to let them into my Face World. Up until recently that's been my standard, and though it's left me with a rather humble friend count, (given the time frame), I don't have to worry about any of them violating my trust or causing me any sort of cyber-grief.

Lately, however, I've let my guard down a couple of times. Maybe it's because I am, after all, somewhat prone to Friend-Count Anxiety Disorder, or maybe like most of us, I love it when someone young and attractive wants to be my friend.  Either way, my recent lower standard for friend acceptance was based on whether or not the request came from someone who was already friends with the people in my existing network. I was making an assumption that these folks had already done the vetting.  But I was mistaken.


Meet "Millie"



According to Facebook, 55 of my close associates are already friends with Millie. A quick scan of these friends revealed that most of them are middle aged Denver artists, like me. Maybe as a group we are just more accepting, or less attentive to privacy concerns, or maybe it's the titillation of a request from a "hottie." Regardless, 55 of you said yes to Millie, though I highly doubt a single one of you knows her in real life.

Something about Millie never seemed quite right to me, so I didn't accept her overture of friendship when I received it six months ago. But I didn't reject it either. Instead I left her request unanswered in my Facebook inbox, where it sits to this day. Maybe I left it unanswered because I was waiting for Millie to prove she was "real" by showing up in my friend's news feeds. Or maybe It's because I wanted to write this blog and needed it for reference, either way Millie remains unconvincing to me. A glance at her Facebook Timeline reveals no narrative whatsoever, just a handful of boudoir "selfies," each of them with the heads cropped out of the photos, so that we are to assume they're all of the same person. I don't believe it's too grave a violation of good taste for me to categorize Millie as a fraudulent, composite Skank. Call me judgmental.

 


 If you do a reverse image search on Millie, what you'll find is that this stolen picture appears on a whopping 428 separate websites, all of them NSFW (that's Not Safe For Work, for those of you over 50, or who don't work in a cube farm). The origin of this picture is lost in the hall of mirrors of internet image piracy. It's impossible to know anything at all about the girl in this photo. We can't know whether she's a Millie or a Cassidy or a Tiffany. We don't know if she was a paid model or a kid whose picture was hijacked while sexting to her boyfriend. All indications of authorship, origin and intent have been stripped from the photo. All that is left is an artifact of desire. One that keeps on giving, apparently.


 
Meet "Jennifer"






According to Facebook, many of you are friends with Jennifer. Anyone care to vouch for her? I said yes to her request, assuming that she was someone I had recently met at a big art opening. She looked kind of familiar. I figured she would drop to the bottom of my active friends list along with all the other ex-coworkers, friends from high school and distant relatives who never really interact with me on Facebook, but all of whom are technically still my friends. Unfortunately, "Jennifer" had other ideas. One was to message me at 1:30 in the morning recently with four separate messages:

I added you because I liked ur photo.

Have u met any cool people on here?

I have to log off right now

Whats your cell number? I can jus text you right now

I couldn't unfriend Jennifer fast enough, but having awoken from a deep sleep, this normally simple procedure required immense mental effort. The next day I took to Google for a reverse image search, and learned that there are dozens of "Jennifers," "Jessicas," and "Ashleys" all using this same profile picture on Facebook.

This morning it occurred to me that I should check and see if any of my profile pics were being used falsely on the web. So I did a search on the following two images, which have both been used as my profile picture.




Not surprisingly, the one on the left didn't return any results other than the original post on Facebook. It seems the one thing no one is pretending to be on the web is an average looking middle aged white guy. We're more likely the ones doing the pretending.  But the other shot of me below the summit of Mount Yale returned 23 instances of misuse. So as long as you're doing something sporty, exotic or ballsy, people are going to want to steal it. I felt flattered and incensed at the same time.

The moral of the story

Okay, there isn't really a moral. Maybe we should just agree that these are sure some weird times, and there's a whole lot of info we need to collaborate on to help each other stay safe and sane. I suspect we could all use a little Amish-ization every now and then. The Amish aren't against technology per se. They are resistant to adopt any technology that doesn't directly support the strengthening of their communities, or that causes one to be selfish or prideful, or that distracts from the fundamental business of being faithful to God. For them, pretty much everything new and shiny falls into that category. In our world, we've tacitly agreed that participating in social media is critical to our communal well-being. Social media is the new "watering hole" and we can't possibly pull ourselves away from its influence in our culture. The real objective then, is to help each other become as smart as we can possibly be in this big out-of-control social experiment. To that end, I have a few recommendations to help ferret out the Millies.

First, don't assume your friends are any more on-the-ball with vetting friend requests than you are. Make a little effort to figure out if a person seems to be real and trustworthy. An empty timeline is a bad sign. So is a request from a user who just joined Facebook. Consider limiting access for people you don't know well. Facebook allows you control over which friends see what info. Get familiar with your privacy settings. If there's any doubt, don't accept a friendship request from someone unknown. There is no obligation to say yes to a total stranger.  Here is a link to seven critical things you can do to control Facebook privacy settings.
http://www.abine.com/blog/2012/do-your-privacy-a-favor-control-the-7-most-critical-facebook-settings-post-timeline/

Second, consider building a separate Facebook "Page" for your business. Broadly speaking, your Facebook profile is for your friends and family. Pages are for businesses and public personalities. A lot of my friends are artists or folks who operate small businesses. To us, the line between friends, supporters and customers is a fuzzy one. A few folks I know operate their Facebook profiles like Friend Farms, actively requesting and accepting pretty much any friend request, because they are trying to grow a business or increase exposure for their creative careers. Problem is, by design, a Facebook profile is set up to share personal info. If you want a tighter grip on who sees what, you'll have to get pretty granular with your privacy settings. Pages, on the other hand, are set up to provide more filtering and protection of personal info. Most folks find managing both a profile and a page to be a pain in the ass, but if you want to keep your customers out of your living room, and your clients out of your vacation photo albums, then you'll give it some consideration. Also worth mentioning, you're never going to track interaction with a Facebook profile, but pages have built in analytics for every post – something potentially useful if you're actively using Facebook to reach customers.

Third, get in the habit of doing some research. Reverse image searches can help you discover if something is amiss with someone's image usage (or one of your own!). There are several search engines offering reverse image searching, but Google is by far the most powerful. Bookmark this link, or better yet, keep it open in a browser tab.
http://images.google.com.
To understand how Google image search works, click here.

While you're at it, bookmark Snopes.com, a go-to site for hoax busting. There are other sites useful for putting the kibosh on internet hoaxes, but Snopes is the granddaddy of them all, and since many hoaxes circulate for years and years, it's good to have a "granddaddy" to reference. Also, Snopes is useful to keep open while you're on Facebook, particularly during election time. It can help defuse needless hostility caused by images with bogus facts and figures like this much-shared classic:

Read the Snopes debunking of the info in this graphic




Lastly, don't forget how easy it is to unfriend someone on Facebook. Go to your Friends list in Facebook. For each person on the list there is a "Friends" button to the right of their picture. Hover over it and you'll get a pop-up menu. Scroll to the bottom and select Unfriend. That's it. They won't get a notification, you will simply not show up in their friend list anymore. Welcome to passive/aggressive friends management at its finest!

Certainly there's more you can do, short of swearing off Facebook entirely, to protect your personal information.  I'm not overly paranoid with this stuff so I've just mentioned a few things that are top of mind. You may have additional strategies. I've gone back to playing it safe with the friend requests for starters.

Be safe. And say hi to Millie, if you see her.

Friday, May 10, 2013

No card says it


Mom and Dad, 1957


High up on my list of troublesome irks is the occasional need to buy a greeting card. Mother's Day cards are especially problematic. From a distance, most of them look exactly like sympathy cards. Clusters of embossed flowers with loopy, Sorry-For-Your-Loss typography. I always feel a little self-conscious when I reach for one. Opening them seems like stealing a peek at someone's diary. Not a diary that contains unguarded truth or salacious revelations. The other kind. The kind that is emotionally tidy and desperate to be read.

Being a writer of greeting cards has to be a thankless undertaking. You'd have to churn out messages with appealing moods and textures that seem at least partially truthful, while keeping the messages general enough to be somewhat attractive to large numbers of people. The cards you wrote would need to be wistful, but not melancholy, nuanced, but not emotionally complex. And above all, they would need to accommodate the various elephants in the room without even a hint of their presence. An impossible task. One designed to fail. No wonder then that selecting the right card is an exercise in finding the one that fails the least to say what you mean.




When I was a kid my parents socialized a lot in our home, but my brother and I never got to stay up late and hang out with the grownups. We'd be tucked in bed at the appointed hour no matter what. I used to love drifting off to sleep to the sounds of adults laughing and telling stories down the hall.  The stories probably weren't meant for young ears, but I wasn't much interested in their content anyway. It was enough to know the people in charge of my world were happy, and to hear them cut loose with their friends was reassuring. My mother's voice was musical and floated above the others in a pleasing way. To this day I equate the sound of her laughter with a sense of well-being, but to my knowledge there is no card that says Dear Mom, Thanks For Laughing.

One afternoon when I was about ten my cousin and I made a fort out of a refrigerator box. We cut tiny holes for windows and decorated the inside walls with magic markers. Our mural quickly degenerated into scatological hieroglyphics. My cousin spelled out every dirty word we could think of, while I drew anatomically incorrect naked ladies. We giggled ourselves silly. Later, my aunt discovered our debauchery and called my mother to accuse me of being a bad influence. I listened from the next room as I heard my mother say, "My son doesn't even know those words." Up until this moment my mom had convinced herself that she was successfully raising the only child in history that not only did not use cuss words, he didn't even know them. Never mind I could conjugate them backwards and forwards. My mother has always given me the benefit of the doubt, whether I deserved it or not. I'd be thrilled to find a card thanking her for that.

I may have been off the hook for the swear words, but not so the drawings. No one even had to ask who did them. I got grounded, but not long after that my mom got me private art lessons. Partly it was to keep me out of trouble, but also she had been paying attention to my constant art making and thought it might be something worth formally encouraging. When I look back at those drawings they seem completely unremarkable, with the possible exception of my dinosaurs. They were tight. Regardless of what my mom's motivation was, knowingly or not, she set me on the path I'm still on today. But try as I may, I can't find a card that thanks her for taking my dinosaur drawings seriously.

At a certain point I stopped letting my mother kiss me in public. After that I began dodging her good-night kisses. The moisture on her lips would make a little cold spot on my cheek that I'd instantly wipe off. That was probably hurtful to her, but I wouldn't have known. She persisted for a while, trying to win me back from my own impending adolescence, but I was pulling away, growing up - and apart. There were times when I would have gone back and reclaimed a few of those unwanted kisses, but the road to adulthood allows no u-turns. If I chose to be sentimental about it, I'd look for a card that let my mom know her affection wasn't lost on me. Not even in those surly teen years.



 Mom, actual size.

These days I only see my parents two or three times a year. With 2000 miles between us, that's the best we can manage. My mom always wears her orthopedic hiking shoes when she comes out here to Colorado. I fix her and dad up with some trekking poles, and they oblige me as I take them on the mildest trails I can find. We've been hiking together for years. It's what we do. On a recent trip I drove them up a remote jeep trail to have a picnic on a mountain pass high above Crested Butte, Colorado. It was a blustery summer day and the sun beat down on us through the thin atmosphere at 11,000' elevation. We spread our picnic on the hood of the car and washed down turkey sandwiches with Gatorade. Far below us the valley sloped into a glacial bowl filled with summer's fading wildflowers. The first hint of storm clouds were lazily assembling on the horizon. Above us towered Cinnamon Mountain. I knew my folks would never have chosen that place for a picnic, and that my mother was way outside her comfort zone, what with the 4-wheeling, lack of guard rails, and no restrooms. They indulged me, because as mid-westerners, my family is easily smitten with the severe beauty of Colorado, but also because they are learning to trust me to deliver them safely to and fro in the wilderness – which is something.  If I could find a card that said Dear Mom, Thanks For 4-Wheeling With Me, I'd feel like I was getting somewhere.

It's foolish to think something from a card rack could tell my stories for me, or could be grateful in ways that really mattered. No card does that. Flowers don't do it either, though they are an excellent place to start. There are many other ways to be thankful, and I'm just beginning to explore them.

Happy Mother's Day.

For Jeanine Howell


Thursday, May 2, 2013

Lifting the Lid


 Double Rainbow Plans Acrylic and ink on canvas, 46" x 46", 2013

This is a different sort of blog post for me. I've never really been interested in talking about "process" where it concerns my own artwork, mostly because I'm just a painter, and there's no real mystery to what I do. I'm not interacting with mold cultures or programming micro-controllers in the name of art. There's nothing "performative" or interactive about what I do. I sit in front of an easel and slowly render things.

But like most folks, I'm fascinated with the details of other artist's creative practices. There are some artists I'd love to hang out with and watch while they work. It would probably be pretty boring, not to mention totally creepy and distracting for the artist, but I would jump at the chance to see how they get from A to B. In the big picture, an artist's sources of inspiration, his or her work-flow habits, whether or not they're a drinker, and who they sleep with aren't supposed to matter. Art is supposed to be able to "stand on its own" without leaning on a bunch of stories. But I can't help suspect that art never, ever does stand on its own. Not entirely. Social context and the artist's personal history always inform the work. It's one thing to know Mark Rothko intended his paintings to be "spiritual," it's another to know he was a depressed suicidal alcoholic who sought transcendence through his creative practice. Each painting he completed was a milestone on a desperate journey of self-redemption. We might look back now and decide he was tragic, but at the height of his fame, Rothko painted like his life depended on it - like each painting would keep him in the world a little longer.

These sorts of stories aren't just told to keep kids awake in art survey classes. They help give us access to an artist's psyche, and to place them in a meaningful historic context. It is impossible to know these tales and not be influenced by them. We are, after all, story-telling creatures.

So without further delay, I've decided to lift the lid on my own process. Not because I think there is anything novel about it, but because its ordinariness allows uncomplicated access to the ideas behind the work. 


 
Double Rainbow

Recently, I ran across this double rainbow diagram while perusing images in an old science textbook. I am drawn to these kinds of diagrams because they are attempts to describe complex principles in highly abstract manner meant for ease of instruction. But I also like them for their metaphorical potential when the viewing context is deliberately shifted. I kept returning to this image from time to time to see if I could build a painting around it. Rather than looking like a description of how double rainbows actually work, it began to look like a plan for how to make one, if such a thing were possible. The title Double Rainbow Plans popped into my mind, and almost immediately I wondered what sort of person would be making plans for a double rainbow. A child, probably. Someone beginning to imagine the life ahead. Someone maybe on the doorstep of puberty. Someone with a lot of belief, and more than a little uncertainty.

Around this same time I began exploring the idea of doing "double-portraits." These show two views of the same person interacting with him/herself. It was a rather literal way of picturing the self split along the lines of belief/doubt, action/inaction, confidence/fear, and so on. I began looking at my friend's children as possible models. Preferably the parents would be creative types, so there wouldn't need to be a whole lot of cajoling and explaining. When you're asking to photograph someone's children, there's a whole Pandora's box of concerns that could spring open. Fore sure it needed to be done by a professional photographer in a real studio, not in my basement studio; and with a parent present and involved. It was going to cost money.

Pretty quickly I thought of an artist friend I have, Jennifer Jeannelle, and remembered that her kids were not only the right age, and the right sort of "look" I was going for, but having an artist for a mom, they were used to being roped into wacky creative endeavors. I had even seen them doing performance art. I didn't know Jennifer that well, so when I reached out to her it was with great faith that this would make sense to her. I described the double rainbow and the double portrait over the phone without showing her anything. Immediately she began offering great suggestions on wardrobe. She also sold the idea to her kids, Sophie and Eric, so I knew this was going to work. The photographer Anthony Camera was available to do the shoot, and the kids had the following week off for spring break. Perfect.



For the main image, I wanted Sophie to be holding hands with herself. This would involve some Photoshopping, but with Eric's "stand-in" hand to hold, I knew I could get what I wanted. What I hadn't counted on was the sibling's lack of enthusiasm for holding hands with each other. After some coaxing, they settled into their roles, with instructions to keep their hands in exactly the same spot so each of the shots would more or less line up when they switched chairs. The images above show Eric leaning comically away from his sister. Though he wasn't thrilled about holding her hand, he is leaning because we needed him to keep his shadow off of her.

Sophie was directed to have two distinct attitudes in the shot. On the left, she stares straight ahead into the camera, with a look of confidence and the tiniest hint of a smile. This version of herself was to be capable and in-charge. Her other "self" was to lean slightly away, with a look of uncertainty. Both kids took this assignment seriously and gave me exactly what I was looking for, with almost no effort.


After staring at these shots for a couple of days, I decided I liked the effect of the gray sweep we shot the kids against. I had intended to replace it with something else, but the gray began to grow on me.  It just needed some sort of graphic element in the background to activate the space.  I also decided that I didn't like the theater seats in the shot and began looking on Google for something more dramatic. I found a French settee that was shot at a workable angle and had an interesting look. By changing the color from burnt orange to lime green it achieved a pleasant ridiculousness that contrasted nicely with the seriousness of French furniture. The scroll fragments in the background were "stock" illustrations left over from a graphic design job that I licensed them for, but never used.   They went well with the settee, and helped frame the central figures in a way I liked.


At this point I should say that most artists pursue a certain "look" that strikes the right balance between what is expected of them, and what allows for a satisfying deviation from that same expectation. Call it a "style," or if that's too crass, think of it as artistic parameters. Either way, an artist often does a given thing simply because it is the kind of thing they've decided they do. This is part of what gives a body of work coherence. I chose the graphic scrolls in the background because I've been using flat graphics like that for quite some time, and because lately I've shifted toward combining imagery that is contradictory in terms of historical period, allowing me no fixed reference point in time.

After a week of planning, shooting and Photoshopping, it was finally time to make a painting. Along the way I'd decided that this painting needed real presence. I wanted to make it life-size, but it would have been about 6' square. I settled on 46" square, which corresponds to the largest size I can fit in my car.




I've always been up-front about my use of a video projector to rough-in the outlines of my imagery on a blank canvas. I want the proportions to be right, especially with the human figure, and I simply don't have the time, skill, or interest to render everything freehand. I adore the people who can do that, but I'm not one of them. That said, I only trace the outside shape of things. There's simply no point in getting too granular with the tracing lines, because as soon as you begin applying paint you cover them up. One way or another, a painter has to know how to render something using paint. Hence, all the photos taped to my canvas for reference.

Usually, when I get near the completion of a painting I find need to put it away for a few days and go do something else, because by then it has completely taken over my brain and I can't even see it anymore. The hope is that when I return to it again I might actually be able to apprehend it with some degree of clarity. It's usually then when some detail pops out at me and I realized I've gotten a shadow wrong or made a leg too big. After a few rounds like this the work settles into its final form. If all goes well the work may begin to make me smile. Sometimes I really dig it and rush it onto Facebook. Days later I may decide it's not done.

Sometimes I can labor over a painting for weeks without knowing whether it's any good. When it isn't, I have no trouble marching it out to the garage. I've got literally dozens of canvases languishing out there, waiting to be reborn as entirely different paintings. But when it is good, and you move it out to your gallery, it's surprising how big a hole it can leave in your psyche. I'm usually lost for a few days when a painting I love leaves the studio. It stands to reason, given the dozens (sometimes hundreds) of hours I've spent conjuring the thing into being. I miss the people in my paintings. Sometimes I just miss the presence of the thing. Still it takes me by surprise when it's gone, and the only workable remedy is to get started on another one.

Sunday, April 21, 2013

Amateur philosophising on the occasion of my 55th trip around the sun



I've never been that good at looking into the future. The next couple of weeks are somewhat clear to me, but after that it's completely fuzzy. I'm not talking about goals. We can all pack some imaginative details around our goals so that they become palpable, allowing us to daydream about this or that vacation or career change. But that's not seeing the future. Sometimes, when I look at my reflection and find an extra set of lines around my eyes, or see the way the skin under my chin is starting to droop, I think I can see it, but that's not the future either. That's the present. Still the mirror seems like a good place to start. Where else could you expect to find it?

Today is my birthday. This is my fifty-fifth year of being a distinct, conscious, living and breathing person. A fact that is somehow still unimaginable, no matter how I try. I don't know what it means to be 55, but it seems like it ought to mean something. So far, all of the big emblematic birthdays: 30, 40, 50, have all turned out to be false alarms. I've dreaded each of them in turn, because like all of us, I was taught to; supposing each of those ages were milestones on a march into inevitable irrelevance. But like Y2K, they are just days you look back on and feel silly for fussing over, if anything. 

I may be wandering into pure B.S. here, but for the possible benefit of the one or two young people still indulging me, I will offer the only thing I have in the way of insight about aging. It's nothing close to wisdom, just a sort of spoiler alert. It is this: The person you are right now is the same person who will wake up in a 55 year old body someday (hopefully), and you will not be prepared for it, despite your best efforts. Sure, you'll adjust to your bad knees, or the extra 15 pounds, or the increased frequency of getting up to pee at night. And by sheer discipline, you may even decide that you "accept" the effects of aging. Good for you. Nonetheless, one day you will wake up and realize you are finally middle-aged, and this realization will feel sudden, even if you've seen it coming. It may also leave you feeling insulted, because you have never stopped thinking of yourself as being vital, and in-the-moment, and because the core self is entirely unallied with any age or point in time.

When I was three years old my mom caught me melting Crayola crayons onto a register grate on our kitchen floor. It turned out that was a bad thing, but in the moments before I was made aware of that, I experienced the pure joy of exploration. I can still feel the amazement of watching the crayons slowly sagging across the grate then dripping down into the blackness. One by one I melted them onto the register until they were gone, and the smell of wax alerted my mom to the fact that I'd been left alone too long. In fundamental ways, I'm still melting crayons on a register.

Each of us crafts a sense of self from the sum of all our experiences. I am still that curious toddler and also the insecure 12-year old who can't yet talk to a girl AND also the know-it-all 25-year old who can't stop talking, plus whoever else I've been since then. We don't progress through life stages as much as we accumulate them, and each stage in turn informs our sense of self. But the thing that is fundamentally "you" - your core self - transcends age and experience. It sits at the root level of your personality and simply observes, like an unblinking eye. Everything we decide to do, consciously or unconsciously, is in reaction to those core observations. Our habits and passions, our coping strategies, creative proclivities, even our humor proceeds from that inner observer, the true self.

The first time I realized there was a more fundamental sort of self that sat back further in the depths of my own psyche than the conscious mind, was when I was recovering from amnesia several years ago. I had been hit by a speeding drunk driver while riding my bicycle in Chicago. I was briefly hospitalized with a concussion and amnesia. Hospital staff would have let me go home sooner, but they needed to release me into someone's custody who could keep an eye on me for a couple of days. The trouble was, I couldn't remember the names or phone numbers of any of my friends or family, and because I didn't yet have a mobile phone, none of that was at my fingertips. Eventually I was able to think of a friend to come claim me. When I was given the release form to check out of the hospital, I was terrified to realize I had no idea what my signature should look like. Memory recovery was sporadic over the next couple of weeks. One day I panicked to discover I was riding a CTA bus with no idea where I was going or even what street I was on. I jumped off at the next stop and stood there staring at the street sign trying to make it mean something. Slowly the world came into focus and I remembered where I had been headed, and why. I wrote it down on a scrap of paper: "going to work," then waited for the next bus. It was a depressing time. Each blank spot came as a terrifying chasm of loss, no matter how trivial the missing memory would otherwise have been. The effect was brief but overwhelming. Each time it happened I was aware that it was happening, which meant some core aspect of my self was doing critical assessment and seeking to re-integrate, even if I couldn't have told you my name. That's the core self I'm talking about. The Me that's in charge of being Me. And its more than a little bemused by this whole aging business. I don't expect that will change any time soon, but since I'm in good health overall, then there's no rush to accept it. Not yet at least. It's also comforting to know about that unblinking eye at the center of me, who could care less about age, and whose job it is to simply watch, and discover, and to be amazed.

Friday, March 1, 2013

What if we don't make it?



That painting is a good one. You are sure of it. So you post it on Facebook and immediately begin refreshing your browser every thirty seconds hoping for the Like's to start rolling in. Ten minutes go by. Only two Likes and no comments. Damn. You check the time and realize all your friends are probably still at lunch. Bad Facebook timing. You should have waited til 2 o'clock, when everyone is back in front of their computers, but they are drifting and distractible, no longer completely engaged by the demands of their afternoon.

Half an hour later your computer chimes and you dash out of the bathroom with your belt still undone. You've got seven Likes and three comments. Whew. You may not yet be Earning Big Money, but now it seems at least possible that you are not a failure.

The creative temperament has endless triggers for self-doubt and a constellation of worries: What if my prices are wrong and nothing sells? What if nobody goes to that site to vote for my song because it's two clicks away? What if I never get that book contract and end up self-publishing, and only sell a handful of copies to my friends and the co-workers who feel obliged? Why the hell am I doing this?

It's a cruel fact that in an era when the output of blue-chip artists like Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons is traded by the global One Percent as an esoteric futures commodity, that so little money actually changes hands down here at the "emerging" artist level. My own anxiety about never making a decent living from my artwork forces me to rely on sleep aids more nights than I'd care to admit. And yet by some standards I'm making it. I've got a couple of buddies who claim I'm living the dream. Why? Because I quit my career and am selling art for nearly unaffordable prices at a grown-up gallery. And because I have my wife's blessing. But if they knew how few paintings actually sell, or noticed that I've been wearing the same pants to every art opening for six years (thanks to the style longevity of Brooklyn Industries), I would drop right off their list of enviable persons.

Like most anyone reading this, I'm a drop in the bucket now referred to as the creative class. A demographic ghetto of dreamers slogging it out the best we can, pouring other people's lattes, building websites, seeking a tolerable work-life balance that keeps our little creative flames kindled just long enough to draw one more picture or write one more song. We make art because we don't know how to stop. Or because our critical reasoning just isn't that good. Or just possibly, because it saves our lives.

My friend Dylan Scholinski runs an art workshop called The Haven Youth Project that seeks to prevent suicide through creativity and self expression. Many of the kids that go through his program are hanging onto this life by a thread. For them, the transformative power of creative expression is essential to their survival. I try to think of this when I get bogged down by the cynicism of the art world, or when a client takes too long to pay.

I can't say art ever saved my life, but I doubt I could live without it. It's been a refuge since I could hold a crayon. It's also been the only thing anybody ever wanted to pay me for. I sold my first drawings in fourth grade. Some kid noticed I could draw, and he paid me his lunch money every now and then if I'd make pictures for him. He would stand over my shoulder and say, "Put a horse over there. And a barn. Can you do a tractor? Good. That's enough. Now don't sign it!" Turns out he was taking the drawings home to his parents, claiming he'd done them. Before long, word came down from on high that these commissions were to cease. I didn't ask questions. But by then the word was out. Kids knew I could draw. Toward the end of that year I was forced by a bully to do pornographic drawings of Peanuts characters. This bully had already beat me up once, so when he said "Draw a picture of Linus and Lucy doing it," I did. But at age nine I was fuzzy on the mechanics. It was hard enough to draw cartoon characters correctly with their clothes on, but to imagine them naked, with adult sexual organs and in positions I wasn't clear about, was a mind boggling creative challenge. Perhaps the hardest of my life. The bully was there to help with the details. The only thing I thought to say was, "Shouldn't it be Charlie Brown instead of Linus?"

You'd think this assignment would have been humiliating. It wasn't. On the scale of childhood woes, it was way down on the list compared to getting beat up. I took it in stride, and delivered the work. I should have known from those early experiences that I'd do well in advertising, but it didn't become clear for decades.

By the time most of us have decided to make a go of a career in the arts, our heads are filled with ridiculous tripe about what making it means. The metrics for it's measurement, the bohemian fantasies we indulge, the value we place on this or that achievement are all contrivances that will turn on us when the work stops selling. When the world says "meh" to your latest show, inevitably some form of the question "What if I can't make it?" will cast its shadow across the work you thought you liked.

At some point you may become aware, or you may decide that this is the wrong question entirely. At the risk of sounding moralistic, a more useful question is something like "How can I better serve the talent I have?" It may seem old fashioned to think of your creativity being saddled with any sort of obligation. Who would you be obliged to?  In a recent interview, 86 year old singer Tony Bennett claimed the secret to his career longevity was commitment to honoring his talent. Years earlier when he had "gotten into the drugs," Bennett was warned by Lenny Bruce's manager that he was headed down the same path as Lenny, because he was "sinning against his talent." Tony got clean and stayed that way for five decades. In this frame of thinking, the artist's indebtedness is fundamentally to his or her own talent, rather than that talent being something the artist exploits.

The idea that artistic giftedness bears witness to creative forces beyond ordinary human enterprise is persistent across time and culture. Rumi was onto it, so was William Blake, and so is that kid next door flailing away on his guitar in his parent's basement. If creativity is something that can be tapped into or channeled, then it demands a certain respect, if not reverence, and it follows that those of us who have access to it should approach it with discipline if we wish to have it make a regular appearance in our studios. I don't mean for this to sound romantic or mystical. At it's most stripped down, this obligation is about being in service to your own curiosity, and to pursuing it with rigor.

When I was a kid, a friend of mine and I wandered the banks of a river in Kentucky one afternoon. For whatever foolhardy reason, at some point we decided to weave little rafts from dried sticks and leaves, which we waded out into the river with, then lit on fire. We held them at arms length until the flames were well established, then launched the blazing crafts into the swift stream and watched them steam and smoke their way over the rocks and riffles until they drifted out of sight and were presumably destroyed by the river, since the woods around us never erupted in flames. We stood there in the river for a long time. Later we didn't talk about it. It would be years until I encountered the word ineffable, and when I did things started to fall into place.

At the end of the day we all have to make our best guess at what artistic success is going to mean. Attempts at values-clarification and living intentionally, or honing your own personal "brand" may get you part way there. Facebook Likes aren't meaningless indicators either. But success is a moving target, and we'd best be comfortable with the directions changing when we are halfway there. One way or another, I'll always throw my lot in with curiosity and the pursuit of the astonishing. It may be a little old fashioned to be guided by such transcendental values, but in some way I seek to invoke them in everything I create. My best hope is that each painting I make will be a little flaming raft disappearing around a bend in someone's river. It's a goal anyway. I may not ever Earn Big Money, but I'm all in with this journey.