Recalculating

Salt Pond, Goosewing, Work in Progress

I love my new life. I want to keep it going. One night last week I walked through Copley Place in Boston on my way to meet some friends, and realized how completely I’ve been enclosed in my work bubble and how out of touch I am now. People were Christmas shopping! They had Louis Vuitton shopping bags full of stuff! My first thought was, “Well, these people have jobs, I guess.” My second thought was that I really wanted no part of this getting and spending. The fact is, I can’t afford to shop. I was never much of a shopper anyway, but now, the less money I spend the better I feel. It feels like a real accomplishment to find a way to squeeze more out of less. Every time I pass up some shiny trinket (especially things I would have bought previously without a second thought, like these boots , for example), I’ve bought myself a little more time to spend in the studio. Probably sometime soon I’ll have to give some serious thought to bringing in some income, and hopefully there’s a way to make this art practice pay, but for now I’m just happy to be doing it. My family, fortunately, is on board with reduced consumption, a smaller Christmas, no dinners out (although we’ll have our Christmas Eve dinner at the Indian restaurant; it wouldn’t be right not to), and although I have had more than a couple of early morning anxiety attacks about the heating bill, the anxiety is manageable, balanced by the immense satisfaction I get from finally building a body of work that’s mine.

This is something I’ve wanted to paint a long time: a wall of golden reeds that edges the salt pond behind Goosewing Beach in Little Compton, RI. This is the third painting I’ve done in Little Compton, and as the season advances to winter and the colors deepen, the structure of the space is reduced to a skeleton, and it becomes more visually interesting to me. I hope to finish this (there are actually two separate panels here, each 48″ x 40″, so the entire painting is 96″ x 40″) by the end of the week, take a short Christmas break, and begin planning for the coming year. I’ve been at this for six months now. I’ve completely recalculated the direction of my life in that time. I look forward to what’s ahead. And yes, I really look forward to finding a way to buy these boots someday.

How art has changed me

My speckled shoes

I got dressed today to come to the studio: Levis, thrift-store sweater, and my usual shoes, paint-spattered clogs. I wear these same things nearly every day. My hair’s getting longer, not by design but because I just don’t think about it. I suppose I’ll get a hair cut someday, but it’s not on my list of things to care about anymore. I was never that concerned about fashion, to be sure, but while I was working in an office I had enough vanity to get regular haircuts, and I really loved having a variety of shoes to wear. Now I wear these clogs every day, everywhere. My outward appearance is beginning to reflect the interior turn my whole life has taken since losing my job in June and returning to the studio.

When I get here, the first thing I do is connect my laptop to the speakers and find some music on Spotify to play all day. Right now it’s Charles Mingus. It seems to fit the mood while I’m slinging paint. When I first recognized that I needed to fill the silence of the studio, I was caught up short to realize that I had no idea what kind of music I liked anymore. I had spent so many years with the background noise and hum of the commuter train, the office, the family, that when I had the chance to tune out the cacaphony of an overextended life, I wanted silence. Now there’s room for music, and I love exploring different genres to see what works best for different moments. This is a revelation. Today I’ve listened to Foster The People, Adele, Weather Report and now Mingus.

I had no idea how far I’d drifted from the deep interior life one needs to make art…I didn’t even know what music I wanted to hear! There was so much noise in my life that I couldn’t think anymore.

So now, there’s plenty of thinking. It’s comical, how much thinking goes on here. A lot of it is mundane: What’s the difference between #12 cotton duck and #10 cotton duck? is Windsor Newton paint better than Lukas? And some of it’s much more consequential: Why am I doing this? Why does anybody do this? How will my work evolve in one year? Five years? Ten years? Will I have ten years? And of course, the profound thought follows the mundane thought in rapid succession, the day unfolding in one long train of thought that chugs across the entire range of my mental terrain. It can get dizzying. Finally, the day is measured not in terms of how much actual canvas I covered, but how many issues I resolved in my mind. The art objectifies the resolutions I make. It’s all interior work, projected onto the canvas. And the feedback loop ends here, until I put my work out into the world.

This way of being is far removed from my old life. In my job, I spent a lot of time in meetings, talking, listening, collaborating. I had friends and colleagues with whom I could discuss politics, family, food, shoe buying, haircuts. Honestly, I miss all that. This daily confrontation with the contents of my own mind is really hard to sustain. But the payoff is enormous. I love the work, the smell of the paint, my own sunny studio, the fact that nothing happens if I don’t make it happen. But I am beginning to understand why I wasn’t able to do this when I was younger. It takes a lot of confidence to keep going to the studio day after day and sifting through the junk in your own mind to find the one shining thing that’s worth examining. Somedays, there’s nothing. But I don’t feel defeated by that anymore. I’ll just comeback tomorrow and set the stage again, hopeful that something will percolate upward. Mingus helps.

The studio