Old is the new new

They’re bulldozing the Hutong.  Beijing was a hard-hat zone when we were there in January of 06, and the coldest place on earth.  The Chinese were rapidly preparing for the upcoming Olympics, teaching the locals that hurling up a lugie or taking a leak on the side of the street might not make for entertaining prime time western television. However with all of the high tech western updates, the Starbucks Empire hadn’t yet staked their claim, which made each morning something of an adventure.  It was equally as hard to find a joint to have a drink at the end of the day.  With a city that occupies the same mass of land as the country of Belgium, you can see how sniffing out a coffee or a cocktail might have been a challenge. 

As we climbed the Drum Tower and passed the monks banging their gongs “Power Station” style on our way to the wrap around observation deck, we could hear the din of progress.  To see the plowing of a neighborhood like the swift snow removal after a nor’easter in my own city is something to behold.  In the short time that we could stand the pecker-shrinking chill of Beijing’s January, a city block of residences could be cleared. 

I was a student of the old.  First as a high-schooler schlepping antiques at a friend’s parents auction house, and later as a student of Nineteenth Century French Academic painting.  I felt as if we were standing witness to an act of cultural genocide, the burying of a community that for so long defined the peasant class of urban china.  It’s easy to be nostalgic though.  We Americans are a comfortable society of nostalgic aristocrats.  I imagine if Rhonda and I were living in a city of connected double-wides with no plumbing and communal outhouses we might have felt a sense of envy and triumph for the Hutong-ites at the prospect of their soon to be posh-er digs.  Regardless, I’ll admit that I’m selfish and it’s hard for me to swallow this kind of progress, (even though I know it’s probably for the best).  At times I wish I could quarantine off my favorite parts of the world so they could stay exactly as I remember them, old, quaint, and repressed.  Try not to judge me to harshly; I can assure you, of course, that I understand the difference between destruction in order rebuild a more progressive modern Beijing and the bombing of Buddhist statues in Burma.  Maybe I need to re-focus my appall?

We were listening to the best radio show ever, as we always do on the ride back to Boston from our cabin in western Massachusetts, Car Talk.  I’d been thinking about old being the new new for some time now and apparently old man Tom has similar things on his mind.

“My uncle looks into my new MG and says it’s a stick?  We’ve been waiting 50yrs for the automatic transmission”

Nothing had to be said between Rhonda and I.  We were, I’m sure, thinking the same thing.  My Mario Andretti delusions lure me to the manual transmission, and only with the birth of our son Rafa, and the need for us to own a car that Rhonda would actually be willing to drive, did I cave and buy the lesser, modern, idiot proof… dreaded automatic transmission.  Tom and his brother Ray we’re advising my kindred caller on whether or not his daughter should be taught to drive on a “stick” or not.  I sank in my seat as the only two allies I thought I had in this world betrayed me, and without hesitation proclaimed that she should absolutely learn to drive an automatic.  Humph!

Of course nostalgia is a prejudice thing.  I can’t imagine there’s anyone who longs for the DOS commands of their old Commodore 64’s, or the form feed printer paper that went along with it.  Is there anyone who’s dying to trade in their sexy Iphone for the suitcase car phones that only the rich fuckers had in the 80’s?  But the same jackass, me, will look at a ’77 Porsche 911 and say “they don’t make ‘em like they used to”, when in fact I know its bullshit.  My boring Honda Element will be safer, more reliable, and in the long run cheaper to own than that old German beater; but I’d still rather be in the Porsche. 

If it sounds like I’m confused about where I stand on these matters, I am.  I wish I had my old cast iron, laser accurate table saw rather than my brand new craftsman with its plastic housing that’s barely accurate enough for rough framing work.  But is this a problem of they don’t make them like they used to, or is it that they used to be cheaper to make and now if you want them like they used to be, you need to fork over the dough?  I imagine if I had spent a couple of grand on a new saw it might have been better than my old one?  In hindsight, I should have just replaced the motor on the old saw and called it a day.  But we don’t do things like that anymore do we?  When your icebox dies you call the fridge store, not the fridge repair guy, and he swaps yours out, carting away the old one free of charge never to bother you again.

Ours died days before my sister in law and her two girls were coming to visit for the weekend, and the thought of having mid-westerners visiting and no way to keep the caffeine-free-diet-non-aspartame cola product cold was terrifying (not to mention the sugar free Jello!).  Being neurotic about my concerns with the old being the new new, I actually called a repair guy; I guess I shouldn’t have been so surprised that it was going to be significantly cheaper to replace the damn thing than to fix the old one.  The kicker is that the fridge was only 5 years old.  Didn’t Grandma and Grandpa have the same icebox as far back as you can remember? 

The world has become a country.  In the past, you could get cheap labor in the poorer parts of our own country, but now our Detroit is China and our West Virgina is Vietnam.  Maybe I could have flown in an LG repair guy from Korea to fix the fridge for less than it cost to replace it.  But then there’s the expense of the Korean translator.  But seriously, we’re so concerned with petroleum and clean air and shit like that, so why have we taken so easily to the disposable?

Old is the new new, but I’m getting older and the evidence is clear when the guy at the bar wearing a fedora and a groomed mustache orders an old-fashioned from me and spasms like a dog at an electric fence when I start to put the cherry and orange in the glass.  “st-st-st-st-st-st-stt-aaaap!” arms waving as if he was calling some batter safe at home plate after an amazing attempt at an out.  “But I want an old old-fashioned” spoken with such disgust that I could possibly think that he in his obvious garb would dare want fruit in his glass. 

I pause, resuming my trained smile, and think; right, like they made them before you could get your fingers on fresh fruit year round.  Buddy you’re a masochist and you want to punish yourself for wearing that retarded hat and even more retarded mustache.  And now that you’ve gotten up to go to the toilet, I can see that you’re further punishing yourself by wearing your jeans so fucking tight that they’re sending your nuts into your stomach.

Has the quality of the old table saw pushed us to this place, or is it just nostalgia, or maybe its just pretentiousness?  Maybe the guy I’m ordering a Bourbon or Rye from thinks I’m a pretentious jackass for not having a Vodka Red Bull?  It seems like the roots of this began with a craftsmanship/quality thing but now the tangles of nostalgia and fashion have made things harder to clearly access?  It’s simple human nature for people to spend their days looking over their shoulders sizing up what the other guy has or what the other guy’s doing? 

Or maybe we’ve gotten bored.  Rhonda loves her Iphone but laments that it might be the instrument that finally kills conversation, as we know it.  There may no longer be reason to wonder or debate anything; we have Wikipedia.

“Why is the sky blue?”

Wikipedia states:

Rayleigh scattering (named after the British physicist Lord Rayleigh) is the elastic scattering of light or other electromagnetic radiation by particles much smaller than the wavelength of the light, which may be individual atoms or molecules. It can occur when light travels through transparent solids and liquids, but is most prominently seen in gases. Rayleigh scattering is a function of the electric polarizability of the particles.

Rayleigh scattering of sunlight in the atmosphere causes diffuse sky radiation, which is the reason for the blue color of the sky and the yellow tone of the sun itself.

Will the answering of basic questions of knowledge free up crucial time for exploring more interesting ideas and questions? 

Take something like the rage of Molecular Gastronomy for example.  A clear sign that the new is where it’s at!  There’s no need to fire up the Barbecue and sear your Rib-Eye, you can have your foam in any flavor you like.  Rib-Eye foam, delicious, and not bad for your cholesterol either.  Or, if you still want the real deal, you can take your Rib-Eye, hermetically seal it in a vacuum of plastic and submerge it in a surgical machine called an immersion circulator, that will keep a water bath at a constant temperature (that isn’t within the range that the Massachusetts board of health thinks food should be stored) and it will be cooked absolutely perfectly to the temperature you want it, with no observable variation throughout the depth of the meat.  I’ve had some of this stuff and I’ll admit the best egg I’ve ever had was cooked this way, but when it comes down to it, I want flames and blood and shit.  I like that my steak at home has a variety of textures, as kids didn’t we fight with dad for the crispy burnt ends? 

All this makes me feel funny.  I’ve eaten shit that looks like ice cream but tastes like pizza; and I’m not amused, I’m concerned.  The ironic mustache seems silly and self-conscious to me, and the pizza-ish ice cream seems totally absurd.  But I still think I’d be happier rolling up in a ’77 911… stick shift.

Looking for a stone

Michelangelo's Atlas

Fuck the Sistine Chapel.  It’s a work of awkward contrived decoration at best.  Mike must have been in the desperate shoes that all artists find themselves in to stoop to such a distraction.  Or maybe the ego of his greatness was so awesome that he convinced himself that it was an important work; but I’m telling you it isn’t.  It’s grand, but it’s gaudy and it’s tasteless.   It’s awkward and forced.  The awe that is inspiring is the tourists lining up with their camcorders to see such a soulless greatness, and the echo that you hear in the gallery that houses the captive slaves.  The average Mike doesn’t even know that they were done by the same genius that conceived of the Vatican ceiling.  The Pieta might be Michelangelo’s greatest work, or possibly the greatest work the world has known, but the slaves may be the most natural and honest.  I might have mistaken their creator for a Taoist monk; finding the form in the rock.  Unfinished as we expect things to be finished, but as perfect and sublime as a work of art could be.  I can’t tell you how often I think of the slaves.  So often the best works that artists have produced are the works that they have done for themselves, with no strings, or better yet cash, attached to.  Have you seen Velasquez’s Aesop and Meippus?  It seems like as we get older and continue to fail, our egos subside, but it doesn’t make it any easier to find the form in the rock.  You almost need to un-do or un-learn your years to be comfortable enough to let it happen.

I spent the morning looking for a stone.  The steps leading down from our back porch land on a muddy patch that I tried to plant to grass this fall, but had been trampled by mid-October pumpkin carving with my friend Josh’s two little girls.  Regardless, with all the effort I could imagine, I don’t think that it’s a spot for grass.  When Rhonda and I were walking with Rafa last weekend we found two intimidating stones that seemed right for planting at the bottom of our steps.  The first was so large that I couldn’t even lift it off of the ground.  I’m not as fit or strong as I used to be.  It was the day after my 37^th birthday and I was feeling my age like a stripper who leaves the dance floor with only a buck.  I went back to the house for a hand truck.

The two stones that day were the start of our path, but we needed at least one or two more  (although Rhonda is becoming increasingly worried with my obsession for collecting and arranging stones).  This time alone at the cabin for the weekend, I walked down our road into the woods.  I thought about driving to the Greenfield Farmers co-op to buy one, but there is something about finding one that seemed right.  This place feels like it grew out of the ridge it is perched on.  It was ruined in the 90’s buy a builder or owner who had no ear for music, but we’re trying to do our best to find what it needs to be.  It was built on rock, literally, without a foundation, and the landscape around us at times seems like a sort of quarry-well.  Each day I feel like new rocks are being born out of the earth.

It started to rain when I was planting the first two stones.  I’m 37 now and I live in the city with a warehouse of umbrellas.  I had forgotten what it was like to get wet in the late October rain.  I thought about going in and starting a more arid project, but instead I walked into the woods.  The autumn colors look different when it’s raining.  They remind me of when I was a kid.  They’re like the madras shirt I bought at the Gap in high school.  As the trees loose their leaves the birch show themselves, Rattlesnake’s ridge grows longer in each direction.  When we bought this place late last winter the view from our back porch was all we needed, but as summer devoured us we we’re suffocated by the overgrowth.  We re-discovered the view of Rattlesnake with a chainsaw and gave ourselves the luxury of a little room to breathe and a little sunshine. 

You can’t go looking for a stone.  When I studied painting all those years ago my instructor Paul would tell me to look toward the subject I was rendering not at it.  It took me five years to understand what that fucker meant, but when I got it I got it. You find things when you’re not looking for them, when you’re not forcing them.  Maybe you don’t.  I veered off of our path and down by the old garden. I was damp and cold, but I felt like I hadn’t had the luxury of being this kind of uncomfortable in a while.  As I made my way back through the woods and over the would be brook in the spring once the snow melts, I found the stone I had stopped looking for on top of the retaining wall I had built this past summer, just a few steps from the landing where it would live.

Force

When force is applied to an object either the object or the applier breaks.  The recipient of the force may bend first, it may even withstand the assault for a very long time, but eventually it will break; or it will break the applier.  It may take a lifetime for the fractures to show themselves, but they will.  I’m sure my wife Rhonda can devise all of the examples that will de-bunk this philosophy, but between you and me, I’m sticking to my guns.  Of course there is the salad dressing problem, but we’ll get to that later.

Now don’t confuse me with an advocate for a passive existence.  I don’t buy the parable that the meek will inherit the earth, and quite frankly the touchy feely pseudo existential types ignite my latent aggressive side.  However the art of seeing a situation from a bigger perspective is something entirely different. I can’t tell you how many students I’ve taught painting to who could never learn to let go of their own egotistical preconceptions about how to draw or paint a portrait and just look at the dumb model sitting right there in front of them.

The fundamental elements of The Big look

An ominous wall blocks Man A’s progress.  Man A sets his feet and pushes with all of the force he can muster.  The wall resists, but eventually Man A breaks through the wall.  Man A now needs to make a trip to the Home Depot in order to buy the necessary supplies to repair the broken wall.

An ominous wall blocks man B’s progress.  Man B sets his feet and pushes with all of the force he can muster.  The wall resists, but man B continues to Force even though his muscles and bones begin to fail him.  Eventually man B ends up on his ass, and Man B’s wife needs to call 911.

An ominous wall blocks the unlikely inhuman Man C’s progress.  Man C sets his feet and pushes with all of the force he can muster.  The wall resists, but Man C’s force is absolutely equal to the walls resistance.  There they will stand emulsified either for eternity or until Man C (the applier of force) decides to withdraw his force and give up.

An ominous wall blocks man D’s progress.  Man D pauses for a moment, then steps backward until his eyes can take in the full dimension of the wall.  Man D then alters his Progress and walks to the opening he has seen as a result of his bigger perspective on the very far corner of the wall.  Man D passes through the opening and safely arrives on the other side of the wall.

The finding way

My parents went bananas at Christmas, but it was something of a drought the rest of the year.  So we convinced Gary’s mom to spring for the rubber raft at Caldor, our local rendition of your Wal-Mart.

Mastic 1916

I’ve always had some sort of a fetish for maps.  When I was a kid, the fold out map of our three towns; Mastic, Mastic Beach, and Shirley, that came in the yearly yellow pages was as good as the lingerie section of the Sears catalogue.  As long back as I can remember I would pour myself into this chart and plot out the most remote places I might be able to make on my bike. I wanted to find the places that weren’t like the pseudo suburbia that I was growing up in.  We lived a stones throw from the Atlantic and I was convinced that all of our geography couldn’t be littered with rotting bungalows, shoddily converted into full time residences, planted with rusting cars and slowly composting trash. There were places on that map where the roads ended.  I found those ends after all the copies of New York Newsday were thrown from the milk crate that was tied to the handlebars of my sister’s hand me down ten speed.  You know, the girls pink “Huffy” that every soon to be cheerleader had in the 80’s, the kind with the center bar at an angle rather than the “ball buster” straight bar, the bike that made the kid living on President Ave cackle at me from his new Mongoose BMX.  I heard a few years back that he had contracted some horrible illness, terminal if my memory’s right, but as you know my memory isn’t what my wife’s is.  The shit that comes around goes around, but it might be a harsher sentence then that fucker deserved.

Gary was often my wingman on these excursions, which was great because he had no qualms about me being the leader.  What’s funny though is that he was far more fearless than I ever was. He grew up with younger twin brothers that had mastered the double teamed fishhook and were working on a two-man pile driver.  His house was a constant steel cage match.  I might have been stronger or tougher than him, but he was the crazy reckless one.  I was the boss and he was kind of my “Paulie Walnuts”; and we were both fine with this. 

As we got further off the beaten path we would arm ourselves with our bb guns in case we drew any heat.  I remember the first time we rode to the end of Jefferson drive, a place that I would know later as “Jefferson”, where all the high school kids would hang at night, light bon fires, drink themselves silly and fuck around.  I remember hearing my mom one night on one of her Irish lunatic tears, when she found my older sister had not been sleeping at Rita’s house after all, but instead had been dragged out of that high school basketball star’s car at “Jefferson” by my dad.  Jefferson was the perfect spot for a daytime attack, and nighttime bacchanalias.  The road dead-ended at the bay, and rarely would you see another person while the sun was high, and if it had set, you quickly knew weather or not you could be there. 

The pavement, potholed and crumbling, literally disappeared into the Great South Bay.  As little kids, we’d drop our fishing lines here and come back with a five gallon bucket of red snapper that my folks would make me give to our Italian neighbor, because even though they lived their whole lives on an island, they didn’t know what the fuck to do with an actual fish.

“Jefferson” had (what seemed like) miles of trails and creeks weaving through the cattails littered with rusting cars and shit that made for great BB gun target practice.  You were in luck if you found one that still had a window intact that you could blast with your red rider.  Though our final storming of Jefferson taught us a lesson that was better learned as punk kids with BB guns, rather than the more mature alternative.  We had grown tired of the rusty targets and had the bright idea of aiming for a swan swimming up creek.  We thought it was awesome when the first shot hit and the swan jumped and flapped the hell out of its wings, splashing like a fucking fish on the dock.  We were scared and excited by our guts and out of our guts.  However, as we continued to hunt the bird, what we had gotten ourselves into was slowly becoming apparent. Sailing up stream a once shimmery pure white non-confrontational water foul, was now a speckle of red and white like a bad Pollack painting or the splatter from a gunshot exit wound on the white shag carpet.  Overtaken with nausea, guilt and fear we realized that we had to kill this bird.  We cried our eyes out as we unloaded on it with all we had and never spoke of it again.  Our Later missions were more Lewis and Clarke and less United States Marine Corps in nature.  Although I did heard that later on in High School Gary ran with a crew that would drive around town hanging out their car windows LA style, blowing out the windows of parked cars with my old BB gun boosting radios. 

We dragged the raft to the end of Gary’s road, through the woods and dropped it in the Forge River, a tributary of the Great South Bay that separated us from the Atlantic and ultimately Europe and the rest of the world.  I wanted to go that direction, but we weren’t sure that our makeshift vessel was up for it, so instead we paddled up river.  According to my telephone book map, Poosepatuck Creek trickled into the Forge river not too far from our point of departure, so we made our way for it and eventually found ourselves on the shores of the Poosepatuck Indian Reservation; only a few miles from the house I’d grown up in, but a place I’d never known existed.  Back in the 70’s, my town, which had once been a beachside summer escape from the boroughs, was invaded by Guido’s permanently fleeing Brooklyn and Queens, wearing thick gold chain necklaces with Italian peppers rather than feather headdresses. Who knew Sitting Bull had a summer place here too?

Long Island had been home to 13 Indian tribes, clearly not as infamous as the Sioux or Cherokee out west, but never the less there were Indians all over the damn place back in the day.  (I know, I’m supposed to refer to these guys as Native Americans, and I do, however we’re in the 80’s now when they were still Indians.) 

If ever you heard reference to our local Indians, you heard them called the Poosepatuck Indians, followed by countless jibes about none of them really being Native American at all. Gary’s dad who was a transplant from the proud southern state of Arkansas would refer to the reservation as if it was our very own little South Bronx.  The history of the tribe is blurry, and the little information I could turn up with my recent Google searches is at times contradictory; depending on weather you were hearing the voice of a descendent, Mayor Bloomberg, or some other historian.  What seems to be agreed on is that they were really the Unkechaug tribe, who after selling off their land to William Tangier Smith, the namesake of my elementary school, were deeded 175 acres along the Forge River and thus was born the Poosepatuck Indian Reservation.  I’m not sure who was craftier, Chief Tobaccus or Tangier, but the Unkechaug managed to sell Tangier the same piece of land between the Forge River and the Carmens River twice, first for a few rifles and supplies and then for some short sum of money.  We talk now of how we took the land from the Native Americans and killed their culture and so on and so fourth, but this was a legit sale recorded in the Brookhaven Town office of deeds; Right?  Although I’m sure Tangier, Floyd, and later Bill Dana slept well knowing that they purchased their land, which afforded Dana no qualms about suing the Unkechaug in ‘35 in order to secure a bit more.  I Imagine it never crossed their minds that the Natives may not have even understood the concept of selling the dirt that they were born to and inhabited, It’s doubtful they even realized that it was theirs to sell.  I can imagine Tobaccus hanging in the wigwam with his boys and their peace pipes laughing their ass’s off about the dumb ass white dude who gave them a bunch of guns and stuff for land.  The deed to the 175-acre Poosepatuck reservation that Tangier so generously gave the Unkechaug’s as part of the second sale stated that it was to be “reserved forever, not to be sold or leased to anyone”.  The reservation today consists of 52 acres.

Chief Harry Wallace

Ironically, nowadays old Chief Tobaccus’s reservation isn’t much more than a strip mall of smoke shops selling tax-free smokes and trinkets to the white man.  It’s earning so much in revenue (over 11 Million last year) that New York’s Mayor Bloomberg launched a massive campaign and lawsuit against the Unkechaug, being the formidable tobacco cartel that they are, looking for back taxes with the finale of his attack being a jab at their questionable heritage as Native Americans all together.  The Unkechaug’s current Sachem, Chief Harry Wallace’s comment was “The goal here is not to stop us from selling cigarettes but to destroy us as a people”.

We hid in the coastline and slowly paddled through the reeds like Little Hiawatha, careful not to be spotted by the scouts.  As the coastline expanded, surprised, we didn’t find the tee-pees and campfires we had expected.  There were rusting mobile homes and trailers, broken down cars on blocks and more of the same trash that landscaped my own neighborhood.  The alarming difference was that the Indian Braves we spotted weren’t white like us, and they weren’t red like the movies, they were black.  The black kids we went to school with had moved east from Queens and the Bronx.  They we’re up on the new Hip-Hop and Graffiti scene.  They taught us how to hit hard on the football field, and that Dougie Fresh and Slick Rick were where it’s at, not the Fat Boys; and that the verdict was still out on the yarmulke sporting Beastie Boys.  So where the hell were these “black” Indian kids hanging out?  Did they go to school, or did they have there own school on the reservation?  How could, according to the census, 270 Indians be living in my neighborhood and I didn’t know one of them?

Excited, disappointed, Sunburned and waterlogged, we beached the raft at the end of the creek and hoofed it home.  It was my first real off the map adventure, meaning, off the paved road.  I’ve had many since then, and not surprisingly, even when I was sitting on the roof of a cargo boat sailing up the Mekong river from Vietnam into Cambodia I thought of our raft on Poosepatuck creek. 

Disclaimer

I should probably start all of this with some witty introduction about philosophy and purpose and all that shit, but really I need to be honest with you…

I have no formal education.  I graduated high school by the skin of my teeth, as my mother would have put it, and moved to Philadelphia to attend the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in September of 1991 as a merit scholarship student.  The Academy had an exchange program with the University of Pennsylvania where any sort of academic work was to be done, but the PAFA was strictly an art school and the closest thing we had to academics was Anatomy and Art History.  All of this being immaterial since I ditched my scholarship after my first year in search of a place that I could actually learn the craft of painting. 

I’ve held jobs as a gas station attendant, a furniture mover, butcher, night cleaner, waiter, an off the books handy-man, a restaurant wine director, and a bartender.  I earned my living as a painter for ten years or so too, but I’m not sure if that counts.

My wife has a law degree from Georgetown, and my closest friends are PhD’s and MFA’s.  I have a non-regents diploma from William Floyd High School, which for those of you who grew up outside of New York State, is about the equivalent of a GED.  I’ve secretly hoped that in the ten year of sharing a household with Rhonda osmosis might have kicked in and given me a little bit of her genius, but I don’t think there’s any evidence to substantiate my theory.  What I’m trying to tell you is that I’m borderline illiterate and totally un-qualified to write anything, and if it wasn’t for the invention of spell check you may have given up on me already. 

This said, try not to judge me too harshly, and when I split the infinitive I hope you think it’s cute and quaint like a Grandma Moses painting.  I’m being honest with you and I hope it will count for something.

So now that we know where we stand, I’ll try to explain what’s going on here.

When I left the Pennsylvania Academy and moved to Boston, I enrolled in a non-accredited studio school that purportedly taught classical French Academic painting.  We used the phrase the big look to describe the art of seeing, and studied the art of seeing as a means to painting.  Literally, painting was about seeing well, not painting well, and the technique was as simple as popping your eyes open as wide as you could in order to take in the entirety of your subject.  This would allow you to look towards your subject rather than at it and gain a much broader perspective of the problem at hand.  Once learned, you had the ability to access color relationships, tonal values, and lost and found edges in a way that you never could understand before.  The idea was that it didn’t matter what subject you were painting, the problem of the subject was always the same; it was a problem of seeing shapes, colors and values in relation to one another.  Meaning that you could spend your whole life learning how to paint a pear, but you would never really be able to paint one until you were able to see one.

I’m sure we’ll have more on this later.

Nearly fifteen years removed from my studies and bored with the art of rendering the natural world as I see it, I’ve realized that the concept of the big look has permeated and at times dominated my life.  

My career as a painter took a back seat a few years ago, maybe because I wasn’t good enough to make it, or maybe because I wasn’t able to jump through the hoops necessary to make it, or maybe I just got burnt out.  My time these days is spent in voluntary exile.  I spend my days reading “The Very Hungry Caterpillar” and singing countless verses of e-i-e-i-oh.  I thought staying home with our eighteen-month-old would be some sort of convalescence, but I feel the restless flabbiness of my ageing creative muscle. 

So I’ll subject you to these musings, and I hope you don’t mind if I get off track now and again.  Maybe if I tie one on some night I’ll read you an excerpt from my self indulgent “Identity Crisis” book thing.  This is my sketchbook.  The stories here are raw.  I haven’t had them edited nor have I spent too much time picking them apart myself.  I should be painting now, but I’m not, so this is what I have for you.  I hope you enjoy the stories, and that you don’t mind the occasional self-indulgence.  And as I asked before, please don’t judge me too harshly; we both know that I really don’t have a clue.