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.