Beginning

A very misleading word, “beginning.” Beginning where? From when? I could say that I am starting to paint now, but I actually started painting when I was…14? I remember the painting very well, and it was terrible. All of the work I made in high school was cringe worthy.

The beginning to which I am referring, is beginning to take myself seriously, as an artist. That began in February 2024, quite a long way away from high school. As an adult, the road to taking oneself seriously, if one has not taken any such road before, is rocky. There are a lot of rest stops, precipices, and detours. Pretty sure I lost a shoe, a water bottle, a sun hat…but my self is starting to materialize. Lose a shoe, gain a foot? Foot hold? And hold onto that, because your life does indeed depend upon it.

Do you watch music documentaries? The musician in question almost always “knew,” when they were 5 or 10 or whatever absurdly young age you care to fill in here, that they could play the guitar or piano or harpsichord, and proceeded to do so – obsessively – for the next 8 or 10 years. Reaching the precocious age of 13 or 18, they’ve put in serious effort and time. What we the pubic see is a fully fledged musician who came into our world with musical mastery. What their parents know is that they haven’t seen their kid in a decade, but they’ve certainly heard their kid, and now said progeny has a gig at some grimy bar in town. Do parents need to go sign a release or something? If a stage collapses it’s not the venue’s fault?

Musicians, I have found, have a real knack for describing the creative process. Perhaps the ones who describe it best are the songwriters, and that would make sense.

When I was in college, I knew that deep personal suffering was the only way to make art. Van Gogh taught me that. Every story about every artist that I ever saw involved some tortured soul torturing the existence of others. Therefore, I sought suffering. And it turns out, you don’t have to go far to find it. It’s right there inside you like everything else, and if you focus on it, it becomes everything – except art. At least, that was my experience. I was so confused, misguided and angry, that putting paint on a canvas didn’t go anywhere good because there was nothing constructive happening in my mind: no path forward, no plan, no guiding principles or priorities; no light. Certainly, there was no room for thinking about what I wanted to paint and how I wanted to go about painting it. Nothing so straightforward as that.