I’ve been painting a lot since quarantine started. It’s a part of the creative output I’ve always done. I studied painting and drawing at The School of the Art Institute of Chicago and even somehow got my poor-kid butt into that school with a scholarship. Sometimes I share my paintings, but often it’s a thing to keep me sane, an art therapy of sorts. I become quite anxious when I can’t produce something. With Set Design, Photography, Filmmaking, it requires such a large crew, weeks or months of preparation, so many conversations and many, many hands.. with painting, it’s nice to be alone and to create something that is truly for myself and no one’s opinion is part of the conversation.
During college I worked for an artist, creating his work, gluing tiny pieces of paper to paper and painting in backgrounds. At that time, age 20, I found selling his work to collectors to be a bit of a dead end. Why would you sell something to die on someone’s wall? It’s why I got into set design.. design lives more broadly, crews build it, people light it, it exists in a room, huge and it’s used to tell some sort of story.
Years later, I realize it’s not the painting collectors bought, it was his voice, his thoughts, his way of putting his own life into something material. He was selling paintings to become immortal. Unlike the work I do in advertising, making paintings feels like the thing I can leave to the world. Advertising imagery feels cheap and I can smell the money every time I see an ad. But a painting feels timeless.
The other night I went out for an “Internet Cruise”. It’s a solo-date I take myself on sometimes.. It’s mostly me digging into deep archives of museums. I found myself on the Denver Art Museum’s website and I saw the image above. This image is from the exhibition: Women of Abstract Expressionism.
I thought to myself: Painting, wearing my coveralls or apron, this is how I feel most like me. So, painting, my oldest friend, is leading me through these times and I feel more like me than I have in 10 years.
After I finish reading Normal People By Sally Rooney, I’ll be reading Ninth Street Women. These somewhat forgotten women of the 50′s/60′s AbEx movement are more than inspiring right now and aren’t they such babes?