I bought my first guitar at a pawnshop in Greeley, CO. It was a ’61 Fender Jazzmaster. It had a purple starburst finish and sound so clean and smooth and mellow it made you want to lick the notes out of the air. Not, of course that I knew how to play it. I didn’t. I didn’t even own an amp at first. I would just sit with it in my lap, cradling it like a newborn infant. I don’t even know when I learned my first chord. It was probably a G chord. Everyone learns with a G. Then, almost a year later, I knocked on the door of a guy living in my dorm that I knew played and asked him for lessons.
“What do you want to play?” He asked.
“I don’t know. Blues I guess, or Jazz.”
He eyed me like a mechanic eyes me when I bring the car in for an oil change.
“How ‘bout I just show you a blues scale. You can play pretty much anything you want with that.” He was being really kind. He showed me the scale and corrected my grip and gave me a parting shot. “When you have that down, come and see me again, then maybe we can do something.”
I never went back. But that one lesson taught me all I ever really wanted to know about playing a guitar. From then on, when I sat with the guitar in my lap, my fingers running up and down the frets, I would imagine myself a great bluesman. To this day I can play that same scale in infinite variation. I can’t play a song, but I can make my guitar cry.
Painting came to me in a similar fashion. A roommate in college was an artist in remission. Never one to throw things out, I caught him tossing out all his old paint, a quickly tucked them away. A few years later, my wife and I moved into a crappy two room apartment at the bottom of Artist Road. We were just starting out and had a futon mattress on the floor of our bedroom and a three-legged table I bought at a thrift store that marked the end of the living room and the beginning of the dining room. One night, probably after drinking too many martinis, I took out the paints and decorated the cement cinderblocks that served as the posts in our bookshelves. From there I bought canvas and more paint and brushes. I painted little still lives of my beta fish and surrealistic bedroom scenes.
A few years later I was still painting the same things when we stumbled into the Art Institute of Chicago. The institute hosted a huge Monet retrospective. We spent most of the day wandering through gallery after gallery of his early impressionist work, his haystacks and cathedrals, and finally to his mature water lilies. As you might have already guessed I walked away from that experience thinking I was the next great impressionist painter.
From Impressionism to Cubism, Cubism to Abstract Expressionism, I have made my way ever since, learning from these masters of art and making my own paintings. I got my first taste of selling my art almost fifteen years ago. I was flabbergasted that anyone would want to buy my paintings, and elated as well. I suppose I had that feeling because I didn’t feel like I had done anything new, or original. I had just taken what I saw and applied it. Later I would have that same feeling about art sales, but more it was because I never really think about selling a painting until it is sold, so it always comes as such a surprise.
Painting is, as you might expect, a solitary enterprise. When I work, I never think about the canvas or the gallery, but always about the mark, the color, the texture, or the feel. For this reason I can’t look at my paintings the way most people do. I can’t see the forest for the trees you might say. For me the feeling of that moment when the painting was made always lingers and it clouds everything. Only later, years later, can I see a painting for what it is, and then, because I am such a harsh critic, I usually can’t look at it for long.
Well, I am sure I have more to say about that, but alas, I can’t for the life of me think what else there is to say. So, until next time, Salud!
