Winter 2018

REJOICE (A MANIFESTO FOR LONELY PAINTERS)

1. Do not become too, too dejected if and when you stain your favorite cardigan with phthalo blue oil paint. Of course, allow yourself to mourn the loss of a once naked sweater. But then remember to rejoice in the birth of new, wearable art.

2. Work on twenty paintings at once. 

3. Work on just one painting for an entire month.

4. Do not faint. When your mind starts to become vague and muted, well that should be okay. But when your entire body starts to become so, take note. When your vision starts to become vignetted, sit down. And when your arms start to feel heavy and your fingers even heavier, lie down.

5. Admit that the act of painting is an aphrodisiac. Rejoice in that reality…Yes!

6. Do not adhere to silly definitions of art that you read online. Create your own and when in doubt: if the maker calls it art, it’s art.

7. Treat fellow artists with kindness. Kindness is cool. Hold fellow artists accountable. Holding others accountable is cool. Kindness and accountability are not divorced. 

8. Painting is therapeutic. 

9. Painting is not therapy.

10. Get messy. Dirty, stained, soiled, muddy, slimy, spotted, disheveled, smeared, marked, smudged, blotched, splattered, tinted, dyed. Dragged through.

11. When visiting museums and galleries and friend’s homes, treat what’s on the walls all the same. Next, allow yourself to fall in love with paintings that are completely, entirely, holistically, and totally distinct from your own work. Furthermore, allow yourself to fall in love with paintings that you do not have the specific skill-set to create. Lastly, allow yourself to fall in love with paintings that you have no interest in making. Rejoice in dissimilar art. 

12. Call bullshit. Someone once said, “if too many people like your art then you are doing something wrong.” There is a good example of bullshit.

13. Make a painting for someone — your father or your roommate or your girlfriend — and give it to them for their birthday. It can be, and it probably should be, a small painting.

14. Do not claim that your paintings (especially the high that comes from making a particularly evocative painting) can substitute for your anti-depressants. You should still take your anti-depressants.

15. If others start to ridicule your paintings of vaginas and labia continue to paint vaginas and labia.

16. If you are painting barefoot you will quickly dye the soles of your feet. When you get home from your studio be sure to vigorously wash your feet before taking a shower. If you go straight into the shower you will irreparably stain your bathtub with that mix of alizarin crimson and yellow ochre and titanium white — the soft dewey pink you made up in the studio and found so beautiful. But your roommates won’t find it so…because stained on the bathtub it looks like period blood.

17. Cry in your studio. Catch some tears in your cans of paint then stir the clear and salty liquid into your paint. Later, once you’ve stopped crying, you will know that your tears will adhere to canvas. 

18.  Listen to criticism

19. Reject criticism. 

20. The world is large and your mind is small but your canvas is whatever size you want it to be.

21. Get as involved in your paintings as humanly, physically possible. Do everything short of ingesting the paint. If multiple peers or professors or mentors or strangers approach you, fearing that you have done that because of how much paint is covering your clothes and body and face, do not worry. But do discontinue the practice of holding paint brushes in your mouth!

22. Take a breath. Now, take another. 

23. Call yourself an artist. Say it out loud to yourself and others. Say it now! “I am an artist.” Rejoice. 

Spring 2018

SECOND BREATH

“Take a breath,” my mother says. So I do. “Now, take another.” She waits for me to. 

Maybe we are along the coast of Maine. Or maybe we are home in Massachusetts. Perhaps we are between the mountains and the rivers in New Hampshire. Nonetheless, we are breathing. 

Her and I, we are both painters. She painted landscapes not too long ago and now I do too. The paintings I create, though, are not concerned with what these landscapes look like. Instead, they are informed by my own intimate connection with earth…with place…with water. I paint about my coming of age on rocky beaches, my sexuality within the safety of the sea, my nostalgia for a childhood within a seemingly ideal natural world.

So, like my mother, I make my paintings with an appreciation for the earth, and especially for the ocean. But I also paint with lust and longing, using memory and imagination as my sole references. I remember the emotional weight that place holds for me while imagining who I and the earth will become in the future. Reminiscing and envisioning. Recalling and projecting. Remembering and imagining. Fearing and hoping. 

Anyways, here I am, breathing. My mother too. Inhaling and exhaling, together, synchronized in earthly devotion. “That second breath,” she says, “comes from the ocean.”