WHO AM I?
“ The hand, the eye, and the heart; two won’t do.”
Chinese proverb.
Chinese proverb.
Me at the 'David Bowie is' Exhibition, The Brooklyn Museum, NYC, 2018
The 1970's
Zulu, Iceberg
Zulu War, 1973
The Iceberg, 1975
1973 – I’m seven years old, I’ve just finished my supper and I’m drawing a picture on the dining room table. It’s a battle between two tribes of Zulu warriors. If you look closely you can see one of the tribal chiefs at the heart of the action, bigger than the rest, proud and confident, almost enjoying himself. The warriors that surround him are locked in struggle, or lying dead or wounded, pierced by arrows and spears. It’s a frenetic explosion of action, like a mass of warring ants. I’m completely lost in the act of creating the image, lost in the image itself. I’m just doing it, because I want to do it; it’s fun.
1975 - I’m off school sick. My mother gives me some of her old oil paints to play with and I paint an iceberg. I don’t know why, maybe there were a lot of blues in the box, or I had just watched something about the North Pole on TV. Again, I’m lost in the act of creation, the dark Prussian blue of the arctic sea, the cerulean pinnacle of ice. Why am I painting this? Because I want to, no other reason. Later that year, the iceberg drifts into first prize at a local art show.
I’m good at this, and I like doing it.
1975 - I’m off school sick. My mother gives me some of her old oil paints to play with and I paint an iceberg. I don’t know why, maybe there were a lot of blues in the box, or I had just watched something about the North Pole on TV. Again, I’m lost in the act of creation, the dark Prussian blue of the arctic sea, the cerulean pinnacle of ice. Why am I painting this? Because I want to, no other reason. Later that year, the iceberg drifts into first prize at a local art show.
I’m good at this, and I like doing it.
The 1980's
Art school, Dumpster, Africa.
Portrait of a woman, c.160 - 170 AD, Roman Egypt. British Museum, London.
Middle school through high school. Art has become a serious undertaking. The goal? To try and make everything as realistic as possible, to make it look like a photograph. Now, it’s all about the craft. I don’t complain, how can you look at the stars if you don’t know how to operate the telescope? But it isn’t as much fun as it used to be, it’s not what it was. There are no more icebergs or battling Zulus’. Now, it’s just…work.
The Byam Shaw School of Art, London. The days are shiftless and shapeless, I’m shiftless and shapeless. I don’t really know what I’m doing here. I was good at art so I went to art school, but is this really where I belong? It all seems so ephemeral, floating, dainty. Bored with painting academically, I move to the abstract department. Influenced by Rothko, Newman, Motherwell and Kline I go minimal, color field. I dabble in unusual methods, creating my own paints instead of buying them in a tube. Like some medieval alchemist, I mix pigments with various oils and then combine them with an assortment of gums and spirits. I lay down grounds of gesso that I sand to a flawless porcelain finish. I become obsessed with glowing layers of paint as smooth as glass. But what I am actually creating? It’s all just technique. What do I want to paint, what’s my muse? I’m drawn to the ancient past, to Neolithic tombs. At the start of my second year, I begin a series of abstract paintings based on these. The response from my teacher’s is good, my work is “very interesting” (just like everyone else’s). Then, I take a wrong turn. I come upon the image of an ancient painting in a book. It’s a portrait of a woman from Roman Egypt. Two thousand years old, it was painted on a wooden panel in encaustic (the immortal medium) and was placed on her mummified remains so all would know who lay swaddled in the bandages. She looks so beautiful with her huge jet black eyes and delicate curls, so enigmatic, so far away. Putting Neolithic tombs to one side, I copy the painting and ponder what to do with it next.
Grim faces from my teachers at the half year review of my work. You are in the abstract department, why are you painting dead Romans? We don’t understand. We thought you were 1950’s New York meets the Stone Age, now you’re a first century Lucian Freud?
I’m confused; isn’t art supposed to be about breaking the rules, isn't it supposed to be mercurial, random? I am put on some kind of half ass probation. They will be watching me to see how things progress, my future at the art school is in jeopardy. This is the wake up call that I need. I don’t want to be here, and I don’t really know why I am. Yes, I’m interested in my paintings, but do I love what I’m doing? I am obsessed with it? Is this what I really want to do now that it’s no longer fun? In short, where are the icebergs and the Zulus?
I leave art school, throwing all my work into a dumpster on the street outside as I depart.
What now?
The Byam Shaw School of Art, London. The days are shiftless and shapeless, I’m shiftless and shapeless. I don’t really know what I’m doing here. I was good at art so I went to art school, but is this really where I belong? It all seems so ephemeral, floating, dainty. Bored with painting academically, I move to the abstract department. Influenced by Rothko, Newman, Motherwell and Kline I go minimal, color field. I dabble in unusual methods, creating my own paints instead of buying them in a tube. Like some medieval alchemist, I mix pigments with various oils and then combine them with an assortment of gums and spirits. I lay down grounds of gesso that I sand to a flawless porcelain finish. I become obsessed with glowing layers of paint as smooth as glass. But what I am actually creating? It’s all just technique. What do I want to paint, what’s my muse? I’m drawn to the ancient past, to Neolithic tombs. At the start of my second year, I begin a series of abstract paintings based on these. The response from my teacher’s is good, my work is “very interesting” (just like everyone else’s). Then, I take a wrong turn. I come upon the image of an ancient painting in a book. It’s a portrait of a woman from Roman Egypt. Two thousand years old, it was painted on a wooden panel in encaustic (the immortal medium) and was placed on her mummified remains so all would know who lay swaddled in the bandages. She looks so beautiful with her huge jet black eyes and delicate curls, so enigmatic, so far away. Putting Neolithic tombs to one side, I copy the painting and ponder what to do with it next.
Grim faces from my teachers at the half year review of my work. You are in the abstract department, why are you painting dead Romans? We don’t understand. We thought you were 1950’s New York meets the Stone Age, now you’re a first century Lucian Freud?
I’m confused; isn’t art supposed to be about breaking the rules, isn't it supposed to be mercurial, random? I am put on some kind of half ass probation. They will be watching me to see how things progress, my future at the art school is in jeopardy. This is the wake up call that I need. I don’t want to be here, and I don’t really know why I am. Yes, I’m interested in my paintings, but do I love what I’m doing? I am obsessed with it? Is this what I really want to do now that it’s no longer fun? In short, where are the icebergs and the Zulus?
I leave art school, throwing all my work into a dumpster on the street outside as I depart.
What now?
African Doll, 1987
Lions in the darkness, their eyes glowing like gold just beyond the light of the flames, keep that fire high or they will kill you. Hyenas manically cackling like evil spirits in the night, elephants moving through the trees as silently as ghosts, so close I can touch them. “We must go quickly now, before the sun goes down, that is when they will come!” Running for my life. Blood, fire, claw, and fang. Lessons in mortality from the primal void, no gray area here, you screw up, you die. Nights in mud hut villages and ramshackle townships. The sound of drums in the night drifting across a volcanic lake as still as the dead. Tuaregs walking along dusty streets under the Saharan Sun dressed in billowing robes as blue as lapis lazuli. Sunday worshippers wrapped in explosions of Kente cloth, they fear no color here. The boy dressed in filthy rags with the tattered photograph who telegraphed to me in no uncertain terms that God did not exist. Lepers, laughter, thuggery, music, disease, beauty, dancing and death.
And then that moment in the valley, when the baboons barked and for one brief moment I vanished entirely from the world.
A seismic shift, I realize I have been asleep my whole life. I see everything differently, forever.
And then that moment in the valley, when the baboons barked and for one brief moment I vanished entirely from the world.
A seismic shift, I realize I have been asleep my whole life. I see everything differently, forever.
The 1990’s
Death, America, the river, a return to the tombs, fatherhood.
Neolithic 3, 1996
My mother and father die of cancer with in two years of each other. They die at home. My mother passes with steroid tainted silver skin and a body maimed by surgery, dignified to the end. I hear her death rattle in every room of the house. My father dies falling through dreams of morphine, a delirious yellow husk, his bowels ruptured. I smell him in every room in the house.
A wife, off to America. We live in California, an ultraviolet saturated Xanax soaked world of fake anchored to nothing whatsoever. If you want to stay sane here you better make your smile genuine and keep popping those happy pills. I hate every minute of it.
Twilight in the Mekong Delta. I’m travelling down a river in a wooden boat. Slowly gliding through the water. The banks on either side of me are walls of the Jurassic world. Every square inch of the muddy silt releases life, an explosion of gargantuan leaves shaped like fans, swords and flags spill across the water. Greens as dark as Hades, or glowing bright as light shot through an emerald, the air a cacophony of vibrating insects. Another brush with the beginning of the world, the dark root of everything; Tartarus.
I travel to Holy Island, Wales. Again I’m drawn to Neolithic tombs and there are tons of them here. I sketch them and take photographs. When I get back to California I work the sketches into bigger drawings. I need more power, so I swap pencils and charcoal for sticks of graphite. I find myself almost carving into paper, the graphite goes on so thick it forms shiny skins of mineral blackness. I become completely lost in the work. Drawn to those ancient fires and resting places, that primal darkness. I feel the same way I did when I painted the iceberg and drew the Zulus. This is it! I ‘ve found it again! But then…
A wife, off to America. We live in California, an ultraviolet saturated Xanax soaked world of fake anchored to nothing whatsoever. If you want to stay sane here you better make your smile genuine and keep popping those happy pills. I hate every minute of it.
Twilight in the Mekong Delta. I’m travelling down a river in a wooden boat. Slowly gliding through the water. The banks on either side of me are walls of the Jurassic world. Every square inch of the muddy silt releases life, an explosion of gargantuan leaves shaped like fans, swords and flags spill across the water. Greens as dark as Hades, or glowing bright as light shot through an emerald, the air a cacophony of vibrating insects. Another brush with the beginning of the world, the dark root of everything; Tartarus.
I travel to Holy Island, Wales. Again I’m drawn to Neolithic tombs and there are tons of them here. I sketch them and take photographs. When I get back to California I work the sketches into bigger drawings. I need more power, so I swap pencils and charcoal for sticks of graphite. I find myself almost carving into paper, the graphite goes on so thick it forms shiny skins of mineral blackness. I become completely lost in the work. Drawn to those ancient fires and resting places, that primal darkness. I feel the same way I did when I painted the iceberg and drew the Zulus. This is it! I ‘ve found it again! But then…
A son! A beautiful boy. How is it possible to love someone so much (I mean really, how is it even possible?).
Jack
No time for art now. Too busy with strollers, diapers and baby food.
The 2000's
Therapy
Anatomical Drawing, Leonardo Da Vinci
Emerging from my role as a stay at home father and now ensconced in the relative sanity of North Carolina, I realize I’ve got to get a real job, after all, I’ve got a kid now. Back to college, but this time it’s physical therapy. This is not Art School. There is so much to learn, my brain has to get organized, those neurons have got to be tight and buzzing, you slack off, you’re out.
Bones, muscles, nerves, physiology, kinesiology, pathology. How humans move, how to move humans, how to get humans to move themselves. Written exams, practical exams, and then out of the classroom and into the real thing. Acute care, hospital stuff, the sharp end. Book leaning? About ten percent of what you really need to know. You have to pick it up as you go along and you have to pick it up fast. . “It will take you five years to become a confident therapist” No shit Sherlock.
Tragic stories, tragic lives, mind games, madness, pain, edge of life, end of life. But also, hope, laughter, courage, and moments of triumph. Slowly I find my feet, I begin to feel confident in what I am doing.
But there is no time for art, no time for anything.
Bones, muscles, nerves, physiology, kinesiology, pathology. How humans move, how to move humans, how to get humans to move themselves. Written exams, practical exams, and then out of the classroom and into the real thing. Acute care, hospital stuff, the sharp end. Book leaning? About ten percent of what you really need to know. You have to pick it up as you go along and you have to pick it up fast. . “It will take you five years to become a confident therapist” No shit Sherlock.
Tragic stories, tragic lives, mind games, madness, pain, edge of life, end of life. But also, hope, laughter, courage, and moments of triumph. Slowly I find my feet, I begin to feel confident in what I am doing.
But there is no time for art, no time for anything.
2010’s
Love, The Arctic epiphany, onwards.
Arctic Sun, 2016
Marriage collapse, everything falls to pieces.
But then, LOVE! So much love I just don’t know what to do with it all. At last kindness, compassion, sanity. A sweet, genuine soul that brings me up instead of grinds me down. I put a ring on it.
Life revitalized and able once again to think beyond surviving at work, the creative urge reemerges. I start to paint and draw again. But I need a different approach. I’ve had enough of oil paint and pencils, that’s something from the past, I’ve got to shake it up. What about that technique my mother taught me before she died, with the tissues? I take what she gave me and push it further, perfect it. Different paint, different materials, a different goal. But what now? What do I want to create? I’m still pulled to those tombs, that darkness, but after being dormant for so long I need something else to get me going, I need a spark.
But then, LOVE! So much love I just don’t know what to do with it all. At last kindness, compassion, sanity. A sweet, genuine soul that brings me up instead of grinds me down. I put a ring on it.
Life revitalized and able once again to think beyond surviving at work, the creative urge reemerges. I start to paint and draw again. But I need a different approach. I’ve had enough of oil paint and pencils, that’s something from the past, I’ve got to shake it up. What about that technique my mother taught me before she died, with the tissues? I take what she gave me and push it further, perfect it. Different paint, different materials, a different goal. But what now? What do I want to create? I’m still pulled to those tombs, that darkness, but after being dormant for so long I need something else to get me going, I need a spark.
January 2015 , Finmark, Norway.
It’s two o’clock in the morning and I’m about as far North as you can go. I’m in a minivan with six other people and a guide. We are looking for the Northern Lights, but they are being coy tonight. Well past midnight, we stop by a fjord in the middle of nowhere. Beneath the icy star strewn sky, a fire is lit on the shore, it’s hot chocolate time! Weary of the celestial hunt, I wander off. I find myself on an empty road, it runs straight as an arrow into the night. I begin to walk and soon the voices of my fellow travellers are replaced by the lonely whipping of the freezing wind. On either side of me the mountains rise, lit by a crystal clear steel blue light from the polar moon above. The landscape of Norway is unlike anything I have seen before. Epic and beautiful (even in the dead of winter), but also strangely present, almost sentient. This is a land of gods, the maker of the Viking soul. I look up at the mountains that seem like sleeping Goliaths and once again briefly vanish from the world.
When I come back, I have what I need.
Back in North Carolina and I need to, got to work, got to draw and paint, get it out. I begin a series of paintings inspired by my Scandinavian journey. This is the spark that starts the fire. The fire spreads, igniting all the creative fuel that I’ve been gathering and storing for three decades. The Neolithic tombs, my voyages through the primal darkness, the stark unforgiving truth of the far North. I’m completely lost in the pieces I’m making, yes they can be frustrating, annoying at times, but I love doing them. I’m utterly absorbed in their creation, and once they are done, I feel fulfilled.
It feels like it did when I was small, it feels like it did when I painted the Iceberg , and drew the Zulus. I’ve returned to where I began.
But now I have to work hard, I don’t have as much time as I used to and there is so much work to do…
When I come back, I have what I need.
Back in North Carolina and I need to, got to work, got to draw and paint, get it out. I begin a series of paintings inspired by my Scandinavian journey. This is the spark that starts the fire. The fire spreads, igniting all the creative fuel that I’ve been gathering and storing for three decades. The Neolithic tombs, my voyages through the primal darkness, the stark unforgiving truth of the far North. I’m completely lost in the pieces I’m making, yes they can be frustrating, annoying at times, but I love doing them. I’m utterly absorbed in their creation, and once they are done, I feel fulfilled.
It feels like it did when I was small, it feels like it did when I painted the Iceberg , and drew the Zulus. I’ve returned to where I began.
But now I have to work hard, I don’t have as much time as I used to and there is so much work to do…
The Crossing, 2020