I think the real story here is the fact that I dug out my old art supplies. I haven't painted since about 2003, when I got the teaching job at the career college. That job represented a turning point for me, a new direction toward something stable and respectable. Away from my so-called art career, the unstable and not-so-respectable path I've trod since childhood. But even as I embraced my new career, I kept my paints, stored in a box on a high shelf. I kept the jug of modeling paste, part of a group of paint cans enlisted to support a book shelf. I kept collecting wooden frames and other art-related paraphernalia, tucking them away into nooks and crannies, waiting for some day when I'd be ready to paint again.
Fooling around with modeling paste makes me think about making art again. That thought makes me wonder if the past 15 years have just been an aberration, a detour away from my true calling. That thought makes me feel a little sick, because I've invested eight of those years and about $50,000 in a frustratingly stalled doctorate. Luckily before I could stick my head too far down that mental garbage pail, I remembered that there are always more than two choices. It's not either-or, it's and, and and, and and—as many ands as I want, as many as I've the guts to pursue.
Maybe I'll paint again, who knows. Although I'd have to give the stuff away: I have no room in the Love Shack to store paintings. And no room to store any more furniture, should I decide to convert my art to shelves and end tables like I did with my last batch of paintings. Art that became functional, I guess you could say. I don't even notice them anymore, old wooden paintings screwed together and obscured by stacks of t-shirts, books, the collected detritus of my life.
I was thinking about pleasant art versus... would I call it unpleasant art? What would you call it, the kind of art that makes you cringe or feel uneasy or squint? The kind of art that makes you work a little bit, or maybe a lot. Compared to the art that looks really nice over a couch or hanging in a stairwell. If I had stuck with making pleasant art, I would probably have had an art career selling stuff to interior decorators. Instead I made unpleasant art that was a little too... raw? Picture in-your-face nudes with no heads, arms, or legs. Yep, 'fraid so. Sadly, not what people wanted hanging over their couches. At least not people in my circle of family and friends.
Some part of me thinks that if I had just kept painting what I wanted to paint, I would eventually have succeeded in making a respectable art career. I wouldn't have felt compelled to sell my soul to stay alive. It's a small part of me that believes that. A much bigger part of me knows it's likely that if I had tried to paint what I wanted to paint, I'd be dead of starvation by now. But one thing I know: if I had tried to paint the pleasant stuff, the butterflies and flowers and rippling brooks, I'd for sure be dead by now. Rest in peace, Thomas Kinkade. I live to paint another day.
