Previous work

Episode 3 of I am Art series

I am Art (playlist)

15 minutes

And so it happened. Or at least I thought it happened. I woke up with a vigor and raced to the sticky canvas and retrieved a brush from a pool of Gamsol, and tried desperately to breathe life into the hog hair filbert brush by drowning it with a cadmium red and sap green mixture. Two strokes and re-load the brush I kept telling myself. Keep the surface fresh. Keep moving on to new expanses of neglected space and refrain from creating mud or dull color. Then it dawned on me. Art is very much a story of my day to day life. The more I paint, I’m finding, the more life makes sense to me. Am I insane? Yes, but that is beside the point. I am discovering the secrets of life through painting. I am becoming the very thing I used to dismiss as empty rhetoric during my Academy and Undergrad years. I recently entertained the idea of reigniting a flame with an old flame (yes she was hot), and was fascinated by how much we had grown apart. We went back and talked about what worked, and what didn’t work. As the conversation went on I became impatient and disinterested to the point of seriously considering literally standing up and walking away from her. As I sat in front of the incomplete canvas I realized the minute I decide to over occupy an area I’d be creating mud, thus sucking the life out the color and ultimately sucking the life out of the image.


Mud can destroy the color and vibrancy of a great painting, just as mud can destroy a vivacious life, by going back to stroke (pun intended) an area one feels the need to go back to. What mud meant in many paintings I’ve produced was an uncertainty and a lack of confidence to move on to another space within the painting. At the moment I am in search of being able to make a decision, and live with it. I realized I made a decision to end a relationship and wasn’t ready to live it as evidenced by my going back to stroke the canvas of my old flame (yes she was that hot). In the practice of art the most difficult aspect of the practice is making decisions. Deciding to be a fulltime professional artist is a decision that can get muddy when one finds themselves having to not pursue it fully without looking back. I look back on my time at the Academy today knowing the class that graduated with me decided art and didn’t look back for two years. Few of those artists have looked back and have since left the practice behind them. At some point in my life after the academy I had to make this decision of going back to school for a back up plan or staying the course and being a fine artist. I am sure I made the right decision and will not look back. I took a stretch and walked away from the painting with my back turned towards the canvas, taking a long pause to adjust my eyes on my wonderful printed T-shirt collection. I turned around to critique the 15 minutes worth of painting I had done while making these mental epiphanies. I was satisfied with the decisions I made and was not going to go back………No seriously I didn’t go back into the studio at all. 15 minutes was enough painting for the day. Remember delayed gratification!

Keeping the brushes Wet part 4

Continued from the last post:

Delayed gratification. This concept I find applies to a lot of the random happenings of ones life. I’m starting to realize that in a painting patience really pays off. I, the school trained artist, was built to create a painting in a week to turn in and talk about the following day. The same twenty minute breath used to describe a slide of a painting created before my time was awarded to paintings of my academic experience with the same care. I would think to myself, “Wow we spent twenty minutes talking about something I put together the night before, and I didn’t even think about it.” Bullshit. Today I find the painting process is slowing down drastically. Proper technique and color relationships to convey the message an artist wants to present to the viewer drastically slows down the process these days. I think before showing other people work, and in the event it doesn’t look like care and great thought went into the painting I pass it off as just a sketch. In the paintings I try to do now each stroke has to have a story or a part of the story. I think of it as writing a paper where each stroke is a line from the text so that if one were to isolate each brush stroke and put them next to each other to form a page they would be able to read my unique story. This delayed reaction will one day be helpful in marriage. As a man I am beginning to understand that many women enjoy the Eric experience when I have a “delayed reaction.” I have begun this mode of talking myself through a painting before I start painting. It cuts down the frustration. I will admit I haven’t been able to paint nearly as much as I would like to. There aren’t enough hours in the day. The children and young adults I teach during the day need to be fed education. I need to sleep. Women need to be smiled at and told day-changing comments such as “love those shoes” and “you have the most paint-able face; here’s my card, I’m an artist.” How do I balance this life? I haven’t. I have neither rhyme nor reason to the madness of trying to be an artist and hold a 9-5 job. I am not ashamed to admit this in hopes that someone will one day sit next to me, gently stroke my turpenoid-stained hands and calmly whisper, “Me too.”

To be continued…

Keeping the brushes Wet part 3

Continued from the last post:

As an AmeriCorps supervisor, I tend to the children of a small community in Providence, RI. I eat trail mix and delicately prepared buffalo chicken sandwiches for lunch. I arrive home at 6:30pm and am tranquilized by the msg dinner that I often prepare. I wake up at 3am and the system starts all over again. As grim as this may sound there is hope. I am coming to grips in understanding that art is the liquid that makes my heart pump. As much as I love the kids I work with, not being able to paint makes me feel nothing. Wine has no taste without the art to accompany it. I have made serious sacrifices in the last month to win the custody battle of my art from my other life; the one that pays my bills. Gone are facebook, and the romances of 2010. They shall be missed, especially the ladies. My only romance at this point is the brush and the canvas, and on occasion the sculptor’s clay and Breyers vanilla ice cream. I am working on continuing the series I began during my 2nd year at the Academy. I like to make paintings reinterpreting my artistic childhood as an adult. What I find many times is so much of society’s issues were present in my own childhood and now reside in my paintings. I was too naïve then to pay attention to them and rightfully so. I was 6, and being 6 is not easy when you have a backyard full of junk to battle invisible aliens with. Even as an adult, I am not able to see these common threads until the piece is near completion. It is now 6:30am and the shower calls. For the first time, the thoughts that go through my mind between 3am now have found their way onto digital format – this blog. Either way, going forward the message I hear in my mind every morning is “the brushes can not dry.” Time for work.

To be continued…

Keeping the brushes Wet part 2

Continued from the last post:

I imagine myself painting and discovering new paths and hidden alleys to “the piece” - the piece we all are chasing as artist. This piece is the piece that tells the world that you have it and have nothing left to offer. I feel as an artist I will always be chasing the truth on a 2-D plane. Like Juan De Pareja before me my dream is to create a truth that is unequivocal. I wake up at 3am paralyzed in bed thinking of the day ahead of me. I peer to my left and see a painting demo from the academy completed a year ago. I observe the subtle shifts of value, and the blind confidence in the brush work. I turn to my right and I see papers. Lots of paper. Loads of paper. Paper that has nothing to do with shifting tone, or creating the illusion of a lily pad floating on water that one does when painting a highlight on the eye.