A good weekend...
It’s Monday evening. The world is still intact for now and there was no reported rapture, apocalypse nor second coming before/during/after the eclipse, so I guess we just keep moving along and I’m ok with that. Had there been any world-breaking catastrophe, I would have been ok with it because the opening reception for my show on Friday went as well as anyone could want and I’m forever grateful for all that took place, most notably that so many people came out and some from some distances: NYC, North Carolina, DC, etc…
Opening receptions are exciting, frightening, joyous, complicated events for the artist. You’re there with your latest works out there for the public to take in and no matter how you feel about the art, it’s meanings for you and its very existence is no longer only yours. It belongs to the greater world now and will take on as many meanings as there are people who see it and you have to be ok with that. And I am. Thankfully, I learned to remove myself or my ego from this part of the process. I’ve said it a million times, but we all bring our baggage to the conversation, good and bad. I can’t control what anyone thinks, so whatever meanings my work has for me matters little to anyone else’s experience of the work.
One of the things I most enjoyed was seeing so many people from different parts of my present life and old lives converge in one space. It’s kind of surreal, really, noticing other connections between people in those worlds that I didn’t know about: former co-workers who know oldest friends, people who live in Philly whom I’ve only known for years as online connections, artist friends I see once or twice a year, and so on. I always feel bad about not being able to talk to everyone, but that’s just how it is. Seeing and feeling the support is energizing. Thank you all for coming out!
Invariably, someone asked me if I had a favorite piece and there’s no way to answer that question. First, there’s recency bias, second, there’s just not been enough time to step back and evaluate the work all together like this and third, I never have “a” favorite. There’s always several works in any body of work that I feel are more successful than others, but there’s never just one favorite.
Having the opportunity like this every so often to have a solo exhibition of your recent conversations from the studio is gratifying and insanely vulnerable at the same time. Having these conversations up next to and across from one another is powerful. There’s 30 plus new works in this show all on view at once, an incredibly amazing thing because I can only have a few out at a time in my studio. There are paintings in the gallery that I’ve only looked at a couple of times in the studio since stopping work on them over the past year or so. Now, they get to hang out and talk amongst themselves and visitors for a few weeks.
Life is fleeting and when you start racking up those years in numbers, you begin to appreciate all of the things that are happening once, like having birthdays. I went a number of years having a very complicated love/hate relationship with my birthday. I liked having made it to see another birthday and at the same time, didn’t want to or know how to celebrate them. Almost without fail, a month before my birthday I would start to get moody and it all had to do with my birthday. Most of my moodiness had to do with where I was in life as well as grappling with getting older and what comes along with that at every stage. With all of that, I usually wound up enjoying my birthdays, anyway.
On Saturday, myself and friends had a dinner out in honor of my best friend, Tet. Amazingly, Tet and I have known each other for close to 50 years(!). He and I are basically brothers from another. His mom was like a second mother to me before and after my mom passed away. Tet and I practically grew up together, lived separate lives in different cities, reconnected and have stayed connected since. Life seems like such a strange thing to experience. I never thought I’d have people in my life that I’ve known for that long, but here we are. You’re lucky enough to reach milestone birthdays like this, considering how fragile human life can be and start to feel really thankful that you’ve made it this far. There are a few of us in my friend group marking the same milestone this year and I have every intention of enjoying every day of it.
Just after the exhibition had been installed a week ago Saturday, I got right back to work making a few small drawings on paper. I’m eager to continue on with lessons gleaned from the latest works in the show. I thought that I’d be wiped out after all of the energy expended in getting this show together, but it’s just the opposite. I’m energized because I see a lot of potential in pushing some of those ideas further. I’m completely running on creative adrenaline. This is the thing, I’m in a spot where work begets more work. There’s a chance I’ll crash, possibly this week, but in the meantime, I’m rolling along.
During the past couple of weeks, I’ve been on a thing about listening to some of my old cds. I have a good sized collection of music in cd format and play them on my studio desktop through a bluetooth speaker. Once in a while I’ll have a serious “need” to listen to something specific and lately, it’s been Red, Hot + Blue: a tribute to Cole Porter. RH+B was released in 1990, is a tribute to the music of Cole Porter and was a benefit for AIDS research. It features some of the biggest names of the time, like U2, Neneh Cherry, Annie Lennox, The Neville Brothers, Fine Young Cannibals, Iggy Pop + Debbie Harry, The Jungle Brothers and more.
I don’t know which song it was, but something became an earworm, forcing me to do some digging to find it, but once I did, I played it at least three times in full last week. The songs are classics of Porter’s from the 1920s and ‘30s brought up to date for the early ‘90s. It’s great to hear how good everyone sounds here. There are a couple of questionable reinterpretations, but most of them are really good. Listening to Sinead O’Connor’s rendition of “You Do Something to Me” brought a tear to my eye considering how things went in her life (RIP). U2, as bombastic and uninteresting their music became over time, their take on “Night and Day” is another fave. Jungle Brothers’ “I Get A Kick Out Of You” kicks (redundancy not intended). Like I said, I like pretty much everything on the album. Check out some of the videos for the songs here: Red, Hot + Blue: A Tribute to Cole Porter.
In the meantime, today I’m going on an errand for cat food and then go to the studio. Until next time, here’s Banjo and Midnight, just because…
That's a great wrap-up, Tim! And how good that you're enthusiastically back at it. I remember that CD. I used to play it all the time in my studio. I'll have to dig it out because I remember enjoying it a lot.