Conformity Noise 2022. Acrylic on canvas, 72 x 53"
Being a rural artist amassing a barn full of paintings to peddle to sympathetic birds and bees has been an exasperating career thus far. I’ve exhausted every avenue of exchange. I can’t take another dime from a friend. And nobody knows me outside of my bubble besides a battalion of social media likers offering as much dopamine for a popular post as I can get petting the cat on my lap. Distribution is the problem. Only a rare gallery as daft as I would want the task of moving these unpredictable paintings. And if committed to the avant-garde, it couldn’t maintain a lucrative mailing list to sustain me year after year. Even if I was offered a contract with a traditional gallery, and played the part of aloof, eccentric arteest, it’s just too obvious after five minutes of vetting me that I loathe the millionaire class, and would repel deep-pocket customers. The old way is dead to the prolific artist. Was it ever a reality in modern times? I don’t think so. We got played and we still play along. Whether it was those innocent CIA sponsored tools post World War II, or the corporate fed clowns of the 21st century, modern art worked as a financial career for a few dozen painters only, and tremendously well as a money-laundering scam commissioned by the Epstein class. Even in my eccentricity, I know exactly what any non-historical painting is worth. Art is subjective, but the market is not. Each bean in a million is worth just one bean, until some coffee table book authority tells you this special bean’s stalk will rise to a miserly giant hoarding a mountain of gold in the clouds. That’s why I am an advocate and practitioner of the new distribution—The Free Art Market. (See future posts).
I also have another special interest that conflicts with art making, while the money is tight and the studio needs to be restocked. For the past two years I have been trying to keep below the U.S. poverty threshold in order to not pay taxes to an ongoing genocide (Palestine) and two-tier justice system (ICE, Epstein Files). And it’s working. Wow, success, finally! And at being poor, no less. Just like an artist should be when she’s making art a lifestyle and not a career. It ain’t easy staying poor with a partner who takes home enough income to support five hand-to-mouth artists. I never expect her to play along, though of course I’d be game if she quit the job that binds/supports us both. She might not like having all that “rice and beans” kind of fun, and has every right to practice a lower middle class lifestyle with a half pint of Ben & Jerrys in the freezer. Genocide and bombing an all-girl’s elementary school is our government’s GoFundMe that we are “legally” bound to donate to every working hour in dystopia. The entrenched mafia has roughed us up considerably. Yet with all its incredible force, violence and psychosis, it has failed to crush my enthusiasm to oblivion. I think it’s because I am a working artist of life who can sometimes will the vision into action. I am one of a million trigger locks to fascism.
It comes down to this: I don’t want an easy life being a comfortable person in Hell. And I guess that’s the whole point. If I fall back in from the edges, I’ll get too comfortable, which, I believe, is the wrong path for any artist. Vision is blurred from the center. Nothing new comes out of the nucleus after stabilization. I crave adversity, though wish I had less of the austerity that is so often a byproduct of will power gone bad (self-righteousness). I want to do with less during the process of making something more for the purpose of art. A contradiction of course. I know that someday I must scrap “the purpose” and be free to paint without artifice. Oops! Enter another interest, “Right Living”, which happens to steer all the others. It’s a Buddhist concept, part of the Eightfold Path, reminding me, in vain, to shut up and not have any purpose.
Christ Buddha, too many contradictions!
I keep a detailed record of my weekly expenses that cannot exceed $300, a few dollars less than the U.S. poverty threshold. Any income I receive via writing and painting is taken off my expenses because, as a failed artist (financially), I am always making art at a loss, and contrary to the arbitrary decisions made long ago by a deceased Congress, I am not limited to how many years I can take a loss. For I do not claim my art as a business. Therefore, if I ever made a profit (which I never do), the government can go eat cheese, for it ain’t getting another penny from me, ever again. Genocide was my red line. During the winter weeks, austerity is a pastime. Summer ones not so much. During the cold, gray months I do with as little as possible in order to compensate for the spendthrift days come June and July. As you may already know, Rose and I are working on a series of large paintings as a kind of cabin fever marital therapy. We ran out of gesso this week, and June is right around the calendar corner. Time to get desperate and beg.
Conformity Noise is one of many big paintings that needs to vacate our premises before I die, which I’m told, can come any second after my last breath. I just don’t want death to encumber the family more than the usual affairs of mourning. I feel the need to reduce my self to non-entity, and if lucky, I have about 20 years to complete the task. For starters, I have vowed to clean up the studio big time this spring. I’m gathering photos and photographing my work for a catalogue raisonné (
Gotta begin somewhere.
So although my art is still free, is there anyone out there willing to donate $100 to cover the cost of gesso and paints for Rose and I to finish our last two collaborations, and also afford me another week (maybe two) of keeping below the poverty line? The money pays for supplies and you get the painting gratis (local pick up only). It also cheats a Donald Trump out of additional funding to kill another human being. I think it would look nice on a wall, and its story will never get old as long as I’m still breathing. I believe that having an artist in your life is a positive good. And to hang one of his paintings acts as a liaison to that relationship. As a bonus, he or she might be the avant-garde—out in front of what’s coming. The canary in the coal mine. The Nostradamus of your children’s children’s trials and smiles. Either way, it’s still a colorful painting in a drab and stale room, sparking along the edges, a million miles away.
P.S. Conformity Noise will also be featured in a TEDx presentation by Damian Schofield on the SUNY Oswego campus, Friday, March 6, from 2-5 p.m. I’ll be in the audience averting my eyes. I just hate the feeling when people look at my art. I know they’re all judging my bald top and chicken legs. Get your tickets!
It will also be live-streamed on earth!
P.P.S. If there aren’t any takers/givers on the donation idea, the painting is still free to anyone willing to do a two-minute video interview for a movie in the works.
P.P.P.S. The video below is an interview of me from 2022. I am gloss-coating Conformity Noise with a little brush.
