Friends Getting Dead 2026. Acrylic on canvas, 64 x 64"
We have finished our fifth collaboration painting while a Saint Patrick’s Day blizzard blows away happy thoughts of spring. Oswego is a hard place for the artist. Somewhat better for self-flagellating monks and their pet cats. It’s a widely known, though mostly concealed fact, that modern people love their cats better than their friends, and they just abhor the monks. Artists are mostly monks with lusts rarely burdened by the guilt of an underperforming will. Aside from the exuberant love-making, the best artists, I believe, are better monks than the monks. Like a less bashful Saint Francis or Francesca, proudly stoking his id and making great art. Artists should seek a loose community of other unmade monk-artists, if just to pass the hair-shirt around the communal fire. Oswego is the perfect summer and fall climate for the alone-togetherness of working painters. The rest of the year is a dark frigid outpost of hell.
Now being (and remaining) a married artist in Oswego is a rare make of monk indeed. And waking up still happily married after 26 years is like finding loose diamonds in the junk drawer. I won the lottery. Rose did not, though she plays it everyday like a scratch-off junkie. She appears content as breadwinner, having fed my delusions of art with financial security while I raised children and kept house.
But now, at the onset of eldership, our lives are changing. Patience is waning with work and time. The repetition of daily life has got us by the sneaks. In winter the problems exacerbate rather than hibernate, because we don’t turn off and slow down like the rest of Oswego Animalia. We think we’re still part of the social stream, wide awake, sunny and alive—when we are practically cadavers out shopping for cheese, and it’s already dark before the sun goes down. This loose, nay, pretend right living among other condemned humanoids is an illusion. Folks in San Luis Obispo do not suffer winter like Oswegonians. Even the homeless there can hear birds singing from an underpass. Homeless people in Oswego seek a working furnace or freeze to death. Rose and I have become slaves to our routines, which are no longer uplifting, and more like the hypothermic sleepiness of slowly freezing to death. The problem intensifies because I am an artist-monk bringing notice to our situation every day. I am seeing what lies ahead for those who stay behind following routine without contentment. Quiet lives of desperation for each winter of our discontent—which is every winter in Oswego after the children leave the nest. Unless… Unless…
We are able to still dream dreams that might be realized someday.
Enter Ron and Rose taking on their new roles of visionary marriage counselors. We promised to work together on a series of large paintings this winter, ones to sell, to give us hope that we can break out of the slave mentality sooner than later. Paint together to imagine change while staying put. Collaborate like we did long ago, during the discovery phase of a new relationship, choosing the insecurity of life, without a clue as to what tomorrow would bring. Those who get old in the traditional manner, know exactly what tomorrow will bring. That is precisely not art. I no longer want to live like a retired man who paints, while waiting for Rose to retire from a job that has become a rapidly replicating cancer of routine. Still, we need an income if we wish to remain married. Compromise will find a solution eventually, and together we have initiated the process with these paintings. You can help our freedom by finding us some walls to hang them on. Preferably walls within a ten mile radius of clumping millionaires. Even the rich want to be married, I’m sure of it. They will get the concept, adore the story, and pay us for our time, art and vision with the purchase of these beautiful paintings.
So I am counting on readers to find a gallery that will kickstart a dream to kick out the repetition.
Process from the latest. One more to go and then spring!
