The Verdict is In on the Emotional Success of My Alter Ego 2026. Oil on paper, 11 x 14"
The following quote from cousin Henry Thoreau sums up my feelings about Free Art Frees Art:
Not long since, a strolling Indian went to sell baskets at the house of a well-known lawyer in my neighborhood. “Do you wish to buy any baskets?” he asked. “No, we do not want any,” was the reply. “What!” exclaimed the Indian as he went out the gate, “do you mean to starve us?” Having seen his industrious white neighbors so well off—that the lawyer had only to weave arguments, and, by some magic, wealth and standing followed—he had said to himself: I will go into business; I will weave baskets; it is a thing which I can do. Thinking that when he had made the baskets he would have done his part, and then it would be the white man’s to buy them. He had not discovered that it was necessary for him to make it worth the other’s while to buy them, or at least make him think that it was so, or to make something else which it would be worth his while to buy.
I too had woven a kind of basket of a delicate texture, but I had not made it worth any one’s while to buy them. Yet not the less, in my case, did I think it worth my while to weave them, and instead of studying how to make it worth men’s while to buy my baskets, I studied rather how to avoid the necessity of selling them. The life which men praise and regard as successful is but one kind. Why should we exaggerate any one kind at the expense of the others?
—Henry Thoreau from Walden
I remember copying this passage into my journal when I was living in a rented basement right after college and my first daughter a toddler. Today, all my old journals are boxed up in what I call my studio, which is just another basement in a house I don’t own. After all these years, the only addendum I would add to dreams of yore, would be that during these final days of my existence I continue to walk the path I chose 35 years ago this autumn. Art and livable poverty.
The title of this post is monetary. I don’t think Americans can imagine a finality that isn’t monetary. Even their society of art wants its focus at bottom line to remain strictly monetary. So few look to art as a daily calling, like they would of the religious pilgrim, because Americans, along with inhabitants of other dying nations, make up a stupid, unimaginative brute force that rejects the creative person who lives each day with the vision of making life an art. He is the friendly enemy of federal capitalism and smiles while drinking its beer. What he desires, *if he is an artist *(which I believe amounts to a solar system beyond art-maker) is to be a lifelong pauper in love and good health. Anything more to aspire to in the creative life is a despised schtick of the monetary, ruinous of the right living art can manifest. If I wanted comfort and money as a means to an end, then why would I spend thousands of days and nights wringing my hands over art? There are more lucrative careers in the garbage-canning trade. Years ago I had an “in” in insurance. I didn’t take it because I wanted THIS, which is exactly what I have now. It won’t pay off because it never should have in the first place. Might as well claim, “I chose to be homeless and dumpster dive for the last thirty years, and now I expect to cash in”. Art practice is not money or a means to make it. Not that it can’t be done. It happens all the time. It’s just not my thing while I am a ward of the wife, and for me, (and mostly for her), that’s final. I’ve been picking over this art garbage for years and sleeping in the rain using a hat for shelter. Why stop now just because my body is old and I seek a cardboard box room with drier walls?
My living expenses from September 2025 to September 2026 were $18,604.34. That’s not even poverty according to my government ($15,600). And it never will be for me either, because I have earned the support that bolsters my practice. After the security of proper food, shelter, clothing and fuel, poverty is just a state of mind. It was right living that taught me so. 30 years of it. And for all you lovers of masochistic hard work for money, it wasn’t cheap. I’m flat broke and proud of it!
For the last two years I’ve made an effort to keep below the U.S. poverty threshold. Both times I succeeded for several months until travel and holidays got in the way. And, as I’ve mentioned before, I was never truly poor because my partner as a competent bread winner was there to bolster me in times of emergency. Happily, she shares with me the lifelong philosophy of alternative pathways to maintain couple equality. Needs are taken care of without much worry. It looks like we will be able to continue this way for the rest of our lives.
I began keeping track of my expenses when Israel began its Final Chapter of the Palestinians. For three years I have been in very poor communication among other people witnessing the same genocide. When it comes to mass slaughter funded and supported by our government, the people can be divided into two camps: Good Germans connected circa 1943 and Good Germans disconnected circa 1943. Both are complicit in the holocaust, deeply propagandized and marvelous deniers about it. I am the connected Good German circa 1943 who saw what he saw and should have gone underground to fight the United States, but chose to play a safe game instead and document it. It’s cowardice to the core, but also apathy because who really cares anyway? So bombs away! No matter how sick it makes me, and us.
Lately I have held a mirror to my face and its long list of financial failures, and every time I see a stranger staring back. That isn’t me at all! I am not making money because I am not making art. Not the art I should be making to make art make money. As soon as I aspire to the latter, the money will flow, but not while I’m alive. And yet, I simply do not care if I can’t support my process financially as long as Rose is here to bail me out. I am not another Horatio Alger capitalist who I would stab in the face if I had the chance. Painting is my religion and path to enlightenment, and I am a husband who abides. I believe with all my heart she would prefer an enlightened partner to a 59 year old dolt obsessing over the abstraction of to be or not to be financially. The patriarchy is dead. I’ve acquired a room with a view. I think it actually helps too that, in the macrocosm, I am a misanthrope. Other painters might desire money and fame. I want freedom to feel and express my disgust with humanity without anyone else needing to get involved. I believe this attitude will make me the richest, most famous artist ever. But I must begin to work on it today because I have failed at it ever since.
What does that entail?
I will go as deep underground as I can without losing the people close to me in order to dismantle the hold of contemporary art and culture, as well as most of society and its systems. I have put myself under house arrest with paints and a blog, self-chosen to be a confined pirate of art.
In the next couple weeks I will cancel all corporate social media including Youtube. I will stay on the crypto social platforms of Steemit, Blurt and Ecency because it is there and at Substack where I feel most digitally connected to people. I will find a professional photo/video app to upload paintings and their titles. I want the archive, without the desperate wannabe celebrity. I will make a couple corporate posts this week to steer interested parties to the False Consensus Effect so they can see and read me without an algorithm taking control. And then I will pull the plug on the corporitos once and for all.
So, back to the Thoreau quote. What am I getting at?
I chose writing and painting as a pastime through life knowing that it could never pay our bills, but would build a priceless archive of creative output. However, unlike the lawyer and the strolling Indian in the parable, I didn’t need to “weave arguments” or make baskets in order to survive. I married well, while still line cooking but having no idea where that would lead. All I can say is that Rose and I were living hand-to-mouth on wedding day, and have thrived ever since. In 2008, I quit cooking professionally and became the physical and emotional maid, cook and butler to the household. The children left the nest. Rose’s paycheck grew. I bought paints, published books and made exhibitions happen with her money. There were a couple years that I broke even, which just means I worked for free. Today one could say that I (we) actually pay society to allow me to work. Fine with me. I’ve always expected to pay for my plans. I have lived these creative years in the red, and will continue to do so until I stop breathing.
I think the majority of successful art stories are similar (life success, not financial) in that some functional support must have come from somewhere established. With that dependable anchor, prolific art-making was sustained, along with near-constant meditations on the wonderful, and will power and/or obsession became the unrefined fuel revving up the creator day after day making stuff nobody wanted. Basket after basket after basket. We are Free Art Frees Art artists if all we desire in the end is to make art our own, and not make the art market own us. You can pay me a pittance to hang a gesture of my practice on your wall. But I don’t need it because I have Rose. She’s better than a gallery too because I don’t have to wait in line petitioning her good graces. She doesn’t suggest how or what I paint, nor ever hold me back so as not to flood the market. I pity the modern gallery painter who never learned how to love well enough to beg. In a dog eat dog world, representation must be a bitch. I mean in the real sense of the word. Always the dog, begging for her bone.
I don’t want to spend the rest of my life trying to convince you to buy my paintings. I want to go underground willfully, and shut up making art so that I can make history— a sublime means to a nothing special end.
Do I contradict myself? Very well then I contradict myself, (I am large, I contain multitudes)
—Walt Whitman
I have been back home for a week after an emergency family visit to South Carolina where I was confined to a toilet seat making pastels in the quiet. Yesterday, I painted in series of threes just so I could get to my 20,000 goal quicker. But I’m done with that, for now. Here is an example:
Fish and Scarf #1 2026. Oil on paper, 11 x 14"
Fish and Scarf #2 2026. Oil on paper, 11 x 14"
Fish and Scarf #3 2026. Oil on paper, 11 x 14"
For the rest of autumn and winter I am going to stretch large canvases and keep a big side painting going while I practice my three a day. I might actually learn how to be with me again, without the Internet getting in the way. Like my grandchildren. Pure of heart, and art.