Teaching Myself how to paint....

When I was awarded a residency at Cite des Artes in the winter of 2006 I had three months to do whatever I wanted to do, in Paris....They gave me a studio next to a pianist and it had a great big paint splattered easel in it. The building itself was on the Seine facing Notre Dame but I was in the back of the building facing a large snow covered garden, it was beautiful! My live/work space was a white room with black curtains, so already I had two musical references going on there.

I walked a few blocks over to the Pompideau to see the Dada show. I remember being impressed with a Francis Picabia paining of a circular form with some words below it and his initials on the upper right hand corner, then I headed over to the Margiela boutique and as soon as I walked in they picked the needle up off of the opera record and put it down on “A Song for Europe “ by Roxy Music It began “
here by the Seine, Notre Dame casts a long lonely shadow “ I was kind of blown away that this song by my favorite band, that I first heard when I was 15 was forecasting the life I’d be living 30 years later. I figured that was enough content for a painting so I headed over to the art supply store and bought a blank canvas, paint and a palette knife.

I had been making drawings of a spiral that came out of me as I played a recording and the Picabia painting reminded me of one of my spirals so I bought black and white paint to make it look like a drawing and Paris got me thinking of Bernard Buffet’s palette knife paintings, So Finally I made a credible painting...

Gratitude

This whole Bluto project came into being very organically. I decided to give myself a year in the studio doing whatever I wanted to do each and every day. it wasn’t about coming up with a concept and executing it, it wasn’t about being critical before during and after... it was just about making what I wanted to make, for me. I made mistakes,  I came up with some very unsophisticated solutions and I learned that I was pretty talented, and I learned to own that….

 It turned out to be an opportunity for me to learn how to paint and to learn how to believe in myself on a whole deeper level, to believe that I am enough. It didn’t matter that I didnt go to the right school and that I never properly learned how to paint, I had amazing teachers in Minnesota who got me started and I continued learning rules and technique by trial and error over the course if my 40 year career.  On the Bluto work I was just painting the way I wanted to paint, with no formula to follow.  I’ve looked at a lot of paintings and I’ve seen a lot of styles that I like and I’ve felt a lot of particular painters hands in their work, and I wanted my paintings to look very handmade like they’re a record of the time that they were made, a record of their own making. And they were about Bluto but they weren’t about Bluto.  My childhood fascination with that cartoon character was a motivator but then using my adult faculties and going back and watching the cartoons I realized there was a lot more going on in them then I might’ve been aware of as a kid, one particularly fascinating aspect of it was the constant flipping of the good guy bad guy role, Both Popeye and Bluto are very versatile. This helped drive home the point that we are all capable of good and bad and very few of us are 100% one way or another. So it was a very productive two years,  it allowed me to fully and deeply forgive myself, to finally believe that I truly am enough .... and once you’ve forgiven yourself it becomes a lot easier to forgive others. Unburdening myself of all the resentments I had been accumulating and carrying around was a really nice gift to myself…thanks Bluto for Helping me learn that…..

Bluto The Surreal

Saturday I sat down at my kitchen table not knowing what I would draw, and I came up with this 12 x 9 in Drawing, Bluto's beard used to be mine, It's my hair

This one is called "Mighty Real " 12 x 9 inches

Movin' On Up 12 x 9 inches