December 31, 2020

I think more than usual, people are waking up today looking back on the year in absolute awe. How did we make it? I turned 65 this year, and it surprised me to no end. How did I get this far? How did I survive this long? You feel thankful, and a bit apprehensive, noting the ages of people who died this year and calculating how many more years that would have been for me, that's me dead in five years, that's in three years, God love them, if I were that person I'd live twenty-five more years. Let's not forget the knee surgery I had that has both humbled and humiliated me. For the first time in our lives my wife has to walk more slowly so I can keep up. Talk about feeling like an old dog.

But it makes you also feel even more grateful for being alive. Every bit of work I had lined up, every bit of ground that I laid in 2019 in order to make money or advance my art....gone, in a matter of a day. My first solo show, cancelled. All my commercial work, dried up. Theater? Gone, but even though one of my plays was a semi-finalist at the Eugene O'Neill Theater Festival this year, I really haven't made any theater since late summer 2017 anyway. And it makes me grateful, maybe, for the pandemic, odd as that sounds because I finally started doing studio art again, something I've been wanting to do for a very long time. I mean, I would be making theater, my own theater--living the dream!--and I'd be thinking of paint-splattered hands and palette knives. I love working with palette knives; like painting with ice skates. I found theater so constrictive, the artists are constrained in their disciplines. Yeah a playwright might also act, and maybe even direct, but it's rare. And you'd never see, for example, something as weird as a playwright/set designer or a light designer/actor. They just don't think in terms of mulitdisciplinary work. It's as if they've never heard of installation art, and I think that pretty much sums up how I approach theater, as one giant installation. (Imagine telling an installation artist they can't design and build the installation, light it, write and record the soundscape.) And when death and despair is all around you, everywhere in the news, and Trump and his loyalists are set on destroying civilization, what else to do but create? I keep saying, you can't keep a creative person down.

So, since about April, I think I've single-handedly kept Blick from going bankrupt. With the nice weather we had this spring, I worked on an old table on the front porch, and when the weather got bad, I commandeered the kitchen table. Sue has been wonderful and understanding. If I have a painting going, we'll now eat Japanese-style, on our knees, at the coffee table in the middle room. And while I wish I had studio space where I could work bigger and could use spray paint, well, you have to always look on the bright side and working in the kitchen means you're next to the refrigerator and the coffee pot.

What does all of this mean? What is that question even asking? Always looking for meaning. Right now I'm happy just to be playing. Artists should always go out of their comfort zone, and I'm certainly doing that. Artists should push themselves and I'm certainly doing that, too. Ten years ago I was in grad school and after that it was the fat years of forming theater companies, being supported by grants, getting residencies. I doubt painting will lead me to comparable heights (you do note the sarcasm, right?) and I'm glad for that. I've always been able to write (and photograph). Painting is something I'm doing with very little experience, without a very much hope of success, except maybe of course my own happiness. And I think my lack of training is an asset. I'm training myself not to get depressed when I look at the low number of followers I have on Instagram, or when I get only a handful of likes. Something that killed theater for me was how commercial it all got, worrying about ticket sales and clicks and insurance. If I don't get a lot of followers, a lot of likes, it lets me work quietly, by myself, without any noise. No noise. That's what happens when I paint. It blots out the noise.

This is how it starts. This is what the first hours into a painting look like. I have an idea, but I don't know how to get there. So I just...do anything. Today I laid down some lines, in charcoal and pencil, using carpenter tools. And then I started laying down a base, but didn't like it, so got out the old trusty palette knives and started scraping and shoving. And it started to get there but my lack of talent and experience makes the going slow. But today I learned a lot. A lot of what might be the beginning of a JGF painting (just like my friends like to refer to a JGF play or story, filled with oddball characters and weird twists and turns of the plot, and death, lots and lots of death.)  I think that's all I want for now: I just want to be left alone so I can get better at painting and discover what a JGF painting is.