It Is Already Happening
This year, 2021, is the first year that I have been selected to all three major shows of the Oil Painters of America. In one of those shows, the National show, my painting was awarded an honorable mention in the figurative category (there are two awards per category: the winner and the honorable mention). But this is not about that.
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I can’t show you where I began, as almost all of my early work was destroyed in a house fire. All of my photographs of the work were destroyed, but if I were to show you, you would see the very average efforts of a beginning painter with no teacher.
For example, I didn’t know how to mix darks, so I used the darkest color on my palette - ultramarine blue - for all my darks. My colors were chalky, my surface was thin, my shapes were blobs. I was enamored with the tubes, so I had many colors that I didn’t need. I spent hours googling the pigments to learn more about them. (I mean hours standing in the art supply store while googling them. I’m that guy…)
I had the standard problems of someone figuring it out on their own. All the while, I was getting many art magazines - American Art Collector, Plein Air Magazine, the Western Art publications - and devouring the images and articles. I would pick up bits and pieces and try to weave them into my little quilt of knowledge, but a cruel lesson is that one cannot use information that they are not ready for.
After flipping through one of those magazines, I saw an advertisement for a book that had a painting of a beautiful home in the snow. My wife loves snow imagery, so I thought I’d try a tiny copy of that painting. A 5x7 panel with no idea on how the rough surface would not allow fine detail, no idea on how to thin paint, no idea on how to get darks or lights or anything. The advertisement was for Richard Schmid’s Landscape book. No idea who he was. It was finished, framed, and given as a Christmas gift. Afterward, it hung by our bed.
Eventually and around the same time, I got Richard Schmid books as gifts and I read an article that happened to mention how to get darks. Life changing. Schmid’s books were everything. I got the special editions of every one. Signed with prints. Beautiful. So full, so much information and experience, so many examples broken down into steps I could follow, yet the wonder was not destroyed. The perfect set of books for someone like me. If I still had them, they would be just as important.
During all of this, I had discovered art classes at the “local” art store - Plaza. I joined a few classes led by Gayle Levee, who, as a trained professional artist, spoke clearly and did a really good job of guiding each person from where they were to somewhere better. Looking back, while I’m sure I received a lot of technical information, what I remember most is her saying, “Painting is a language.” We need to be clear as to what we are trying to say so that we can say it clearly. I think of that so very often.
I believe my first workshop was with Jason Saunders. “Workshop” here being defined as working outside from life, as opposed to a “class” which is carried out indoors and over time.
Jason Saunders gave me so much, yet he didn’t have much to say to me. He spent most of his time with other participants, but when he came over to me (he’d have to find me because I’d be on a fringe somewhere), he would be so encouraging. He kept mentioning my compositions. Once, he came over to find a panel that I had thrown to the ground and asked me what that was. I mumbled something about failure (I was so mad at myself), and he said, “That’s why you are going to be a great painter.” I did not know what to say. I had failed, but I had known that I failed and still started again.
Since that day, several professionals - people whose names you would know and who make their living selling their creations - have asked if I aimed to be a professional. (They have to ask because there is no external reason to believe that that is my goal. I don’t try to sell, I don’t seek representation, and I don’t introduce myself as a painter - definitely not as an “artist” and I maintain a full-time job). One artist (who you know FOR SURE) looked in my eyes and said “You are a great painter.” I have never known what to say. I have never seen what they saw. Another person (who you would know FOR SURE) recently gave me so much encouragement. He said, after seeing me at Plein Air South and speaking a little with Dawn Whitelaw (don’t even get me started with that luminary) that I don’t need more workshops, commented on my mark making, arrangements (design), and choices in general. He wasn’t saying I had arrived. He was saying that I was at a point where I needed to be scooted out of the door, over the threshold, and into the world - that there comes a point where teachers give less and less in return for the time spent with them, and a person on a path eventually needs to get going on their own - that they could stand and walk - and that they should - right now. Even as I type this out, it seems like they were talking to other people, but I know they weren’t. I don’t know what that means, but I’m putting it down for the record.
Since then, I have joined workshops and instructional opportunities from other “local” painters - mainly through my association with the Chestnut Group. I have learned much more than I can prove with paint. I have in my head all I need, but my hands need to catch up. I need to make the paintings I need to make. I need to fail at making those paintings. I need to get it into my marrow that failures and questions are the stairs by which we climb, and that constraints generally make us better. It wouldn’t hurt to celebrate the highs a bit more, also.
Here is a list of accomplishments that I can remember:
2021 Oil Painters of America Eastern Regional
2021 Oil Painters of America Summer Salon
2021 Oil Painters of America National Show
2021 Oil Painters of America National Show Figurative Honorable Mention
January 2021 Best Nocturne, PleinAir Salon
2020 Oil Painters of America Summer Salon
2019 Oil Painters of America Eastern Regional
2019 Oil Painters of America National Show
2019 Salmagundi Club Non-Member Show
2018 Oil Painters of America Summer Salon
2017 Oil Painters of America Eastern Regional
2017 Oil Painters of America Eastern Regional Honorable Mention Wet Paint Competition
2015 Tennessee Top Ten
If you knew where I started, why I decided to try to learn to paint, under what circumstances, you would be shocked. I had no business picking up oil painting, and now I am only 2 National shows away from being rejected for Signature membership in the OPA.
That is awesome. Unbelievable. Praiseworthy. Fleeting. Made of echoes. Distant.
We toil alone. I remember showing up to my parent’s land to paint many times with the weight of the world on my shoulders (from terrible circumstances almost too big to comprehend), unloading my stuff, setting up, and the thin strength I had mustered just to get in the car and SHOW UP fractured and broke. I would barely get my easel set up before breaking down weeping. Just me. In a shady space. Dying inside. Then - voices.
“It was meaningless to show up there believing I could paint. Clearly, I can’t paint. Clearly nothing will come of it. You are wasting time and money you literally do not have. What did you think? That you would come out here, make a painting that people would like, and you’d get applause? Vanity! Your life is crumbling are you are here wasting your time, living as though nothing is happing, that all is peachy. Selfish. Self-centered. This is all for nothing. People won’t even want your panels when they find them in a white-trash yard sale. Sweatbands from the 80’s are worth more than your efforts will ever be. Why aren’t you doing more? That’s right. Because you can’t. You have no skills. You might as well take whatever menial job you can, because your best days are done. Your life is all but over and here you are in a pasture playing with colors like a little kid.”
Suffering - actual suffering, not artistic anguish - was integral to my growth as an individual and as a painter. All those voices quoted above won many, many battles against me, but I kept showing up. (I still can’t articulate why, but Purpose remained a cloudy notion inside me.) In fact, I’d say the voices won every battle except one. The hand at my back was always there, pressing. Sometimes it pressed me down to my knees, other times it lifted me to my feet, but it was the silent strength that ushered me through the crushing weight of the vocal throng.
I was a teenager when my aunt asked my dad to help watch a field that she wanted to set on fire. Her intention was to improve that field. It didn’t look like it during or after the fire, and I’m sure the rabbits and other animals that were there saw nothing positive about the act, but the field came back greener than ever. Fires consume and fires purify. I once stood in a place black and ashen, but there was another season coming and the discovery that some people are pyrophytes.
We toil alone in the hopes that others will like what we do and pull us up, but that is unlikely. All of those professional painters who lifted me up with their words cannot paint for me, envision for me, walk for me, pay attention for me, or overcome difficulties for me. They cannot beam their experiences over to me. The path that I am on is one that I must choose to stay on. It is easier to not paint, to try less, to become a Netflix expert, news expert, a more involved uncle, cousin, son, husband, but that hand in my back presses me to paint - at least for now. I may lay it down one day, but not just yet.
I say all of this wishing I could show you all of my early efforts. Despite very real struggles and so, so many failures, here I am. I don’t make any money with painting. I don’t have a list of people begging me to teach them. The only apparent successes are listed above (a fairly short list for a dozen years of trying). BUT Someone will read this. Someone else may even appreciate it. Someone else may even comment about it. Another person may see themselves here and be encouraged to get up, get on with it, stand in fires, outlast them, burn brighter. I want the reader to see what comes before accomplishment - even if modest: mostly failure, disappointment, good advice we’re not ready for, and persistence. Persistence - not the set-your-jaw-and-try-harder kind, but the seated, listening, prayerful kind. I do not mean that I mustered up strength and tried again and again, and by such strength I overcame hardship. I mean that persistence was like an invitation to join something already in progress! I just answered “yes.” Usually in a raspy, thin voice.
If you only let one thing sink in from this, let it be the bolded statement above.
I wasn’t burdened with the responsibility of strength or cunning to relieve the pain. I was invited to something already happening. You don’t know what you are capable of if you are depending on yourself alone. Sound upside down? Our accomplishments are not ours alone. We are built for relationships. I am the one that practices, who enters shows, who tries, and who may receive recognition from time to time, but there is an unseen assembly of all those who have fed us and led us that lines the sides of the path. It looks like we are alone, but when we raise our voices to pray and sing (when we show up to paint or enter shows)
in any circumstances
we join our voice to the crowd who has been cheering us since the beginning - our people. That is bigger than painting. That is more important than art income. I want good paintings. I want art income. More than anything, however, I want to come to know more the One who calls us from the wilderness, from our numb hands and deaf ears, from gazing at our own reflections. I want to know more about the Source of this:
If I speak in the tongues of men and of angels, but have not love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal. And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but have not love, I am nothing. If I give away all I have, and if I deliver up my body to be burned, but have not love, I gain nothing.
Love is patient and kind; love does not envy or boast; it is not arrogant or rude.It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrongdoing, but rejoices with the truth. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
Love never ends. As for prophecies, they will pass away; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will pass away. For we know in part and we prophesy in part, but when the perfect comes, the partial will pass away. When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I gave up childish ways. For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face. Now I know inpart; then I shall know fully, even as I have been fully known.
So now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; but the greatest of these is love.
Here is the end. It has been a great year for my painting, but it is all for nothing if I don’t remember those who have helped me and spoken into my life. It is all for nothing if I don’t continue to answer, “yes.” It is meaningless if, while becoming a better painter I become a lost person. Hardship will do that to you. It will twist you. Find the One Who Is Calling. Sit at His feet. Listen. You may be shocked at how different He is. You may be frightened at how familiar. Either way, He is not who you think. He is not safe, but he is good.
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