Time God's Bestowal, Acrylic & ink & graphite on 3'x4' canvas, 2024

The Conceit

I did have the idea, as far back as 2022, for an illustration cramming my son Lo together with as many cartoon influences as I could possibly muster. I ended up pushing it back again and again, sure that it wasn't something I was really interested in doing, at least in my typical digital pixel art medium. Still, I couldn't brush it away. There was something there. Opportunity struck, though, when my mother came nagging about a couple things. "When are you going to paint again?" - I hadn't painted anything in around fifteen years - and "you used to just fill up these sketch pages when you were little, just crazy nonsense and I was like "what is going on in that crazy skull of yours?", I still have them!" What "happened to" my art, of course, was just that it took other forms. The method was never really all that different, to be honest. My music took the form of the dramatic and cinematic desperately stretched to cartoonish heights. My small-following failed game franchise paraded its own corpse around in a self-referential black hole. Still, I knew this time she was right. They were sending me back to college to turn my shit around. (Read up on the Art Institutes fiasco if you're curious…) They deserved something in return. A vision of just that something was forming. Coming out of a very dark period in my life, to be honest, I deserved something too. I had every confidence, like no other project before it, that this pursuit was going to be worth it.

Prototyping

I knew from the time I bought the canvas, saying to HELL with it, I'm going to buy the biggest one here!, and then struggling to fit it into my car in the Trader Joe's parking lot, that the soul of this thing was going to be dependent on me re-learning all of this, from scratch, on my own. If I wasn't scared shitless by the prospect of the next step, I knew I wasn't being bold enough. Each session was a focused meditation on some inner work I was doing, in conjunction with my therapy for PTSD. I discovered the painting's True Name under the umbra of the northern Total Eclipse. I primed the canvas to the sound of Jacob Collier's haughty talks on creativity, the Gesso was primed with my own ritual blood. I met with gurus. Each session after that, I danced under Gnossis to the sounds of music both dear and new, taking great care to listen to EVERY single recommendation from my hipster friends, the tones and notes and phrases and rhythms never failing to align perfectly with the brush strokes I was discovering were already on the thing, had always been there, etched into the fabric of the universe… Well ok, I may be embellishing a little. But why else would you be reading something I wrote? One thing I did to ensure I stayed within the rhythm of the practice was worth sharing, I think. I never "finished" the sketching step before the inking step, nor the inking step before the coloring step, etc. Each session, I was leaving something over from the previous step, forcing myself to take the thing from sketch all the way up to as far as color in a single session. The beginning was held in sight for as long as it could, Many prototypes were made as, from the first completed outline, I redrew each character from scratch when it was their turn to be filled in, mirrored in pages on my sketchbook. Before the brush could ever touch the canvas, I had to be sure I was holding the perfect image of their caricature freshly in my mind. What I had done was I committed, and renewed that commitment in each session, to risk it all at every step, communicating faith in my own ability that no matter how rough and hopeless it looked in the moment, that it would take shape, and it would continue to take shape time after time. The stakes only rose from there. This kind of work can only take so many erasures and revisions. The few times I did have to take an alcohol swab to it felt a bit like holding a match up to dynamite. Right up until the end - I could screw up the whole thing. And the "whole thing" was only getting bigger.

Finishing

Shpeeb is NOT a real WORD!!! WTF!!!

The Enduring Meaning: Art as Therapy

Painting this whole thing in an apartment bedroom, it didn't take long for it to become an impossible presence looming over me. At first it was mostly intimidating. The weight of responsibility was right there as I worked, or slept, or procrastinated or ravished supermodels in my twin bed. Am I giving it all I can? was the feeling day and night. Yet eventually, it became a stranger and stranger comfort. It became impossible to imagine it not there. And it had steadily become an unignorable monument. A testament to my dedication and, increasingly, capability. This single artifact was cementing every bit of faith in myself I was rediscovering, each and every time I wrenched a scrap from the jaws of misery and confusion. My therapist had no idea of this project until I showed her the final photo, and it's one of a few distinct moments I will seriously never forget. "Climb a mountain, don't tell a soul" is the saying.