The Painting I’m Avoiding

I’m avoiding a painting right now.

I’ve got it sketched out and ready to go but I guess I’m not quite there. I’ve been planning this one for over a year, painting it in my mind, telling myself a story about it and trying to figure out what it means.

When I graduated from UC Davis in 2003, my painting professor told me I couldn’t paint.

After three years of obsessively making art, those words were devastating.

What hurt wasn’t that he was wrong.

It was that he was right.

I had spent years focused on ideas while neglecting the fundamentals of painting.

Then he said something I’ll never forget.

He told me I had ideas worth saying.

He told me that if I learned to paint, I could become a great artist.

Somewhere inside me I think he said, “You could be one of the greats.”

Maybe that’s just what I want to believe.

I went through so many emotions in that moment. Fear, disappointment, shame, embarrassment, rejection and then just anger.

You say I can’t paint?

Well, I’m going to teach myself to paint then.

The reality is you can’t learn it all in college. I think what I did get was art history and a whole lot of theory.

But I was too wrapped up in what I knew to understand what I needed to learn and thankfully, I had a teacher who finally gave it to me straight.

I think he saw me working on the wrong things over those three years. I wish he’d said something sooner, but maybe I needed to flail around for a bit before the lesson would hit me.

I wish I had taken more classes and learned to paint then, but I was done with college and moving into the working world.

So even though I worked on my art every day, it wasn’t my priority anymore.

I didn’t have the same free time to work and develop because I needed a job to pay bills.

I started painting with watercolors.

Little abstract experiments letting the paintings talk to me and tell me what they wanted to do.

I learned to control my mediums better and also let go.

It was during this time that I came up with an idea called Confessionalism.

I would write directly on my paintings. Honest stream-of-consciousness diary entries about my hopes, dreams, fears, and insecurities.

Nothing was off the table.

I juxtaposed these naked thoughts with images of naked women.

Classless images that were purposely confrontational because I needed people to feel uncomfortable if they were going to see my truths displayed on the canvas.

Those paintings eventually became the word portraits I’m known for, so it’s sort of a full-circle moment for me to be doing another Confessionalist piece now in the style of my word portraits.

But instead of a naked woman, this one will be a self portrait.

It will be about my struggles with alcohol over the years.

I’ve been sober for 511 days now.

That’s a good stretch of time.

But 511 days don’t really mean anything if I go back to drinking.

There is an anxiety wrapped around this painting.

In 2011 I took my first shot at being a full-time artist.

I’d just created my first word portrait, I had the abstract cities, and another series about balance that I thought was really interesting.

But I fell on my face hard.

My parents kept urging me to paint portraits, but I thought they were too simple.

I wanted to be an abstract artist.

But I wasn’t good at painting.

And abstract art is all about the paint.

So I got out the old oil paints for the first time since college.

I painted a series called #SelfMe.

The paintings were better than what I did in college and I think the idea was ahead of its time.

It was about the destructive, performative narcissism of social media.

But my painting still wasn’t there.

I was still an idea guy.

I think that’s why this painting scares me.

For twenty-two years I’ve been trying to become the painter I wanted to be when I walked out of that critique.

Not because I wanted to prove my professor wrong.

Because deep down I knew he was right.

This painting feels different than the others.

Maybe because it’s a self portrait.

Maybe because it’s about alcohol.

Maybe because it feels like all these different threads of my life are coming together in one place.

The confessional paintings.

The word portraits.

The years spent learning to paint.

The failures.

The 511 days.

All of it.

I think in the last two years my painting has improved dramatically.

I still have a very long way to go, but for the first time I feel like my professor wouldn’t be telling me I don’t know how to paint.

Maybe that’s why I’m avoiding this painting.

Because once I start it, I have to find out if I believe that too.