Breakdown

            Early in my artistic development I was obsessed with permanence. As a teenager and a child I often felt as though I had no control or say in anything in my life. I was abused as a child and it contributed to an extreme lack of confidence, despite what my checks my cocky mouth might write now. I have never taken drugs due to my extreme need of control in every part of my body. Compounding this was a lack of anything in a formal spiritual foundation. I developed my own spirituality through the metaphors and symbolism I discovered in my art. It took decades before that language became something I could understand. So, how does one reconcile the value of their life and its meaning after their death when they are faced with no absolute guarantees after life? Legacy was part of my obsession with permanence. The only thing I ever felt of value in my life that was higher than the simple meaninglessness of my miniscule existence in the grand universe was my art. It tapped into something I did not fully understand, but felt was more eternal than me. It gave me a link to the past and the future. With a rather undeveloped philosophical understanding I convinced myself that my work had to have the physical ability to outlast me. This led me to laminating nearly everything. Several of my important childhood works had been lost. A flood in my new home had destroyed most of my early art school works. This assisted my paranoia. My new home gave me plenty of space I labored to fill. I created works, then horded them; sure that only I could properly care for them. My first love: I clung to her desperately, long past her expiration date.

  

 

            Eventually, that love left me, despite my claws in her. I was forced with another existential crisis I had to come to terms with. Nothing is permanent. My work began to reflect this. My garden projects took over as I became fascinated with the natural decay of materials. My house had become full of my hoardings and I was out of space. My art had never sold well, which meant I had to accept that creating was more important than what happened to the work afterwards. It was the journey, not the end that was important. This time in my life was the journey after my life altering divorce. After the initial depression I reveled in my new found freedom. I was rediscovering myself every day. I exploded with creativity and consumed more than a few people in the process. It was simultaneously destructive and creative at once. The entirety of the symbolic birth and death cycle repeated itself within me, through my hands constantly. 

 

            This former period was certainly a mark of evolution, but it was not my final form. I still had a foot in the past, and that was my connection to things. As a child, my mother eventually lost the ability to show love if it did not involve a thing, some object. My own shoplifting history adopted a similar habit; giving things rather than revealing myself to people. I struggled constantly with trying to be the honest, real person I did not know how to manifest and mirroring Americanized consumerist behavior. As an artist, I knew the value of putting meaning and symbolism into things. I took this too far, then got upset when others could not understand the importance of things. I tried desperately to distill myself into things. Eventually, after obsessing over the love who abandoned me, she also became a thing. My obsession did not center on her being an ever-changing being, but as being a vessel of emotion I tapped to create. It was not a good place to create from. Things did not have more meaning than people. At this point in my life, I had taken some rather far journeys. I learned that the experience and reflection on it was greater than the relics of the experience. Lisa had become a thing. My home was a thing. I filled it with things. Things left me as empty and as abandoned as people did. I began giving away a number of my possessions and former artworks. In this process I discovered more materials and supplies I had horded for so long that their rediscovery demanded instant creation, then letting go of.

            This period was a transition. After creating my way through the emotional overload of divorce, abandonment, new love, abandonment again, then the birth of my child I was left in a nihilistic void. If things didn’t have meaning, then what did? If I was just creating more useless things, then why create. Why own anything? I had made the conscious decision to stop drawing from the well of my ex-wife for inspiration. However, without her, without things, what was I to draw upon to create? And if I was not creating, what value did I have in this world? I entered an identity crisis period. Much of my art reflected a split composition, with two entirely different halves. My preoccupation with masks reached a pinnacle as I constantly tried to change my outward shell under the formless nature of my internal shifting mass. I became obsessed again. This time it was with clothes and costumes, most of them reflecting the chaotic split nature of my internal battle. In the process of not knowing what or how to create anymore, I created completely new forms of expression for myself. I experimented more. I even created some of my first works intended to be destroyed immediately after their creation. One such work, a pastel effigy of the monster my ex-wife has become in my head; I punched a hole in, then set on fire, in the presence of the two people who still mattered from that past life. The ceremony also included a costume, meant to represent that transition.

        My artistic curiosities began experimenting with nature and the ever changing works I could create within it. I experimented with how the world changes with time and how the objects (people, myself) within the world are changed. I took a number of decaying materials, most of which abandoned, like myself, then filled them with dirt and plants. I marveled how nature reclaimed and filled in the scars of our wasteful past. Even when nothing was within these vessels, the world provided something to fill them. Mine came in the form of my son, Alexander.

 

Of course, unexpected parenthood does not come without its own culture shock and I surely felt unprepared and inadequate for this task.  This fed my nihilism for a while. None of the things I owned meant anything. At this point in my life I had built my home, the one I retained from my marriage, into a museum of me. But, there was so much in that home that was pure artificial adornment. It was not me, just a covering, allowing me to hide from the real world. It was useless armor. I went shifting back and forth between abandoning my entire life for the road, suicide, retraction and clinging, and utter despair. I was at an uncertain point in college and my career, and my great followup love to my marriage had also failed. How could I create a good life for my son, when I could never create one for myself? How could I make him strong without the horror I had faced?

 

            Then, life smacked me on the ass, again. I got arrested for shoplifting, falling back into a former coping mechanism. I was in a suicidal, depressed crisis. I had just fucked my entire life. But, it turns out, I had made some smart decisions in my past, trying to be better than this. They helped me to convince several legal systems that I was not a lost cause. It also forced me to face the reality of my mania and the only outcome of my criminal history. My son deserved me as a parent, not me as my parents. It started slowly, with a realization that I had to decide on an end game for college. My criminal mistakes and over-extension of college had left me financially crippled. I could not provide for my son. In coming up with my end game, I realized that my entire former life was coming to an end. My legacy, from this point on, was always to be moving from this point. My home had served as a strong and often beautiful barricade to my future. It enabled me with nearly endless art possibilities. It was its own art project and indistinguishable from the art that had left it. I had built it into everything I had ever wanted in the past, but it was not what I needed for the future. My son is.  My home is too anchored in a past I cannot drag around. It was time to leave, properly. I am selling my home, marveling at each scar I left on it creating myself, as I do.

 

 

            In making this decision, my emptiness begin to be filled. I wanted to spend my life not building or hording things, but people. My son needs my maintenance, not this home. In reflecting on my time here, I realized how many people had come into my home to build things with me, and in the process I got to help build them a little. Ultimately, my obsession with things reduced them to things. I lost touch with my true meaning for ever asking others to join in my creation. We are creating life, not things. Experimentation and refinement have once again regained their mark in my artwork, as I am delighted to find new ways to represent this new life I am moving towards, while also acknowledging and respecting the past. It’s still there, but it’s time I used it to step up, instead of hiding under it. 

 

           I am breaking down the elements of who I used to be and rebuilding them into a better man; a man worthy of being called Dad.