What Lies Beneath

What Lies Beneath, 4″ x 6″, oil on canvasboard, $100

It’s been 6 months since I painted, and I didn’t even finish that painting. I got tired of it. I didn’t like the way I couldn’t post about it. I got busy. I got fat. I got tired. I got dull. I got a life. I didn’t get a life.

Secretly, though, I have to get beyond myself. I don’t really like showing my work. It’s scary. It’s like opening up my brain and REALLY letting people peek inside, maybe test the fit on the spark plug boot and blow some dirt off the manifold. I don’t like it. But, as I’ve said, if I want to do this – and I do – then I have to shut my fucking trap and get over myself.

Don’t we all?

So I’ve been seething, I’ve been Jones’in’, I’ve been building up this pressure until I couldn’t take it any more. This morning, I had a tube of Venetian Red on my desk. A really nice tube from Old Holland. I got it for myself around the December holidays (xmas, if you like  – I don’t). It’s been there, doing its thing… which is nothing, really, except the symbolism. We’re into symbols, aren’t we, silly humans. A symbol, a metaphor, a reddish brown bitch taunting me and mocking me.

I couldn’t take it. I had to do it. I’ve had no less than 4 paintings completed in my head in the past few weeks. That’s how I know it’s time. The paintings never really come out onto canvas how they are in my head, but that process itself is part of the magic of painting, the magic of poring through the vast recesses, the nether regions of the brain and unsetting the carabiners.

“What to call this one?” I thought. When I think that, I always remind myself that “red on white” is actually mentally retarded. So is “study with Venetian Red.” Who the fuck CARES about that shit? Nobody. It draws about as much passing interest as my dog shitting on the lawn. So reach down and really name your painting. Really give us some oomph, some gut-punching, soul-tearing name that’s likely to give you at least a whimper of a thought to everyone that’s evolved past Homo habilis.

I briefly considered a longer name, such as “bursting through from the depths” or “a torrent of pent-up desire breaches the surface” or something along that vein. But TOO wordy is also bad. You lose people after only a few words. People can’t even wait to get out of their cars before they’re fucking texting each other, for chrissakes. So I let the former ideas steep whilst I went out back and photographed the painting. True to form, that slush between the ears came up with “What Lies Beneath,” a more apt title hinting at the inner struggle of a calm countenance, a struggle that’s been raging beneath and just now burst to the surface. And that’s pretty close to how it is to go 6 months without painting for me.

This painting wasn’t a choice, it was a bursting through, a necessity, a respite, a power grab.