Acrylic On Canvas: Peaceful Winter, Late Winter Of 1999

This is one of the first paintings I ever did of my adolescent years. For this reason, it's of course lacking somewhat in verisimilitude because of my lack of technique. And, because of this, unfortunately, this painting really did fail to do what I had intended for it to do. It instead, quite ironically, reflected a lot of other meaningful ideas. I was, however, so discouraged by it when I initially did it, I almost threw it away. My friend Melissa rescued it from that destiny, and kept it for many years, until she returned it to me when I was ready to have it again. She's a very, very, very, very, very good friend.

As I intended it, this painting was supposed to be a true reflection of what I felt was a place and event from a past life, the early turn of the last century. This was supposed to be a man I knew, barn storming somewhere in the mid-west probably between 1910 and 1925. The painting was supposed to reflect not only this memory, but almost appear to have been painted in that era. Whether I wanted it to be convincingly old looking or simply a tribute to the time period, this painting did neither. When color-copied at Kinkos in order to give a copy to the person in this life I felt was the subject matter of the painting, the copier attendant laughed. "It looks like a cartoon!" he said. And, indead, it does.

So, we could blame my lack of technique on the supposed "failure" of this painting to look at all realistic. Or, we could realize that alternatively the fact it is cartoon looking is meaningful in and of itself. I was extremely frustrated as a painter trying to do this, what having no real skills and desparate to convey a message. This negativity partially I think contributed to the problem. But this painting, really, never was about the scene itself: the place, or the event. This painting was about the person: seemingly sitting perpendicular in his supposed bi-plane. The man at Kinko's, and other people as well, either through lack of cultural knowledge, or from the artistically misscommunicating aspects of my work, fully miss the fact that the subject of this painting is supposed to be barn storming: a dare-devil, albeit dangerous act, where the pilot flies his plane through barns and other inappropriately narrow passages. He is not, in fact, killing himself while flying.

And yet, I myself believed that this subject in his past life did kill himself, eventually through other means. He did it in either the late 1930's or early 1940's. This painting, ironically, very much looks like something out of that time period: a cartoon almost.

And in the way that a cartoon is usually sort of a joke, lines on paper, often with color, reprinted a hundred times over in newspapers or comic books to be sold for pennies, so does that reflect so much of flippant quality of how he viewed life at that time. At least, in my perspective.