Happiness is a New Painting

I read a meme on Facebook the other day, “Do something every day that makes you feel glad to be alive.” I thought back over my life for the answer. Whether I was doing well or down in the dumps, had money or was scrambling to meet my bills, the one thing I did that always made me feel glad to be alive was paint.

I have been a painter all my life. When I was a schoolboy I won a coloring contest sponsored by the local newspaper and remember my mother taking me up to the editorial offices in that big building to get my prize – a coloring book and full set of crayons. I spent many fun hours staying within the lines and balancing color compositions. I would cut the drawings out with scissors and arrange them on poster boards as collages.

In art school we were tasked to create all sorts of visual images out of any materials we were bold enough to employ. We learned how to stretch canvas and linen over wood supports. You roll out the material, lay the rectangular stretcher on top and cut around the perimeter with scissors. A good pair of heavy scissors is essential for this work. You then start in the middle of the widest side, staple the canvas to the back of the frame, then go opposite and bring it taut. You next do the ends and work from the center to each corner, stretching and stapling as you go. You trim away the extra material with scissors, then prime the front and edges and when it dries you are ready to sketch and paint.

After college, I was tired of being indoors and started painting houses and hanging wallpaper. Being in the fresh air improving the look of someone’s home with the birds chirping and the wind tossing your hair was a great relief from the stuffy classroom. And when you were done you could stand back and feel like you made a real impact on the look of the neighborhood.

Installing wallpaper in a bathroom was a different story. Each style of paper has its own unique “repeat,” the distance between patterns you had to carefully line up along the seam. Like laying tile, I found it best to start in the middle of a wall so if the architecture was not perfectly plumb or square, the noticeable effect would be less than if you started at one side and went across. You use scissors a lot cutting and trimming each piece before adding the glue, or if its pre-pasted, running it through a water bath. You also use a straight edge and a utility knife to cut overlapping seams, notch around socket plates, lights and other fixtures. Hanging wallpaper is an art onto itself and requires both creativity and technical skill.

In Miami I became a licensed painting and weatherproofing contractor and ran a crew of guys who painted restaurants, retail shops, hotels, and shopping centers. As they sprayed the walls and cut in the windows, I would always do the fine detail work. We did a TGI Fridays once where just the painting took up 105 pages in the architectural specifications. Three types of gold powder were required I mixed with varnish to paint the inside domes of the phone booths. The foil wallpaper had a tricky 42-inch repeat and had to be double cut perfectly to get the flamingos to line up. Scissors and lots of razor blade exchanges in the utility knives were essential.

I also worked as a magazine editor and art director. Laying out the photos, ads and copy in those days required fine cutting the images and text block then pasting them down with hot wax onto lined sheets. Scissors did the rough work but to cut 1/64” lines required a sharp eye and new razor blade in the utility knife. As a graphic artist my skills evolved away from physically cutting and pasting as computers entered the scene and art programs were developed like Adobe Photoshop, Pagemaker, Illustrator and InDesign.

I was always drawn to creative jobs that paid less money but were more rewarding to me aesthetically, and I always made time to paint. I experimented with different materials from wood to plexiglass to stainless steel which required an epoxy undercoat to get the paint to stick. I used concrete adhesive on heavy canvas so plaster would adhere on a painting titled “Ideals of Democracy Splitting the Iron Curtain.” The plaster became a section of the Berlin Wall painted with graffiti as it ascended into a section of chain mail taken from a fireplace to represent the iron curtain I cut with a heavy pair of tin snips. A wedge of native oak covered with a photo of Poland’s Solidarity leader Lech Wałęsa was attached with screws as it pushed down to separate the chain mail. A halo of democratic ideals carved into the blue-sky painted plaster emanated outward from the wedge: Expression, Opportunity, Representation, Dignity, Equality, Liberty and Tolerance. I painted this a year before the Berlin Wall was torn down.

Sometimes a painting will flow right out of you and is completed in a matter of minutes or hours. Other times you start with an idea that keeps evolving as you go, and you paint over a canvas many times. I did a one-man show in Austin titled “War Stories” that contained eight paintings, each one symbolically encapsulating historical struggles in a geographical area of the world. “Candle in the Wind” about the Chinese revolution came easily, as did “A Sea of Heads,” a historical representation of the days of Vlad Tepes and “Midnight in Moscow” where the only honest deal to be had in black market post-communist Russia was under the golden arches where a Big Mac was selling for $10 US.

Trying to create a visual representation of the situation in the Middle East with the disparate political, spiritual and economic systems was challenging. I first cut out newspaper clippings I stuck on the canvas and painted around. But that proved too simplistic and incomplete. I next painted the countries of North Africa to show their proximity, but that too was not sufficient to explain the history and the modern exigencies related to oil.

Then it dawned on me. I went to the fabric shop and bought heavy red sackcloth I cut with scissors in the shape of a robe I glued to the canvas in the center. I then adhered wood and a coil of barbed wire around an empty container of motor oil. I title the piece “Oil Cloth” as it gave a succinct visual summary of activity in that area.

The great thing about painting is you get immediate visual feedback about what you have done. It is the same whether you are painting a landscape on a small canvas board, an abstract on a large stretched canvas, several large panels in a series, or even a large wall mural. I designed and painted a mural in Los Angeles on a wall sixty feet long and sixteen feet high incorporating philosophical themes with supernatural images a couple years before Spielberg made Close Encounters.

I did another mural ten feet tall by 110 feet long that curved around the top wall of a country club restaurant in Austin with a Texas theme, showing cattle drives and the Alamo. Murals are seen by more people than paintings in homes, but the joy is in the creation itself. If people resonate with the work their joy is a bonus.