A Second Narrative

One hot day in the middle of a summer two decades ago I received my art degree in the mail. When it arrived I was either away at work, a bar job I got while in college, or was asleep, because I was in my twenties and worked at a bar. I didn't go to my graduation.

A few weeks prior I'd had my final critique with my photography professor and mentor. The meeting was supposed to be a review of the work I'd done during the independent study course I'd taken that year. What followed was a three hour meeting in which we didn't really talk about the art I'd made. Instead Masumi asked me what I was planning for my future and repeatedly told me "Go to grad school. Don't do anything else. Don't stop along the way. You need to go to grad school."

I had another important conversation that week. I told my boss that I loved working for him, loved my job, but even with all the hours I was working and all the cutting back I'd done I couldn't afford to pay my rent. I told him I wanted to keep working for him if he could help me figure out a way to stay. He made me a bartender.

So I didn't go to grad school. I became a bartender. I don't remember giving up on my dreams. I just took one little step away from them, one day at a time, each necessary.

At some point I convinced myself that this was what being a grown up was like. Art was something I used to do. It wasn't a career. Careers are serious, hard, and require sacrifice. So I sacrificed.

It took me ten years to reach my limit. Working at a restaurant when I was in my twenties felt exciting and adult. Working the same job in my thirties, when I wanted to own a house and start a family, felt different. I was tired of missing New Years, Mother's Day, Saturday nights, Sunday mornings. I'd had my head down for so long, taking one necessary step at a time, that when I finally looked up I realized I didn't know where I was going.

So I quit.

I started Wright & Rede. A place where I could be creative, but sell things. Serious things that people could use. Adult things. Not art. Practical things.

In doing so I had to learn social media. How to promote and market myself. I started documenting my work. Business stuff. Not art. I was selling a product.

But sometimes, when I had my camera out, the light would hit just right or I'd be driving my son home from preschool and we'd stop at a park. I'd bring my camera with me just in case there were some pictures I could take to help define my brand. Definitely not for making art.

Then another decade passed and now I'm making art. To be clear, I wasn't making art. I stopped, but now I was making art again. Which I wasn't doing before. Definitely.

And then.

Last night I was looking through all of those pictures. The ones I took because the light was nice. The ones I shot when I had my camera out. The ones to show my kids what I used to use when I made art.

There, hidden in with all the pictures I'd taken telling my narrative of Wright & Rede, was a second narrative. A story about a parent. Someone who stopped to watch the sunrise. Celebrated the bitter sweet moments of watching his children grow up. Knowing that these were moments we'd never be able to return to. Memories we were living in. Pictures where the light was just right, the composition was perfect, and it all came together with how it made me feel. When combined it made something more than the sum of its parts. Art.

I am an artist. I always have been.

Looking back now I can see an unbroken chain of pictures. Taken when my guard was down. When I thought they didn't matter. Just because. Capturing this fleeting feeling I have. To savor life, all the little quiet moments, because they are always slipping away and I can never have them back.

It has taken me twenty years to understand what Masumi was trying to tell me. Don't stop. Take it seriously. Take the next step, but in the right direction.

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A year ago on a sleet colored day in January, I was standing in my studio watching from the window as cold wind made waves in the winter browned lawns outside, and I was feeling lost.

At that point I'd been in business for ten years. Ten years of craftsmanship. Ten years of subverting that by sneaking a little art in there. A few less than ten years of realizing that was what I was doing, and a few years less than even that of realizing that's what I should have been doing to begin with.

I could feel the path I'd planned out for the year slipping away beneath my feet. It wasn't a bad plan. I was going to do a ten year retrospective. I'd pare down all the good idea's of the past decade and make little collections featuring each of them.

Old ingredients make for bad dishes.

The problem was that the work that had gotten me there wasn't the work that was going to get me to where I needed to go. The long arc of progress doesn't bend you back around to where you started.

In February I gave up on that plan.

The next few months were about making messy, intuitive work and then seeing if I could reign it back in. I didn't allow bad ideas. If I made something weird, ugly, or too far out from the work I was comfortable in making, I forced myself to finish it. It worked. Mistakes became seeds. Seed grew into ideas.

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I messed up a lot. I remember a particularly bad day when I accidentally cemented a leather tray to the wooden form I'd used to shape it. I gave up on the piece and tried to at least rescue the form, and in doing so cut a big gouge out of the wood, ruining the form.

At the same time I was churring out cyanotypes. From from the moment the midwestern sun finally peeked out in May through the deep red embers of October I made more work in a season than I have since college. My plan was to make a lot of work. I didn't care if it was good work. Just to make work and see what happened. I came up with three big concepts for collections that summer. None of them made it to fruition.

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I taught myself how to make leather bowls. The first bowl I made was a beauty. The next six months of bowls never lived up to that first one. All of them marked with lessons about what not to do along the way. Patience they whispered at me. This is an old art. Go slower.

By September I was sitting in my studio making beautiful bowls, trying not to think about how I didn't know what people would use them for. I wasn't making standard brown wallets. I'd stopped talking about the satchels and briefcases I'd spent years developing. You can't even eat out of them, these bowls.

In October I decided that the bowls were used to hold a person's memories. Memories of the person they were when they got it, and dreams of the person they're going to become. I haven't told anyone that until now. But it's what I think about when I watch people pick them up, feeling them to see if it's the right container for all that they were and all that they will be.

In November I poked my head out from the teetering stacks of images I'd made and realized I'd nothing to show for it. A bunch of half finished ideas. In the waning days of November I made one last collection. An entire body of work in just one week. It was about uncertainty, and anxiety, and the chaos of being a parent, and worrying about the future, and interruptions, and changing plans, and all the noise and static and frustrations, and in all that mess finding something beautiful. Something beautiful not despite all the chaos around it, but because of it. I think it's the best work I've ever made.

In December I broke records. I brought my work out into the world for people to pick up and see in person. They all picked up the bowls. No one asked what they were for. They took them home. The weird funky trays went too. The cyanotypes went faster than anything else. I tried not to get tongue tied trying to explain that I had made them too. That both types of art were mine. That I was allowed to make them. That I was sorry they couldn't eat them, or seek shelter under them, or anything practical.

I just smiled. They made me feel something when I made them.

On my table there was quite literally no room for all the work I'd made in the past ten years. I didn't bring any bags to show people. I didn't have my standard brown line up of practical goods. Yet still. I broke records.

Now it is January again. It is still grey. The wind is picking up. I'm still looking out the window. But I am not the same person. Armed with uncertainty and the knowledge that what I'm doing is of value I'm heading out on a new path.