Let's start with my break from painting
I took a hiatus from the brush for about an year and a half of, and tried to write a novel. That's right, I tried to write a god-damned epic fantasy, and discovered just how bad I am at this writing thing, I picked up a few things along the way. The most important of them was a vision of a world that was much bigger than I first anticipated. The world of Wizard's Wrath gave me a medium with which to explore my personal mythology and Thelemic philosophy. It gave me places, characters and stories that are already showing in my esoteric paintings.
Then, though a friend, Lisa got a place in Atlantic Highlands reading tarot cards and suddenly I had a place to show my work. Hearing the positive feedback from the people around me, I got me psyched about painting again. Does it make me weak-willed that I need external validation for my artwork? It's a question I often ask myself, and the answer always changes. Anyway, it worked and I'm back on the saddle, eager to see my vision through.
There is just one little problem. Is my vision so crytic and heavy that people won't care about my work?
My tarot paintings are loaded with hermetic and alchemical symbolism. As Lisa repeatedly points it out, the average person who looks at my work has no clue what it means. I just had my first show since graduation at the AJ Dillon Gallery. It was a success in as much as there were a lot of people at the opening, I got a great overall reaction, and I sold one of my large paintings. I should be over the rainbow, right? Except that it was the conceptually simple Dusk of the Dead that sold and had most people talking. Folks generally didn't get my heavier work. I could speculate at length about it, but my friends and family suggest I "bring people to my level" in a more gentle manner, with more relatable paintings. I have conflicting opinions on this. I haven't exactly figured out a golden formula yet, but that is precisely what I had hopped to do in my tarot related work. I wanted to take the harsh and wonderful Thoth deck and make it more accessible to the people. How realistic is it that I should succeed in my first try?
To remedy this disconnect between my grand vision and the real world, I'm starting something new. I'm planning a series of paintings based on the side of pop culture I love: Gaming. There is something odd about coming full circle back to my senior thesis from undergrad. With my spiritual worldview so completely turned from what it was in 2005, I know I'm going to rock it way better than I did then. I'm not, by any stretch of the imagination, giving up on my vision. What I am doing is coming to terms with it's lack of commercial appeal, and coming up with a new line of paintings that strike the middle ground so as to fund great works like Fortune.
Dusk of the Dead 42''x56'' oil on canvas, 2009
Fortune oil on canvas 42’’ x 56’’ work in progress.
