I Am Going to Make Things Again
When I was a kid, in high school and in college, I painted denim jackets for money. Not because I had a brand. Not because I was trying to build an art career. I needed going-out money, and I knew how to paint.
So I made things. People would bring me an idea, a photograph, something they wanted on the back of a jacket, and I would try to figure out how to put it there. Hendrix. Picasso. Whatever somebody wanted.
I would spread the jacket out, put my paints around me, and work on the floor. The younger version of myself completely absorbed in making something. That person was packed away 30 years ago.
Then and Now
This summer I went to see Van Gogh's Starry Night at the Museum of Modern Art. I didn't realize that the Picasso I had copied from a book so many years ago — Three Musicians — was hanging on a wall just a few miles from my parents' house, from the bedroom floor I used as my studio.
Seeing it was visceral. I was transported, transfigured by the colors, the shapes, the paint. I found me, the me that existed before life happened.
The Painted Jacket Series
I went on a hunt and found two pictures and a video that somehow I carried with me all these years. Hendrix and Picasso denim jackets. There is something wonderfully uncomplicated about making something with your hands, handing it to somebody, and having them want it enough to pay you for it.
No pitch deck. No business plan. No website. Just: “Billy told me you paint jackets. Can you make this?”
I Am Going to Make Things Again
The jackets were only one part of it. I drew. I painted. I made films. I wrote stories and plays. Later I built mosaics, frames, businesses, products and other things that had nothing to do with art.
For a long time, I never thought of those things as connected. Now I do. The common thread may not be art. It may just be making: willing something into existence, god-like, unconstrained.
Somewhere along the way, as work and responsibility and everything else accumulated, I did less creating with my own hands. I didn't decide to stop. I just stopped.
Finding these photographs and an old video reminded me of something I had almost forgotten:
I used to make things. More importantly, they made me want to make things again.
So, I am going to. I'm not dead yetti.