Ann Arbor was a great show for Katie and me, and it almost always is. Unlike most shows, Ann Arbor draws serious people from a very wide swath. All of Southern Michigan, Ohio, Indiana, even Chicago and Cleveland. The weather at the show cooperated and I spent the last few weeks being overwhelmed and confused. No confusion about Zingermann's Roadhouse though, that is all good.
Part of me never wants to do this again. I am physically and emotionally spent. It is increasingly difficult to keep this pace up, which I didn’t want to do this year, and I feel creatively drained. The work feels formulaic to me at times. It is harder and harder for me to drive around in rural America and be motivated. America is ugly, and has gotten much worse in my lifetime. Science and technology make it worse. Our addictions to cheap food, cheap houses, and cheap solutions, wears me down. Many days I come home upset by the lack of craft, thought and beauty. Its hard seeing people get rich off of it too. Furthermore, our deep political divisions only add fuel to the fire.This is not how I want to spend the rest of my life: feeling down.
Then there is a part of me that loves what I do. Painting plein air always makes me happy, even when I fail. All the cool people that I meet keep me going. As much as I dislike the world around me, I at least try to light a candle, even if I do curse the darkness. I am proud of that. I see what most people put in their homes, I know I am giving people something different, authentic, sincere and aspiring to be beautiful for their homes, and that feels good. And it is rare. Unquestionably, I put my heart into it. So I am torn as to what to do next. Right now the thought of painting the Mississippi River or Lake Michigan or the woods makes me most excited.
Lately I have been thinking about what 19 year old me would think of this. It started when a couple of women in their 20’s came into my booth, separately, and cried because the work emotionally got to them. 19 year old me says “see I was right the whole time!”. I feel fortunate that I stuck with that initial inarticulate rejection of dominant culture and have refined it. That I focused on finding beauty for my whole adult life. For me though, it is still hard to separate 19 year old abrasive scrawny dirty me and 47 year old me. I recently sat down with a big strapping fireman and his beautiful wife who had come to town to see me, it is hard to imagine that ever happening to me. The whole thing is like a dream. Like aren’t you people going to make fun of me and be mean at some point like when I was in high school? I think about dropping 19 year old me into many of these situations and wonder how that shit kid would have totally flaked out. Like, I act weird enough as it is, but imagine Napoleon Dynamite with long hair, that was me. Sometimes, sadly I still act that way, and yes you should make fun of me for it. I guess I deal with my success by finding ways to not think about it. Being successful makes me uncomfortable(I am Lutheran), but I do cherish people telling me about a painting they bought from me at some point and that they value it. Thank you everyone for that and for helping me grow up.
