“When you’re 15, I’ll give you a thousand dollars or a car. That will be your stake. With that, you’re on your own.”
That was what my sister and I were told pretty much every week of our lives. When I turned 15 in 1980, I was worried how I was going to make a living on my own. My mom had already made me sign a document promising to give her the first $50,000 I earned for the privilege of not being kicked out onto the street right away. Another (not legal) document, “Emancipation Proclamation,” made me fully independent, relieving my mother of all parental responsibilities. The money or the car, needless to say, were not forthcoming.
School was a problem because I couldn’t work for a living and go to school at the same time. My mom set me up to take a proficiency exam so that I could legally leave high school immediately. The test was embarrassing. I could have passed it in third grade if I’d been given it then. Once it was done, I was out of high school. Columbia University liked my SAT scores and asked me to apply. I didn’t. I wanted to be an artist.
Instead of earning a living, I discovered that financial aid as a 15 year old college student left me enough money to live on peanut butter sandwiches and donuts. Back then, my heart beat a little too fast and a doctor told me I was malnourished, not that there was anything that could be done about it. The good news was that I was painting. Unfortunately, making a living that way isn’t easy. Columbia would have been a better choice, but I liked art.
I made a little money making illustrations for magazines in New York, and then drawing comics, but when I started doing computer graphics, I was suddenly earning in the top one percentile. That was great, but I missed painting. In 1998, I moved back to San Jose, where I grew up as a kid. I spent $10,000 on fancy bicycles in one month. To justify the expense, I took them into the mountains and made small watercolors.
Every Saturday morning, I was out on the trail riding a $4,500 mountain bike up steep hills, drinking water out of my backpack hydration system, occasionally falling off my bike after going too fast or missing a turn, and having a great time. Once, I came back from a ride with three paintings and eight grease-filled puncture wounds in my right calf after getting flipped off my bike and landing on my gear cluster. It was a great day.
During the week, I had to work at my job as an art director. This left me little time to go to art supply stores to buy paper and paint. That job fell to my wife, Kitty. For some reason, she kept getting me successively larger sheets of paper. When I started, I used tiny 6” x 9” watercolor sketchbooks, but the page sizes gradually increased, all thanks to Kitty.
Kitty saw that I enjoyed making the little watercolors, which really were the highlight of my week, and encouraged me to take more serious painting trips. The deal was, if I came back with good paintings, I was allowed to drive to more distant locations, even if it meant camping there overnight. Challenge accepted.
I started my first painting of Yosemite at three in the morning, after driving for six hours the night before to get there. It wasn’t easy painting in the dark while I needed to sleep, so I tore up several versions of the painting before I got the one I liked, of Yosemite Falls at about eight AM.
This started a habit that lasted for a few years. I bought an annual pass and drove to Yosemite almost every weekend. I’d do three to six hours of hiking, then sit down to make a painting, then hike back to my car and drive home. Some trips I came home with five or six paintings.
My paper kept getting bigger and bigger. I had started with pages the size of a standard letter-sized envelope, but graduated in small increments to working on three foot by four foot monster-sized pages. Handling these in wind, rain, and snow was not easy.
The day I made my favorite painting of Yosemite, I also made my second favorite painting. Both were of the huge variety, and took a combined total of about three hours to make. While I was working on the second one, a wind tore it free of the board I was painting on and I had to chase it down the road to recover it. It wasn’t that badly damaged, so I put it back on the board and finished it.
Once, I went out to Griffith Park in Los Angeles and captured the smog over Century City on the biggest painting I’d attempted to date, 40” x 60”. At this point, I was getting very serious about these paintings. I wasn’t selling them though, they were all for Kitty and me.
I went to different places, Red Rock Canyon, Mt. Whitney, Sequoia National Forest, Death Valley, Monument Valley, Big Sur, anywhere I could think of. It was great. This is what the early 2000’s were like. I’d come a long way from being told I had to leave home at fifteen and having a little malnourishment problem.
I switched to making monumental acrylic landscapes in 2003. By then, there was no way I could hike because the canvasses were too large, sometimes as big as four by six feet. For these, I strapped them to the back of my truck, got as close to the subject as I could drive, and used my truck as an easel.
The way I painted, my pictures looked pretty bad at first, then come together quickly. While I was painting the image below, cars drove by on the road below me without stopping until the last ten minutes. Then, they’d stop and get out to watch. I’d hear the tourists talking about my painting from 200 yards away, able to see what I was doing because of the size of the enormous canvas. Sometimes, my paintings blended into the surrounding landscape because the colors were matched so well.
In 2003, I left Hollywood for good, and set out to become a gallery artist. I found a dealer, had a handful of one man shows, which sold a total of one painting collectively, and kept painting until the paint ran out. That was when I made my favorite painting, which I let my church use to raise money with, Call to Prayer. It was my last serious painting. I had to go back to making a living, and that meant co-founding a school for CG artists and getting a PhD in Europe.
I still made watercolors, but they were small again, and made for the fun of being out in the landscape, nothing more. I went to Paris to watch the Tour de France live, and made a few images there, including one of Notre Dame and another with the Eiffel Tower in the background.
When I look at these paintings in my drawers, on shelves, and hanging walls, what I see is “The Right to Pursue Happiness.”
That is gone in America now and I want it back.
I haven’t painted for a few years because there are bigger problems facing the people in our country right now. I look forward to the day when I can go back out in the forest with my paints or a camera and make some art. To get there though, our country has to be free again.
MAGA!
Thank you for sharing your amazing talent with us, and also for your gift of discovering the algorithms manipulating the data in the voter rolls.
Now if only enough people would understand what you have discovered and shared.
And act to spread that knowledge far and wide and to then remedy the problem.
In time. Because there really isn’t any to waste on this.
Your talent has seen you through.
But oh....as the mother of teenage sons, my heart aches for 15 year old you fending for yourself.
I honestly cannot wrap my head around your mother's behaviour.