A reader named Nick H. Tang wanted me to talk about painting. Said sure.
So, here's my thoughts about it.
Intro: pandemic hit. Band can't play anymore. Living alone in an old farmhouse with a couple labs. So I figure: what the Hell. Whatsername ain't around to tell me my art sucks. Here goes.
**
Had painted in the distant past. Liked it. Here's one I did, way back. Kept it because I like skies. Alberta and Saskatchewan are best.
**
So I decide to get back into painting with another sky. (Always paint something you like.) Easy, right? Wrong. Clouds not working. Call my Mom, artist. "Use your thumb," she says. My thumb? Okay. So I did.
**
Hmm.
Decide to put it on Twitter to get unvarnished reviews and abuse. Got some.
Got an email. Old university friend. She wants to buy it. Bullshit, I said. She pushed and pushed. I relented. Maybe I'll do another one. Perhaps.
**
Over the phone, my Mom: "Get to know your brushes." Don't paint a thing. Paint what's in your head. Experiment. So I get 3 X 4 canvases, cheap, to the door from Amazon. Decided to paint the world turning, playing with the brushes. Use me acrylics. Dry fast. Forces you to think.
**
That one, I liked. (Mom didn't.) Decided to hang it up. Looked at it often. Hmm.
Watching a Western, they cut away to sky. Have some other 3 X 4s. Should I? Yes. Did. It's the only thing I ever did that I will never give up. I couldn't believe it came out of me. Still can't.
**
Started to feel some confidence. People encouraging. So I decide to do something harder.
I find a photo my Alberta friend Rob Laird took. A lady bought it while it was still wet. Well, whoa.
**
You'll see something off there, and here, too.
Little-known fact: I'm color blind. What you see isn't what I do.
"Mom, I know these aren't the colors but it's what I see." Paint that, she says. You're the artist. I do.
This amazing bit of tree, the ground aflame with sun.
**
So, I was learning, perhaps.
Get to know your brushes. Yes. Use a medium you like - me, acrylics. And paint things that you want to remember. And keep going.
Time to do an impossible sky. One that looks fake when you finish. This was my Mom's favorite.
**
That was a moment, a glimpse of...something. A perfect, never-again sky.
But what about stuff down on Earth? Stuff around me, that I pass on my bike every day. So began my love affair with barns. I'm a city guy, and I (predictably) love barns. They're so beautiful.
**
Skies keep pulling me back, though. Winter sky is clear as glass and precise. Summer skies are loose. Fall, big.
**
War starts in Ukraine. I'm a political guy. I'm in a rage about it. Decide to put that on a canvas, too. Sell them, give money to Ukrainian Red Cross. My Mom does, too. We raise $30,000+ for them. Even did prints. Here's one from that angry time.
**
Same thing happens later with Israel. My Mom passes, October 7 happens. Everything is suffused with grief. So I paint it.
Here's a place near Nova where I spent the day with a soldier who made me cry. This is what the sky was like above us, where he almost died.
**
I'm Irish. I'm emotional. So I decided to lean into that, and make myself paint things that make me feel emotion. So I painted Roxy after she died. Painted, too, the lane by my cabin and the little trees at the end are my Mom and Dad and me and my brothers, reaching up. She’s the light.
**
Got on planes, go to places partly just to get things to paint. Iceland, Ireland. Looked for different skies.
**
Buildings are hard. So paint the ones that hold memories of you between their walls. Here's two.
**
Cell phones are a curse. But they let you snap quick photos of things you want to keep in your mind. To keep around.
**
Anyway. Final piece of advice: work fast. I do. You can feel it is the right thing and you have to get it out of you. So I did this one for E in a couple hours. It's her shop window.
**
That's my advice. Ignore the reviews: don't give a shit. Know your brushes and medium. And always: just paint the things you like. That matter. 'Cause you're not painting a canvas.
You're painting bits of your life, and leaving them to show that you were here.
The end.
Hello Warren,
This comment is "personal". See, my Dad was an accomplished watercolorist. He was a low key mild-mannered fellow but did manage to acheive some modest reknown and financial success out of his passion. Our Mum was no slouch artistically either, so the visual arts sort of run in the family DNA. Dad, like you, had a special thing for dramatic skies and old barns. So I think (trying not to overreach about my own much more limited credentials) that I can say it with at least some education: Damn, you're pretty good! The one I liked best was the strand of barbed wire against the prairie backdrop. True creativity and a world of visual meaning in such a simple image. My Dad did something like that in a painting that was regrettably taken from us by somebody buying it: just a few blades of pale gold grass sticking up out of the snow on a sunny crisp winter day. Made all the more striking by an oval mat around it. You could practically feel the winter air and imagine the farmhouse in the distance and sense the blue sunny sky overhead, even though none of those elements were actually IN the painting itself. A moving and beautiful image I've always thought. I see that in some of your own works, and it's what I at least like best in art. You better watch it sir: musician, lawyer, political activist, journalist, and now a painter. You're in danger of being remembered as some sort of polymath.
Cheers
Good job Warren! I like your paintings. They convey the emotion. Keep up!