Redtree Times

Early Attempt- 1993

If your determination is fixed, I do not counsel you to despair. Few things are impossible to diligence and skill. Great works are performed not by strength, but perseverance.

–Samuel Johnson, The Prince of Abissinia, 1759

I have mentioned here a number of times that this time of the year I sometimes go through my old work done before I was showing my work publicly. Most of the time I go through work that was beginning to show signs of what was to become whatever style I might have. I can see where things are heading in many of these pieces.

Early Attempt- 1993

But yesterday, I went through a bin of old work that I have been avoiding for a long time. It contained a lot of my very earliest attempts, done in the months after I was injured in a fall from a ladder back in 1993.  These first attempts were done with old airbrush paints and a brush pushed into the cast surrounding my shattered wrist. I don’t know what even prompted me to do this outside of a nagging, almost panicky need to express myself that was feeling restrained by the injuries I was nursing.

I had to do something.

Going through the work, most on paper or paper canvas, was sheer agony at times. Oh, there were glimmers of what might come later but some was just painful to take in. Much of it was muddy and dull and some just plain terrible to behold.

Looking at them, all I could think was what in god’s name made me want to keep moving forward from that point? I sure couldn’t see it.

What was in this work that was telling me to keep at it? Why go on?

I can’t answer that question. Maybe it was, as I said, just a need to express myself even if it wasn’t as graceful and satisfying as I would like. Maybe even in these awful attempts there was still something, a small step forward, I could see then but can’t recall now. Maybe it was like stumbling through a maze in absolute darkness and seeing a tiny firefly go around a corner in the blackness ahead. Enough to make you go ahead just a little more.

The interesting thing here is that I had no idea where the maze was leading. I enjoyed looking at paintings and other forms of art but had no notions of making art my livelihood or career. Never even thought it was a possibility. Maybe I sensed I was at a turning point in my life and this would be a way to document it so that I could look at it later in order to make sense of the moment.

I don’t know.

But something made me persevere. Something made me want to continue so that eventually the single firefly ahead of me in the maze became a glowing torch that almost demanded that I forge ahead.

I am showing three of those pieces from the first months after I was injured in September of 1993. They aren’t great, not even very good though they are among the best from this earliest group of work. Not a high bar to clear. Like much of my work even now, they just came as they were, unplanned and unmodeled. I just made a first mark and soon after, they appeared.

Maybe I am a fool to show them. Why would an artist show their weakest work, the kind of stuff that most artists either hide away forever or destroy? I can’t answer that except to say that maybe they were the fireflies I needed.

Whatever the case, I feel a sense of gratitude to these early pieces that gave me what I needed in the moment.  And maybe they simply bought me more time to grow, more time to listen to and develop my own voice.

And that’s a lot.

Here’s a song, Time, in that vein from 1970 from Edwin Starr. You most likely will remember him for his classic tune War with a line anyone who lived in that era knows so well: War! What is it good for? Absolutely nothing! I didn’t know much of his work at the time outside of War but everything I have come across over the years from Edwin Starr has been like finding a hidden treasure. This is one of those.