Intersection

“Intersection” is about choices, destinations, and reading the signs.

Intersection, from 2016 is a story about myself, and serves to remind me about the priorities in my life. 

I am devoted to surrealism, and my creations. Whilst they are ostensibly about me and my experiences, they can convey a personal message to anyone willing to allow that message to soak in. 

Intersection is a perfect example of this. Before you read on, allow your mind to wander into this image and figure out what this piece means to you. 

Now… to me it is very personal. It signifies the moment when I realised that I’d already run over too many stop signs - this realisation turned me back to my roots.  One Way!  Go back, fix the pencil, as it was the art that was holding me up the whole time and I was deflating. 

As an artist and especially a surrealist artist, I am not faced with a choice to be this person. I had spent close to five years building a business that was designed to help others in the arts. Naturally, if it had succeeded I would have made some money, but it was not to be. I drove myself into the ground trying to make this thing work. The craziest part about this is that I had put the one most important thing in my life aside to help give it to others. My art!!

I thought to myself, ‘How can I convey this feeling?’ At the time, I was known for painting the pear. The pear in many ways represented me, so what was the pear doing? It was deflating.

A common phrase in the tech world is to ‘walk the desert.’ The phrase is used for young companies with little funding, an idea, and a team of people willing to take a risk. This is why I placed the pear in the desert. 

Quite often I paint a piece with a basic idea; a deflated tired pear for example. As I painted into this piece the idea grew and grew…. and grew! 

It was not as though I was in this business choice alone. I had friends, support, food in the belly and, of course, my imagination. 

Art always gives me energy, and in many ways it was my art holding me up throughout this process. In this image I have added mahl sticks. Mahl sticks are designed to hold an artist’s arm up and steady over a wet oil painting so that the paint can’t be touched. 

They are my analogy of the art holding me up throughout the 5 years of business.

This is where my mind took a fun turn. These stop signs were not a part of the original idea, but as the painting took shape I was in a constant dialogue with myself. What, how, when, who, why and repeat….. Stop!!!! Turn back. Why didn’t I listen to that internal dialogue that exists in all of us? I feel so often we are gifted with signs on a daily basis. All we need to do is listen.

After all of this, what does it all mean? What is life all about? To me it is about art!... and where did the art start for me? It was with the pencil… and the pencil lay dormant in my life for these past 5 years. 

So very randomly I painted a pencil  into the painting because it felt right. 

These days I approach my work very differently and far more calculated. I would not be making wild decisions like this in the middle of a piece these days, as I feel it defeats the purpose of a well thought out message. But in these older cases it was like a fun adventure into thought the whole way through. Like the old ‘Choose your own Adventure’ books really.

So… here is where it landed. The pencil had broken… Me…. and the ambulance has come to fix it… Art. 

Art was my savior, and the feeling of being back to it has no words. 

This being said, the things I learnt during my years in tech have no price tag. They were invaluable to me and have shaped me as an artist. 

I think there is a huge lesson in all of this and it is something that I hold true in every aspect of my life these days. Fear being a compass! I was terrible at business, communication, marketing, taxes, etc… and what made me pull it together was tech. It scared the shit outta me, the thought of being a voice for a company, a communicator and having that level of responsibility.  But in the end it was the thing I feared most, and taking it on as a challenge is what gave me the tools to be the artist I always wanted to be. 

This compass can be applied to anyone, and I truly believe that anything associated with fear will be a path to being a better person.

The next fear I face is creating marketing videos of myself. I can’t stand seeing myself on camera or hearing my voice repeated back to me. How strange it is that the most important step I can take in my career right now is to do exactly this. Yes I fear it, and yes I will do it, and yes I will take one big leap forward for my career because I did it.. 

If I don’t fear a move in my career it is one of two things; something I already do well or something that has no importance to me.