If I can’t sell my paintings, then I may as well just foist them upon people.
This morning, I struggled my way out of bed around 8am, loosened up my hamstrings with some yoga, then ran errands on foot around my neighborhood. The first stop was a house a block away from my apartment. A couple years ago, while doing my neighborhood walk, I stopped beside this house and snapped a picture from the sidewalk; a beautiful red and purple flower shot out of the landscaping. I turned that photo into a painting:
Indian Shot
acrylic on canvas panel
June 2023
San Diego
The painting had floated around my apartment in the ensuing years, until I decided this morning to gift it to the homeowner. An identical story accompanies the following:
Cypresses
acrylic on canvas panel
April 2025
San Diego
At each house this morning, I tried to surreptitiously drop off the painting near the front door. In neither case did my scurrying avoid notice. At the Indian Shot house, I leaned gently over the front fence to drop the painting on the lawn just as the front-porch door began to creak open. I did not look up long enough to see who was opening the door. I dodged the opportunity to provide an explanation for my behavior by quickly carrying on my merry way.
At the Cypresses house, it was not a human but a security system that took notice, alerting me of its detection with a long, low beeeeep. Again I scurried away.
Mission accomplished. The idea is that these homeowners would likely appreciate paintings of their properties more than any art-collecting stranger on the internet, not to mention I am yet clueless as to my ideal customer, so we’re going guerrilla on the marketing for now. Boots on the ground. Erm, rubber-and-foam tennies on the ground.
As I paint more, I create more paintings. These paintings need somewhere to exist. If they exist in my apartment, they take up space and make me feel cluttered. I do not like that feeling. I dream of a day when I have an actual studio space, where I can be messy and cluttered as hell and then can close the door to that space and go on living in my tidy and relatively minimalist environs.
Luckily, bad paintings can be thrown away or burned, and I utilize that strategy frequently these days what with my foray into oil painting. I am just so, so new at it and so, so unskilled and so, so impatient. I love the visceral sensation of painting—the movement and the connection of brush to canvas—so much that the creative act feels aggressive, almost angry, like I am mad at it for not making sense yet.
The fury also comes from a drive to annihilate the inner critic, to move before I am inspired, to reclaim all that time I held back my creative urges—through jobs, schooling, adulting, doubting, all the things that slow the damn roll if we let them. My shitty painting feels like vomiting, purging all that. It’s rebellious. It’s a “fuck you” to everything that has ever held me back, primarily myself. It’s an ego death. It says, “I can use my hands and my body and my mind and my soul and make things and fuck up and not produce anything valuable and still be here, still have the right to exist, still have the right to express.”
Speaking of the responsibilities of daily life, my creative time is up for the day. I’ll end this post by stating how thankful I am that I can upload digital photos of my work (like those above); the images can own their tiny little lot in the universe; and then I can discard the physical, material art itself. Thank God for the cloud.