49

It’s been a while since I’ve done anything on here so I figured what better day to work on it than my Birthday or as I like to think about it a celebration commemorating making it another year.

  I don’t think it’s age that really bothers people on days such  as this as much as it is thinking that the clock is winding down faster and faster every year. I know that’s what it feels like to me.

Mortality has a way of making you think you are forced to make as much progress in your life as you can. From the moment that you realize that this period of suckin’ air while wearing a meat suit is limited and actually has an expiration date you become aware of your accomplishments and shortcomings. No one is realistically happy with everything that they have done at least not so far.

  I’m no different than any other swingin’ dick limpin’ around on this planet, there is shit that I still hope to do and some other passing moments you will always wish you could just erase but you can’t…it’s all just part of being who you are.

 Some of us rise from the moment of conception while others (me) flounder around just havin’ some kicks and hoping that the end will come before your passed experiences bite you in the ass before you bite the dust…but it eventually catches up with you unless you die early enough to leave a pretty corpse.

The stories and excitement of your rebellious youth become the things you share with your friends around the campfire and make you cringe when you think of doin’ them again. I have a lot of great stories that I am really glad I’ve been able to collect. If I hadn’t done them would I want to do any of them now, some yes, but the really interesting ones I probably wouldn’t want to even toy with the idea now that I have gained even a limited amount of wisdom.

  Making plans has never been my strong suit. Most of the time I consider this a great way to live your life. Just roll the dice and see where you ass ends up in a few decades. I ended up living in alone in an RV working out of a studio in a small town on the other side of the continent. Breathin’ fresh air and wondering if this happened by choice or just by chance. All you can be sure of is this is exactly the place that time has planted you. If I ever thought about it maybe I would splatter my brains all over city hall but I don’t and it has so far saved the city the money for the cleanup do to some self-serving act of cowardess.

  My life has run the gammit. I have had strippers give up the goods when I was still a looker  to having MILFs eye me up like I’m someone’s creepy uncle now that time has passed and the greys have set in. I’ve attended midnight mass at the Vatican and ass fucked a school teacher over a guardrail in central Florida. I’ve seen the love in my brother’s eyes at the birth of his son and I’ve gone on a three day ethyl-ether bender with a bum in Philly. I’ve seen the top and lived at the bottom and there is nothing I can do about any of them and if I could I probably wouldn’t.

  So here I am alone by the wood stove thinkin’ on back and headed towards the door lookin’ for something new…this shit will never end.  “GTP”

Day One....

30" x 40" oil on canvas

It ain't just a couple of half naked chicks...

   People look at paintings and shit and just see it as a picture, they ain't, not to the fuckers that paint 'em and the stoners that stare at 'em. To me they ain't a picture, the overall image is cool but it's the work in different little areas that you can really just lose yourself in.  Man it's a gas, faces become choppy little blotches of high chroma larva and the hands in the shadows become supernovas.

  I finished this painting yesterday and just let it dry and gave it the 'ol critics eye basically looking for anything I did wrong and beating myself up over it. It sucks, I was broke but I had weed and just got completely baked. I pulled up a chair up close to what I had done and just road the waves.
  I can't get any good shots of the thing so I just keep trying. Last night I was stoned and had a camera and shot pictures of it because that' what stoners do.
  They have some light refraction so the parts that dry differently have a reflective surface. That's what makes the picture above's the top right corner looks chalky. Fuck it... now that's out of the way, let me take you on a guided tour. This is why I paint.

This enitire section was more or less done in about two days. Not consecutively but it took two days. Once you get past that it's two half naked chicks doin' what they do it's pretty fuckin' deep. Not deep like in 'heavy' I mean deep like you can fall right in it. It's the shadows man, with out 'em the whole thing will look flatter than Kate Moss.
  I've been working with shadows for a while and for some reason the planets aligned and it all worked. The stereo was pumpin' out whatever it was pumpin', the subs were slappin' and paint was flyin...nothing else really mattered. I lose it, just stirrin' pigment and makin' it work, don't even know what the fuck I'm doin' it most of the time.Sometimes its fun, sometimes your pissed an when you are you paint...a SHOVELHEAD!

  Yea man, when I say pissed I don't mean like 'mad at your boss pissed' I mean like big rock guitar solo kind of pissed. Just like riding angry, you paint pissed. Big thick loads of paint with big, unrefined, brush strokes. Make it seem hostile and rumbling, it ain't a dainty motor so beat it up and leave it. I think I was listening to a lot of Ministry during this.
   There is a lot of paint in this area...it's thick. I never know how anything is going to look when I'm done, but when I got all the colors right I just stopped which ain't easy to do. I always want to refine each area until it's perfect...a habit I have since broken.Shitty habit!

  These bottles are a goof...any time I paint a bottle it is. There were bottles here in the photo I work from but I eneded up just slappin' colors where the needed to go and not thinkin' about them being bottles, that's how I always do it. I used to hate that they look so Dr. Suess but now I really like that feel and do it on purpose. This time they almost look like they are melting...like half way through a Dead show kind of melting. Pretty fuckin' cool.

  

  There ain't no black in real life, just like there is now white, everyting is affected by the colors around it. No matter what color you have it will be reflected onto the colors near them and vice versa. So a flat black gas tank is whatever colors are near it also.If I painted the tank just strait flat black it would look like somebody just took a big ol' shit on it so it takes forever to get it right. Plus there are warm and cool colors. Warm colors make things seem inviting and comfortable, cool colors look dead, I don't use them much.
  Separating a flat black tank from the shadow it's sitting in was a cunt to get right but what made it worse is trying to figure out how to make something that is 'white' look like it was in the shadow... that almost gave me an aneurism. I don't use glazes which are transparent colors that you can use to 'drop" things into the back ground. I used to do it but it felt like the pussies way out so now I mix the right color. Not always easy...this time was no exception. It took a lot of trial and error and when I got it right it was just the color of one of the girls eyebrows...it always works out that way.

  This is a real shitty picture of something that my stoned eyes gazed at for hours. I had a problem, I used two completely different styles that collided right at these hands. I had the sardonic brush stokes of the motor and the slick as pudding brushstrokes of the chicks. I had to do something with the hands to tie the two styles together and hands usually already suck to paint. Pot helped on this one...it just worked...like bending brake lines. Sometimes you just look at things different.
  I don't really know what this blogity blog is all about but not many people are going to get to see this painting. Eventually it will sell and even I probably won't see it again. There's no applause at the end of these things for that very reason...I should have learned to play guitar if I wanted that.
  I thought that some of you would be interested in what I noticed AFTER I was done and it was signed. Staring at it is them is the best thing about them. You have a picture and then you have what the guy behind the brush was thinking when you get up close. At least that's how it is with mine....so fuck it, I must be right.

This is my mean assed dog Bud....stare into her dead eye of doom...scary huh?  AmericanMotherFucker.com "GTP"

Scooter tramps have found the Sub-Basement!

·         I’ve been kind of layin’ low and workin’ in the studio just slingin’ paint. I have been getting correspondence from people on the road that want to stop by and check out the shop and see what’s shakin’.  Today I was going to just slam out the final stages of the painting when I got some messages that someone (I thought) was going to stop by if it was cool. Repeated questions and answers were exchanged which alone made me think was kind of weird, but traveling bikers are in their own world and I just chalked it up to road brain and just went with it.

·           I got a call from Matthew Donaghe was just outside of town and needed directions to the shop. I gave it to him and he arrived shortly afterwards. We shot the shit and he told me he had been out for about a week or so and was just riding around to clear his head out. We shot the shit for a while just kickin’ back in a couple of chairs soakin’ up the sun when the phone rang.

·           It was Barry Land and he was asking directions to the shop. That’s when it hit me, the repeated conversations were because I was talking to two different people. It was all face book conversations and everyone is welcome here so I don’t check who it is. Barry showed up on his CB750 and he has apparently been on the road well into five months.

·           I put the paint brushes away and just settled in to shootin’ the shit and talkin’ about life and time on the road. It was great. Smokin’ cigarettes and eating pizza we just wasted the afternoon. Opening the shop is the best idea I’ve had since I started actually painting in ‘studios’.

·           An hour or so before the sun started to set and the weather turned cold they decided it was time to split. Matt headed to New Mexico and Barry to Jerome before heading back up to Illinois to align his life for the next trip.

·           I got absolutely no wrk done so far but the night is young and another buddy on a bike dropped by a little weed for me so I’ll just zone out and paint for a bit.

·           I’m hoping more tramps stop by sometime I the trip to trade stories and swap lies. It was great. So if you are inclined give me a shout and you’re more than welcome…bring weed.  “GTP”

Fuck your H.O.A. !!!

                                                My house can kick your houses ass !!!

...rollin'.

 Packin’ up, haulin’ ass and diggin’ in. It’s a pattern man, a reoccurring chain of events that has been regurgitating itself for years. Now it’s become serious…when I split from one piece of ground to another I can do it in grand style. No packin’ or forethought I just got to unplug the house, turn the ignition, start the 440 and suddenly we ain’t in Kansas anymore. Poof, it’s like I never been there… I’m here now.

  There’s always a reason to leave no matter what you’re leavin’ in. You sacrifice something when you leave, good ol’ country relaxin’ for work, weeping willow trees and overlooking the mountains for a chain link fence and a view of the Circle “K”. Drastic changes occur but you just have to have a good reason to leave and a future plan.

  I was feeling comfortable in the digs I was parked in for well over a year but I felt myself becoming complacent, stagnant if you are so inclined, things had to change. It was never my intention to stay here anyway but leavin’ is a bit of a shock to the system. I’ve only moved a mile or two up the road but where I stopped is in town, just like all the other towns I found myself in.

  Fuck it man, at least it ain’t a ghetto, just the industrial section of a small town…trees are a comin’ as soon as I get ahead of this painting thing. A few years ago this would be a dream come true, I’m just dreamin’ different now.

  I don’t know what has gottin’ into me as of late but painting and making a living off of it seems to be what is drivin’ me. I’ve been driven by other things in the past but this is something that I ain’t fightin’. It’s a lot like an addiction but not as detrimental as most. It’s an addiction I can live with. Just like bikes, this is something that is actually improving my life, I think…if I had one…a life that is.

  I’m in a thick of it now, I’m in the middle of another day that will surely end up being another 10 plus hour day slingin’ paint. Time flies when things are like this and when you’re done you end up staring at something that was in your head for a while before the painting process even starts. Some of these things I see are cool and others are things that you would have rathered not have in your head in the first place. Case in point something that has been hiding in the shadows of your consciousness suddenly big as life and following your every move with eyes that you have painted. Creepy as fuck when you don’t expect it and you never do.

  But such is the life that I apparently chose. I ain’t bitchin’ but I wish I put this time and effort into my own comfort, that’s something that always seems to be put on the back burner…but I’m getting better at it. I have a roof, a stable studio, a bike that runs more often than not. Things are far from bad but the grass is always greener…somewhere…no matter what your own personal landing pad looks like.

  The first night I was here it rained cats and dogs bringing along a cold front that hung like snot from an unkept child’s nose. The next day was gloomy and cold.

  The weather was for shit and I just walked the few yards to my studio and spent the next twelve hours painting and getting’ stoned with the little weed I had left. By the end of the day my legs were sore and on the easel was a painting that was no more than a day away from being done. The miserable day was only miserable outside. Being well insulated, the studio got no lower than 60 degrees. A few minutes with a small heater and it got up to seventy and stayed there…even when I turned the heater off.  Once I get the woodstove piped in it should be nice and toasty for the winter months.

  There’s no sewage dump or water hook up for the Hamsteak but the studio has a full bath with a shower. It’s going to take some getting used to living half in the studio and the other in the RV,the RV now just being a place that isn’t in the studio which is a nice place to stop painting,read and sleep.

  I’m only living here for a short period of time while I gut and rebuild the interior of the ‘steak and make it something set up for one skinny old fuck and his one eyed dog. With a bit of work I can really set it up for me and maybe a guest to hang comfortably.  I don’t need much and it’s not like I have a gaggle of friends that will staying the night so I can really open the place up.

   With intentions of not only having an old RV to live in but something really functional and impressive I might be able to get a bit of the old ‘how do you do?’ from the random cutie that I can get into the back of my mobile crime scene.  It’s not going to take much to make it something cool aside from the improvements I want to make to all the systems (water, insulation , etc) and with a bit of cash and work it should be ready for its next move to a place I have lined out back in the country in fairly short order.

  Maybe I’ll stay for the winter or maybe I’ll be done before that but I know when I am ready the place ought to be a little bit of all right. The big money has been funneled into the rig, now it’s just a matter of work and planning. I’m in a good place for the next move that’s for sure.

  This morning the sun was out again. I slept like a fuckin’ corpse and opened the door, lit a cigarette and drank a cup of coffee as Bud did her ‘yey!... the sun is back’ dance and flopping down on the warm concrete with a satisfied exhale air and a fart.

   I pulled up a chair next to her and read a book as I finished my coffee. A chapter or two later I was cleaning pallets and getting ready for another painting marathon that doesn’t even seem like work at all.

  Playin’ air guitar and jumpin’ around the studio as Bud passes judgment with her one good eye and a wag of her tail it’s going to be a good day. I’ll take as many of those as I can.   “GTP”

If I wasn't driving my house to its new home this would probably be done tomorrow! "GTP"

                                                             30" x 40" oil on canvas