100 Days of Painted Solitude (2020)

Three weeks ago, I received a message from a mutual Instagram follower who works as an administrator in an art museum, about how he wanted to purchase a painting I created of Marsha P. Johnson. He described it as a “retablo”, a Mexican/Spanish devotional icon painted on humble materials. It wasn’t the first time I was messaged by someone about purchasing a piece, nor the last time. To say that I was complimented would be an understatement. A professional mistakenly thought I was an artist.

But every time I received one of these requests, I was also confused. I tried to explain to each person that I’m not an artist. I could see how they would get it confused. I had a different mutual Instagram follower, the first one to purchase a piece, explain to me that I was, contrary to my protestations, an artist.  
I painted to stay sane during the extended isolation. I wasn’t painting for commerce. I had started painting with acrylic paints 72 days earlier, and while I’d been to scores of museums and galleries around the world over the past two decades, I hadn’t created any visual art at all since my mid-teens. 

I wasn’t an artist. I painted for catharsis. I painted to cope. I painted to grieve. I painted because I was in isolation. I painted because it transported me back 26 years to a time that the world was easier for me to understand. Art was therapy.

My circumstances were that I was living alone in an apartment in NYC, the epicenter of the beginning of the pandemic, blocks away from three different hospitals, listening to the sirens regularly pierce the otherwise ominous silence. For months, I left my apartment only a handful of times, and within the 98 days, I had physically seen only two socially distanced friends

I vividly remember the last hug and human contact before it all began. Much of my anxiety stemmed from the fact that I didn’t know the current status of anything: Was I an asymptomatic carrier of COVID? Did I still have any clients? Was I still in a relationship? The only analogy I could think of to describe my mental state was that of Schrödinger’s cat. Worrying about the future was a luxury I couldn’t even fathom. 

One thing that I noticed was that I was unable to focus on reading anything, watching new television or movies, or even listening to new music. My only comfort was found in the music I listened to in my teens and twenties, and television and movies I had previously rewatched many times. This, coupled with my fear of leaving the apartment and my sisyphean attempts to be “productive,” resulted in my being fixated on a screen most of the time.

I had randomly bought some acrylic paints months earlier, for some project I can’t even remember. I had never used acrylic paints before. I hadn’t even painted since around my Bar Mitzvah, when I was gifted art classes in which I learned oil paints and pastels. I painted a single painting over the course of many months, which ultimately hung in my parents’ living room for two and a half decades, until a recent redesign.

I began by painting on found materials: empty wine bottles, gluten-free beer cans, chinese takeout boxes, pizza boxes, and leftover pieces from old shelves. I saw them as blank canvases. . I was inspired by the art I saw in galleries in LA, where artists painted on skateboards and other random items, because they were only the materials they had.

I was underwhelmed with what I had created. 

And then I found my stack of empty manila folders and ordered slightly better acrylic paints and began my daily painting. My inspiration came from everywhere. My library, my apartment, artists I loved, the animal kingdom, personalities, performers, and my emotions. With the rise of BLM, I felt the need to say something. Inspired by the History of Protest exhibition I saw at The Whitney, I wanted to capture snapshots of different forms of protest. I wanted to say something that I didn’t know how to convey in words. So I tried with paint.

I was always experimenting with new techniques. And if something came out not perfect, it was fine, because I was painting for myself, not for anyone else. At some point, I decided to start using my leftover paint to create new pieces. And then I’d look at the paint brush with the melange of color from my technique, and realized that it was beautiful in itself.

Since the end of the first month, one of my friends was pushing me to sell the art. I resisted. He’s the sort of person who turns everything into a business. I quoted Leah Jones, who says, “Why do we feel that all hobbies have to turn into businesses? Why can’t hobbies just be hobbies?” I also repeatedly reminded him that I was not an artist.

Then I sold four pieces without advertising anything. I donated 50% of the proceeds to charities, because I was resisting the business side, but I was also conscious about how much money I spent on paints and supplies. People kept asking me about the availability of various pieces.

One day, I was walking down the street and saw someone selling some photography, an enlarged matchbook on an otherwise white piece of paper. I bought it, stared at it, and walked to Fedex Kinkos and just wanted to see what a print would look like. I saw the potential in what I saw.

That day I bought a camera and ordered a lightbox and wanted to capture the entire manila folder. It was symbolic to me. You wouldn’t understand the contextualization of the painting without knowing that it was painted on a manila folder. It was storing my memories, my emotions, my isolation. It was more than just a pretty dancer or hot violinist. 

If I was going to do this, I wanted it to be professional, but also local. I found a local company that creates beautiful giclée prints.

I spoke with an art consultant and curator, and explained what I wanted to do, and he plainly said “Those aren’t prints.” I became offended, like I didn’t understand something. He patiently explained that a print is a reproduction of the art itself. I wanted to take a photograph of the whole folder. That is a still life, or an in situ, photograph of the painting. It’s something new. 

As I later explained to a theatre friend: A video of a play isn’t a play anymore. It’s something entirely different.

Immediately, I was revitalized. If this is photography, I’m able to manipulate it in different ways. I created a four color version of one of my dancers, channelling both Andy Warhol and Edgar Degas.

It became as if I was using every single part of the process to create something new. From the folder, to the paint, to the leftover paint, to the paint-filled paint brush, to the photography, to the edited and remixed photography. 

It reminded me of all the shows I watched on Netflix about chefs who used every part of the animal, or their traditional food, or something they foraged, in a new and interesting way. And that was when I considered them artists. Or Orpheus in Hadestown, who “could make you see how the world could be, in spite of the way that it is.”

I first felt comfortable with calling myself an artist, after 100 days of painting every day. At least I began to believe it then, and that’s all that’s important.