One Day or Day One

8x10 oil

Shortly after my step-father passed away, my mother was surprised by the massive effort it took to hold down a job and raise four kids under ten on her own. She soon realized that she needed help, and found it in Lynn, a teenage girl from Texas. Lord knows how or where she found her, because we lived in Hawaii. Anyway, Lynn brought the best and the worst of herself into our home in Kailua on the island of O’ahu. (FYI, Lynn appears in all of my Calvin Coconut books in the character of Stella).

Anyway, Lynn, bless her black heart, gave me (and my mother) one of the greatest gifts of all time … music! Big music, bull in a China shop music in the form of loud, rollicking, wild, free, rowdy, steamy rock and roll! And the steamiest rocker of them all was this guy named Elvis. Ho, man, did I love Elvis! Whenever “Hound Dog” came on I ran to my room and grabbed my old untuned ukulele and mimicked him all over the house, to the point where Lynn was on the verge of squashing me flat for ruining her idol with my inane antics.

But that’s a whole other story.

In the seventh grade, the Everly Brothers and the Kingston Trio had me completely captured, my musical tastes by then having mellowed a bit. I begged my mom to buy me a guitar and taught myself how to play it so I could sing “All I Have to Do is Dream” and “Five Hundred Miles” over and over and over.

In my junior and senior high school years I was in a folk singing trio, and in college I taught myself how to play an electric bass and got into a four-piece rock and roll cover band as its lead singer, and one hot night on stage in Santa Barbara, California, in the midst brewing up a bar full of rapture with “I Can’t Get No Satisfaction,” with a wall-to-wall crowd surging and swaying and singing and shouting and jumping and pumping their arms high above their heads, and a band of band-fans four layers deep in the front row smiling up at us in wild exhilaration … there … in the midst of that song … in those wild and crazy euphoric moments … I made a huge discovery.

I was no longer playing my bass and making music … I WAS the music.

Me … inside the music. Not me, the shaggy-headed Mick Jagger wannabe trying to make it big and get rich and famous. The music and I were for one amazing moment, one.

To this day I can remember that feeling. It was one of pure and complete joy … joy in the performance, joy in the experience, and joy in the palpable ecstasy of the crowd.

This is art.

It wasn’t in us making the music … we were the vehicle. The art was in what the crowd was taking from it. Like what I took from Elvis, The Kingston Trio, and The Everly Brothers. It was in how the music made the crowd that night in Santa Barbara feel. That’s the art. The emotion it evoked. The joy.

A painting is a vehicle. What it evokes within someone who experiences it is the art.

“One Day or Day One” is sort of a directive to myself. Metaphorically, I’ve a choice to make at the top of that road. Do I One Day want to put myself into my paintings, as I did that night on stage? Do I want to paint what truly moves me, as opposed to continuing to try to execute decent looking pieces of work that I think others will like? Is that what I want to do … one day?

Or, do I want to make tomorrow, or even today, Day One of making art that expresses how I feel about that which moves me?

Can I even do that?

Well … I don’t know … yet.

One day thinking will probably never make that happen.

Day one thinking has a fighting chance.

It’s a choice. For each of us, on any path. One day or day one?

I say, let’s get this party started.