You Lookin’ at Me?

Reasons aren’t everything. 

“But why’d yah do it?” the detective asked.
“It seemed like a good idea at the time,” I said.
Even good reasons aren’t everything.

I look at a lot of things, I look at everything I can. Because of that, some say that I am good looking. I correct them and add “at.” I am good at looking.

For sure I am.

That having been said, I think we need to be careful about what we are looking at. With so many absolutely wonderful things to grab our attention, we can pretty easily be completely derailed and not even realize it.

In my working to rekindle a fresh body of work, in my new studio space, I was struggling to lay down any brushstrokes that felt like they meant much to me.

Puzzled, I made the conscious decision to look seriously back at the last work I did pre-pandemic that excited me. So, I unwrapped some work and stuck it on the wall and just looked at it.

I could see a thread, and for however many reasons there are that I let go of that thread I looked, and I heard my own art speaking to me as if it was Travis Bickle looking right back at me saying, “I’m hangin’ here, you make the move. You make the move. It’s your move. You lookin’ at me? Are you lookin’ at Me? … Who the hell else are you lookin’ at? You lookin’ at me? Well, I’m the only one here. Who do you think you are looking at?”

You can imagine, I was a little taken aback to have my own artwork talking to me like Robert De Niro flicking a pistol out of his sleeve at me.

Needless to say, it got my attention.