In about one months time I expect to launch the boat, so to speak, and begin my career as a professional artist. On some levels, that seems like a leap of faith, considering I’ve never made money from it. My attitude is similar to the one behind my answer to a fellow who discovered that I’d gone out and bought a brand new car with the help of a four year loan, the only time I ever bought new.

Said he, “Dennis, you must think you’re going to be here a long time.”

The implication was that my purchase was rash, since the industry I was in was subject to ups and downs and layoffs. We were standing in the production bay of a steel fabrication shop where my employment was less than a year old.

Before I go on and share how I replied, you might consider how I got the job and what unique aspect of the union contract at that place bolstered my confidence.

While I was attending art classes toward a commercial art degree at a community college, dad advised me to get a trade that I could “fall back on”. He was a welder. Seeing the wisdom of that counsel, I took a year off from the art schooling to get trained as a welder. Meanwhile I fell into the company of a long haired girl. By the time school was done, the two of us were committed to each other and leaving my position at the Dairy Queen was a desireable probability. Events transpired that would convert “falling back on” to “staying on”.

For the record, I point out that having a specialty to fall back on in case your preferred vocation ends in failure is akin to keeping a girlfriend on the side in case your marriage fails.

One day, I told my lady that I would go to a certain metal shop and apply for work.

In fact I did go to the place I told her I would go but I shrunk from going in as soon as I got close to the building. The bays were wide, tall, and noisy from the grinding, pounding, and welding of steel within. Every force inside me said to turn back and I almost did except for the realization that I’d told her what I was going to do. So I pushed past the urge to run the other way and got out of my little car. With my welding hood in hand, used as a cradle to hold leathers, gloves, and a slag hammer, I found the business office and went in. The receptionist was not enthusiastic and told me there was no hiring going on at the moment.

I hadn’t promised to get hired, I promised to apply. So I asked for an application for employment anyway. Against her protest that it was a waste of my time, I filled it out and left it with her.

On the way to the car I was approached by a darth vader character all dressed in black, a large and muscular man. He had the perfect menacing look to be the welding foreman.

“Can you spray arc vertical?” he asked.

It is not possible to weld a contiguous vertical spray arc bead. The puddle doesn’t freeze fast enough.

“I can.” I told him. It wasn’t a bluff. I knew that the vertical weld could not be made conventionally, but believed that I could trigger the weld. Spray arc is a process where a portable machine rolls bare wire off a spool and it serves as both electrode and filler. The wire feeds when you press the trigger and it stops when you let up.

“C’mon inside.”

He never was wordy.

He set up the test and told me to weld a couple of plates of steel that he tacked together like a Tee.

My suspicion was correct. I triggered a puddle and watched as the orange glow faded away, triggering in a new puddle just north of the one below as the orange almost died. The finger print sized puddle would glow orange and as it cooled, the light shrunk to the center. At that moment, the next trigger was added. The weld looked perfect and I was invited to start the next day.

The union agreement that I mentioned was unusual among the local shops and I found it to be very sensible. It certainly favored me. Typically when layoffs had to happen, the company was not free to keep their best talent in union shops. Instead, they had to hold on to the ones who had been with them the longest time. This company had just the opposite agreement. They could keep whoever suited them.

As a result, I had consistent employment with them for the next almost five years.

When the old timer suggested that I must think I’d be there a long time despite that I was new, he was hinting that I may have jumped the gun.

“I may not be here forever,” I told him. “But I’ll be working somewhere.”

Every time a layoff came, I was afraid it would be me but I never needed to feel that way. They always kept me.

Many years later I was in the position of hiring and firing employees at the office I helped run and I saw the picture from the other side.

My attitude as an employee was that I should maximise the value I bring. When I worked as a welder, I tried to lay down as much metal as possible and with the highest quality bead. whether the temperature was well below freezing or above a hundred degrees, I really believed that my output should not vary except as actually limited by external forces I could not control. That nearly got me killed, in fact.

Employees rarely have the attitudes I brought to my job. Too often, they’re more interested in maintaining a level of performance just above what would get them fired.

Along the same lines, as an artist I’ve long held the attitude that the creations I sign must be competently rendered and well designed. Developing a style didn’t particularly interest me, but what I wanted was to be able to command the tools and mediums so that whatever message the art was to convey  could get through.

So while the kids were growing up I learned from the books by examining the pictures done by  the big boys. One could say I was a realist painter, but the truth was that realism, so called, was the language that most often said what needed said. There are other languages and if they were the way the message needed to be delivered, then that’s how I spoke.

Sometimes the unexpected happened. That was the case with my writing system, the core of which was essentially dropped in my lap by whatever force in the universe oversees such things. From there, I built and refined it.  It came suddenly one day 45 years ago this month. I’d been trying to devise such a thing ever since I was ten. Suddenly, it popped into my mind and I got right to work on it.

About thirteen years later, something similar happened with an abstract painting that explains some of the finer points to consider when choosing a wife. The explaination that came with the image was that there will be many others who rise and fall along the way but the correct choice will be one with a similar consistent history with regard to living with the same basic values as I do. After our union, together we would enjoy a noticeable steady improvement in our progress.

This painting came to mind with it’s explaination in an instant and happened in a place where I could not get to the painting for another three or four hours.  I burned with excitement over it and painted it later that day.

 

Unwisely, I didn’t take that as my guide and the price was steep.

That sort of misstep is why I long avoided writing my personal history. Too embarrassing. There were others.

Now, here I am at the threshold of the new phase in my life, most likely as artist. There is no historical validation that I’m good for this. No sales, no crush of buyers pining for my entry into the market. I have no contacts in that world and in fact I have no part in that world.

Inside me, I have a calm.

Still to this day I do not have a style. But all those years of examining the published work of a long list of well known artists and taking the quality of expression that they embodied as a personal watermark for my own minimum quality have elevated my expectations.

I took the critique seriously when I read that Mr Sargent claimed, “A portrait is a picture of someone with something wrong with their mouth.”

That’s not acceptable.

Many commentaries indicated that hands are very difficult to render. Well, they’re right or they are wrong. Excuses don’t make up the difference.

When Picasso responded to someone who thought that a portrait didn’t look a thing like it’s subject, he was written to have said something like, “in ten or fifteen years, it will”

To me, that meant that after the picture has stood as the representative of that person for long enough then it becomes the icon image that represents that personality. I determined that he was correct but that if he was, then that image should be true to the person it represented and if possible complimentary.

There is one way I can fail. When someone wants a portrait or a landscape or a picture of something dear to their heart, if they have to choose between two artists who can barely speak on canvas because they don’t even know that I’m there for them then I have failed them. People ought to have a choice.

Until there are satisfied voices willing to point people to me, it’s my job to get the word out. My ardent wish is to turn every buyer, every commission, and those who see my art into converts and evangelists who’ll happily spread the good news that people have a better choice than what they were considering when buying art.

Me.

I won’t claim to be the best. There are tastes in art that simply won’t be satisfied by my art dialect. There are many art languages I won’t attempt to speak, but I intend to be fluent and persuasive in the one’s that suit me.

I mentioned that I’m calm in the face of statistical uncertainty. Temper that with the realization that I have no distinctive style any more than I have a distinctive accent. But I do have a distinctive voice, both on canvas and in conversation. I’m not sure that I have an easily recognizable brand but hope that what I do will stick with people like Will Rogers, Mark Twain, Cary Grant, and Normal Rockwell’s work did.

I’m scratching my head wondering how this will work. Not if it will. How. It will.