I’m thinking about un-disowning some of the paintings I did at MICA. I dragged them out of the closet to look at them, since I wasn’t sure if I wanted to include one or two of them in my little introductory slide show thing at Windsor (for a point of reference as to how crazy I am, I’ve actually been rehearsing what I plan on saying every night when I’m lying in bed–this is just like a five minute deal, and all I plan to say is “Hello, I’m Steven. I’m from Florida and I got my BFA at MICA,” and then cut to slides. Really, not something that needs rehearsing). I figured it might be useful, but really? I’m just looking to prove that my work did have some kind of “edge,” at some point, anyway. Clearly I have little else to do with my free time other than fret about all the ways people might not like me.
Anyway, it isn’t that I really lost faith in the blackface paintings. I stopped making them because the circumstances of my life changed, and I didn’t have the stamina for that kind of work, anymore. Also, I had to leave all of my oil paints in Baltimore when I came back to Tampa. And they were kind of Baltimore-specific, anyway. Granted, critiques were a headache–painting faculty who could only bring themselves to talk about paint handling (my biscuits? oh, that burned them); that guy who referred to me as “that guy who painted himself blue; dozens of people who couldn’t stop telling me how funny they were, and one or two people who just told I was a racist, pure and simple (that was actually the only criticism I got that could potentially be valid–I hope it isn’t, but I can’t say I didn’t see it coming)–but I only took them off my site because a) they don’t really… mesh with what I do now, and they would have been distracting; and b) I didn’t really want to talk about them anymore.
But looking at them again, now, I’m kind of taken aback at how good they are. I’ve been out of oil painting for so long that it’s a bit shocking to realize that I am (or was) actually quite good at it (I apologize, my modesty tends to falter considerably as regards my work–I assure you, gentle reader, that it’s always a shock when things turn out well, but I don’t care to denigrate what I do for the sake of decorum–I spend quite enough time trashing everything else I do. I’ve also been known to find ways of working my SAT scores [1500] into casual conversation, but that’s just because I’m kind of a dick sometimes). The paintings have darkened a little in the last three years; some of that will go away with a little sunlight, but I think it makes them a little handsomer. In any case, I don’t think they’re ever going back on the portfolio, but they are on flickr, now.
Unrelatedly, I downloaded Fergie’s solo album. Mostly so I could listen to “Big Girls Don’t Cry” over and over again without having to hit the “watch again” button on YouTube. And somewhere in the chorus there’s some little synth fall that sounds, for the life of me, like my cellphone ringtone. It’s driving me bonkers. Not bonkers enough to turn the song off, though.
