YOUNG PEOPLE LOVE VISCERAL ART
Young people love my art and buy it. They get what I’m doing. It’s visceral, not intellectual. They don’t verbalize it. They just tell me they love my paintings. There is a repeating pattern. I am overjoyed again and again. It happens everywhere and more with time.
From two year old children who pull their parents into my booth and point at the painting, saying or emitting guttural sounds of delight and excitement, to late 30s men and women, with or without toddlers, who tell me they are struck, and wish they could afford. Their eyes are wide open and their smiles are wide as their eyes. When they hear that young people get 15% off, for life, if they can afford anything, even the tiniest painting 10”x4”, they buy on the spot.
Sometimes they take a card and say, “One day, we’ll be able to afford your paintings and we’ll email you.” And they do. One couple met me in Texas 10 years ago and said these exact words. 8 years later they contacted me from Arizona, and bought their first original. Two years later, they bought their second one.
Occasionally young couples in their early 30s, with toddlers, can afford a mega canvas painting and buy it. Sometimes I see sad faces who have no money and beg me to make prints. But one thing is clear, these could be my children or even grandchildren, and they connect to my childish array of styles, my colorful madness, my whimsical and even parodic attitude to art, and to life, my fun, my taking it all ironically, jokingly, lightly, yet very seriously.
“I am seeking, I am striving, I am in it with all my heart.”
Vincent Van Gogh
I’ve been painting for 58 years, but remain 15 years old in my basic mindset. Maybe five years old or even three years old. I am so happy that as I evolve over the years, instead of losing contact with these young people, I am striking deeper and faster roots in their souls, and the numbers grow and grow.
There is no greater drive, no bigger inspiration to keep evolving and changing and spreading out even more into new combinations of styles, than these children, teens, young adults and young parents. I love them. I thank God who is keeping me a baby when I paint.
