new york stories

I first went to NYC when I was 20 years old.  Times Square was the manifestation of every cautionary tale from my fundamentalist upbringing brought to life and writ large; hookers, pimps, dealers, hustlers, junkies.  It was dirty and dim and sketchy and I took those first steps along the yellow brick road toward my own Oz.

In the times I've returned throughout the years, I think back on that first impression and it makes me smile.  Walking through the post St. Patrick's Day parade crowd in Times Square in heavy wet snow on Saturday night on my way uptown was nothing like that first encounter.  (I got a high five from Batman, for christsake).  New York, like all great cities of the world, gets under your skin and into your blood; and there is a part of me that is home there like nowhere else.

The Ides of March, James Austin Murray's solo show at Narthex Gallery did not disappoint.  There will be more reflections on that in the weeks to come; it's still so new in my experience and so powerful in my memory.  A friend said it best, "it is the perfect combination of art and space."  The work belongs there.  It inhabits the space in an intensely powerful way while somehow managing to coexist with it.  It is solid, significant work, -by far the best painting I saw on the walls my whole visit.

I've spent the last 15 months or so shedding.  Like Bird, I reached a point where I felt I had to withdraw for a time and find my voice.  I may be no Charlie Parker to the visual art world, but I've got chops that ain't like nobody else's.  It feels time to climb into the ring, to live or die by the intensity of personal vision and unyielding tenacity.  I may get a few beat downs along the way, but the world will never see what I make no effort to show it.  Now I know that it has to see it; that's why I'm here.

So I come back into the daily grind recharged and transcended.  Good art always makes me want to paint.  Being in artists' studios always makes me excited and on fire to return to my own.  Shots in the pub and much bantering about art and paint and space and form, it's time well spent...always.  But painting is what unites us.  Time in the studio getting in and getting down; that is its own realness.