I’m a writer living in Los Angeles, making emojis of faces I find on Instagram. When I get a moment, I paint portraits on canvases I build from reclaimed wood.
This is getting serious.
This painting of Christopher hangs in my bedroom. I finished it a while ago, and it was coincidentally an accurate portrait of him. I was fond of this retro spark plug graphic and some old gasoline signs, so I worked it into the painting. Chris is more into cars than I had known, thus it was more representative of his personality than I had ever planned. Sometimes I’m smart, but most of the time, I’m just plain lucky.
Which brings me to this portrait of Joe that has been haunting my studio for over a year. I woke up the other day and it finally dawned on me what the painting wanted. There’s a quality to the Christopher portrait that I have lost in my new series of paintings. Something about the layers, ghosting over positive and negative graphical elements. And of course the face.
I created an animated profile pic at the beginning of the year. You know, this one (below) with the sketch draw paint combined into one graphic. That’s what the painting needs to be. Different things layered. A portrait, as complex as Joe, whom I strangely ran into randomly one day at the Burbank Ikea.
The story of meeting Joe.
It’s happened a few times in my life, when I run into people I know in the weirdest places. Not that Ikea is weird, because I practically live there. I had been painting the portrait of Joe for a while, making him a celebrity in my brain. It was surreal to see him in the flesh, quietly sitting on a couch, waiting to return something. Turns out, he was also surprised, because when I started speaking to him, he had no idea who I was.
Let’s start with this. Joe is really attractive. You know it, I know it, it’s a thing. But looking at him in real life was something different. There’s this reserved warmth about him, that was the complete opposite of the graphic ink covered his arms and his hands. He had a lot of tattoos.
As I said, he didn’t know who I was (not that he should’ve, because we never met before). He started politely nodding as if to buy time, going through his mental rolodex, hoping something I said would trigger an ID match. It wasn’t until I started talking about the painting that he put two and two together and a relieved smile perked up his face. Joe owns a fancy barbershop in Beverly Hills. At first, he thought I was one of his clients, which was flattering, because my hair generally looks like a hobo cut it. Now he realized, I was just some weird lunatic from Facebook that he really didn’t know.
He was heroically polite as I droned on and on, making sad transparent excuses for not having gotten further with my portrait of him. He shrugged it off with a, “Don’t worry about it.” (Probably thinking, when is this guy going to shut up? Please, please, please call my number so I can peacefully return this Svorka.)
Then, I did this really weird thing. I’m not a touchy person. I don’t hug people. I’m not warm at all. But, I took my index finger and touched the back of Joe’s hand, pointing at what I remember as a bird tattoo. In my head I was saying, that’s a really good tattoo, followed immediately by the thought, why are you touching this person? My self detection for creepiness triggered a defcon 5 and I said something like, “I’ve taken way too much of your time”, thanked him with an awkward smile and sauntered away as cool as I can manage, which for the record, is not very cool at all.
So that’s my dumb story about serendipitously running into Joe. I so need to get this painting right. Plan B can start as soon as I get a moment to take apart Joe’s canvas and remix it back to square one.
Work in Progress
I’m a writer living in Los Angeles, making emojis of faces I find on Instagram. When I get a moment, I paint portraits on canvases I build from reclaimed wood.
