Lazy Bones Studio Upon Request

Lazy Bones Studio

In our latest Black Ivory Podcast, I reminisce about the painting hut I built in the woods before I came out as a public artist, and promised @jompiy that I would post about it soon. I have more pictures and video of the time period, but they’re buried deep in Throop archive. I used the hut all year round, and in the winter, would go out at night after dinner, carrying my paints and light the Aladdin Kerosene lamps. No one knew I was a painter at the time.
From my book Making Friends With Wild Dogs: Reflections on Stuckism For Its 25th Anniversary

It’s 2006. We’ve moved to the country with 8 acres of private land beside 5,000 acres of farms and forest butting up against a Great Lake Ontario. Near total isolation. No friends. No enemies. I build a 12 x 12' cabin in the woods. After dinner on the coldest nights I take my paints and a kerosene lamp out to the cabin and work in the weak light. I have a little propane heater at my feet and shadows flickering on the wall.
I paint on nights that I am off from work. I am a homemaker, restaurant cook, painter, writer in that order of importance. Rose has become the bread winner. Income from restaurant work is supplemental. My favorite subjects to paint are copies of my five-year old daughter’s drawings. Such innocent and mysterious creations. I am still a copycat student of expression.
We tap maple trees in February. It’s March, 2008. I apply to a local juried art exhibition and get accepted. This is the first time I have shown paintings in public. One of my pieces makes the cover of the promotional postcard. I attend the opening and win an honorable mention. It’s strange to see so many people looking at my work, now out of the closet. At the gallery exit, some big bearded guy with a Texas accent introduces himself to Rose and me. I pull my hand out of my coat to shake his hand and a maple tap falls out. He asks me what is that? I tell him about syruping. Then he does the brazen Texas thing and invites himself over to my place to watch me boil sap. He looks at me, then Rose, waiting for an answer with a huge grin. No doubt he just wants to get closer to my wife, kill me, and marry her. He tells me there were only a few artworks in the show that interested him, and it turns out mine is one of them. His name is Dan Leo and I decide to do what no neurotic New Yorker would dare. I invite him over to play at my house.
A week later, while the sap boils, I take Dan and his little boy to the hut to show them some of my paintings. He tells me I need to join the local art association and exhibit whenever possible. At this time Stuckism is nine years old and has an international following. Stuckist groups are popping up all over the world, and progenitors in the UK are getting some notice in newspapers and on TV. I know nothing about this. I am not interested in art or a contemporary art world. I paint what I am thinking. The majority of my paintings are inspired (and copied) from my daughter’s drawings. I title them with my day’s psychological state of mind. The rape and pillage of Afghanistan and Iraq, killings of innocents, corruption in politics, global warming. I am scolding the world with color from a hut in farm woods, NY. My neighbor, whom I will never meet, shoots his guns every day. His yard is a mud pit of half-wild dogs, and what’s left of American culture is a septic tank buried in the ground that you can fill up with crap on the Internet.
But this is reality. I tend a huge garden, care provide for the family, paint pictures and write pulp philosophy in the backwoods of a paradise country hell, while goading my neurons to make herculean synapse leaps of determination that only the minds of gut artists would attempt in such smothering adversity.

Some paintings from the hut, paper and canvas, all acrylic:

Rose and daughter in the kitchen while cleaning the lamp wicks.