The Oswego River School

Pine Cobble, Northwestern Massachusetts 2020. Acrylic on paper, 20 x 16"

From my book, A Spring Without Mulch, published March, 2021:

While coming to terms with my reality, I must face up to some hard truths. I am a prolific, untalented image-maker and hack writer. A human artist ostrich, with my head buried in the sand. By now, after 30 years of creative effort, I should have hit an acceptable plateau of celebrity. Two or three eager fans to keep the illusion alive and my head buried in output. This year I picked my head up, spit out a scarab, and assessed the truth. There are political and philosophical “followers” of professional basketball players. Teeny-bopper entertainer Taylor Swift, who has the auspices of 87 million fans on Twitter, wrote the following a few days ago: “not a lot going on at the moment” and posted a couch selfie taken by a professional photographer. A half million people loved it. After 10 years on Twitter, I have 13 followers. This is my latest Tweet: “I have an ETSY shop where every painting is $30. Any Throop purchased today is destined for chicken coop wealth tomorrow. Invest!” My 13 followers didn’t like it. It was audacious of me to ask for money for originality no one asked for.

It’s also audacious of ICAN (International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons), with 37 thousand Twitter followers and a 2017 Nobel Peace Prize, to beg nations not to make strontium-90 dust out of Taylor Swift and her 87 million followers.

I get it. ICAN is moral and morbid. Ron Throop is not a promoted entertainer. When Taylor Swift asks for love or money, a half million people give it to her. Once in a while ICAN will receive a $5 donation from a grandpa who wants his granddaughters to become grandmothers. It wouldn’t be so heartbreaking if Taylor Swift made excellent outward expression of an inward grace. She does not. In fact her “talents” align more appropriately with the pine sap smeared on the jazz shoes of these virtually unknown dead entertainers. Each super dancer was probably paid an omelette breakfast and subway fare back to Harlem. Please watch them and think on today’s performing “artists”. COVID has cleared a path to kill off celebrity worship once and for all. Do you not also see the banal mediocrity of today’s popular entertainer? Put Beyoncé in a room alone with only her thoughts and a leotard. Her absolute best choreography couldn’t hold a candle to the most junior of dancers in the video. Yet 129 million people are interested in her looks and what she has to say. That is some power persuasion potentiality! To daily vocalize her support of ICAN could significantly reduce the threat of nuclear annihilation. But she chooses not to, for it would mean less fans, more seriousness, and a moral backbone to bolster her limp talent.

What a shame. One catchy pop tune and dance about Nagasaki could influence policy on a level that ten thousand painters couldn’t reach in a lifetime of expression.

I am a mediocre talent like Taylor Swift and Beyoncé who practices in another genre of creative expression. I have been unable to break into the racket to support myself humbly with words and images. America demands more dishwashers and less artists. Both are horrible career choices, but one is much worse. Especially if rent needs to get paid and food eaten. How did I get here?

Once, long ago, I was a very good dishwasher and salad-maker who got promoted to line cook and there discovered my people and career. However, simultaneously I took up child-raising as a hobby, that turned into a passion, and conflicted with advancement in the restaurant trade. I quit often because I refused to abandon homeschooling, or expect my wife to take up the hobby that brought passion to my life. She had her career and it paid better without having to contend with wet lettuce and floating fish heads during an evening shift.

I refused promotion in the cooking trade time and again because to rank as chef would require a 70 hour work week, and force the beloved hobby out of my life. Since college days I had/have a strong attraction to life-giving authors and painters of the past. I would channel their biographical energies into my own life and take a second hobby, art, that might pay the bills someday when my bones could not keep up with the demands of the professional kitchen. Art would act as liaison, binding a dead end career to a passionate teaching and parenting lifestyle. Like attention to my daughters, art became a commitment that challenged my talents and wrecked any path to a sustainable work life.

And here I am, still practicing painting and writing, and home making—an amateur of will, a master of nothing.

Recently, a friend complimented my productivity in avenues of expression. It got me to thinking. How can I work so regularly at something I’m not very good at? What is the fuel that provides the energy to paint unpopular pictures and write unreadable books? After some reflecting I got my answer.

Diving headlong into the total care of my children turned me into a self-righteous moralist without the presence of religion. I discovered the Golden Rule, taught it and math to my little girls, and expected everyone else to follow me, even fossil fuel and weapons industry CEOs. I realized the latter were just line cooks of life, though more prone to psychosis, confronted with a choice of paths in early man/womanhood. Raise children or inflate profits? Over time I picked out the guilty and honed in on their crimes. Who and what was going to harm these charges of mine? Who was responsible for dark clouds in their future? Add a Golden Rule algorithm to a moral-coded mind, and it was easy science to extol virtue and castigate the sleazeballs.

I wrote back to my friend to thank him for the compliment. To paraphrase:

I think these thoughts on art, and all I can hope for is communion, connection, what have you. In another time I would have been a minister of Bibles or stump orator for the Wobblies. Lord knows I suck at art as any Hudson School painter of yore would attest. He might say, “Throop, find a congregation and leave beauty to us.” And of course he’d be right.
I missed out on religion as a community connection/control, and moral guideline. So much of my work effort feels preachy, but it’s not meant to be. It’s just me reminding myself to hold everything together as best I can and demand that everyone else is doing the same. It stems from taking a self-taught 25 year total immersion course in parenting in the land of the world gone wrong.

So this week I plan to paint Hudson River School landscapes to prove once and for all a poor career choice for a man of my energy output. At the same time I shall seek options to fuel new pathways to contentment. Art was and is a suitable pastime for a non-believer to express spirituality. It got me through some difficult times of confusion and despair. Once I was able to paint myself out of a corner. Now I feel more stuck in it by the repetitive motion that was supposed to liberate me from myself. The children have grown and left the nest. I’m too old for line cooking and my culinary arts education was stunted years ago. Where do I go from here? I’m not ready to die.

To the basement studio to paint what can be seen better with the naked eye or a photograph.

---

Well, this is an omen. Just a few hours after painting the landscape and thinking my art wretched and meaningless, my basement studio flooded.

How’s that for some portents?

(Un)fortunately I caught it in time and water came in only an inch or two high. The sump pump was stalled but started up again after I tapped it with a stick. Some paintings got wet, but I will dry them today and tomorrow while emptying the basement of wicked wood and wet carpet. I’ll also read up on sump pumps, buy a suitable back up, and hope it doesn’t rain for the rest of my life.

If I have a genuine need for change (which I suspect), then the events of this week will act as good catalyst for that which needs to come. Life episodes of intensity may or may not spark noticeable change. For me, conditions on the inside and out are just right. I have felt them before and know the routine. Go in a broken, confused, desperate fraction of what you once were, and come out new, aware, and more alive. The pandemic, my abysmal art, and the historic Throop basement mini-flood has got me primed for significant life adjustment. The ever-present noisy dissonance is ready to attack. I imagine that COVID is coaxing a monumental transformation for many in society. Any person cooped up inside the head for too long is bound to unravel enough to notice. Now the virus has everyone caged in one way or another. The microbe of death and rebirth. Some change is coming. There is some solace to be had this time through. At least I know I’m not alone.