let me start by being perfectly honest here, i am not an artist… not in the drawing, painting, nude sculpture making sense anyways…

when i was in high school i somehow managed to end up taking art as one of my choice subjects [i copied a monkey face pretty well back in standard 5/grade 7 and got accepted in art at westerford somehow that way] for grade 8 and 9 but very quickly found out that the teacher didn’t so much teach art as assumed art and so if you didn’t know how to do the type of art he held up you were pretty much screwed… which led to me and ray wright largely spending two years just mixing paint colours and unintentionally blocking up drains…

i was not allowed to choose art for grade 8 to 10 and so effectively i like to think that i was kicked out of art… academically at least.

til i heard about this thing called First Friday in Philadelphia where i currently live and move and have my being. our summer intern and friend Beth took a bunch of her really good art to the streets and came back with money – lots of it.

so i schemed with monkman aka A-Ron aka Aaron, another housemate, to make some art and take it to first friday and take irony for a joy ride cos surely if i could make some art and someone could buy it for real money then that would just throw art on it’s head…

last saturday i spend the whole day painting on a window within a frame that Jamie from across the road [one of the original members of the simple way] gave me and came up with something some people would call art, at least until they looked at it. Monkman came home after being out the whole day, took about thirty minutescreating his minimist art piece [also on a window frame] and it looked 1000 times better than mine.

there were bits of mine i liked. tbV liked at least two parts of it and i think i liked three of the four corners or at least ish. but as a whole it was going to take some irony walking by.

two things happened tonite at first friday which made me happy. the first was two quite trendy girls walking past [and we had my painting next to monkman’s and a bunch of t-shirts and patches he was selling so a decent amount of stuff] and the one turned to the other one having indicated my painting and said ‘that’s good’ or ‘i like that’ or something to that effect. job done.

the second thing was that i sold my painting for 20 dollarbucks. like money. real money. that you can buy things with. oh irony, your head has been bruised by this ‘art’ this nite… or something. this girl really dug it and i didn’t know what to charge her for it and she said twenty bucks? and i said sure [i’m a kick-ass haggler] and she gave the twenty bucks and walked off [and is theoretically going to claim it later – she had just arrived and wanted to check out other things – pretty trusting in these parts]

so all said and done i think that makes me officially an artist.