I held back writing; held back for a few months; held back until now, on a silly train to Ipswich.
I had a theory that what I would see in coming to England was comically small hills and these privileged over-ground views; be it of pasture or country, and now that I’m rolling by on a train, I may include townships. I pass these by at eighty feet up, and sometimes the more panoramic views could even measure a hundred feet down.
Indeed my premonition was previewed. I have been here before; in a rhetorical sense somewhat in a geographic sense, (I have not strayed far from London the once I was here, but overall this train and the stations and townships have a European feel), and figuratively I have made a planned but ill conceived Hail Mary trip abroad before. This feels familiar, but what is different is my eye, and my mind. I will catch myself looking at graffiti, and I’ve been enraptured by graffiti in my sketchbooks and I’ve been tagging a little bit in the streets back home, but my mode is different. I want to be funny, and I’ve been exposed to such artists as Ravillious, Bawden, and Nash (through my dear instructor Stephanie Henderson), as well as Moreland comes to mind, at Ringling College in Florida, but more relevant maybe to this trip, and in addition to that group who first gave me the itch to come to this land where funny paintings come from, at PAFA I got way more into Nash, followed up my reading of a book on Ravillious- seeing and looking up the works of his lovers and a few of his friends, and learned of some others- Stanley Spencer and Euan Euglow come to mind. I have not fallen for Euglow and Stanley Spencer so much yet, but am certainly on the lookout. What’s more, I know the big dogs are here too, and I hope I can kindle a more substantial flame to Cotman, Constable, Turner, Gainsborough, and William Blake. Truly England bar none has the best painters, and I feel like I get what they’re getting at, and I feel like an alien or a mutant, like their paintings look like. I read a book of the History of English Architecture in full and was tickled by the conquests followed by the long periods of isolation, endemic to the development of England’s own identity and style. I arrived here on October the 19th, 2019, which was supposed to be the date on which was decided the state of a hard Brexit. I haven’t heard a peep. But I think it is telling that Britain is hungry again for some alone time, after the orgiastic few years with the EU. In the British paintings, there’s an embrace of the weird. The paintings don’t climax on some cliche, they ring instead, a whole painting singing eccentricity. But getting ack to the graffiti thing. Graffiti is a young adults sport- an introduction to the world, and i hold it dear to my heart forever. From disenfranchisement to direct action, to an understanding of the push and pull, and teasing at the threads of structures of power. I would like to read Foucault in so many ways, but I will have to get back to you before I more fully bring him into this but suffice to say, from what I have read it seems relevant. Kant says enlightenment is letting go to the suffering ignorance we bring upon ourselves willingly. We subscribe to that which we know, for comfort. So I’m entering this country, and I look for graffiti, and when I see it, I analyze it, but from this moving train I also catch compositions like snapshots. Color shapes ignite ideas of abstracted pictures, picture planes, photographs, paintings, collages, illustrations. What I’m trying to say is that I have been through art school.
I was awarded this trip by way of an Endowed Scholarship. $5000, in a check. It was called the Scheidt Scholarship, and is awarded every year by PAFA. I won probably because I painted strong in classes, and inspired and help other students. The prize is awarded based on a end-of-year wall, and I hung one that said ‘I paint more, more broadly, and with more accuracy and feeling than anyone else in the school, even if they’re off, they’re on.’, so all this to say in my wall I tried to make a subjective decision into an objective one. I say all this, and it puts me into contrast to a student who might know what he is doing, or has made well conceived and executed fine paintings, clean and clear paintings. I say this because I believe what won me the prize was my efforts off the wall, and my standing with the teachers, seeing how hard I worked. I am here in hopes of making work, making it work.
I’m bleeding money as soon as I hit ground. That’s what makes the train ride silly. It cost me 56pound to get to Ipswich from London, including the ticket from the airport train National Rail 62. I bought a breakfast sandwich and a coffee for 6 pounds, and a phone charger and a lighter for 27, and I got off the train since my first three paragraphs and am now seated in a vegan cafe where I ordered a quiche, slaw and a English breakfast tea with oat milk. This latest expenditure I don’t care for but I needed a place to sit for a while to tap this stuff out. Did I mention Ravillious lived and painted in Ipswich for a while? That’s why I’m here. I needed to come see it. My list of places to go is so unstructured, but I applied to a few different houses in the south on Couchsurfing and a couple agreed to host me for this first night. The couple is vegan, and they won’t be home for another seven hours. I told them I love a good cafe, so they recommend this place, Hank’s Vegan Deli.
Money aside, I am thrilled at my decision to jut east upon arriving, rather than exit the subway ‘tube’ in the middle of london, and having to figure it out from there. Clean as London is, the urban life has been grinding on me in Philadelphia. In the weeks leading up to this trip, I became somewhat of an indentured servant to a few projects which I will now relay stories of;
In spring of 2019 I was in an art market. I made $1200 off selling my student works and other cheap paintings. For this show I borrowed a tent from my girlfriend Frances’s place of work, Asian Arts United. In return for this favor, I rebuilt their garden. Out of a window overlooking the garden work, looked one of Frances’s colleagues, Dewi, whom I had met briefly before by way of coming inside the building to pick up Frances. Dewi is a landlord and had a bad breakup with her recent tenants- they decimated her house, blowing holes through drywall, and generally making short sided modifications to the home. So I was leaving a commercial house painting job to focus more on my art, when Dewi asked me to fix up her house. I asked for $20 per hour, a raise from the house painting rate of $15 hourly. Long story short, I quoted her a time and a budget and we went right through the money, and then the timeframe (though I asked indeed for all the way until the 19th, knowing the job was huge). I was good at being worth the money mostly, but I had one bad week where I decided to bite the bullet on some supplies and time, and that week Dewi begrudgingly wrote me a $900 check. Thereafter, I became shy about my billing, and asked if she would settle on a flat rate to finish the project as a compromise. I asked for $600, then $600 plus materials which I under billed at $100, so totaling $700. Well it was miserable working there, knowing I was eating into projects too big to be worth my time, but I did it. I left the house two days ago. The house is much healthier than I first encountered it, livable even ( excepting the cancerous bug bombing that Dewi subjected the place to- I don’t know if the house will ever recover from the smells of pesticides). Anyway she and I walked through the house and she wrote me the check, so that’s that for now. I stashed some stuff there which she knows about- my tools and a couple of paintings and some oil paint, which I will pick up in January or so. I flirted with buying the house, since now I know it so well but for one the pesticide thing is a deal breaker because I only think of cancer when I’m there, and another thing, Dewi wants $220,000. It’s not the right time for me to spend that, maybe upon landing a teaching salaried job, maybe after grad school.
The other project has it’s roots on Instagram, through which I met someone from England. He and I would talk a bit and at some point he came to Philadelphia for an unrelated wedding of his brothers-in-law or something. He hit me up for a wall. I got us this spot on a warehouse door, and while painting it I met a landlord who offered me his patio to paint. I agreed to do it for free. While working on his patio mural, he learned I was doing house restoration, and contracted me to help him fix up one of his slum houses, which he payed to have fixed up real nicely. he is a ‘grade A’ gentrifier property developer go get em capitalist, and he is exploitative and solipsistic. So I got wrapped up in some work on this slum house too, and between Dewi’s, the Mural, and the slum house, I did not finish everything, but I did work a ton. Each day was about the work. Drowning, yuppie that I am, made sure I wasn’t being eaten alive- this I would pretend to deal with by taking a long breakfasts before I got started working each day, like I had time to spare; then I would finish the commute to the job site and either work hard because I hit it right, or dobble around and try to get my thoughts in order. I was stressed. I would put in a fulls day’s work somehow or another. It was a miserable few weeks. I became lost, and rather than use super strength to power through all of the projects (as they all felt endless), I deferred to the methods described, trudging.
I think I picked right. On the train ride out to Ipswich and in Ipswich proper I am finding the shapes and proportions, and even the ‘about to get beat up’ fears which I anticipated. I am taking photos of a small-appetite type; fence, weeds, post; pile of dirt, magpie; corridor, light; cobblestone, chains; a broken window that reminds me I could get my head bashed in. I’m scared of highschool students here. The outfits and the accent makes me think they’re aggressive. I’m tempted to appropriate some of it, see if I can’t get a little tough. There are lots of ninnies here too. I’m at a gay owned vegan place and the traffic is pleasant. Four men sat next to me. One placed his hat on my table, and we cordially gave a nod to one another. So while I do think any group is suspicious, if it’s a group which displays kindness, it’s a pass. The groups set on looking tough I am scared of.
I brought along a few clothes, a waterproof bivy bag, a sleeping bag, two sketchbooks an ipad, phone and a potable keyboard. The ipad I had doubts on whether to bring, but the decision is well thought out. I want to get better at digital painting, I want to organize my life in a - that somehow I can’t seem to find time for at home (I tend to take on so many projects, while on the road the flux keeps the stone rolling- gathering no moss), I want to write and document my time now that I’m out of art school especially, and since I don’t have internet access often with this ipad, it will be limited to these productive ends. The digital art might be one of my best choices. I want to more directly work from photo reference, have work that is ready-made for instagram and facebook, ( and therefore portfolio and jobs), and have work that is not dictated necessarily by this ‘poetic shred of a yellow wrapper’, or likewise. I have a habit or miring around in garbage, making garbage art. I believe in this in terms of validity, however I fantasize when I’m not making art of the tabula Rosa of the empty screen, there to take in what I program into it, no need for glue or wires, just working in the medium of light itself. I think I made the right choice, and I haven’t even made anything! But what’s more about the digital is that I won’t squander my paintings on poetic self-sad gifts like a clown. They’ll be digital files, and I’ll bring them home, and if I want to use them as studies for further works, I can make that choice.
This is truly the first headroom I’ve had since graduating PAFA. And the first great blue yonder since leaving my second college (Florida State University) in 2012.
In 2015, I entered art college, but for real this time, at Ringling College of Art and Design. I thought I would stay a year, then split, as was advised to me by Jim Draper; “just go for one year- stop taking about it and just do it.” After the first year, the second year looked like it could be useful, but not the third. I wanted to focus in on traditional painting so I applied and transferred to PAFA. I also wanted a more sophisticated group of peers, which at PAFA I found. In between the two colleges I stayed with my parents for a summer. It was a good chance for us to become acquainted, as six years prior, at the age of 21, I decided to go by my middle name, Kemeys, rather than ‘Robbie’ which is now (hopefully) my dead name. It was a clear time, but like any big change it’s liberating, then laborious. Becoming is the game, and it’s a long one. Declaration is the easiest part of becoming; it’s cheap. That summer was good; living with my parents, volunteering at the library repairing books, volunteering with Habitat for Humanity, and painting two murals (endeavors which I also milked til the last possible minute then abandoned to drive up to Pennsylvania to begin my third year of art school and first year at PAFA). I took up meditation, which I continued for two years and some change.
When I graduated and got the scholarship, I spent a week and a half decompressing, preparing for the next move, which turns out was getting a job painting houses. I stopped meditating to live in the great grayness of blended days. I haven’t returned to meditation. I picked up drinking beer a week or two ago; just a couple maybe twice a week as I’ve been getting ready for the trip; trying to get into the spirit of it. And I think I’m handling it all well. That’s it for. Now.
