the christophers: lost time
I used to be an artist.
Painting used to excite me, and I lived in two distinct worlds. The real world, the one that we all participate within, and My real world, the one that mattered to me. The real world could have been on fire a thousand times, and it is on fire now, just as it was on fire then, and I never fully cared nor fully invested in the emotions of it because I. had. my. real. world.
My real world was big and limitless, and anything I could desire or think of, all I had to do was just paint it or bring it out in a sculpture, or a song, or a birthday cake, or a joke, but most of all I could see and feel and taste all of those things, because they were real. Painting takes a lot out of you, right alongside all the responsibilities of The real world, and, after a certain point, one world has to make the cut. Some people are lucky, they can balance their worlds and exist within both. Some people can monetize their worlds. Some people don’t have to choose work. I chose work, partly because it was how I was raised:
“You have work and find a job so that you can just paint.” was something repeated to me over and over until I gave in, and I believed.
But before that concession, I painted and drew everyday nonstop for nearly 25 years, and I always believed that I would “make it”, and that my real world would eclipse the standard, liberating me permanently.
Naturally, I starved, especially at first.
I worked part-time jobs and avoided invitations to move back home. I survived on instant oatmeal, brown rice, and bananas. The work flowed easily. I became vegan to save money on groceries and impress a boyfriend who was bad in bed, but baked me bread.
I painted large canvasses and did two installation shows. I became anemic due to lack of protein. My work went from 2Dimensional, to interactive and multimedia. I had to have a wisdom tooth pulled and when the bleeding didn’t stop, I swallowed it and fell asleep, waking up to vomiting up my own blood on the futon. I made project after project and website after website. The weeks towards the end of every month got very scary. I found myself in a relationship, and he said I was wasting away. I took a management job and finally had money to buy paint again, instead of solely making art from trash.
It happened slowly, at first, I really believed that I would be able to finally fully support my passion as an artist. My new job had multiple connections for young artists, and I saw this as a joint-stepping stone for not-starving and being successful. Obviously, this was the wrong choice. It was a mess, the hiring was bad, for weeks, many of us cried in backstock, and little by little, my real world became damaged. Five years later, I finally quit working full time altogether.
The buoyancy of my 20s was gone, my materials had aged, I was single, and the landscape had shifted. It was over, but at least I felt alive. I picked up right where I left off, but I was off. The innocence was gone and I’d seen just how things could go really wrong. My real world packed up shop and left, and I was stranded in The real world. When the excitement of finishing a painting was over, I turned to video art, then “multimedia art” which could be anything, and then a short film shot inside a sweaty apartment, then insanity, then Covid, then more screenwriting, then more death (Father and Grandma died four years apart), more insanity, more hustling, more writing, and here we are.
If you haven’t been introduced to the magic of art, the magic of creating art, creating meaning from scratches and abstraction, or turned meaning into abstraction, if you haven’t allowed yourself to escape into sculpture or gluing random shit down, if you haven’t fallen asleep on your 5 foot drawing on the floor, haven’t flirted with a guy so he’d buy your painting so you’d have bus fare for the month, if you haven’t sat in a cab with your friends after returning from a punk show pooling your crumbled dollars together to get home safely, if you haven’t lurked around artist residencies smoking the half-smoked cigarettes from random ashtrays, if you haven’t tried to paint during your lunch breaks, if you haven’t had potential models or photographers flake on you at the last minute, if you haven’t peeled dried acrylic paint off a wooden floor, if you haven’t painted your friend’s car with a giant can of white housepaint just because, if you haven’t had to store all your paintings because you couldn’t sell them, if you haven’t had to store all your drawings and sketches and zines and jewelry and journals because you couldn’t move back home, if you haven’t had a storage unit you could no longer afford because you lost both part-time jobs due to Covid, if you haven’t had to have the conversation with the person working at said storage facility that your entire life’s work would be abandoned because you couldn’t pay, if you haven’t lost your dreams, if you haven’t lost your time, if you haven’t lost your youth, if you haven’t lost your world, if you haven’t lost people, then watching The Christophers won’t really mean much to you, but it did to me.
