KEITH HARING and Other Childhood Accidents

There are certain things that happen during childhood that, for reasons nobody can adequately explain, become permanent fixtures in your brain.

Core memories.

Not necessarily the important stuff. Not birthdays, graduations (I only had one, by the skin of my teeth, or because they just wanted me gone), or those carefully orchestrated moments your parents spent hundreds of dollars trying to make memorable.

Sometimes it’s something completely fucking ridiculous.

I have a few.

One of my earliest memories involves being approximately four years old, sitting at the kitchen table after an afternoon of junior kindergarten. Might have been a Tuesday.

I’d just enjoyed a lovely bowl of Kraft Macaroni & Cheese, served in a mustard-yellow pottery bowl customized with my older brother Ben’s name. Someone had made it for him when he was a toddler.

I remember that bowl vividly. Particularly the sound of my fork scraping against the bottom. I can still hear it.

After lunch, I was enthusiastically sculpting something out of Play-Doh. Completely absorbed in whatever masterpiece I was attempting to bring into existence.

And then I shit my pants.

Right there. Mid-creation.

Apparently, I’d become so consumed with the artistic process that I’d neglected the increasingly urgent correspondence coming from my lower intestine.

Then I cried like a little bitch.

I couldn’t tell you what I was making or what happened afterward, but I remember that moment with remarkable clarity nearly four decades later.

Why?

Why has my brain dedicated valuable real estate to this particular episode?

Maybe it’s a metaphor for my entire creative process.

In fact, this was the first thing I thought about when I decided to write a memoir. This ridiculous little episode was my starting point.

Become completely consumed by an idea. Ignore every warning sign. Make an enormous mess. Cry about it. Start over.

Come to think of it, that’s a pretty accurate description of my adult life, too.

Fortunately, most of my artistic catastrophes these days don’t require a change of underwear.

Most.

Another core memory is considerably more interesting, although admittedly less gastrointestinal.

When I was around kindergarten age, Keith Haring visited Cranbrook as an artist in residence at its prestigious graduate art academy.

Cranbrook was where I’d eventually attend school from kindergarten through graduation. This must have been around 1987, which lines up with what I’ve since found online. My brother Ben would have been in fourth grade and my oldest brother in sixth, which probably explains why I was there before I’d even started attending.

I have this strange, fragmented recollection of sitting in a packed gymnasium at Vaughn, the middle school I’d eventually attend, watching this man draw.

I believe he spoke for twenty or thirty minutes. Maybe longer. Childhood has a funny way of distorting time.

But I remember him.

The thick glasses. Receding hairline. Jeans. Bright colors. He reminded me of some of my mother’s community theater friends.

He was soft-spoken and seemed almost uncomfortable addressing such a large crowd.

He looked nothing like the people I was accustomed to seeing at Cranbrook, where appearances, tradition, and the occasional absurdity of private-school formality were taken rather seriously.

By the time I attended Vaughn in the mid-1990s, sixth through eighth grade was an all-boys affair, complete with a dress code. If your shirt wasn’t tucked in, you best believe the dean of boys would tuck it in for you. 1996 was Different fucking times.

Anyway, back to 1980-something.

Here’s this guy in jeans, drawing cartoon people for an entire gymnasium full of children.

The fucking nerve.

I remember the room being packed.

And I remember something else.

I recognized his work.

Not because I knew anything about contemporary art. I was a little kid. My artistic education consisted primarily of crayons, cartoons, Nickelodeon, construction paper, picture books, and apparently the occasional bowel-related incident involving modeling clay.

But I’d seen those figures before.

On T-shirts. Television. In magazines.

Those dancing bodies. Thick black outlines. Strange, energetic creatures existing somewhere between cartoons, hieroglyphics, and electricity.

I particularly loved the little lines above their heads, indicating surprise, fear, excitement, or whatever emotion Haring wanted to communicate.

It’s something I frequently incorporate into my own work.

A little visual trick I learned from Mr. Haring before I could reliably control my own bowels.

And suddenly, there was the man who made them.

Standing in front of us.

Just drawing.

It was probably my first exposure to the idea that someone could invent an entire visual language and release it into the world.

Not just make pictures.

Make something recognizable.

A universe with its own rules.

I don’t remember what Haring said that day. He might have delivered the greatest artistic lecture in Cranbrook history.

I remember the drawings.

And I remember something else, a few years later.

A much more somber school assembly about the AIDS Memorial Quilt.

By then, Keith Haring was dead.

The strange, ominous disease we’d begun hearing about throughout the late eighties and early nineties had taken him.

The young, talented man I’d watched drawing cartoon figures was suddenly being memorialized through fabric, photographs, and stories about people who were no longer alive.

I was still a kid, trying to understand what AIDS even was.

And now this guy I’d actually seen, whose artwork was everywhere, was gone.

What the fuck?

It’s a strange thing to experience as a child. One minute you’re watching someone create these joyous, energetic figures. A few years later, you’re learning about the disease that killed him.

I didn’t understand the magnitude of any of it.

But apparently, something stuck.

For decades, that memory sat in the back of my head collecting dust.

I didn’t think about it. Didn’t tell people about it. Certainly didn’t consider it some defining moment in my eventual development as an artist.

Hell, I didn’t become a painter until my late thirties.

For most of my adult life, I was a musician. A producer. Someone who understood creativity primarily through sound.

Then, after the drugs and drinking stopped and I began excavating the wreckage of my former existence, these strange fragments started resurfacing.

Images. Colors. Faces. Experiences I hadn’t thought about in decades.

Maybe that’s what happens when you stop pouring chemicals into your brain long enough for the filing department to reopen.

Maybe sobriety gave certain memories room to breathe.

Or maybe I’m assigning significance to things because they suddenly make sense in the context of who I’ve become.

I don’t know.

And I’m perfectly comfortable not knowing.

I have a complicated relationship with the art world.

Not with art itself. I fucking love art.

Granted, my taste is strange, and some people probably wouldn’t consider much of what I enjoy to be “good art.”

I give zero fucks.

What I don’t particularly enjoy is the politics surrounding it.

The gatekeeping. The posturing. The competition. The endless need to categorize, contextualize, intellectualize, and explain why something deserves to exist.

Music had plenty of that bullshit, too, but at least I understood the competition in more concrete terms.

Visual art feels infinitely more subjective.

Make someone’s ears bleed and you’re probably a terrible musician.

Make someone’s eyes bleed and you might be the next big thing.

I’m not an art historian. I don’t spend my afternoons studying dead painters to establish some respectable academic lineage for whatever the hell I’m doing.

I’d rather look at books about demonology, old magazine advertisements, or VHS covers from the eighties and nineties.

Things that get me going.

A better time in our country, as the old-timers say.

But I know what I like.

And I know what makes something inside my brain light up.

That’s enough for me.

If we’re identifying my three biggest influences in the traditional art world, I’d start with Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring, and Hieronymus Bosch.

Quite a dinner party.

Basquiat brought the chaos and randomness. Haring brought the language and figures. Bosch brought the demons and surrealism.

Basquiat’s influence on my work probably needs little explanation.

I’ve been called a Basquiat poseur before.

My response?

Okay, then you fucking do it, fuckface.

I don’t study Basquiat obsessively or pretend to understand every aspect of his experience. I certainly don’t claim to know the struggles of being a minority in America or living with heroin addiction.

But I understand darkness, chaos, addiction, and the need to communicate things that don’t always translate into conventional language.

I have my own struggles. My own symbols. My own visual vocabulary.

And apparently, some of it resonates.

So go fuck yourself.

As for Bosch, I wrote a paper about him in seventh grade. One of the only A-pluses I received that entire year.

Shout-out to Mr. Fogarty for recognizing that something was brewing beneath the mountain of detentions he handed me.

Three artists from completely different worlds, each creating something so unmistakably their own that you could recognize it from across a room.

I love that.

Not because I necessarily want to paint like them, but because they understood something I’ve come to appreciate.

You don’t need permission to invent your own universe.

And if we’re being thorough, we should invite Eric Carle and Ed Emberley.

Carle’s magnificent colors and the way he arranged his animals and strange creatures. Emberley’s brilliantly simple instructions for turning basic shapes into entire worlds.

A few circles. Some triangles. A couple of lines.

Suddenly, a monster.

Or a little person having a nervous breakdown, complete with Haring-style exclamation marks.

Which seems rather prophetic.

I recently bought my son Wolfi the entire collection of Emberley’s colored drawing books.

He’s killing it.

Watching him discover those same little tricks I learned as a kid is beautiful.

Then there are the less obvious influences.

John Carpenter. EC Comics. Horror illustrations. Comic-book covers. Vintage advertising. Halloween decorations. Cheap novelty toys. Forgotten packaging. Music. Religious imagery. Anti-religious imagery.

Cautionary signs depicting little stick figures being electrocuted.

Cartoon characters that probably weren’t intended to be as unsettling as I found them.

I mean, what the fuck is Grimace?

That thing should not exist.

Lock it up.

The cute and the grotesque. The funny and the horrifying. The angel and the demon.

I’ve always loved that intersection.

A lot of this came from wandering through antique malls and flea markets with my mother when I was young.

Hours spent exploring other people’s discarded possessions.

Old magazines. Toys. Records. Paintings. Advertisements. Rusted signs. Strange figurines. Old porn.

Objects that once meant something to somebody and were now sitting on a shelf with a handwritten price tag.

I loved it.

Still do.

And I know how to haggle because of it.

There was something magical about discovering things that weren’t supposed to be together.

A religious statue next to a G.I. Joe collection. A smiling cartoon character on a cigarette advertisement. Beautiful midcentury design selling something that would probably kill you.

America! Fuck yeah!

I didn’t know I was collecting influences.

I was just looking at shit.

And buying shit.

My girlfriend calls me a maximalist.

Maybe I just hoard influences for my art.

Apparently, some part of my brain was taking inventory.

And it never stopped.

That’s the strange thing about my relationship with visual art.

I can explain my musical influences with almost surgical precision.

Dr. Dre taught me discipline, space, and how to make drums knock. Timbaland taught me that rhythm could come from anywhere and how to manipulate syncopation. Mutt Lange taught me obsessive layering, harmonization, and precision. Prince, Jam and Lewis taught me the relationship between sophistication, simplicity, and a whole lot of funk.

The list goes on forever.

I studied their records. Dissected their decisions. Stole their techniques, modified them, and made them mine.

Not stealing the song.

Stealing the understanding.

Music was a deliberate education.

I knew who my teachers were, even if they had no idea I existed.

Although, in 2016, Jimmy Jam personally contacted me to remix a Janet Jackson record.

One of my musical gods asking me to work on a record.

That’s a God moment if I’ve ever had one.

Painting is different.

I’ll be working on a canvas, and suddenly a shape appears that reminds me of something I saw thirty years ago.

A color combination feels familiar, though I couldn’t tell you where I first encountered it.

A character emerges with the DNA of six cartoons, a horror movie, a cereal box, and some grotesque figurine I saw in a Michigan antique store when I was nine.

Or something my best friend John and I drew, recited, or pretended to be a hundred times on the playground at Brookside Elementary.

And somehow it works.

I didn’t consciously put those things together.

They were already together.

Somewhere in there.

Waiting.

That’s why I’ve started thinking of my brain as a savings account.

Every interesting thing I encounter gets deposited.

A painting. A song. A face. A ridiculous commercial. An ugly piece of furniture. A stranger’s expression. A color on the side of a building.

Most deposits are tiny. Some are probably worthless. Some I forget entirely.

Most of the important things I forget entirely.

I still occasionally confuse whether my son’s birthday is the eighteenth or the twenty-first.

Don’t ask me why.

But apparently, I can remember the precise sound of a fork scraping against a mustard-yellow bowl of macaroni from forty years ago.

Excellent priorities, brain.

All these deposits stay in there.

Collecting interest.

Collecting cobwebs.

Occasionally getting mixed up with things that have absolutely no business being in the same account.

Then, years later, something clicks.

The account opens.

An image that’s been quietly compounding in the darkest corners of my subconscious comes flying out onto a canvas.

Sometimes I recognize where it came from.

Usually I don’t.

But here’s the problem with that savings account.

The interest isn’t always a good thing.

Memories appreciate in value, but they also mutate.

A five-minute conversation becomes an hour-long philosophical exchange. An ordinary afternoon becomes a defining moment. A passing comment becomes life-changing advice.

It’s the psychological equivalent of a fish story.

The fish gets bigger every time you tell it. Eventually, you’re not even sure there was a fucking fish.

Might have been an octopus.

I’m particularly guilty of this.

I’ve always loved telling stories. I got that from my dad, who had plenty of fish stories, both figurative and literal.

I love the details. The absurdity. The timing. The little embellishments that make an otherwise forgettable anecdote worth listening to.

Sometimes it’s harmless. A better punchline. A little creative rearranging.

Other times, not so much.

We exaggerate our importance in situations where we were barely relevant. Make ourselves the hero when we were clearly the asshole. Conveniently omit details that might make us less sympathetic.

Sometimes we outright mischaracterize another person because our version makes for a better, or considerably worse, story.

Eventually, you stop remembering the event and start remembering the last version you told.

Ideally, it becomes a generational game of telephone, each retelling more spectacular than the last, until you’re remembered as some larger-than-life legend who probably never existed.

Who was that guy?

At least, that’s what I used to tell myself.

The embellishment becomes the memory. The memory becomes the truth. And the truth becomes whatever bullshit you’ve rehearsed enough times to believe.

I’ve certainly done this, particularly when my relationship with reality was being heavily subsidized by narcotics and alcohol.

It’s remarkable how easily irresponsible behavior becomes a charming anecdote when you’re holding the microphone.

Danger becomes adventure. Selfishness becomes youthful exuberance. Someone else’s humiliation becomes the punchline.

A night that should have ended with serious consequences becomes another legendary chapter in the mythology of yourself.

The storyteller gets the applause.

Everyone else might remember something entirely different.

Something to consider as I write these stories down.

There goes that fourth wall again.

I’ve always made things bigger, louder, stranger, and more colorful. It’s part of my personality and certainly my artistic process.

Every report card seemed to feature some variation of “Jamie has a wildly vivid imagination,” carefully positioned next to “Jamie needs to think before he acts.”

Apparently, neither condition has improved considerably.

So when I remember Keith Haring standing in that Cranbrook gymnasium, I have to acknowledge that some details might be wrong.

Maybe the room wasn’t packed. Maybe he wasn’t wearing jeans. Maybe he spoke for ten minutes instead of thirty.

I remember it vividly, but vividness isn’t evidence.

That’s the hidden cost of accumulated interest.

The original deposit gets buried beneath decades of nostalgia, ego, selective editing, and good old-fashioned bullshit.

But I don’t want to empty the account.

Those distortions are part of my imagination. They’re how I create characters and build paintings out of things that may or may not have existed exactly as I remember them.

In art, distortion is a gift.

In life, a liability.

In a memoir, it requires a little fucking accountability.

I can paint a childhood memory however I want. Brighter colors. Bigger monsters. More absurdity.

But when I’m writing about real people and real consequences, I owe them, and myself, enough honesty to recognize where memory ends and mythology begins.

I don’t always know where that line is.

But I’m trying.

And maybe that’s why painting has become so important to me.

With music, I spent years trying to master a process.

With art, I’m learning to surrender to one.

Not every mark needs an explanation. Not every character needs a backstory. Not every influence needs to be dissected and placed in some tidy historical context.

Sometimes I make something because it’s funny. Because it’s ugly. Because it’s beautiful. Because it makes me uncomfortable.

Or because it’ll make YOU uncomfortable.

Back in 2022, I wrote “Phish is overrated” in tiny letters in the corner of a painting.

Wouldn’t you know it, a Phish fan approached me and said it was the first thing he’d noticed.

He wanted to know why I’d written it.

Two reasons.

One, they’re massively overrated.

Two, because I fucking felt like it.

He did not purchase the painting.

Sometimes I just think something looks cool.

And that’s a perfectly legitimate reason to make art.

Picture me as a toddler.

A little human being with no preconceived notions about anything. No understanding of artistic movements, composition, technique, or whether something is considered good or bad.

Just a creature reacting instinctively to colors, textures, sounds, shapes, and emotions.

That’s what art is to me.

I didn’t begin painting at thirty-eight because I wanted some distinguished second career in the arts.

I started because something inside me needed an outlet, and apparently, after nearly four decades, I still had a few things to get off my chest.

I know very little about the art world, and I’m not particularly embarrassed about it.

No preconceived notions. No reservations. No allegiance to what I’m supposed to admire or how I’m supposed to create.

I’m not trying to unlearn decades of formal artistic education.

I never had one.

And maybe that’s my greatest advantage.

I’m not trying to see the world through the eyes of an artist. I’m trying to see it through the eyes of a child who hasn’t yet been told what art is supposed to be.

Before judgment. Before expectations. Before someone explains why the colors don’t belong together or the proportions are wrong.

Just instinct. Curiosity. Wonder.

The occasional complete lack of impulse control.

I think about that little kid watching Keith Haring draw.

I wonder whether Haring had any idea what he was depositing into the minds of the children sitting in front of him.

Probably not.

He was just making things.

And somewhere in that crowd was a little boy who would spend the next several decades pursuing music, making terrible decisions, accumulating an impressive collection of personal catastrophes, and eventually discovering that painting was one of the few things capable of making his brain shut the fuck up.

I don’t believe that assembly predestined me to become an artist.

That’s too convenient. Too much like the retrospective mythology people invent to make their lives sound more intentional than they actually were.

Another fish story.

But I believe it left something behind.

A deposit.

One of thousands.

Millions, probably.

Maybe that’s how influence works.

Some of it comes from self-proclaimed geniuses. Some from legitimately heralded ones.

Some from comic books.

Some from wandering through flea markets with your mother.

And some from sitting at a table at four years old, sculpting Play-Doh while quietly losing a battle with a bowl of Kraft Macaroni & Cheese.

You never know what’s going to stick.

You never know what your brain is going to save.

And you certainly never know when it’s going to make a withdrawal.

I spent fifteen years learning how to make things sound exactly the way I wanted, within the skill set I’d acquired and the ego I flaunted.

Now I’m learning to let things look the way my brain remembers them, and most of the time, I don’t particularly care what anyone thinks.

Maybe that’s the difference between my two creative lives.

Music taught me how to construct something.

Painting taught me how to uncover it.

And somewhere beneath all those layers of paint, memory, nostalgia, horror, humor, and accumulated psychological debris is a four-year-old kid who has absolutely no idea what he’s making.

He’s completely absorbed.

He’s having the time of his life.

And he’s about to shit his pants.

The bank statement says one thing. My imagination says I’m a billionaire.

And somewhere between the two is probably what actually happened.