STILL LIFE IS FOR DEAD PEOPLE

“What's with all the skeletons and darkness?”

I get asked some variation of this question quite a bit.

Why the skulls? Why the monsters? Why does everything look like something terrible either just happened or is about to happen?

My answer is usually pretty simple.

“Because I can.”

And I don't mean that in some defiant, fuck-the-art-world, misunderstood-genius kind of way. I mean it quite literally.

I can finally draw whatever the hell I want.

Which is particularly liberating when you consider that I don't actually think I'm very good at drawing.

At least not in the traditional sense.

Put a bowl of fruit in front of me and ask me to render it in charcoal, and there's a pretty good chance it'll come out looking like a collection of severed heads that survived a house fire. There will probably be some thought bubbles, a few song lyrics, a cartoon character with his cartoon dick out for scientific reasons, and something I overheard three days earlier that I decided was philosophically significant.

And I might really like the painting.

That's all that matters to me.

But to understand why, we need to go back a little.

Just past the Play-Doh poop-pants incident.

My best friend John is probably the most naturally gifted artist I've ever known.

We met in third grade when he transferred to my school, and we became inseparable almost immediately. We were obsessed with Calvin and Hobbes and Garfield, spending countless hours trying to reproduce the work of Bill Watterson and Jim Davis.

Except John could actually do it.

His drawings were practically indistinguishable from the originals. Not good for a nine-year-old. Just fucking good.

His original creations were even more impressive. He understood proportion, movement, expression and composition before either of us knew those were things people went to college to study.

I still don't really understand most of those concepts from a scholastic perspective.

Nor do I have any particular interest in learning.

At nine years old, John could produce drawings that most adults couldn't accomplish after four years of formal instruction, seventeen YouTube tutorials and purchasing a $400 pencil set from an art supply store.

My drawings?

Dog shit.

Absolute fucking dog shit.

I couldn't draw a straight line or a proper circle to save my life. Everything was angular, aggressive and slightly deformed. I pressed so hard that my drawings practically left impressions on the next six pages.

To this day, I don't know how to hold a pencil correctly.

I grip it with all four fingers and my thumb, like I'm trying to strangle a confession out of it. Every mark I make hits the paper with a completely unnecessary amount of force.

Which, in retrospect, explains quite a bit about both my artwork and my personality.

John's notebooks looked like they belonged in the archives of a future animation legend.

Mine looked—and still look—like evidence collected from the bedroom of a troubled adolescent.

Skeletons. Monsters. Skulls. Weird little creatures. Storyboards for imaginary horror movies I still fantasize about producing someday. Cartoons featuring characters who were dead, dying, dismembered, exploding or suffering from some unspecified psychological disorder.

Cyclops. Medusa. Dinosaurs. Demonic possession. A fried egg masquerading as somebody's dog. A cornfed harvest mouse, a hooker, a nun, A flemish peasant woman, whips, chains, yo-yos, a circus midget, my grandma riding by on a bicycle flipping me the bird and a duck

My first original cartoon was called Heeptoad and Nibbs, about two aliens making their way through Earth. Imagine a significantly less funny, less interesting version of the Sega game;ToeJam & Earl, created by a child with questionable motor skills and a deeply concerning imagination.

One of the characters was a fried egg with a bacon mouth.

I cannot adequately explain why.

I also drew things I'd seen in movies I probably shouldn't have been watching. Super Shredder. Jason Voorhees. Gene Simmons. Tom Hanks in Bachelor Party. An assortment of monsters, demons and other deeply inappropriate childhood influences.

Then I'd invent my own creatures and give them bizarre little worlds to inhabit.

Everything was covered in mistakes, cross-outs, scribbles and lines drawn over other lines because I couldn't get anything right the first time.

Or the second.

Or the third.

Or, frequently, ever.

And there were skulls.

Lots and lots of skulls.

Sound familiar?

It took me approximately thirty years to consider the possibility that the nine-year-old version of me wasn't actually a shitty artist.

He just grew up and became a shitty person for a while.

Maybe he was already drawing like me.

Maybe the problem wasn't the drawings.

Maybe the problem was that I spent thirty years comparing them to somebody else's.

Comparison is the thief of joy, right?

Somewhere in my education about what constituted art, I developed this ridiculous understanding of what being a legitimate artist was supposed to look like.

You learned perspective. Studied anatomy. Painted still lifes. Eventually somebody placed a naked person in the middle of a room and everyone pretended that was a completely normal Tuesday afternoon.

Now, if somebody placed a naked woman in front of me and instructed me to produce an artistic interpretation, they'd probably get something closer to a Russ Meyer movie poster than a classical figure study.

I'm juvenile as fuck.

I've always had an extraordinarily difficult time taking even the most serious things seriously.

You learned how to paint a vase beside a pear while wearing an unnecessarily complicated scarf.

An artiste.

Then, after enough years of suffering for your craft, someone presumably handed you a raspberry beret and authorized you to have very strong opinions about negative space while smoking a cigarette.

None of that ever appealed to me.

Except the cigarettes.

I'm not still life.

So why the fuck would I paint it?

When I first started painting in 2022, fresh out of rehab, I enrolled in an abstract art class at the Winnetka Community House.

Our instructor was a wonderful working artist, incredibly sweet and encouraging. The other students were a handful of women, all over sixty, who were genuinely lovely people.

And then there was me.

A thirty-eight-year-old newly recovering lunatic who had recently discovered that painting was a considerably healthier way to occupy his time than most of his previous hobbies.

The women would work on beautiful landscapes, tasteful abstractions and thoughtful interpretations of whatever lesson we'd been given that week.

I rarely cared about the lesson.

I mostly wanted a larger space in which to paint.

If the assignment involved exploring texture through natural objects, they'd produce something elegant with leaves, pine cones and a carefully considered palette of calming blues.

Meanwhile, I'd be in the back of the room attacking a five-foot canvas with something resembling the final moments of a demon's childhood.

At the end of class, we'd share what we'd been working on.

The compliments were always wonderful.

“Oh, Jan! That flow is beautiful! I can't believe you got that from a pine cone!”

“Christine, I absolutely love your use of primary colors.”

And Christine really did have a way with colors, I might add.

Then someone would turn toward me.

“Well, let's see what Jamie's been working on.”

That was usually the turning point in the evening.

The room would get weirdly quiet.

Not necessarily bad quiet.

More like the kind of silence that follows someone discovering a human foot in a refrigerator.

“Wow, Jamie. That's really... interesting.”

I wouldn't have blamed those women for quietly gathering their belongings, leaving the building and contacting the proper authorities.

Instead, they encouraged me.

Once we all acknowledged the headless elephant in the room, they seemed genuinely interested in what the elephant was painting.

I was the elephant.

A very large, occasionally sweaty elephant taking up a disproportionate amount of space with paintings that looked like they'd been recovered from a crime scene.

An elephant who was also unsuccessfully attempting to conceal the fact that he was hitting his vape every two minutes.

I'm fairly certain those women just collectively decided to let me do my thing.

And I loved them for it.

They were instrumental in helping me become the artist I am today, not because they taught me to paint like them, but because they never suggested I should.

That's real respect.

They didn't ask me to soften anything. They didn't tell me to add flowers or make things prettier. They didn't insist that my interpretation of the assignment was somehow incorrect because nobody could identify a single fucking pine cone.

They saw something.

Maybe they didn't entirely understand what they were looking at.

Frankly, neither did I.

But they recognized that whatever was happening on those canvases was authentic.

And that was enough.

I wasn't supposed to paint like them.

I wasn't supposed to paint like John.

I wasn't supposed to paint like anybody.

I was supposed to paint like me.

Me, as it turns out, is a pretty strange place to spend an afternoon.

I'm not beautiful seascapes and flowers. I'm not a sunny afternoon with a positive affirmation buried beneath a field of smiling sunflowers.

I'm a psycho.

A dreamer.

But I've never been particularly interested in dreams of success, paradise and endless ecstasy.

I gravitate toward nightmares.

The inexplicable traumas that appear in my sleep. The distorted faces. The impossible situations. The unsettling little psychological experiments my brain conducts every night without bothering to ask for permission.

I practically high-five the sleep paralysis demon when he shows up.

“What's on the schedule tonight? Anything good happening in the nut house?”

I'm a recovering professional catastrophe with an overactive imagination and an unusually high tolerance for disturbing imagery.

I love dark shit.

Chaos. Horror movies. Weird characters. The grotesque. The absurd. The macabre.

The psychology of what makes seemingly normal people completely batshit.

I'm fascinated by addiction, obsession, ego, fear, identity, death, humor and all the bizarre little performances human beings put on to convince everyone around them that they're perfectly fine.

Probably because I spent a significant portion of my life doing exactly that.

I love tortured souls because, historically speaking, I've been a fairly dependable tortured soul myself.

In the immortal words of Lydia Deetz, “I myself am strange and unusual.”

So why on earth would my paintings behave?

Why should they be polished, symmetrical, technically flawless representations of things that already exist?

I have absolutely no interest in reproducing reality.

Reality has caused me enough fucking problems.

I'd rather rearrange it.

I'd rather escape into some strange nightmare world where, ironically, I often learn more about myself and the real world than I do while participating in it.

My art should be rough around the edges. Excessive. Contradictory. Occasionally ridiculous. Sometimes genuinely unsettling.

And full of mistakes.

I don't particularly care about negative space. My brain doesn't leave much room for it, so why should my paintings?

Things crossed out. Painted over. Scratched into. Dragged back into the light.

Glitter beside something horrifying.

A skull next to a dick.

A dick next to beautiful song lyrics.

Beautiful lyrics next to bottles of pills.

Bottles of pills next to something I heard in an AA meeting.

Something from AA next to a neon sign that says, “YOUR AD HERE.”

Something beautiful pressed right up against something deeply uncomfortable.

Because that's how my brain works.

I'm A.D.H.D. to the M.F.T. to the third degree, motherfucker.

And apparently my paintings are, too.

The funny thing about painting is that the mistakes often become the most interesting parts.

I'll put something on a canvas, hate it, paint over it, hate that even more, then spend three hours trying to resurrect whatever I destroyed in the first place.

A mistake becomes a line.

The line becomes a character.

The character becomes part of the painting.

And eventually the thing I fucked up becomes my favorite part.

I can't think of a more appropriate metaphor for my life if I tried.

For years, I assumed the art world was populated exclusively by wealthy snobs, self-important intellectuals and, perhaps worst of all, bitter, jaded hipsters who dropped out of art school but still desperately needed everyone to know which art school they'd dropped out of.

And how talented they were.

Those types are the fucking worst.

The Morrisseys of visual art.

“Heaven knows I'm miserable now, but look how extraordinarily creative I am. Not that I care what you think. I don't care about anything, actually. Except artistic integrity. And capitalism is evil. Art is sacred and shouldn't be commodified. Anyway, this piece is $4,800 and I refuse to do any gallery commission split because this is MY ART!”

These are the people who seem most offended by my existence.

The gatekeepers.

The ones who look at somebody like me and decide I'm a hack because I didn't follow the approved trajectory.

I didn't attend the right school. I didn't spend years suffering under the tutelage of some obscure European painter. I didn't earn my stripes through a series of unpaid gallery internships and emotionally devastating critiques of my use of ochre. 

The fuck is Ochre?

I just fell into it.

If only they knew how many fucking floors I fell through before landing somewhere around the seventh circle of hell and beginning the long, miserable climb back out.

How dare somebody discover something they love, become good at it, receive recognition and occasionally make a living doing it?

The fucking nerve!

To be fair, I've met plenty of wonderful people in the art world, too. Artists, Collectors and Gallerists alike.

But I have absolutely no interest in participating in its imaginary hierarchy.

I already spent fifteen years playing that game in music.

And I wasn't particularly good at enjoying it.

Chicago has been known as Haterville for as long as I can remember. 

Long before GLC and Million $ Mano put the phrase on wax over that Kill Bill-inspired whistle.

And I wasn't just a victim of that culture.

I participated in it.

I judged people. Compared myself to them. Resented their success. Questioned their talent. Wondered why they were getting opportunities I thought I deserved.

And I was on the receiving end of plenty of that same bullshit.

It became this miserable cycle of insecurity disguised as confidence, competition disguised as community and envy disguised as artistic criticism.

Eventually, it contributed to destroying me.

Music, at least from my perspective, never seemed to have much of a middle class.

You were either feasting at the top—major artist, major producer, major success—or scraping away somewhere beneath it, wondering why you hadn't arrived.

I spent an enormous amount of time wondering why I hadn't arrived.

Which is particularly ridiculous because, by almost any reasonable standard, I had a pretty extraordinary career.

At least from the perspective of stories I'll someday be able to tell my grandchildren.

As Jimmy Con, I worked on incredible projects. Performed. Traveled. Met fascinating people, both famous and people who absolutely should have been famous.

I experienced things that the nine-year-old kid drawing shitty skeletons in his notebook would have considered completely impossible.

I got to do things that most aspiring musicians would kill to experience.

And somehow, I still managed to convince myself that none of it counted.

Because I wasn't there yet.

Wherever the fuck there was.

There was always another VIP room to get into.

Another person to impress.

Another credit to chase.

Another opportunity that might finally validate the previous fifteen years.

Another imaginary version of myself who was apparently happier, wealthier, more important and had considerably more notches in his belt.

I was so busy trying to get into the penthouse that I never bothered looking around and realizing I had a pretty nice fucking apartment.

That's the tragedy of constantly measuring yourself against some imaginary destination.

You can spend your entire life achieving things without ever experiencing the satisfaction of having achieved them.

On to the next one.

On to the next one.

On to the next one.

The worst part is that even if you finally reach the destination, you'll probably just invent another one.

I know I would have.

Because that's addiction, too.

Not necessarily the chemical kind.

The insatiable appetite for more.

More success. More recognition. More money. More attention. More validation.

More of whatever you think is finally going to make you feel complete.

Elvira Hancock put it best to Tony…

“Nothing exceeds like Excess”

It's a vicious fucking loop.

I was exceptionally talented at moving goalposts.

Probably more talented at that than I ever was at making music.

Painting has been different.

Not because I've suddenly become some enlightened spiritual being who has transcended the need for recognition.

Bitch, please.

I still have an ego large enough to require its own ZIP code.

I want my work in galleries. I want collectors to buy it. I want people to stand in front of my paintings and feel something, even if that something is mild concern for my psychological well-being.

Or their own.

I want to be successful.

I want to make money.

I love money.

I love the freedom it affords us. The ability to provide for the people I love, do the things I want to do and not spend my entire existence worrying about how I'm going to pay for them.

Anyone who insists money is completely irrelevant is either lying or one of those art-school-dropout gatekeeping motherfuckers I mentioned earlier.

Somebody get that man some deodorant and a hot dog.

Unless he's vegan.

In which case, I'm sure he's already told you.

I'd love to have my work hanging in museums someday.

I'm not going to pretend otherwise while sitting cross-legged on a mountain, quietly painting a lotus flower and congratulating myself on achieving inner peace.

But for the first time in my creative life, those things aren't the reason I'm doing it.

I genuinely don't know what becomes of some of these paintings once they sell.

A collector buys one, and off it goes into somebody else's life. Others get stacked away in my studio until I rediscover them months later and briefly wonder who the hell painted that particular thing at that particular moment in my life.

Sometimes I make so much work that I forget certain pieces even exist.

And strangely enough, I'm okay with that.

Because the satisfaction isn't entirely in what happens afterward.

It's in the making.

I paint because I fucking love painting.

Sometimes I'm working on two or three pieces simultaneously, bouncing between canvases like an overcaffeinated lunatic who can't decide which particular manifestation of his subconscious deserves attention first.

I love turning the music up and moving around a canvas. I love the physicality of it. The movement. The mess. The colors. The ridiculous little ideas that show up halfway through a piece and completely change its direction.

I love that I can begin with absolutely no plan and somehow end up with something that feels more honest than anything I could have deliberately constructed.

I love that it shuts one part of my brain off while opening another.

I love that I don't have to explain what I'm thinking.

I don't have to justify why something is there.

I don't have to impress anybody.

And perhaps most importantly, I don't have to be particularly good at it in the conventional sense.

I just have to do it.

There's something very liberating about discovering an activity where your natural imperfections aren't obstacles to overcome.

They're the whole fucking point.

After spending most of my life trying to correct myself, improve myself, impress somebody, become somebody, escape myself, destroy myself and eventually rebuild myself, painting is one of the few places where I don't feel compelled to apologize for how I operate.

I spent years treating the things that made me different as problems that needed fixing.

The intensity.

The obsessive tendencies.

The darkness.

The strange associations.

The inability to leave something alone.

The itch that had to be scratched.

The compulsion to keep adding things when a normal person would have stopped twenty minutes earlier.

Those characteristics created plenty of problems in my life.

Some of them were genuinely destructive.

But put a canvas in front of me, and suddenly those same tendencies have somewhere useful to go.

The intensity becomes energy.

The obsession becomes detail.

The darkness becomes humor.

The chaos becomes composition.

And the mistakes become something worth keeping.

I don't think that's some grand revelation about the healing power of art. I'm certainly not suggesting that a few tubes of acrylic paint can cure a lifetime of questionable decisions.

If that were true, I'd be the fucking Dalai Lama by now.

But I do think there's something remarkable about finding a place where the things you've spent your life fighting against can finally work in your favor.

And that's most likely why I keep painting skulls.

Not because I'm obsessed with death.

Not because I'm trying to shock people.

Not because I have some elaborate philosophical statement about mortality that requires a twelve-paragraph explanation and a museum docent wearing tiny glasses.

I paint them because I've always painted them.

Because I like them.

Because they make sense to me.

The monsters make sense.

The crossed-out words make sense.

The crooked lines make sense.

The inappropriate jokes make sense.

The strange little characters make sense.

Even the mistakes make sense.

Especially the mistakes.

Or maybe they don’t make sense to me and the inverse is the mission.

I stopped trying to become the artist I thought an artist was supposed to be.

I started becoming the artist I apparently always was.

Which brings me back to my homie, John.

I still think he's one of the most naturally gifted artists I've ever met. That hasn't changed.

What has changed is how I look at those two little boys sitting next to each other, drawing on yellow legal pads.

John could put exactly what he saw onto paper.

I could barely draw what was right in front of me.

But I could draw what was happening inside my head.

And for most of my life, I thought that made me the lesser artist.

Thirty years later, I make a living doing the very thing I thought I was terrible at. The crooked lines, the fucked-up characters, the skulls, the mistakes. All the things I thought I needed to fix turned out to be the things that made my work mine.

I spent half my life trying to become somebody else and nearly destroyed myself in the process.

Turns out the kid who had it figured out was the one I kept trying to correct.

I'm still that nine-year-old sitting next to my best friend, drawing dog-shit skeletons.

I still hold the pencil wrong.

and I still press too hard.