THE FOURTH WALL

You don’t have to shy away from breaking the fourth wall as a visual artist. I, actually love to do it.

With music, in my opinion, you always had to toe this incredibly fine line between giving the listener a story and explaining the story so thoroughly that you murdered it.

A wink and a nudge was good. Some clever little breadcrumb that made somebody think they figured out what the song was about.

But you couldn’t just stop halfway through the second verse and say:

“And that’s why I wrote this song about my ex-girlfriend. Also, the year is 2006.”

You’d sound like an asshole

Or worse, a terrible songwriter.

Visual art doesn’t seem to care.

At least the way I paint doesn’t.

I can suspend a moment in time, document it, vandalize it, write directly over it, contradict it, date it, explain it, make fun of it, talk or “talk shit” directly to whoever is looking at it and then go right back to painting like nothing happened.

I can break the fourth wall and leave the hole there. In fact I’ve accidentally poked a hole in a canvas before and drew an arrow pointing directly to it with “Oops”

I have one painting where, buried among everything else, I scrawled in tiny letters:

“ON THIS DAY THE LIONS TRADED TJ HOCKENSON.”

That isn’t what the painting is about.

It’s barely even noticeable.

It wasn’t some grand conceptual statement about football or Detroit or the impermanence of professional athletes.

The Lions traded T.J. Hockenson that day.

I was painting.

I felt something about it.

It was a moment in time.

So I wrote it down.

Now that completely ordinary moment is permanently trapped inside a painting.

In another piece, considerably larger, I wrote:

“PLEASE BUY THIS PAINTING TO SUPPORT MY KIDS.”

That one I wanted you to see for obvious reasons.

Maybe it was funny. Maybe it was uncomfortable. Maybe it was shameless. Maybe it was commentary on the absurdity of trying to make a living selling your therapy.

Probably all of the above.

But mostly, I felt it.

And I wanted it stated.

That’s the FREEDOM I’m talking about.

Not everything has to arrive with some carefully constructed artistic thesis. Sometimes a thought enters my head while I’m working and I want evidence that I had it.

So I put it there.

Small if it belongs in the background.

Huge if I want it screaming at you.

A date. A freshman year inside joke. A confession. Something Wolfi said. Something completely inappropriate. Something devastating. Something so mundane that putting it inside a painting somehow makes it important.

It happened.

I felt it.

I wanted it stated.

So it stays.

There are no rules.

It only took me a few months of painting to figure that out, which is mildly infuriating considering I spent roughly twenty years making music constantly wondering where the fucking guardrails were and how to get my flowers.

Everyone knows the old adage “seeing is believing.”

But I’m more interested in the reverse.

Can I make you believe something because I showed it to you?

What if I told you ghosts exist?

In music, that becomes an undertaking.

I’d have to build an entire world around it. Mellowdramatic Chords. Atmosphere. Production. Lyrics. Some haunting metaphor about a woman who disappeared from my life who is obviously supposed to represent a ghost but is actually an ex-girlfriend or cocaine or depression or whatever else musicians pretend isn’t exactly what it obviously is.

Painting?

I can just write:

“I SAW A GHOST ON CRANBROOK ROAD IN 2004.”

And then I can paint what I think I saw.

Now we have a completely different problem.

Did I actually see a ghost?

Was it a shadow?

Was I tired?

Was I fucked up?

Did nineteen year old me simply have a very active imagination?

Was there actually something standing there?

I don’t know.

That’s between me, the ghost and whoever is standing in front of the painting.

You get to decide whether you believe me.

But I’ve given you evidence.

Not evidence in any legally admissible sense, obviously.

Please don’t call a detective.

But evidence of my perception.

That’s the part I love.

I’m not necessarily documenting reality.

I’m documenting what reality looked like to me.

Those are two completely different things.

And maybe that’s why, despite spending far less of my life doing it, I prefer painting to music.

I don’t have much trouble being authentic when I paint.

Which invites the obvious explanation:

“Well, of course. You’re sober now. Your mask has been lifted. You’re finally free. You can express yourself without substances.”

BZZZZZZ

Wrong!

Thank you for playing.

If anything, authenticity became considerably harder once the armor came off.

Substances are wonderful little scapegoats.

I was fucked up.

I was drinking.

I was high.

I wasn’t myself.

Sobriety eliminates a lot of those convenient footnotes and excuses.

Now if I make something completely fucking insane, I have to stand next to it at an art opening wearing a nice jacket and admit that, yes, this came directly from my fully functioning sober brain.

Nobody made me do this.

There were no substances involved.

This is apparently just my personality.

Terrifying.

I think I had the relationship between drugs and creativity completely backward for most of my life.

I thought substances removed the boundaries as we tend to believe.

Maybe they created them.

Addiction isn’t actually limitless.

It’s incredibly repetitive.

The same nights.

The same conversations.

The same places.

The same lies.

The same people.

The same chemical pursuit.

The same brilliant four-in-the-morning revelation that becomes complete fucking nonsense when you wake up.

You think you’re forging the Oregon trail when you’ve actually been driving around the same cul-de-sac for six hours.

That isn’t creative freedom.

That’s a loop.

And I spent years confusing the loop with exploration.

Maybe the substances didn’t expand my creativity.

Maybe they stunted it.

Maybe I needed them because I thought they gave me permission to be strange.

Permission to be excessive.

Permission to be inappropriate.

Permission to take an idea too far.

Permission to make something completely fucking ridiculous and defend it with the convenient excuse that I was out of my mind when I made it.

Now?

There’s nothing to blame.

If I make something insane, I made something insane.

If I write something uncomfortable across a canvas, I wrote it.

If I put something deeply personal into a painting and somebody asks me about it at an opening, I have to stand there completely sober and answer the fucking question. That’s hard to do.

That’s considerably more vulnerable than being high.

The armor is gone.

And without the armor, everything hits harder.

Shame hits harder.

Embarrassment hits harder.

Criticism hits harder.

Failure hits harder.

Which brings me to whatever it is I’m doing here writing this book or whatever it turns into.

See what I did there?

I just broke the fourth wall again.

Apparently I can do it here too.

There are probably a million perfectly reasonable arguments for why I shouldn’t be writing this.

Shame.

Guilt.

Embarrassment.

Cringe.

There are stories in here that make me physically recoil while typing them.

Sometimes I hear myself talk and want to stab an ice pick directly into my own skull.

Figuratively.

Not literally, guys.

I promise.

Baseline is pretty stable.

For the most part.

But I’ve done a lot of stupid things.

Some funny.

Some humiliating.

Some selfish.

Some genuinely awful.

And at some point you have to decide what you’re going to do with all of it.

Pretend it didn’t happen?

Quietly bury it because the current version of you is embarrassed by the previous one?

Spend the rest of your life carefully curating some sanitized version of yourself who made all the right decisions?

That guy doesn’t exist.

And I’m not interested in inventing him now.

Here’s a good one.

The only time I’ve ever been arrested was arguably dumber.

In college, at age 19, after drinking an extraordinary amount of whiskey on third anniversary of my dad’s death, a few of my football cronies and I decided to smash the windshields of some cars.

Why?

I have no fucking idea.

I wish I could give you some fascinating explanation.

There isn’t one.

No grievance.

No heroic misunderstanding.

No deeper psychological metaphor I can conveniently manufacture twenty years later to make myself sound more complicated.

We were drunk.

We were idiots.

We smashed some windshields.

I got arrested.

That’s it.

And that’s one of the things I’m deeply sorry for.

Some stories become funny with enough distance.

Some don’t need to.

Some things I did were just shitty.

If I’m going to write about my life, I don’t get to lovingly restore every memory until I look charming in it.

That would defeat the entire fucking purpose.

I’m not interested in glorifying the worst things I’ve done.

But I’m equally uninterested in bleaching them.

I’d rather drag them into the light.

Look at them.

Laugh at the ones that deserve laughing at.

Apologize for the ones that require apologies.

Make right what I can make right.

Learn something from the things I can’t change.

And maybe even appreciate the fact that I survived long enough to become embarrassed by some of them.

 Embarrassment requires perspective.

Regret requires growth.

If you can look backward and cringe, congratulations.

You moved.

The goal isn’t to become a person who never did anything stupid.

That person is unavailable to me.

The goal is to do less stupid shit now.

And when I inevitably do something stupid again, hopefully I recognize it faster, own it sooner and hurt fewer people in the process.

That’s progress.

Not perfection.

And maybe that’s what painting has been teaching me this entire time.

There doesn’t need to be a cap on the lunacy.

There just needs to be accountability for it.

That’s a massive difference.

Sobriety didn’t ordain me.

Thank God. ;)

I didn’t emerge from rehab godly and clean, some newly anointed version of myself with a halo over my head and all the uglier parts of my personality scrubbed from the permanent record.

In fact, the horns probably shine a little brighter now.

Billy Corgan already screamed his way through that particular contradiction thirty years ago. You can be saved, changed, reborn, whatever word you want to use, and still be fundamentally fucked up underneath it all.

I understand that breakdown of Bullet with Butterfly Wings considerably better now.

And maybe that’s why so many of the creatures I create end up with both.

Demon horns and angelic halos.

I draw them constantly. Sometimes almost unconsciously.

Man has duality.

I have duality.

I can be two things at once.

I can be loving and selfish.

Generous and vain.

Thoughtful and impulsive.

Spiritual and completely consumed by my own bullshit.

I can spend the morning trying to be useful to another human being and the afternoon mentally putting the duct tape, rope and ski mask in my trunk because somebody sent me an email I didn’t like.

Both guys live here.

Sobriety didn’t evict either one.

What it gave me was a better chance of deciding which one gets fed.

And I’ve learned that the amount of spiritual fuel I put into myself has a pretty direct relationship with which direction I lean.

Meetings.

Service.

Gratitude.

Accountability.

Helping somebody.

Getting outside my own fucking head for five minutes.

When I’m doing those things, and believe me I don’t do them nearly enough,  the world around me tends to become a better place because I’m behaving better inside of it.

When I stop?

I can turn that same world into my own personal shooting range.

Not literally.

We’ve already covered this. I am fine.

But emotionally?

Absolutely.

Everybody becomes a target.

Every inconvenience becomes an offense.

Every criticism becomes an assassination attempt.

Every disagreement requires a defense attorney, a closing argument and apparently the full mobilization of my own personal death squad.

That guy is still in there.

So is the other one.

That’s why I don’t particularly believe in this idea that recovery reveals some pristine, authentic person who was hiding underneath the addiction the whole time.

My authentic self is complicated.

There’s a halo.

There are horns.

Sometimes they’re both shining at the exact same time.

Sobriety didn’t make me quieter.

It didn’t make me normal.

It didn’t turn me into some serene, beige version of myself who drinks herbal tea, journals at sunrise and suddenly has reasonable opinions about everything.

I’m still vain.

Still anxious.

Still impulsive.

Still obsessive.

Still occasionally an asshole.

Still completely capable of making a terrible decision.

The difference is that now I’m usually conscious for the decision-making process.

For years, I thought drugs and alcohol were what allowed me to access the strange parts of my brain.

Now I wonder if they were standing in front of them saying “VIP ONLY”

Keeping me occupied.

Giving me the illusion that I was constantly discovering something while making me repeat essentially the same behaviors over and over again.

Sobriety didn’t purify me.

It gave me access to myself.

All of myself.

And apparently there was a lot more shit in there than I thought.

The skeletons.

The jokes.

The trauma.

The stupid shit.

The beautiful shit.

The things I’m ashamed of.

The things I’m proud of.

Detroit Lions transactions.

Ghosts on Cranbrook Road.

My children.

My mistakes.

My recovery.

Whatever completely unrelated thought happens to enter my head while I’m holding a paint marker.

Nothing has to be filtered through whether it’s sophisticated enough to qualify as art.

I don’t really give a shit anymore. That’s the truth.

If I feel it belongs there, it belongs there.

If I want it whispered, I write it small.

If I want it screamed, I pick up an oil stick and drag it across the fucking canvas.

And if somebody standing in a gallery twenty years from now wonders why the hell I thought it was important to document the exact day the Lions traded T.J. Hockenson?

Good.

They found it.

And, actually, while we’re talking about documenting moments exactly as they happen:

It’s 5:23 a.m on Wednesday morning.

I just woke up from a dream where I was doing drugs in Colorado and trying desperately to impress everyone around me (Like the first time I used the devil powder)

Which, if my subconscious was looking for a concise summary of several decades of my personality, feels a little fucking on the nose- No pun intended.

I woke up, grabbed my phone and started writing this whole thing down while it was still fresh.

This.

The thing you’re reading right now.

So there it is again.

The fourth wall.

Maybe this is the literary equivalent of scrawling “ON THIS DAY THE LIONS TRADED TJ HOCKENSON” somewhere inside a painting.

It happened.

I felt it.

I wanted it stated.

So it stays.

And now 5:23 in the morning, a drug dream in Colorado, my lifelong pathological desire to impress people, sobriety, Billy Corgan, demon horns, angelic halos, T.J. Hockenson and you; The person currently reading this, are all permanently trapped in the same piece of work.

That feels about right.

For most of my creative life, I thought freedom meant removing my inhibitions.

Turns out that wasn’t it.

Freedom is having the inhibitions and doing it anyway.

Being completely aware of how something might look.

Completely aware that somebody might hate it.

Completely aware that you might embarrass yourself.

Completely sober for all of it.

And putting it there anyway because it was true when you made it.

That’s the fourth wall I’m interested in breaking.

Not just between the painting and the person looking at it.

Between who I was and who I am.

Between the story I told people and what actually happened.

Between the parts of my past I’m proud to frame and the ones I’d much rather leave in storage.

I don’t want to sanitize any of it.

I want to use it.

The good shit and the terrible shit.

The halo and the horns.

Because both are mine.

Maybe the real work isn’t trying to cut the horns off.

Maybe it’s remembering I’m the one who decides which direction they point.

So why should there be a cap on my lunacy anymore?

Nothing’s holding it back.

The substances didn’t unleash me.

They kept me busy.

Now I’m sober.

I’m completely aware of what I’m doing.

And somehow I’ve gotten much fucking weirder.