Blue Riot

September 22, 2025

I cannot tell you how much fun I had on Sunday...but I am going to give it a shot. With all that surrounds us, bombs in Iran, political strife, the cost of goods, rampant moral relativism...I want to show you the joy I find in this Million Dollar Garage.

I wrote to you in the beginning...a full three weeks ago or so..."The Bones, The Dream and The Invite"...about a daydream I had...about community and artwork and good will. It was a snapshot of what it could be one night, for one moment. Field of Dreams stuff.

Yesterday, Million Dollar Garage was something else.

A bucket filled with tubes of paint. Precut boards to paint on...6 of them. Clean and organized tools. 95 degrees...no shirt...cutoff sweats...SPF 50 and sweat in my eyes...cold water from the garden hose...Ry Cooder on the stereo...loud. Sami reading her book on the back porch...Iced coffee...black...easels...sawhorses...festival tents...Detroit Tiger Baseball (win!)...

Narnia!

Sunday June 22 was one of those days when it all comes together...nothing mattered but the canvas in front of me. All my worries were compartmentalized into one manageable packet, the packet is detonated with anti-climactic psst...like a bangsnap on the fifth of July...like the seventh balloon popped at a 7-year old's birthday... a popcorn fart. Diminishing return…molehills…mountains…into the sea.

My fears replaced with hope...all my expectations focused on practicing the thing that either leads me to the promise land, or more likely, make a little pop and dies...like my fears…a good thing. This productive little poof-explosion becomes a positive byproduct that propels me forward...a a little pop from a four-cycle engine: intake...compression...power...exhaust. A little more slowly than I wish for, but if you don't do the thing...you don't get anywhere. Forward motion…take the win.

What can I make with tubes of blue and white acrylic paint. These are the colors that make sense to me. Not all blues. I certainly detest one shade of blue in my core...one that is often paired with a peculiar yellowish color. Let’s save that commentary for a fall Saturday in October.

Blue plus white and a blank canvas. I know what needs doing. Add neon pink and I would make the same painting over and over again and be happy. Maybe someday I will make 100 of them in succession.

Yesterday was a no expectations day. A no worries day. One stroke of the palate knife and move....knife and move...scrape...reapply...blue...white...some other colors. three paintings at a time...95 makes the paint dry fast....silicone oil...made for treadmill lube...rubbing alcohol...made for disinfecting…blue...white...stick and move...paint and react...scrap wood scraping...trowels and a dozen tubes are empty...

Patching plaster...WD40...scape...hit it with water from the green hose...flip it the other direction...solve it from a different angle...more blue…stick and move...paint on my torso, somehow...lotion in my eyes...stop. Change the soundtrack. Muddy Waters...Johnny Lee Hooker...Boom Boom...Mannish Boy...Johnny Winter on slide guitar...Stormy Monday...Lightening Hopkins...Mose Allison. stick and move...take a shot with the mobile phone...see it different...dance a bit...ice brewed coffee...more blue.

Baby...cerulean...midnight...teal not turquoise...cobalt...sea foam...blues.

Titanium...metallic...mixing whites.

These colors instruct my untrained artistic mind what to do. This is the first time I ever told anyone. I think of blue like this….

The blue and white paintings are like watching day break with the sun at your back, through the captain's windscreen of a Boston Whaler. You can feel Lake Michigan rocking beneath your feet connecting you to the world.. You have the same feeling at Coopers Beach in Southampton…Oval Beach in Douglas and Baby Beach in Aruba. It makes me feel like I can touch the day’s possibilities without grasping toward them.

To me, the blue is a cool mist that follows directly after the crashing of a wave. It negates the breaking violence of the crest driving itself into the sand, and punctuates it with a soft and cooling, almost imperceptible wafting spray of cool relief. And the white is all that is left of the wave. It is the aerosolized foam that floats upon the ebb of the wave returning to the deep blue lake or sea.

I see a blue and white abstract painting that hangs in an infusion center...a softness that eases the spiritual pain of those fighting for their lives. A focal point that helps the patient stop fighting by using their body and gives them the serenity to win the battle, physical or spiritual, with their soul. . Some paintings receive your spirit if you look at them from a certain angle. And sometimes they return a reflection of our true selves, a calming reminder of our goodness.

Most viscerally to me, blue and white are the colors I remember as a sleepless toddler forced against his will to take weekday nap in his grandmother's bed. He peers up and out the bedroom window and tries to identify shapes in the clouds...wondering what else is up there in the ether.

I know the power of blue. I know what blue is. Yesterday, though, I wasn’t thinking about such things. I was only working. With my shoulders blistering in the sun, acrylic paint streaking in my hair and my fingernails caked with various degrees of drying pigments, no thought, no worry and no nostalgia could get me off my game..

More blue...more scraping and spraying and applying new layers. Hours have passed...100 layers? 500 motions over the canvas? 3 applications of sun lotion. 1 Quart of ice coffee. 2 bottles of water. 3 body towels. 38 tubes of paint. 6 new paintings....I don't know what time it is. I wished that I could have painted longer but I worked myself out of blue and out of sweat for the day.

I retired to the porch..not knowing if the paintings were finished or complete, let alone sale-able. That wasn’t the point anyhow. Covered in paint. I couldn’t go in the house because I couldn’t determine which paint splotches on my body were still wet. Couches and doorknobs and refrigerator doors get ruined if you can't clock the wet paint. I grabbed the hose and the towel. How about a cool outside hose-shower like mom gave us after we went fishing?

I had worked and sweated my whole being to exhaustion. I was full of gratitude. I don't get many days like yesterday….Maybe 12 per year. I had a chance fill myself up. 100% productivity without predictive outcomes.

Maybe it will help someone…down the road.

Today, looking back, I hang my effort in effigy in that infusion center and hope it makes a difference.. I imagine heading out to sea at 6 am with no return time, just blue skies and refreshing spray. I don’t even care if the fish are biting. I am that little boy who hated naps. I'm still that boy with his head in the clouds.

But really, after all this talk and typing…I made a blue riot in my backyard. A riot of one man…and six paintings…in a vacuous flow state without a care in the world. Do you know what it feels like to not care if you get dirty. Mud puddle jumping, running in the rain. Snowball fights and water balloon pranks kind of fun. I did good work. I had fun doing good work. I got messy. Success.