Start From Zero
Alois and the Sawdust Coffee Mud
All paintings have stories. Some tell direct narratives. Some, the peculiar ones, tell stores of dragons and drunken bums. Others, just watch and never tell a soul.
Meet Alois.
Our hero slammed his fist on the plywood launching his laptop and sawdust as a wave over his lukewarm coffee mug. Algorithmic slavery. Fight the power.
All he wanted to do was erase his life. Not for shame or for some drastic reason, but for renewal. Like erasing the chalkboard after the math exercise to move to language arts or biology.
He looked at the overturned mug, the sludge of sawdust and dark roast and shrugged. C’est la vie.
He went back to work with his dried acrylic painted hands. He stopped and thought that the paint on his hands was the best result of today’s work. Truly alive artwork. He deleted old pics and dumb platitudes from his Facebook feed…slow work. An hour later he was nowhere.
He left the shop and went for more coffee…dried sawdust mud on the side of the mug…”fuck it, I don’t deserve a clean one yet. At least its hot…”
He puffed sawdust from his lips like an errant hair had landed there…like a little girl blowing her bangs back from her eyes. Sat down in the folding chair and slowly drifted back into day dreaming.
Alois was, is and always will be an excellent daydreamer. He exercised his dreams and tried to break them... and then evolved from the wreckage. over and over building skyscrapers of systems and things to do. AA calls it paralysis by analysis. he was building layered puzzles that worked in concert...spiritual puzzles, emotional puzzles, systems of production, end games.
at some point the dreams needed erasing, complete eradication, to become actions. the actions never worked out because the world does not conform to Alois systems, nor does he align with the world’s random rigidities or current trends.
Alois’ disappearance was occurring gradually, but definitely. He decided on one last effort. He would drink sawdust mud until he either succeeded or flamed out.
He involuntarily emptied his back account, he erased his chalkboard of hope, scratched out all the self-created limitations produced by his faulty perception of other’s opinions, he burned boatloads of paintings from yesterday...
and determined to turn all that energy used trying to be authentic into kinetic desperation.
“fuck it, let’s go!”
and he returned to his folding chair, his sawdust mud covered plywood desk on sawhorses, his coffee slurry; and his abstract painted fingers began to learn to make his dreams into paintings.
...but who knows, maybe he can daydream his way out of it...
Million Dollar Garage is going through a thousand changes. Pardon our dust until January 8. Stay tuned…