The World’s Slowest Home Run

SOUNDTRACK: “Just One Thing” by My Morning Jacket

How to create your magnum opus in only eleven years:

Step 1: Have divine epiphany. This is the easiest part of the process.

Step 2: Excitedly collect resources needed to execute your piece, and get started with execution. Wheee!

Step 3: Discover obstacles in your way, realize that this won’t be as easy as you thought.

Step 4: Dither over how to surmount obstacles… for seven or eight years.

Step 5: Wait until technology catches up with your work methods, revisit closeted project with new vigor.

Step 6: Get bogged down in the teeeeeedious minutae that every work of genius requires. Work more and more slowly until the unfinished piece starts to feel like an old piece of furniture in your studio.

Step 7: After months of drudging progress, see the finish line in sight and put real energy into its completion.

Step 8: Screw your piece up in way that adds another month to your work-load.

Step 9: Morosely toil away at repairs and final details.

Step 10: Nervously consider whether the painting is finished, then hang the goddamned thing proudly.

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Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Time and Relative Dimension in Space, probably my greatest artistic accomplishment to date, and a creative project more than a decade in the making. That isn’t to say I was actively working on it the entire time. As the instructions above suggest, there was a long period of zero activity (and mild, steady guilt). I envisioned the piece during a party near the end of my senior year in college (still have the rough concept sketch) and began creating it shortly thereafter. But as you can see, that color palette is complex, and I simply didn’t have any way to nail those colors down using just my imagination. Thus, the eight year pause.

Digital photography and computer illustration came to my rescue a couple of years ago. I captured and recreated the painting’s design on the computer and there was able to tweak the colors to my heart’s content, making several design revisions in the process, then finally began painting in earnest. The remainder of the work was rarely enjoyable: locate areas with the same color, mix the paint, carefully mask the areas to be painted, paint the canvas, remove the tape, correct any edge glitches, repeat (roughly one hundred times). All in all, I would estimate that I’ve spent around 150 hours on this thing.

This “magnum opus” is also the final painting in this style that I intend to create, for a couple of reasons. One is that, as you can tell from the above description, it just isn’t much fun. I’ve enjoyed designing pieces like this, but executing them is more or less a paint-by-numbers task. More importantly, this style simply doesn’t represent me anymore. It represents the “old me” who often interfaced with the world in a rigid, calculated manner. While my future endeavors may use geometric design to some extent, and may be planned in advance to one degree or another, they will also include a healthy amount of free-form rendering that’s directly influenced by passion and emotion. I can’t wait.

On my last night of painting, I considered the piece for quite some time after adding the final touches, then made the nervous decision to call it finished. I carried it to the living room, hung and carefully straightened it, looked it over for awhile longer to make sure I didn’t still have some work to do, then returned to my room to finally take down and put away the various painting implements that had dominated my room for two years: a large, paint-smeared plastic sheet, a dozen tubes of paint in various states of use, an assortment of worn-out brushes, the two plastic boxes that had propped up the painting, tape, towels, exacto knife, etc., etc..

A My Morning Jacket song that I was hearing for the first time played on the stereo. I dropped tube after tube of paint into my storage box, and then, to my surprise, collapsed into my hands, crying. I realized that I was at the end of a very long, tiring journey. Never has an artistic piece taken so much of my time and energy, of my life. Somehow it felt like saying goodbye to an old friend, while at the same time finishing a marathon. I hadn’t realized until that moment how many feelings were wrapped up in that goddamned painting.

That was nearly a month ago, and I still feel that sense of loss when I relive that moment and remember that my “friend” is gone. But I now feel more pride and excitement than anything else when I look at the painting. I wonder sometimes If I’ll ever be able to part ways with any of my pieces. This one will hang on my wall until the day I die.

:: “>whit