This project has been finishing up now for about the last 3 or 4 months. It looks like its pretty much complete at this point. My next painting will be a commission piece for a friend of mine of the Pulaski Skyway, which is only a remotely related subject.
Five Mile From Times Square began about 4 years ago, on a cold January day. I dragged my very dear friend Willie Joe to the foot of Snake Hill. He stayed below while I climbed to the top and shot several rolls of film (film...!). I eventually wrote a grant proposal (PDF link here) which got exactly zero interest, and I was forced to slog ahead on the project without any funding or support, but hey, painting is what I do.
The only difference is that I completed 13 paintings (my goal was 10-12) in 4 years instead of 1, and I wasn't able to get any financial backing to use as leverage towards getting a gallery show. But I sold about half of what I produced, so I guess that doesn't matter either.
So now I move on, look for a different subject. What I'm left with is a legacy of 13 images, many of which belong to other people now. No size, no titles, no dates, no info, just pictures, 13 pictures.
There was one reference I forgot to mention: the painting's namesake.
I've seen the movie The Great Escape only once, when I was about 11 years old, and I loved it. If you don't know the movie, it involves Allied prisoners of war in Germany during World War Two, and their plan to orchestrate a mass escape from one of the highest security prisoner of war camps on the enemy side.
The most memorable scene for me is the most climatic, where Captain Virgil Hilts, played by Steve McQueen, almost at the Swiss border, jumps the motorcycle he's riding, becomes entangled in barbed wire, and is re-captured by the Germans and returned to camp. Hilts is able to avoid execution as a spy by showing the Germans his Captain's insignia sewn to the inside of his shirt.
Hilts is dubbed "The Cooler King" by his fellow prisoners, because of his propensity to try and break out of prison. This behavior generally lands him in the cooler, or solitary confinement, which is one of the harshest punishments imposed by the Germans for the most disobedient prisoners.
Most of us are Virgil Hilts. We infuriate our captors with frequent escape attempts, only to be alienated and locked in the cooler once our attempts to free ourselves are discovered. We have no choice. Our desire to live free drives us toward the goal of liberating ourselves from the limits of civilization, expectations, peer pressure, pre-determined concepts of success, and anything else that forces us to suppress our desires and limit our effort to self-actualize.
Realizing our constraints, we dream and strive to separate ourselves from the pack and grow as individuals, try to do something that we want, to live like we want to live, to exist outside of rules imposed on us. We conspire to build our own tunnels, plan our escape routes. Most of these attempts are discovered by the guards.
Our tunnels, like those built by the prisoners in the film, never reach the tree line beyond the prison walls, and only a very select few successfully vault over the barbed wire border fence on our stolen motorcycles. Most who even get that far are usually captured by society and returned to prison to be our own versions of The Cooler King.
We can fight, conspire, dream, connive, or fly below the radar all we want, but the tentacles are almost always there to bring us back in. Once captured, we gladly flash our insignia that shows that we are still willing to comply in order to not be called out as an outsider.
So another painting, this time named after a movie about a quest for freedom, is my latest motorcycle. Will I clear the barbed wire at the border this time?
Formerly called "Untitled Painting," it now has a title: The Great Escape. It's oil on canvas, measures 30" high by 64" wide, and was completed in the year 2013. Its my latest and one of my most successful, which is one of the reasons behind its title.
It has significance as an escape in its reality as a landmark piece, a career milestone, an artistic turning point, a personal affirmation, and metaphorically in its subject on multiple levels.
I promised to document the conclusion of each sitting, which you can see in the series of photos below. What I did not do as promised was to blog each night's photo. I was just too busy, too tired, too preoccupied, too lazy.
It was completed in 13 sessions, considerably fewer than some I have documented in the past. I recall Xanadu, which was recorded in the same way, but took 44 sessions to complete. That was the old way. Things have a new sense of purpose now, and my priorities have changed. Hence the title.
I've been able to bridge a gap so to speak, or to parallel the subject of the painting, a miry, fecund swamp of mediocrity and meaninglessness. This painting was completed in a period of transcendence.
My previous 3 posts are sittings number 1, 2, and 3. Below are 4 through 13...
