In August of 2009, I did a show at a local art gallery, and included in the show was a triptych of three nudes. One included a penis.

The pose was relaxed… seated. A figure study. You know, the kind from a life drawing class. The brushstrokes were loose, the colors were bright, not human skin colors. (continued)

I found some photos from the opening reception for that show

Let me point out that I am very sensitive to inappropriate sexual expression. My daughter was sexually abused prior to coming into my family a couple of years ago. Because someone used their body in a criminally improper way, doesn’t mean we should deny the existence of bodies across-the-board. We need to face things in order to release their grip on us and move on.

After the show was over and had been taken down, I heard that someone (I believe it was one of the board members) made a complaint about that painting, though no one said anything to me.

The comment made after my show has gnawed at me for twelve years because I haven’t examined it until now.

It really makes me wonder what people have against the human body.

I personally do not find the human body offensive. I don’t find it inappropriate.

Besides, this was not a penis. This was a few marks of acrylic paint. True, they were intended to represent a penis. Not an erect penis. It was not a sexual image.

It’s the amazing power of art that takes a few lines of paint and lets everyone see a penis where there really isn’t one at all! Even our ancient ancestors realized that they could make a few lines with a stick from the fire on a cave wall, and it would conjure in everyone’s mind, the thought of a buffalo.

Maybe the person who made the complaint doesn’t like penises and thinks no one should have one, see one or like them, either.

This wasn’t a painting about a penis, it was a painting about a human, but the complainer made it all about the penis. In fact, he or she made the entire show about the penis.

I remember another show in that same gallery featuring photographs of naked women when no one took issue.

Is Michelangelo’s David inappropriate? Is it pornography? There are probably those who think it is. I’m glad they are not the ones curating global public art.

My show brought in a good deal of money for that gallery, and it was a show that I was proud of.

They haven’t had me back.

Thank goodness I do not care one bit about uptight, self loathing, modern day puritans who fail to see the beauty of the human body. They attempt to blind the rest of the world along with them in some misguided moral superiority.

Look at the history of art. You don’t have to look very far to see that the human form has a rightful place on gallery walls.

It’s stupid that I’m even defending this, and unfortunate that we have such uneducated people serving on art boards in our county. It’s not really an art board at all, but a historical society board, so there you have it.

As often happens, I find that the detail that hooks me is attached to another, larger issue.

I can circumvent all of the arts organizations in this county, be they commercial or non-profit and find success in my art on my own terms. I’m not interested in the petty agendas, the broken promises, the fragile, puffed up egos and fund raisers. For me, what’s happening is a grass roots movement where artists are joining hands in support of one another without the ever more irrelevant organizations.

You don’t need all that red tape to be an artist. You don’t need the bureaucracy. Well, I don’t.

I inherited my grandfather’s printing press. I have a friend who is a master printer, and generous with advice. I have another friend who loaned me a potter’s wheel and enabled me to get started on my lifelong dream of making ceramics. He saw my passion for it. I have painter friends and cartooning friends. I have writing friends and drawing friends, and we share what we know and what we do with each other. For free. And it takes away nothing from any of us, because what comes out of us, comes out with our unique flavor. Each one of us and the world is richer when we collaborate and love and inspire not only each other… the branches keep reaching out and dividing and reaching out some more.

I’m doing more of that texture, and trying to make paint look like glaze. This time, it’s on heavy watercolor paper, in a few layers of paint and acrylic glazing medium.

There are as many approaches to art as there are artists, I guess.

I think there’s a real danger in trying to appeal to the greatest number of consumers as you can, which, unfortunately, is the mindset many commercial galleries feel they must adopt in order to stay in business.

The danger is in dumbing art down for your viewer. It is in giving them nowhere to go with it.

Trust them to be able to look with a critical eye and see the less obvious story that lurks in the brushstrokes. Trust them to see the story in the art and feel the connection to their own story.

Anybody can do whatever they want to when it comes to creative expression or commercial venture. That’s a driving force behind free enterprise.

I’m actually not trying to convince anyone of anything. Not in art, not in religion. If I state my opinion, take it simply as that. If you disagree with me, kindly get over it and move on. I don’t need to be convinced. I’ve been convinced of many things without your help. I do enjoy a good conversation, however.

When I was in high school, I really didn’t care at all about the popular kids. I knew I would never be one of them. I’m glad about that. I could afford to be an individual without worrying about my status or rank.

That’s kind of how I think about my art now. I do art for myself. Art that tells my personal story, or helps me work through things whether they be current life issues or nagging childhood concerns.

In working through personal issues visually, I find that I am not unique. Many other people have dealt with exactly the same things I have had to work through. So the more personal my stories are for me, the more personal they can be in the eye of the viewer.

I don’t mind a pretty picture of a shoreline or one of the many species of waterfowl or flowers that grow here. I just have no interest in painting them.

Like many people who developed a visual language at a young age, I wrestled with the gift of dyslexia, which was far less understood in the 1960’s than it is now. And so I believed I was stupid.

Did you know that a fish in a tree is a symbol for dyslexia?

The image came from Einstein’s quote Everyone is a genius but if you judge a fish on its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.

If I had to choose a new medium to work in, it would be glass. When I was in art school, I was a photography major. One day I was talking with a glass major, and he said there was a similarity between photography and glass. To me, they seemed as different as could be. What he meant was that the art we produced wasn’t manipulated directly by our hands.

Glass blowing takes a long time to learn. After working at it for four or six years, you might be considered a good beginner.

I don’t have the time or the resources to learn glass blowing, but it fascinates me.

I will stick with pottery and painting.

I do not need to get my creative juices flowing. If anything, it would be helpful to know how to turn them off at times, or at least slow them down.

No matter how tired I am, when I climb into bed at night, the inactivity of my body seems to turn up the activity of my brain. Maybe the brainwaves are the same, but the hands are no longer responding, so it only seems more intense.

Art is an important way for me to process my life. Not only what is happening today, but all of the yesterdays as well.

I love producing art, and it is deeply meaningful for me when someone responds to something I have produced. I am known as an artist. Still, my art is not my greatest accomplishment. Art is self serving… self informing… self enriching. This is not a bad thing. It may hold benefits for others around me.

My greatest accomplishment in life has been assembling my family. My family was assembled the way a magnet assembles metal shavings from a workbench. We were drawn together. Disparate parts with diverse histories were drawn to each other by an invisible pull. It took some work, but the work is nothing without the attraction.

That’s how I want to be remembered. As a family man, who happened to tell his stories visually. Because if I can tell my story, you can tell your story… or maybe through hearing my story, you can realize you have room in your life for someone else who needs a home.

I don’t know why I was so fortunate to get the parents that I got. I was truly lucky, and it was due to no merit of my own. Not everyone gets that chance in life. I want to pay it forward. Even as a child, I looked forward to being a father someday. Adopting teens has given my life new meaning. To see them grow and thrive in the security of a loving family is the most important thing I have done in my life, and it is what I plan to do for the rest of my life.

I’m replicating this texture that I’ve done on some of my pottery on certain walls in my house. This is in a doorway.

I think I’m creative. I think this view of myself was influenced by other people, because people pointed out that I had certain skills, or that they were impressed by my ability to do things like draw. I might not have noticed this if someone hadn’t mentioned it, because it just seemed to come naturally to me. I didn’t know there were other ways of being. When I was about 15, I drew a Coke bottle in school. The adults around me were amazed that I could draw this from memory, and said that they would not have remembered the shape of a Coke bottle. How can you not remember the shape of a Coke bottle?

It makes me think that people go through their lives never looking at things. Never noticing.

I wonder what they see when they look at the world, if they don’t even know the shape of a Coke bottle.

I never tried to remember it. I had held them in my hands. I had drank Coke from them.

A Coke bottle is part of our culture. It’s one of many common, everyday objects that have a function.

This is what I mean by culture. The way we live. This form or stage of civilization that defines the period and place in which we live. It includes our language and our clothes.

I have a feeling that pretty much everyone regards their culture as the best one, and as stable and entitled. I guess that’s because it’s familiar. Anything else is foreign and not as good.

I don’t feel that way, maybe because I’ve had the privilege of living elsewhere, in other cultures. But I digress.

My culture makes its way into my creative expression. It’s my springboard and my foundation. It structures my thoughts. I’m a product of my culture.

I’m lucky to live in a beautiful small town that appreciates and supports artists. This also influences my artistic life, because my work has somewhere to go, and for what it’s worth, I am recognized as an artist. I am known. In a culture within a culture, I am Grand Marais Minnesota artist Tim Young.

I’m an emotional person. I wasn’t always. I cry easily. It doesn’t mean I’m sad. I don’t paint my emotions. I think my emotions are indicators for me. They indicate authenticity. They often accompany sleep deprivation, inspiration, joy and sometimes grief.

Emotions ride near the surface. I let them come and go. Things have to seep in deeper before they get into the paint.

The main person I paint for is me.

Everyone will regard my artwork differently. While painting is a visual language, it’s not spelled out in words and punctuation. You may never know my specific intent or my exact motivation, and so the work must speak for itself. I bring my story when I paint it, and you will come to it with your story, too. You can ask me, and I’ll be glad to talk with you about it. I hope you’ll be open to talking with me, too.

Back in September, I started working on this 48×36 canvas (You can see the original post dated October 7, 2020). I’ve spent a lot of time with it. It hangs over my bed. If you read my blog posts, you’ll know that I talk about “meandering through the brushstrokes”. Certain passages get too precious to me, even if they are in a problem area. So I had to come to terms with sacrificing some details I liked in order to gain a satisfying painting. And that is how this feels to me now.

I don’t doubt that some of you will shake your heads at this. My brother once looked at some abstract paintings here at my home and immediately announced that they were of “nothing”. That’s fine. That is where that conversation ended. I can assure you that for me, these paintings are not of nothing. In fact, the longer I look at them, the more they reveal.

Of course I identify with my creative product. It came out of me. It is my expression. Still, it might be more accurate to say that my creative product identifies me… the way fingerprints can identify a person that was in a particular place or touched a particular object. My paintings are marks I leave behind me as I pass through the world. My father found a drawing of mine from the 1970’s and used it as his Christmas greeting this past December. I drew that in Africa. A few years ago, a friend sent me a picture I drew for her in the 1980’s.

So you see? It’s true.

They both held onto the type of drawings that I never kept for myself. And I drew all the time, so I don’t know how many still exist.

That is the impact I hope to have. That people will value what I’ve done enough to not throw it away. That there will be evidence… a paper trail… proof that I was here. That I felt something, and said something about it in my own way, wherever I was on life’s Highway. The notebook paper I drew on was not valuable. The ink was not anything special. The story and the connection made it worth something. Made it worth keeping.

The people who have most influenced me are my parents. They supported me and loved me. I took them for granted, the way teens do, I suppose. They made me feel secure, and encouraged my interests even when they didn’t understand them. I was fortunate to get the parents I got. I see now that many are not so blessed. I want to pay it forward.

The people most influenced by me have got to be my children. I don’t want to let them down.

I’m sandwiched between two extraordinary generations, marveling to find myself here.

I work a full time job, and I often say that I can make more money at home. I’m not sure if that’s true. Besides the pay, there are other advantages to my job. For example, when people ask me what my job is, I like to have an answer. I could say I am an artist, or I perform weddings, but I worked hard to become a nurse. I like being able to say I am the only full time nurse working for our school district. And I do love my job. Furthermore, being a nurse has allowed my son to attend school on campus during distance learning with the children of other essential employees, and that has been valuable for him. He is graduating this year and will still need supervision. This is a challenge. So whether or not I purchase a building to run an art gallery, I think the time has come for me to focus on my art, on my family and on my home. I think it’s time to see if all the things I say I believe about myself are really true. Can I make it as an artist? As a full-time professional artist? I believe I can.

I owe it to myself to find out.