Brown Cardboard Boxes and White Plastic Buckets
by Sean - December 30th, 2009
For the first thirteen years of my life my father was in the military, and like most military families, we moved a lot. I think we may have moved a lot even by military standards. Every 2 to 3 years a moving van pulled up to the house and everything we owned was wrapped in paper and packed in brown cardboard boxes. California, Massachusetts, Virginia, Kentucky, Michigan… we lived all over.
My father preferred colder climates, although the military didn’t really give him a choice. He could make requests, but they were viewed as suggestions, not rules.
“In colder climates,” my father would say, “people have been forced to scrape their living from the cold earth. They’ve learned discipline. They’ve learned to work hard and appreciate every little thing they have, something you don’t learn when all you do is lay around on a beach all day eating bananas.”
Being of Irish and Swedish descent, and having grown up in New England, I suppose his perspective is understandable. My mother, on the other hand, had no preference. Coming from Japan, America was an exciting, exotic place and she wanted to see as much of it as possible. She used to jokingly call us gypsies, which in many ways we were. Every few years we were uprooted and planted somewhere new. A new house, a new school, a new set of friends. We were always in a state of packing or unpacking.
My older sister, Christine, and me in front of our house at Fort Knox, KY.
We lived in military housing: spare, transient spaces… ugly, cheerless boxes with stark white walls and gray linoleum floors. Spaces that held no trace of their previous occupants and would hold no trace of us after we left. Like the people of cold climates, we had to dig deep to find the beauty in these homes.
On the blank white walls my parents would hang the black-lacquer-with-mother-of-pearl-inlay Japanese tabletop (which had been converted to wall art when its legs had been damaged), my father’s bagpipes, and the stuffed sailfish. In the living room they would display the Japanese kokeshis on the Early American furniture. And in this culturally-schizophrenic home we would settle for the next 2 to 3 years. (Later, a stuffed deer’s head, which my little sister, Katy, dubbed Charlie, would join the sailfish. Charlie’s hooves were made into gun-holders, which were positioned below his head… giving him the appearance of being in some sort of drywall stockade, forced to carry the weapon that had been his demise.)
What does this have to do with art? I’ll get to that in a minute. Or two.
In direct contrast to the featureless military houses we lived in, there was Japan. We would periodically visit my relatives in Tokyo: a place that was anything but stark and gray. My grandparents, uncles, aunts and cousins were warm and colorful. We made friends with the kids in my grandparent’s neighborhood. The houses were different, the food was different, the smells were different… sight, sound, touch, taste… everything was different. It was sort of like going from black-and-white Kansas to Technicolor Oz.
Trips to Japan: With my Japanese grandmother; with my friend Yugi who lived down the street from my grandparents; with my sister, Christine, and our grandparents, uncle, aunt, and cousin.
Two different worlds. East. West. Two opposites that somehow managed to be very normal, very natural.
Moving all the time teaches you to be fearless… and curious. Some of the places we lived were interesting, others less so, and some were exotic (we lived in Hawaii for a year before my Dad requested to be transferred away from that banana-infested place). Being constantly presented with new places and new faces is probably not a bad thing—it stretches your mind.
But it can also be lonely.
You learn to enjoy solitary activities, like drawing, writing, and reading. I loved books. I loved the illustrations, I loved the stories and I even tried writing my own. I was probably the only ten-year-old in the country who asked for a typewriter for Christmas. I saved my allowance until I had enough money to—against the advice of all those After School Specials—buy some friends. The Hardy Boys, the Borrowers, Lucy, Edmund, Peter and Susan…I loved all of them. They were the best kinds of friend because, when it was time to move, I could carefully pack them in brown cardboard boxes and take them with me.
Again, what does this have to do with art?
From roughly 2003 until 2007 I was fascinated by bright color. Vivid, intense color. The colors of tropical fish. In fact, I painted a lot of fish. Recently, I have become more interested in muted color. Colors without color. Warm grays, cool grays, soft browns, green-browns, red-browns, and all the beautiful ranges of whites: from warm eggshell to blue winter-white. They are colors that, like those cold climates, you have to work a little harder to appreciate. It’s easy to see the beauty in a bright red ruby; it takes some effort to see it in a dull gray stone.
Glenn and me
My friend Glenn and I have known each other since high school. He is my best friend. If I could, I would pack him in a box and take him wherever I go. We’ve been through the pain of adolescence together, survived broken homes together, and even—in our teenage years—both got arrested (although not together). My arrest was better, much more dramatic… in that lessons-learned-TV-Movie-of-the-Week sort of way. His was kind of lame. [Note: the "arrests" were more like "stern-talking-to's" and did not involve handcuffs, firearms, or anyone being thrown to the ground.]
But anyways, that’s another post.
Whenever we reminisce about old times, he always asks me, “How do you remember all this stuff?” I don’t know. Maybe I remember more than most people—or at least more than he does.
Growing up as a gypsy, I suppose I developed the habit (cliché as it sounds) of packing memories into cardboard boxes along with everything else. When you are always on the move, you never stop feeling like an outsider. You are always starting over… observing, listening, memorizing. You store things and bring them out when you need them. A jacket when you’re cold. A copy of Treasure Island when you’re bored. Or a memory of your sister twirling around in the front yard in her favorite red dress and getting crapped on by a bird… when you are starting a strange, new school and feeling a little scared.
Lately I’ve been thinking about vanishing rural communities as metaphors for life, inevitability, change. About old ways of doing things vs. new ways of doing things, whether it be farming or creating art. Old vs. new. Traditional vs. modern. Opposites. But opposites that manage to work together and be very normal, very natural.
I’ve been doing a lot of packing and unpacking. Digging around in brown cardboard boxes.
In one of the boxes I found some buckets. White plastic buckets, the 5-gallon kind that have as many uses as duct tape. We used to (and still do) have them on Celtic Springs Farm. They were handy for storing any number of things from birdseed to baling twine. I remember seeing them in the barn… the new ones looking oddly bright-white against the dun-colored barn boards. The older ones—battered, cracked and dirty—looking as if they were trying hard to blend in and be inconspicuous. Surrounded by all the antique farm machinery, they looked completely anachronistic.
I thought about the buckets about a month ago while I was at work. I stopped what I was doing, and made a quick sketch.
Buckets sketch
Over the next few days, I rooted around looking for a few actual 5-gallon buckets and drew a more accurate sketch, paying attention to all the subtle little details that made each bucket unique (the squiggle at the base of the second bucket is a bit of baling twine I threw in for good measure).
Revised buckets sketch
I then scanned the sketch and overlayed it with some paper I dirtied up with coffee grounds to use as an underpainting for a new painting.
Buckets sketch, underpainting
The new painting is slowly taking shape.
Buckets painting, with barn boards background
Over the past several days I have been working on the background behind the buckets, the weathered barn boards. I have been painting all this digitally, in keeping with my experiments in combining paint and pixels… combining old and new methods. At a certain point, I will transfer the painting to a rigid surface, probably via gel transfer, and complete the painting using traditional media.
Buckets painting, with barn boards background 2
White plastic buckets. All the beautiful ranges of whites: from warm eggshell to blue winter-white. Some new, some old. Set against the old barn boards… all colors without color… dun-colors… warm grays, cool grays, soft browns, green-browns, red-browns. Muted colors that make you work to see their beauty. Dirty, plastic buckets, like outsiders, newcomers.
Old vs. new. Past, present, future. Time. Change. Inevitability. All One Big Thing.
The painting has a long way to go. I’ll keep posting its progress. In the meantime, I’ve been thinking a lot lately about a broadcast tower I pass on my way to work. At one particular stoplight, I have an unobstructed view of it. It makes me think of brussels sprouts.
But that’s another post.
