A Change in the pattern

grows with click

It was early in 1979 when I left my job as night custodian at my old Junior High. I didn't really want to leave that job, but I kept hearing, from my girlfriend, and others, "You're too smart to be wasting your time doing this kind of work." I didn't think so, but I put in an application with the Gas Company, just to shut them up. I figured that a utility would be such a huge bureaucracy, that they'd forget about the app, I could tell everyone, "Hey. I tried", and the whole business would be forgotten.

The bastards hired me. I got a job in field service, and hated it from day one. I applied for other positions in the company, but never heard a peep. One day in the spring of '81 I was, as always, up to my elbows in rancid grease and cockroaches, and I just said, "Screw it." I drove back to the yard, parked the truck, and headed straight for the office. I had my speech for the boss prepared. I opened my mouth, and before I got the first syllable out, He said, "How would you like a transfer to the Hollywood office?" I took it. Within the week, my brother, who lived about three miles from that office, moved to New York, and I got his apartment on Melrose Avenue.

Out of the grease pit, and into the pressure cooker. I had always sworn, as genuine, bona fide, surf rat hippie individualist rebel type that I would never end up in some office job chained to a desk. I spent my days answering billing complaints, and doodled to pass the time while I sat there, tethered by the earpiece to my cubicle. People would pass by the cubicle, see the psychedelic stuff I was making, and ask if they could have it for their wall. One of the women in the office brought in a copy of Celtic Art, the Methods of Construction by George Bain. I just went nuts.

But I didn't last a year in the office. This time I didn't say screw it. I yelled,"Go straight to fucking hell, and take your goddamn gas bill with you, and you can shove your fucking meter up your ass!" I really needed to go surfing. Suddenly I had plenty of time to do it. But I wouldn't find the Celtic Art book for another ten years.

JWM

Knot a Lot to Say

click to make all big

Synchronicity, or as I like to call it, The Web of Coincidence seems to be afoot these days in the blogosphere. All sorts of things are getting tied together. There is an enormously unlikely sequence of events that led to me being able to create this piece, and I may get into telling that story later on. This artwork is old. I did several of these pieces between 1993, and 1997. This was the first. It is one of the few pieces that I actually sold, and now I regret having sold it. I tried last year to break a long creative drought by starting a new one, but it didn't get far. The pencil sketch is sitting on the light box waiting. I call this sequence John's Impossible Knot because it's easy to begin, and continue, but very difficult to end. This sequence did not come from a how-to-draw-Celtic-art book. It is an entirely original composition, not a copy of anything. But that, too, is another story for another time.

JWM