why ken paints

 

A friend of mine emailed me about how my show was going, and maybe I wrote too long a reply but here it is.  I have been doing these shows since 2005, usually once a year, sometimes twice, about twenty shows altogether sounds about right.

I remember after putting up the first show, walking back down Irving Park to the train, and thinking this could be my big break.  Lots of big time art critics surely find themselves strolling down Ashland Avenue on a sunny afternoon, and developing a thirst might drop into the Ten Cat to wet their whistle, and leaving four hours later, completely smashed, trip coming out the door, and look up at my array of cats and declare "A star eeez (they are French of course) born!"  And then it would be all fast cars and whiskey, long haired girls and fun.

It didn't turn out that way.  At first I thought I should have more shows in more places, spread my stuff around you know.  But there weren't that many places, and those places were kind of picky.  I'd heard about the Ten Cat from a friend in that Saturday adult ed watercolor class that I have been attending since September of 1989, and when I asked the owner, squeaky-voiced, on the phone, if I could put my stuff up in her windows she said sure.  When I asked her if she wanted to see my stuff first, she said nah.  So you see, it was easy. 

I've got it all down to a routine now.  The Ten Cat has eight easels and each easel can hold two paintings so every year I pick sixteen paintings I have done, usually as sort of a series, cats, birds, alleys, etc. http://www.bckat.us/KenSchadt/index.htm I go to the same framer to mount my paintings on 20x28 foamcore because they are much easier to haul on the train than framed paintings, the same printer to print my postcards (pretty useless in the age of the internet, but I like them, have a shoebox full of them in the plastic shelving that lines my bedroom holding all the paintings that never sold), bake a slew of corn muffins (getting better at that with every show), buy some chips and salsa and some cheap sweet stuff from the five dollar tables at the Jewel, haul it all over there and set it up and wait for my crowd (forty to a dozen, maybe twenty as an average) to show up and for a couple hours once a year I am a big shot in a small pond.

Sometimes I sell none, sometimes four or five.  Mostly it's friends or neighbors or friends of friends or friends of neighbors, and that's fine, but there is always a suspicion, are they doing this because they want to be nice to me?  But here is the thing.  I always put up a little note in the window with the prices (one or two hundred, the same price for all of them) and my email.  They are in the front of the Ten Cat so that any passerby can see them whether the place is open or not.  And sometimes, maybe once or twice I get an email from a stranger, wanting to buy say #6 from the Cats and Corn show.  I could finagle some deal where the bartender could take the cash and they could take the painting away.  But I always finagle it so that I am there for the exchange, because I want to see them, talk to them a bit, because they are paying money for my painting.

It's always a little bit disappointing.  They don't know shit about art, my deft use of burnt sienna is not noticed.  They are buying it for their brother's birthday because he is a trader on the exchange and it is a painting of corn.  But still, there are other paintings of corn and they chose this one, and they are paying a hundred or two so they are making some sort of sacrifice for this.  And you know there are a shitload of theories on art and what makes a good or bad painting, but still I think there is something, not in the heart, but in that deep dark subconscious mind that is always with us, but is mostly a stranger, but is somehow touched by that bit of derring do with the burnt sienna, and there, I have made a connection.

I paint early most mornings, and it is mostly fun, but sometimes I wonder isn't this stupid stuff that I am doing.  But then I think of that stranger taking the painting out into the night, and it was worth some dough to him to do it.  So you see, it means something.