I had a conversation with a good friend of mine, Karl Matson. We had a conversation about people like you, and me, and him.
If you don’t have a real honest god fearing job, a 9-5 construction or trades or even office slash supermarket slash burger flipping job and you aren’t on welfare, you’re probably an art fag.
Even if you do have one of these jobs you may be an art fag. If you come home from work tired and find yourself unable to sleep until you have given life to the images behind your eyes. A voice to words you have never read or a melody to the song you’ve never sung before.
You are an art fag.
We had this conversation after work a couple nights before the Sweetwater 905 festival 2010. A yearly affair his family puts on out at the Matson’s family farm on Sweetwater road, Rolla B.C.
What started as a brainstorming and bitching session by me (I don’t have time or space to paint or create this year Karl) well why don't you get on stage and read? you've been writing.
The year before he approached me a month before the show and said “hey your an artist, you should make something for the show this year!” so I did. He said the key word was monumental so after a couple days and some sketches my idea went from a sketch of a painting of a metal moose to a real metal moose to a real metal moose that drove around. His name was Gary and he was good. In an art faggy way.
And that is what drove our conversation that night to art fags.
It’s not easy being an art fag, it’s not friendly or fun or cool. Our loved ones have a hard time understanding sometimes... a lot of the time really. But how do you explain what you can’t understand till it’s done?
I need to build something. What? I don’t know yet.
What are you drawing? I don’t know.
I hear stories in my head and they won’t let me sleep until their told. I tell Karl this and he says “I KNOW EXACTLY WHAT YOU MEAN!”
it’s like being driven, or possessed, or something even worse This thing I see, it has no colours or shapes, I don’t even know how big it is how will it ever fit on this canvas? We don’t do it for anyone else, not fame or money, good luck getting paid for what we do is the most common symptom of art faggotry. This passion and stupidity that drives us try’s the people around us as surely as it tries our own sanity. But to stop? Unthinkable.
The night wound on and the conversation grew quite animated till his lovely blonde haired blue eyed daughter distracted us in most 4 year old way. She was up way past her bedtime already so it just made sense to indulge her little play pony tricks and feed her fruit that her pony could have too. Before long we had a race course with hurdles set up around the house and we were all racing ponies and spinning stories about the ponies we were racing, by the time Inge-jean came home there were paints and pens and ponies and drawings of ponies and hurdles and empties spread from one end of the house to the other.
One time Karl put his canoe and his lovely wife Inge-jean into the creek in his backyard and they rode in that canoe till they reached the Hudson’s bay some 2500 kms. North and east. Their longest portage was 30 kms. I think he made a movie of it; he’s also made documentaries in India. He paints and welds and creates and couldn’t stop if he wanted too.
He is an art fag.
I wrote this at 1 a.m. in Chungking mansion on Nathan road in downtown Hong Kong. It’s a cheap guest house in an old mall complex about a city block long and 15 stories tall. B block 3rd floor room 316. My girlfriend is snoring next to me and there will be no sleep till this story is out of my head.
I am an art fag.
To quote the Ramones, “we accept you, gabba gabba we accept you, one of us”
My buddy jay Balaam likes to think of himself as an art thug.
He is an art fag.
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