Port Clyde boy, born and raised, on the trail of Neil Diamond, (New York City born and raised)

It's been an interesting journey for me, painting the "self-portrait" as a teen age Neil Diamond painting. I've learned a lot about myself, which I had a "kind-a feeling" I was going to when I took it on. It's like saying to the universe "bring it on!" It's a challenge, in every sense of the word.

I didn't want to paint this painting. My first attitude toward the notion of such an undertaking was: "oh, come on, let's give this a big skip -- you've got to be kidding me!" I mean I get a lot of ideas for paintings, it doesn't mean I do them all. As if I could, or would want to.

It's that business my father used to say: "I'm gonna tow that around awhile before I haul it aboard". But this painting wanted to be done, I could tell, because I've been around myself long enough to separate the wheat from the chaff. Still, I don't cotton much to the notion of "idol worship" like as in making somebody in the entertainment or sports industry some kind of god, and my Neil Diamond memories are intertwined with a lot of really great things as well as a lot of anxt -- some of it very existential that I felt as a teenager.

I mean. . .did I want to "go there". Well, painting for me has always been about exploration of my life and my actions and reactions to it. So yeah, in a very real sense when this image kept coming up for me to deal with it and get it out on canvas, it just got more and more in my way until I had to do something about it. Like put it out there.

Oh, crap! You know? But I'm glad I listened to that voice. It's always been for the best that I do.

I've met my fair share of celebrities over the years in different walks of the general entertainment world. When I worked on the "In the Bedroom" movie that was shot around here a few years ago for instance. I could have gone on and worked on other movies, and I was invited to do so. Basically I wanted to paint pictures. The movie industry is a kind of patron for a lot of writers and artists. Just not this one. I'm past it where I want to live in a hotel room in New York or Boston or god only knows where for months at a time. It's just another job, and a 12 to 16 hour a day one at that. I got a credit for "In the Bedroom." I've seen it twice. Too much of that stuff goes on around here as it is, I don't need to see it on the screen.

Andy Warhol's pithy statement about "In the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes," which since the era of the internet I've heard adapted to: "In the future, everyone will be famous to fifteen people" is 'bout the size of it, in my estimation.

Still with all due mercy shined on my adolescent psyche I didn't have much to hang onto as a kid, other than doing my art and writing, and at the time I'd taught myself how to play guitar. So there was music. I actually got to be a pretty good player and singer. I even wrote some songs. I still have them in a box of things from my high school days, that some how my mother managed not to throw out when she moved out of Port Clyde in the mid-1970's.

So in that sense, I learned to play the songs I liked, and wrote a few that also filled the bill. It's been tentative, because the room mates are still with me for a few more weeks, but I've picked up my guitar on again / off again, in the last few months and started strumming. Since it's an electric one, I'll wait just a bit longer 'til they're gone and then I'm going to cut loose.

I think Neil Diamond -- well, his songs I mean, helped me stay focused when I was that age. . . you know, a teenager. Basically I was a talented kid in a dead end town was how I looked at it. You never really appreciate "home" until you've been out in the world and learned a few lessons that it can kick your ass, no matter how talented you are. When you've got to pay the rent, and you've got to get a job to do that, you get to see just how dedicated you are. . .as opposed to how dedicated you "think" you are.

I've been painting a long time now. Closer to 40 years than 30, so I know when I'm onto something in the way I ought to be. And this "Neil-n-me" painting has hit that point "like a guitar hummin'" in the way he sang about in a song he put out during the summer of 1972 , (a fabled summer for me in the pantheon of my heart-most Port Clyde days for a fact ). The song was "Cracklin' Rosie". This was Neil Diamond's first American #1 hit by the way, something which I guess may or may not have registered at the time on my radar screen. I just liked the tune. I still associate it very much with that summer and fall, which marked my passage and that of all the rest of my classmates from grade-school down here in T-Harbor up to Georges Valley high school. 1972 was freshman year.


I've turned the corner and I'm on the home stretch with "Self portrait being a teenage Neil Diamond
rockin' the shack and Port Clyde Roads." The last update I did on it was February 26th, roughly a
month ago, in other words. I put it away for awhile (over three weeks now) while I got going painting on other things, tinkering with some other ones in various states of completion and also starting a bunch of new paintings. Sometimes you just need to see things with different eyes, that's all. It's kind of like any relationship. . .things need time to gestate.

It's reached the point where I"m going to put it in a temporary frame and hang it on the wall. That's always a good sign. It means it's time now for contemplation at a more leisurely pace. The composition is well established and won't change a whole lot from here on in. Not the "major" things in it anyway.
I pretty much know what's what, and what I want to put in and leave out now that I'm onto the final stretch.

It feels good to be onto the final stretch with the painting. I'll probably be tinkering with it for awhile, but basically it is just about finished. There's still some adjustments I've got to make, but they are pretty minor. At any rate, it's fitting the painting is almost done. It's coming into spring. I started it on Hallowe'en night, which I think is also fitting, since Hallowe'en is where we dress up to be some other character, other than ourselves.


cwo