Dear Robyn

Dear Robyn,

So many times working on this project I have wondered if I’m dying or already dead. 

Me and T were in a bad car crash on New Years day in 2013. We totalled the Jeep. I thought we both were dead but neither of us was even hurt. The one memory that stands out more than anything is how intensely calm I was when I thought I was about to die. 

From time to time since then I’ve wondered if I actually died there. The magic in this story seems unlikely among the living, and yet, I’m living it.

It started as a just fun hobby project where I would find a story throughout the lyrics of Gaslight Anthem and Brian Fallon’s music. There was no plan. I had no idea what it would be and it was about just following clues and going wherever they took me. It was always about finding a story rather than creating one. 

Now the treasure hunt—the magical, mystical, living art, fiction-non-fiction, sci-fi, VR quest in the real world—has gone on for more than a decade and I have no idea where it’s going next.

It became an art project that currently includes over 100 paintings in progress along with countless essays, notes, and stories. There are multiple storylines. 

It’s about family history and impossible synchronicities. It’s a journey inside the psyche, and it’s outside of time and space. 

It’s all about the interconnectedness of everything. And it's about how music and art are sources of healing, and joy that every one of us can access. 

I’m not special, I’m just paying attention. I was only looking for fun and I found it.

The story is ever evolving. I have no control over how it will end. I have lots of ideas for purely fictional tangents but I have found that the fiction that life hands me is often better than what I could have made up. I think the final product will eventually be some kind of multimedia fiction based on a whole lot of uncanny real life details.

The process is completely intuitive and I’ll write more about that process later. Figures and characters and scenarios and clues reveal themselves in lyrics, in paintings, and in real life. I go with whatever it gives me.

The story is a hunt through deep musical rabbit holes. I’m so grateful for all the music I might never have known without it. I started a thank you page here for the music that makes up the layers of these pieces. It’s a true collaboration with the music. With different music it would be a different story. 

Without Joe Strummer, Bruce Springsteen, and all the many others, Brian Fallon might not have his music. Without Fallon’s music and all of the others, I would not have this project.

Everything is connected in the most fun and amazing ways.

The story has roots on our beach in Cape Breton and it’s definitely connected to New Jersey. According to the clues so far it’s Jackson, New Jersey, Asbury Park, Atlantic City and Mays Landing. I’ve never been to Jersey.

Wouldn’t it be cool if there was someone in New Jersey who is writing a story that is connected to Cape Breton in ways they don’t understand?

I don’t think this thing is just mine.

I wonder sometimes if maybe when Poppy was in his early drunken days and trudging around New York and waking up in box cars in Chicago, if he left pieces of a family behind in New Jersey. You know how mysterious his background is. The more the story goes on the more closely connected to him it seems to be. There’s been a pull in me to write about him for years.

While the story is rooted in these two locations the characters have been in a lot of times and places—Harlem in the 20s, Queens in the 40s, and on the Brooklyn Bridge in the future. They were on the Titanic and in Hollywood through the decades. They’re at football games and concerts, in theatres, diners, and churches, in VR, in space, at the beach, and in my real life.

The art is an adventure. I only started painting in my 40s and I’m learning to paint as a I go. I’m learning a lot and trying lots of things but it’s really freeing to know this is not about following rules and making a grade. The art is just what it is and it’s purely about joy and healing. 

I had to learn the fundamentals of art and composition for my job and I have learned a lot on “YouTube University,” so I know a little. But this is all instinct and I don’t get bogged down in the rules. 

When the rules don’t follow the story, I don’t follow the rules. 

The painting is already there in the layers and my only job is to pay close enough attention to uncover it as it wants to be. I remember hearing Michelangelo’s “angel in the marble” idea and feeling like that summed it up perfectly. The music lays the foundation and I just follow directions until all of the angels are freed. 

Each painting is a draft and most parts will be painted over and over. But there are stories in every layer. Each layer informs the next and leaves pieces of itself behind peeking through. I try to take a lot of pictures because I find the evolution of the painting fascinating. Whenever I learn something new or see something I like online it goes in the next layer. The paintings are rarely done and most of them are continuous works in progress that can change at any time. 

A few times there have been paintings that hold pieces of the story so specific and meaningful that I can no longer paint over it. That is one circumstance when a painting might be done. Not finished, just stopped. 

A few paintings have got to the point where nothing draws my eye and I feel balance when I look at it. That’s another circumstance when a painting might be done. A few I have varnished and regretted; a few I’ve painted over and regretted. There are a few that I’m getting close to stopping now.

This website will be an archive for now. A way to organize all of the notes and pictures and files I’ve collected and the tangents I’ve been on for over a decade.

Entries here might be lots at once and then few and far between. They might be stream of consciousness about what I’m seeing in the paintings in the moment. It could be casual emails just telling more of how the story came together. 

Some entries are essays like I would write for a class and some might read more like journal entries. Sometimes I might even post voice notes if it’s flowing better that way. I still don’t know what form this is going to take so it’s a little all over the place.

The story might not be in order although I’ll try to make it make sense. There is so much to it that there will be tangents. If I mention something that is not clear yet it will be clear in another story.  

Somethings are still not clear to me.

I’ve become an expert at recognizing patterns and connections. I’m decoding it and interpreting but I really don’t think I’m making it up. Most of the time I don’t know where the story is coming from. 

I’m more comfortable calling it fiction because it’s so out there. Many of the characters are fictional although some not. Jackson and Mae are technically fictional, I guess. But they are so real at the same time that to think they are not with me all the time now is absurd to me. 

They are always watching from the paintings. I can see their faces.

Margaret Atwood says "when you're writing fiction, everybody thinks you're secretly writing about real people and things. But if you write an autobiography, they think you're lying as one does."

This is neither and both of those. 

The paintings always felt like worlds looking into other worlds. It’s like every canvas is a verse in a multiverse and the whole set is a puzzle piecing pieces of the story of the multiverse together. 

There are always clear images of faces staring through the layers, some familiar. 

The clearest faces and most fascinating illusions often emerge from sections that are all different tints and shades of blue. 

I can’t help but echo the line we might always be blue from Myles Davis the Cool, right before the crowd shouts Jackson! He lived in that song until I found him.

The story is almost too big for me at times and that it’s ongoing is overwhelming. Sitting in front of a painting is like binging a series on Netflix. There is no way I can record all that I see. 

So much of the magic is lost in the moment and in my own senses. If their purpose is to show me joy, I’ve seen it and felt it on a level many people might never experience, though I wish everyone would.

While the story feels deeply connected to me and my family, I am just one part of it and it does not belong to me. If someone sees this and connects with it, then it’s also theirs. If they have pieces of it to share, then it is ours. I’d rather it be about the story and not necessarily about me. 

When I talk about real people here I’ll just use initials. DJ is my VR name and so I picked it for my art name too to keep it a little separate from me. Having said that, some essays are personal stories of my life. This is as much a healing journey as anything else and this project got me through some real intense shit over the past few years.

So much of this story is such cool fiction but the details are all true. Story details are often taken from real life in precise detail but my interpretation of the details and what they mean to the story is the fiction. Though, some days I’m not sure that they are completely separate. 

It’s weird that the one thing in my life that makes me feel alive also makes me wonder if I’m already dead.

More of the story here.

We'll have coffee at the beach in the summer and you can tell me what you think.