Brian Fallon once shared during one of his live from home concerts where the phrase Diamond Sinatras came from. 

He said sometimes there are words that seem like they are just stuck together, but they meant something to him. They were things that he loved and that he just needed to say. They made sense to him.  

"It was an image that put together a feeling."

That’s what these paintings are. 

Each one is a Diamond Sinatra—like something I saw in a dream.

I will tell how the story comes together here. It will be ongoing and it might take a long time. 

City Lights

Even though I had been dabbling with this story for many years before I started painting, it was the art that really made it come alive. 

At first I didn’t know the paintings were connected to the music or the story, I just knew that I was throwing myself completely into this new hobby I'd taken up on a fluke in my 40s. It was giving me so much much needed joy and catharsis at the time. I fell in love with painting very quickly.

Wanting to learn as much as I could. I stared with YouTube tutorials—Bob Ross and a whole bunch of others. You can learn anything you want on there if you want to put in the time. So I experimented and practiced and learned a lot.

I loved painting abstract cityscapes. Tutorials would give me the basic foundation and then I started to go off on my own, using weird strokes or unusual tools and that was way more fun. I needed to know the techniques but it was powerful and freeing when I realized I didn’t need to stick with the plan.

Working on small 5X7 canvases, I had a few different pictures of cities on the go. The first I saw as London, near or outside a tube station, a blue umbrella in the foreground. 

London is where T and I met. That same trip in 2011 was the first time I saw Brian Fallon live at the Revival Tour. That concert was a spiritual experience and that trip changed the course of my life.

The line chasing all the umbrellas in London from the Painkillers album seemed to belong with this one and so I called it Watson.  Later, when I realized this whole experience was turning out to be a mystery quest, I found the name Watson to be apt. Blue umbrellas have since been a marker in the story and in real life.

This probably happens to a lot of people when they get really consumed with a creative project, but I would lose track of time and I’d be at it for hours and hours. Sometimes it would be 4am and I still would not want to stop. Sometimes I’d forget to eat. 

In one of my very late night sessions I saw the word Hi carved on the wall in the Watson painting. Even though I was consciously aware that abstract brush strokes are bound to create images that look like words from time to time, a certain energy went through me when I saw that word.

Hi. 

It felt like a greeting. 

I wasn’t ready yet to believe someone was really there. But I was open to it. And I knew this was more than just brushstrokes and paint.

There were three other three cities that made up that first set of four. The next one was Toronto.

After seeing Hi in the Watson panel I was paying very close attention. On the other wall of Watson, or was it underneath, I saw the letters TO. Just then I glanced over at the light blue and red city I had not yet identified and noticed the Skydome and the CN Tower were there. I noticed them but didn’t  intentionally place them there myself. This was the first time one of the paintings told me who they were.

This painting was Smoke. 

I have also lost my mind in the middle of Toronto, the city I lived in for much of my former life.

Next was a painting of New York at the Brooklyn Bridge. 

When I was in my early 20s I went on a very brief trip to New York. I remember distinctly standing in the middle of a busy street corner on Broadway, looking up at the flashing billboards and seeing a giant ad for that show, Providence. I was struck frozen for a moment and I had this wild overwhelming feeling that somehow I belong there. And yet I have never been back.

The Brooklyn Bridge shows up a lot and I believe Mae might have died there once. She may be back there at some point in the future.  There are two yellow headlights coming across the bridge asking Would you come for a drive?

These first three match in their blue color schemes, but the fourth was bright yellow and black. 

It felt kinda like Batman and so it had to be The Queen of Lower Chelsea.

Brian tells a story in one of his live from home concerts about how someone once corrected him for calling it Lower Chelsea. He said Lower Chelsea actually came from Batman and we should always defer to Batman. 

It was fun to think that this was a kind of Bat-Signal. I was at the beginning of something and this was a call to keep going and to keep uncovering the clues. 

It was all there in those first four 5X7 panels.

I placed the four panels together on my easel to take a picture and the way I randomly arranged them revealed that the Skydome and the moon hanging over the Brooklyn Bridge connected perfectly to form a partial infinity sign. 

There is a YouTube video where Brian Fallon talks about a demo tape he made back in the 90s called The Coffeehouse Sessions. There may have been 15 copies total. He said those songs are what taught him to do what he does. There is a song on that album called City Lights and I named this first set of four connected cities for that song. 

These four 5X7 cities were the first to teach me what I do now. They taught me to pay close attention and to trust my instincts. They taught me that mistakes are just layers that add texture and that something beautiful always comes from them. And they gave me the first four story boards in this unravelling myth. 

The Coffeehouse Sessions 

There are pieces of this story in the music even as far back as this.

Elsie's Diner

"I challenged myself to incorporate every track on the Horrible Crowes album and called the diner Elsie's. There was a murder and Betty the waitress with the black hair was at the scene of the crime."

Skip to Elsie's Diner 

Live Fast. Die Awesome.