020: the questionable painter
RAFTM Blake on falling in love with painting
Blake. Phillip. Mancini. National treasure. Italianx king. My Capricorn twin (fun fact: our birthdays are a day apart). Blake has many passions — Playboi Carti, archival Prada, and Belmont cigarettes — but recently, his great love has been painting. Like he is about most things, he’s shy about sharing too much. He never really shows you what he’s working on and any photos he shares are fleeting IG stories but when he talks about it, you sense he has a real reverence for it. I imagine that in a few years from now, I’ll be attending Blake’s first exhibition and there he’ll be, black turtleneck and cigarettes, still funny and sweet but with a profile in ARTFORUM. He wrote about finding painting in the pandemic and how the muse is not the only thing that keeps him going.
When Akosua approached me to produce a guest piece for her newsletter, I knew I had to come up with something quick-witted and beguiling. Aside from my weekly ramblings that I store safely in my NSUO Carti notebook I haven’t written much as of late and I know following my good friend Kyle’s debut would be a tough challenge to take on. Unfortunately, I’m not much of a curator when it comes to my profile on Apple music, so I figured I’d take Akosua’s recommendation and fill you in on my journey so far as a (newfound) “painter.”
Art has always been something I’ve took a great deal of interest in. I took up painting in April of 2020, when you-know-what began, as a way to visually portray a sentiment or feeling to myself, something I desperately needed at a time when my life consisted of something I like to call the three D’s: Deleuze, Drake and a debilitating nicotine addiction. Not much has changed since then, since all three still have a crippling hold on my life, but I have found a way to visually express certain feelings and moods that I pick up throughout my exhilarating life as a full-time stock boy. From Michaelangelo Antonioni’s Red Desert to the heart-crushing first verse of Momus’ The Sadness of Things, to a night where me and my friends have drank too much wine and have smoked too many cigarettes, these specific intricacies that are living rent-free in my head at a certain time or place are huge elements that direct me to whatever I want to create at that time.
Although true, I would be getting off way too easily if I simply told you that my “feelings” were the only factor involved when wanting to begin to paint — I promise you, I’m not that insufferable. Since it’s only been a few years since I decided I’m going to be the next Bob Ross, I’ve been getting high off forcing myself to go outside of my comfort zone and create a field of experimentation in order to find ways to make my work “mine.” That, or I’ve been breathing in way too much paint thinner. I mean, a good artist always has that certain characteristic that separates themselves from others. You have Bauhaus icon Paul Klee, with his ability to mould shapes to the point where they are unrecognizable, or Young Thug, whose ad-libs alone make him stand out from his contemporaries.
Picking up a new interest in your mid-twenties is strange. It begs the question of whether or not I’m okay with beginning from scratch, even more so when I’ve spent the last three or so years of my life writing about art and artists or, more specifically, the people who are in the position I am currently striving to be in. Learning how to use this to my advantage is something I’ve become comfortable doing. Change and obstacles are scary, yet they’re the only things that drive me to set my current rewatch of The Wire aside and paint. It’s been two years and I have yet to decide where I want this newfound obsession to take me, and to be quite honest I don’t necessarily think there will ever be a destination in mind.
I mean hey, Jerry Saltz drove trucks until the age of 47 before becoming the world’s most questionable art “critic,” so I’m quite comfortable with the ambiguity.
Blake occasionally shares his paintings and zoomed in iPhone photography @mmoderation. He’s also on Hinge.