#1 - I Am An Artist

An argument to myself for myself

Sep 14, 2024

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Ballpoint drawing on a page from the little tan notebook

Prelude to #1. I don’t do vulnerability. Maybe every now and then, in a song I’ve written, couched in metaphor or a poetic turn of phrase. But there is an open confessionalism to parts of this opening salvo that as the launch approaches has me feeling a little uncomfortable, as though my soft underbelly is exposed. I draw inspiration and courage from my partner BA Lampman’s long-running newsletter “Feed The Monster’’ in which she shares thoughtful ruminations on her creative practice…and being a human being. It is unflinchingly honest and often shows a very human vulnerability that is compelling and resonates with readers. Moving forward, I won’t be doing that. Get it while you can.

In 2017, my life partner Betty-Ann, our daughter Chloe and I spent Christmas in New York. The last night we were there I went out by myself to Small’s Jazz Club to see Hammond organ player Akiko Tsuruga (see links below). I’ve been a Hammond nut ever since I took a flyer on a used Jimmy Smith album in my 20’s. I’d microdosed mushrooms that evening, got back to the suite we’d rented in Brooklyn all jacked up on the throbbing organ and everything else.
Crossing Brooklyn Bridge on a bike, bitten by December wind. Skyscrapers, streets, stores, and subways. MOMA, The Whitney, Desert Island Comics, The Book Of Mormon on Broadway, Carnegie Hall, The Feast of the Seven Fishes, Harlem soul food. And people! People people people!
Drinking enormous Manhattans at Bemelman’s and tearing up when the piano player performed Misty, memories of my daughter Chloe as a child playing it on our piano flooding over me. Truly one of the world’s beautiful melancholy melodies.
Brooklyn Christmas Eve, grooving to Guinean beats with Chloe at Barbès. Manhattan, pissing in a parkade behind a line of black limos because I couldn’t find a public toilet, then being yelled at in an Arabic tongue by a troop of fist-shaking black-suited chauffeurs. I was vibrating, I was trippin’ ballz in a New York State of Mind and set to writing in the little tan notebook I had brought along to doodle and write in.
I recently came across that notebook.

“I am an artist”

I wrote that night in blue ballpoint.
And hence followed seven pages of me arguing and advocating for this statement, this four word manifesto. Before Grade 7 I was not an artist the document implies. It was Grade 7 when I signed out a book on cartooning from the Stettler Junior High library and taught myself to draw cartoon characters.
Painstakingly rendered hockey goalies making amazing saves churned out obsessively in grades 5 and 6 did not qualify as Art. Apparently.
The epic aerial dogfights I drew in earlier grades, with planes like crosses bristling with thorny armaments and as many bulbous gun turrets as I could fit on to the fuselage - not Art.
But dammit these drawings were interactive! Is that not artful? I would send spidery lines shooting from the guns of a chosen plane and if I hit another plane I would furiously scribble it out in a grey graphite explosion. I pretended, that like some kind of Ouija warfare board, these lines of fire were guided by a mysterious power of chance, fate, and justice - but of course they weren’t. The Brits would always beat the Krauts. That was the warfare construct of my childhood.
Not Art.
The cartoons I started drawing in Junior High - they had intent. I wanted to entertain and impress others. Entertain and impress? Sure, why not. The art that I connect with speaks to me, makes me feel something and I suppose being entertained or impressed could qualify. We’re talking junior high school here.

one line ballpoint pen drawing from the tan notebook

The I Am An Artist Manifesto goes on to dig into and discuss my drawing and painting, writing, performance art, and the journey I embarked on, starting in my 30’s, of writing and performing music. I wasn’t just laying out a history. It was a pep talk, a manifesto, a call to arms, self administered therapy. It swerves erratically into elementary school events, global politics and power structures, expounds on my thoughts and ideas of art and my art practice, delves into the why of the performance art I mounted in the mid to late 1980’s. It concludes with me urging myself to start drawing and painting again. This was an argument to myself for myself.
I am 63 years old. I draw, paint, and take photos. I write songs, record, sing, and perform music on accordion and piano. I have recorded and released seven full length albums and numerous ep’s. I have a low-tech noise project with the moniker Grampa Big Balls. I post drawings, paintings and photographs on my Instagram account. Search #dadaismydada on Instagram to bring up my Dadaist photo self-portraits. More on me and Dada in a later installment. Links below.
And yet.
Yet.
Yet.
I struggle with my ego and identity as an artist and musician. Constantly. It’s a goddam rollercoaster ride, it’s Mortal Kombat. Literally. I am fighting for my life. Why? I wish I could clearly and concisely tell you.
I have a job and that job is not art. Boo hoo. I have had that job, in one form or another for more than thirty years. My job has never been to be an artist or musician. This doesn’t make me unique in any way. Artists, musicians, writers with jobs that pay the bills because their creative activity sure the hell won’t is more the norm than exception. Yet it is something to me, something that has taken time, energy, focus, mental space, and even emotion.
The feeling is sometimes deep. The feeling I’m not doing what I was meant to be doing.
I don’t show my art in galleries and have barely rarely tried. The most interaction I’ve had with gallery structure was when the late Todd Davis was the director of the artist-run gallery Open Space in Victoria, BC, Canada. Todd was a generous, impassioned, and thoughtful curator. He first invited me to do a Hank Williams installation and performance as part of a group show, later engaged the Dadaist performance duo I was a part of with artist Roy Green – The Hermaphrodite Brotherhood – to mount one of our absurd performances. I can explain this lack of engagement with gallery and art world structures as part of my Dadaist philosophy and stance toward the Art World. As a rejection of an elitist construct, of meaningless art speak, the internalized dialogue and coded conversations of the art world. Closed doors, nepotism. I can also explain it as a lack of self-belief and a fear of failure and rejection. That voice, the “you’re not good enough” voice.

I have had a modicum of success and recognition musically in my home city of Victoria, BC, Canada and here and there up Vancouver Island. Over the years shifting circumstances have taken me from being a satellite orbiting the Victoria musical community performing regularly, to being a distant planet rarely appearing in the night sky. The pandemic certainly didn’t help. The “you’re not good enough” voice is no help at all.
But I’m not here to whine and bitch about what I haven’t done and what I wish I could achieve. It’s not my nature to share my self-doubt and insecurities in a public forum. I’m shitting my pants. I’m quivering in my space boots.
No more sharing, shitting, and quivering.
I am embarking on this newsletter in an attempt to ignite and engage my creative spirit. Before and after the How To Draw Cartoons book, before during and after art school, before I picked up an accordion, figured out a way to play piano, started writing songs…..I wrote. I always wrote.
I honestly don’t know what this newsletter will be. If there’s a second issue. Don’t worry. It won’t be a series of creative confessionals and bitch sessions about what I wish I had done or could’ve should’ve done. My intent is to engage and entertain.
It will be an outlet for my writing practice. To express, explore, expound, confess, conflate, confound, promote, preach, postulate, share and shred.
No boundaries. No mandate.
No rules.
No deals.

Links’n’Stuff

Find some art and photos and stuff on my Instagram page https://www.instagram.com/jackasspath/
Find my music and noise on my Bandcamp page https://davidpsmithmusic.bandcamp.com/
The night I saw Akiko Tsuruga at Small’s Jazz Club

jackasspath