Jon Rappoport May 4 2013
Unhappy is the man, woman, or child who doesn’t live with imagination at the prow of the ship…
As my readers know, I recently launched another mega-collection, Exit From the Matrix. You can read the details at my site,www.nomorefakenews.com.
A little personal background. I had a passion for painting, and I started to work in a studio in the summer of 1962, when by “chance,” down to my last few bucks, with no place to live, having just returned to New York from Cape Cod, I went to the Metropolitan Museum straight from the bus stop, and…
I wandered through rooms I’d visited many times. But this time, I decided I needed something to eat and I walked into the Museum restaurant. I’d never done that before, in my dozens of visits to the Met, and…
There I ran into a painter I knew from a gallery in the city. He sat down and we had lunch. He told me he was leaving for the Cape the next day, and he had a problem. He hadn’t found anyone to live in his studio for the summer, and…
He asked whether I knew anybody who needed a place to stay. We’ll, I said, with the blood pounding in my ears, I would be happy to sublet it, but…
I had one problem: no money. He said, don’t worry, pay me what you can, I just need someone to live there while I’m away for the next two months.
And that’s how my new life began. Painting in that studio.
I don’t cut things that close to the edge anymore, but the theme remains the same. There is reality, and then there is imagination that creates reality.
Somehow, for me, painting is a touchstone. Doing it, looking at it, thinking about it. In unexpected ways, I take off from it, and life changes, becomes far better, becomes something quite different.
I was never trained as a painter. I can remember, in the second grade, my teacher telling my parents I had no discernible talent for it, and perhaps I should be excused from art class altogether.
