Never Been Shown - New work going out on the street this weekend

16" X 19" Recycled Screen Printing Frame with epoxy acrylic and rusted background print.

I'm not a real sort of artist that touts my credentials and has stuff shown in a gallery. The best I have done over the years is sit on the streets in the late Eighties and sell a bunch of pieces, hang some quasi-political stuff in my own space in Hollywood, show and sell a few things in my store in Los Angeles and put some of my photo-fresco pieces on my truck and park it around Sausalito. I've sold a few things over the years and the process of getting something out of my system is complete once I either let things weather outside on my truck or once the pieces I've made have been subjected to the hot sun of the front window of Y-Que in Los Angeles. If the work survives those challenges by then I have moved on to a new attempt at the same concept, but with different materials to fix whatever problems came about through the process.

Create, Expose, Destroy; is the cycle of my craft. I've got a shellmound in my backyard that is the final resting place of pieces that can't survive a good toss. I've got a storage warehouse with cracked and separated pieces that didn't make the cut. It's a workout moving these things around, but each time I go through them it's a reminder of what not to do. This is what keeps me mixing, pouring and painting on epoxy and cement, acrylic and fiberglass, wood and screws; testing and printing until every possible combination has been had. Still my work no more complex than the stuff I did in the 90's, except for the inks and the background materials. Instead of canvas I use epoxy and instead of gesso I use rusted steel. I like the quantity of consistent pieces that I have recently made and now comes the time to put it out on the street and down into the store.

This weekend is the Sausalito Art Show and I somehow like vaguely being on the edge of a recognized art community, sort of the same with many things in my life. Are these my peeps? Wine drinkers, yes, craftspeople, yes, fun loving rich people, not so much. That's where the edge comes in because I can't really hang with regular stable successful people who are the patrons of the craft art world. I call it craft art because to sell it you have to go the whole route and set up a booth to show your stuff, like a craft fair. I've seen some well presented exotic work from the edge looking in at these events and realize that it's just like a trade show and by the second day I might be too hung over to talk about my work or too let down to want to try. Still I feel drawn to want to get my stuff out and that means mounting some wood and created a sort of wall on the back of my F250 and parking it on the street.

In my head it's like a statement, "I'm still here doing stuff!" As if to say, I'm alive and I don't need your stinkin' walls. It's true, but for some reason I do need viewers and I can't get that by sitting in my backyard or on Etsy. It's never been overly gratifying to watch people walk by and not even notice the large bright colorful pieces mounted all over my truck, but I still want to do it. I keep thinking that I have done something different that will make a difference and cause people to stop and look, even for a moment, or to raise their head from their iphone and glimpse at my truck for a second. Maybe I have this time, I have a bigger truck and can go higher, to eye level and possibly two levels of paintings making it 12 pieces on each side of the truck. It's gonna' be big, I say, dangerously so.

This brings up the next set of issues, which is to make is stable and safe. I have a schedule and a parking problem, 3 days, 72 hours and a very busy town. I may or may not be able to get a parking spot that can go from Friday to Monday unless I finish the truck and get it down there Thursday night late. I could do all of this work and then drive by and not be able to find a place to put my vehicle. There isn't any reason to go check though if I can't leave the truck, so for now I am going to get my butt in gear and put together a truck gallery.

link to old truck gallery work on my smaller truck. http://williamwyatt.org/