Good Trouble 2020 | Watercolor paper | 20" x 10" | Collaboration with Bill Hamilton

October 9, 2020

In the summer, as part of the USPS Art Project, I collaborated on this work of art with my childhood friend Bill Hamilton. For this project, two artists pair up and each begins piece of art that the other then completes. I went the sentimental route, deciding to memorialize my personal friendship with Bill, sending him a small watercolor base with some imagery from our shared past. A few weeks later, a large box appeared on the front porch with a different kind of memorial inside. It was shortly after John Lewis died, after a lifetime of devotion to service and dedication to cause (if there is anyone out there reading this who is not familiar with all that this man did in his life, I highly recommend the graphic novel trilogy March, written by John Lewis and Andrew Aydin and illustrated by Nate Powell).

No pressure or anything.

I sat looking at Bill's meticulously inked and lettered drawing and the empty field of white paper, playing out different ways I could approach this collaboration and this tribute to someone who was a truly impressive and honorable human being. Whatever pressure I felt was of my own creation, but I wanted to do it right (whatever "right" means). I definitely didn't want it to feel trite. I didn't want to get lost in the slew of other tributes being made. I didn't want it to feel like a meme. And so I fell back into my old stand-by mode—the conceptual art director/book publisher role—and started coming up with concepts that would somehow distill his life and contributions into one image, playing them out in my mind and even getting close to one I was feeling good about. But the ideas all felt like a reduction, like they were making him smaller than he was.

I sat with it some more, and then some more. Each time I kept getting flood of orange in my mind, until I finally recognized it as that other mode I can slip into when I remember not every solution has to arrive from an academic place. And so I opted to approach this in the way that I approach my Visual Meditation paintings, to just open, focus, and allow whatever comes forward to come without questioning it. It's the complete opposite of the need to assert control through intellectualizing a problem or an unknown.

I sat in actual meditation with it, that flood of orange washing over everything: warm, vibrant, a blending of passion and wisdom, of drama and joy, radiating out like the sun. John Lewis was bigger than one event, than one movement, than one human being. His impact was far reaching across humanity and across time. He was a force that could not be distilled into a set of images, and he is still that force, more than just the man and the name and the deeds. An energy. Perpetual light. Orange light.

The loose, immediate, non-objective approach of my Visual Meditation paintings are a stark contrast to Bill's intricate realism, but this felt right. Stylistically, it is both of this world and not of this world. The realism acts as a gateway into to something else that acts as another kind of gateway. There are layers. This artwork is something to spend time with in order to access those deeper layers, either sustained or repeated, to sit with. A photo on social media or on a website doesn't really do the trick. It's a slow burn, a continuum, perpetually presenting us with the concept of Good Trouble, of what that means in our own lives, of how we connect to the shared humanity that John Lewis suffered and worked for and that he held in the highest regard, of what we radiate from within ourselves.

Humble thanks to John Lewis for his contributions to healing, strengthening, and expanding our shared humanity, and humble thanks to Bill for creating an opportunity for me to engage in that through art.

.  .  .

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