Red is the best flavour of candy I can think of. Cherry tastes like medicine, strawberry and raspberry taste like each other, but red flavour tastes like everything red ought to taste like. Red candy is like purple drink: it doesn’t have a real worlds fruit correlate; it just tastes fucking delicious. Unless it turns out to be cinnamon, the flavour of a red candy neither shocks nor disappoints you. It’s like buying a lottery ticket you know will win you triple the price of the original ticket.
Why, then, is it so difficult to find a two-bedroom apartment in the West End for less than an arm and a leg? After hours of scouring newspapers, online listings, and three real estate offices, I have found nothing I would consider livable for any less than $2,500 a month. A month! Drive a few hours east to Chiliwack, and you can find a three-bedroom house and pay $2,500 for four months’ rent. I am appalled at the availability of affordable housing in this city, and frankly, I’ve had enough. I don’t want to be sold a “real fruit juice, not from concentrate, additive free” cherry-flavoured apartment. I want a red one! However, I should add that while red candies don’t do wonders for your teeth, at least they aren’t infested by rodents and surrounded by homeless people and young vagrants who enjoy having spitting contests to see who can land a loogie inside someone’s window. I came to this city to make a living for myself, maybe raise a family, but several forces at work are currently keeping me far away from this dream.
My current living situation is less than envious. I share the basement suite of a house with a roommate very much in the same situation as I find myself, but after years of squirreling away money, we’ve pocketed a decent nest egg for ourselves. It’s nothing outstanding, but it’s at least enough to keep us out of a basement for the next ten years or so, until either of us makes it as artists. I’m a painter, he’s a writer, and so far I have had one piece go on exhibit, ever. I did well enough in art school, but I was malinformed as to how painful is the process of getting a painting to be hung on somebody’s wall. I’ve got dozens of landscapes that take up less than a two square metres each, so why can’t curators just squeeze a couple in? I don’t even need a dedicated exhibit to showcase me; all I want is to piggyback a bit on the backs of those who can support me without losing anything themselves. My roommate is in a nearby boat: he hasn’t been published since the days of his university journals, unless you count his brief job at a magazine company. He was an intern for the Features editor, and occasionally he had the chance to write snippy five-word blurbs about celebrities that either “wore it worst”, or “put on a few pounds too many during beach season”. Never credited, he stuck out the internship to the end, and came away with a reference, if not his dignity.
That’s the beauty of being an artist: all you want to do is express yourself and have others appreciate what you have to express, but to get there you have to do all the bullshit everyone wants you to do. Art school made me reproduce the techniques and styles of great artists of yesterday to the point that all I can draw anymore is based on what someone else has done. Really, art is as conservative a trade as anything – including science – because it’s based on what some call a bounteous wealth of knowledge. I prefer to think of it as an elitist pile of creativity-stifling horseshit. I ought to call for a revolution among young writers! Isn’t that the foundation of our entire craft? Art is meant to overthrow and inspire, not satiate and make complacent! I have a piece I’m hiding from the world outside my apartment, because I think it would be too much of a pot-stirrer… See? I’m already thinking like the man. I should revel in my ability to break out of traditional impressionism, and Warhol it up all over the place! The painting at first glance isn’t particularly edgy, but looking closer, one can notice that the texture of the paint is a bit off. And that’s because I didn’t use paint. To critique the disconnect between humans and urban life, I painted a rather aesthetically pleasing forest landscape using the most man-made of all man-made materials: my semen, dyed various colours to make a complete palette.
Back in my second term of art school, I casually mentioned the use of bodily fluids as a supply. My teacher immediately spurned my suggestion, calling it a desperate length to include oneself in one’s work, but I think he was only considering blood, or saliva. Few artists would have the patience or stamina to reload their supplies, but I enlisted some help. It’s not my proudest moment, and I expect to leave this particular section of my life out of my autobiography, but I knew I could never finish the project on my own. I started by asking my roommate if he ever jerked off with a condom on. This is a perfectly acceptable question in my household, but I had to plan my follow-up very carefully to keep him from throwing me out of the house on the spot. Once I started the ball rolling, I had to keep going, so without a pause I asked my friend if I could throw his swimmers on a canvas and call it art. The silence that ensued was longer than when I told my parents I wanted to go to art school instead of getting a technical degree in plumbing, and for a second I thought I had lost my roommate. But then he burst out laughing, clapped me on the back, and asked if he could use the story later to write a book about living with roommates. I made him swear to change my name and gender, and we shook on it.
Even with my roommate’s cooperation secured, I didn’t have nearly a strong enough flow of man gravy to start my piece. So I broke another personal boundary, and put out ads calling for spunk. I was relieved and horrified at how quickly the responses came in, but the translucent icing on top of the beefy cake was when I received an anonymous donation of a mason jar filled to the rim with coconut jam. I stored my supplies in a mini-fridge I bought for the painting, which I planned to melt and destroy after finishing. I had all the donations I would need, though, and so I completed what I consider my first real masterpiece. Dying the stuff turned out to be pretty easy, though I still wore gloves whenever I handled it. To avoid needing too many coats, I kept the piece light, and I think if anything it makes the scene look brighter. I’m still trying to figure out how this ties in with my theme of reconnecting the disconnected, but I’m sure someone else will think of a way for me when they one day look at it on display.
I hit a bit of a rut after my “man-scape”, as I find myself wont to do whenever I finish a difficult piece, so I started looking at nicer apartments. I found three that were the in perfect location: I can walk to the office where I pull shifts doing clerical work, while my roommate finds the area inspiring. I don’t know what exactly inspires him, but if we lived in any of these three apartments, life would be perfect. I could paint in a sunny living room instead of a dingy basement. I’ve considered getting a pet of some sort, probably a cat, since they’re pretty self-reliant. I would have to get claw-proof furniture because I don’t believe in declawing cats, but I think it’s a worthwhile sacrifice to having the additional companion. What I really want is a nicer kitchen. I find a lot of parallels between cooking and painting, and while I was flipping through an Ikea catalogue the other day, I saw the kitchen set of my dreams. Everything was chrome. I felt like I had finally hit the future, and knew that eating food prepared in this kitchen would make me a better artist.
My roommate says I spend too much time looking at furniture when all I paint is scenery, but I just rebut that he spends too much time reading books when he should be writing them. I know his point is a lot more valid than mine, but I let him get away with excuses for not doing his chores, so we have a system worked out. This is the first roommate I’ve had since I shared a room with my older brother as a kid, so I’m just amazed I haven’t chewed the heads off any of his favourite toys. Being a starving artist is as dreadful as it sounds, and I think it’s humbled me a good deal. Getting my way is an immense privilege, and I take money whenever I can, which is just another way I’ve put a price on my self-respect recently. There are nights where I have trouble sleeping because I know I’ve sold my soul twelve times over, but I hope that one day it’ll all pay off, and maybe I’ll be famous before I’m dead.
The piece that made it into an exhibit is one of my least favourites, but it jumps through every hoop my art teachers would have put in front of it in art school. I know exactly why I dislike it, too: every brushstroke is visible, and you can see that I changed my shades of red with each new coat. To anyone but me, these don’t seem particularly significant, but to me, it’s a failure of my human spirit. I made my every move visible, so there’s no mystery left in the scene. Every leaf is flipped over. And by having changing layers, I’m telling my audience that I’m submitting to their pressures of conformity. My first red wasn’t good enough for you, so I tried out a second and third to suit them better to mainstream tastes. I look at that painting and I cringe a bit, embarrassed to even include it in my portfolio. One more nail in my coffin.
I consider my life pretty fulfilling. I’m working a job I don’t much care for, but it gives me time to work on my real passion. I have enough friends to find regular weekend plans. I do my part to make the world sustainable, and live in a city that supports all my good (and bad) habits. I haven’t given up on everything and moved to the suburbs only to commute back into the city for a nine-to-five McJob. I live within my means, and don’t borrow any more than I can pay back. I’m going about life in a smart way, but I still wish I had my dream apartment by now. I have a diorama set up in my room of potential layouts, and use catalogue clippings as furnishings. This is the one thing I keep secret from my roommate, because I don’t think he would appreciate it the way I do. I’m not calling his art lesser than mine, but really, writing doesn’t take as much time or money as painting. When we upgrade, he’ll be so thrilled at the prospect of letting me take care of all the decorating that he won’t even question where I get my inspiration. If we have a big enough den, I can make it a dedicated shared workspace. The additional square footage shouldn’t be too expensive, and I would like not having to move my easel every time I wanted to entertain company.
Word count: 2,020
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