a sold artist

When I was little I wanted to be an artist.  I was pretty good, I even had the drive necessary to make that career happen.

I had no vision for what my life as an artist should look like.  I had no vision of myself or how I would live or act.  I didn’t imagine myself living in New York attending my latest art opening wearing a beret and a black turtle neck.  I knew only that my love for making art was pure and that I was happy while doing it.

In elementary school I was always the best artist in class and I milked my role as such, acting humble sometime rejecting compliments with “No, I’m not that good.”  When I got to high school I began to notice that in terms of artistic growth my peers were surpassing me.

I’d become lazy and impatient with the process.  I knew the basics, that everything in its most pure form is just simple geometric shapes, how to place light and create proper shadows, and how to use perspective to create depth.  I knew how to implement these concepts I just didn’t have the patience to take the necessary steps.  It was apparent that if I could make those essentials work for me I could be good, without them my work was off.  Out of embarrassment I stopped making art.

I replaced my desire for visual art with the desire  to be a rock star.  I could fully envision 

what my life as a hard edged tortured rock star would look like; ripped jeans, flannel shirts, a sweaty audience begging me to play my hit song before I smash my guitar into a thousand splinters expressing my anguish.  Eventually this died too as again I grew impatient with the guitar and refused to practice chords or scales.

After my dream of being a rock star faded I put my efforts into being an actor.  Again I fully envisioned my life on stage; speaking the words of Shakespeare, Chekov, Pinter, and Albee.  I eventually went to college to continue to pursue this ambition only to realize as a junior that I was too lazy to practice my skills necessary to grow.  Not only that but the day to day life of an actor seemed severely disappointing.  After turning down a role to hold a spear in a production of Hamlet I officially retired.

I have always loved writing but before college I had never thought of it as a legitimate career choice.  After I stopped acting I put all my efforts into writing.  For the first time I found that I enjoyed the process just as much as I reveled in the product.

Like my visual art aspirations, I had no idea what my life as a writer should look like.  I knew only that I was happy while doing it from start to finish.  I found that no matter how great the struggles, no matter how disappointing the rejection I still wanted to write.  

This was why I found what happened last October to be rather ironic.

My senior year of college I copied a picture of Audrey Hepburn that I’d seen at IKEA for Jaime.  This awakened a desire in me to begin painting again, not for a living but just for fun.  In the next few years I amassed more paintings than I could fit on my limited wall space so quite canvases a few ended up in the back of a closet. 

Last October as we prepared to move from Los Angeles to Seattle we held a yard sale.  It was more like a Fire Sale, as we were selling off just about everything but the essentials.  This included four paintings I’d done that I was ready to get rid of rather then haul back north.  My expectations were that someone looking for a cheap canvas to paint over would buy them.

When one woman picked up a black and white painting and asked how much, I was about to say $2 when Jaime grabbed my arm and spoke up.  “$5!” She said, the girl looked enthused and bought it.  Later I watched as a car made a sudden stop in the middle of the road, reversed and then a woman got out of the car to buy a specific pastel drawing.  Once again I sold this one for just $5 and she was thrilled with the new canvas she had to hang in her home.

By the end of the day I’d sold all but one painting.  Drunk with success I insisted the last canvas go for $5 and no less, the little Mexican man offered me $2 but I turned him down.  I can’t go around selling Brian Snider originals for $2, it would destroy the market.

It was then that I realized that I had done it.  My childhood goal was complete, I’d become a sold artist.  There were three of my paintings hanging in three separate southern LA homes.  I imagined that they would invite guests over for dinner and while sitting on the couch they would ask their hosts, “I love that painting.  Where did you get it?”  With pride they would reply “Oh, thats just a little thing I picked up at a garage sale in Los Feliz.”

this painting is unfinished

I did some mental math and taking in the cost of the canvas and supplies I figured that I’d made a negative $60 profit.  Not much but it was a start.  Now if only I could get someone to pay me, even if just $5, for my writing.

posted by: brian snider

when it rains it pours

this is rain in LA. (Look closely.)

In Los Angeles rain is rare, but when it does it comes like a waterfall.  Within minutes the streets become rushing rivers, parking lots become great lakes, and television channels are interrupted with warnings of flash floods.

Not long after our Vegas trip Jaime and I received a series of parking tickets from the ruthless iron fisted LA municipal parking police.  They can start out at $50 a pop and double when they go unpaid after the deadline.  Which makes sense because if you don’t have $50 today then it is much more likely that you’ll have $100 tomorrow, right?

Following the parking tickets Jaime discovered that LAMILL would be changing how employees collected tips.  Instead of individuals collecting tips on an individual basis, they would be pooling them and splitting them evenly.  For those of you who have not worked in the restaurant industry, for waiters who are less then stellar the pooling system is great.  For good waiters like Jaime who work hard and make their customers happy the pooling system can cause you to take a big hit in what you take home at night.

I was also having difficulties, struggling to scrape together at least thirty hours a week at Borders.  The writers strike had just ended in mid February and the hope was that there would be an exodus of guild writers going back to their jobs.  Unfortunately the four month strike turned out to be the death of many productions.  Shows that had been getting by on just the skin of their teeth got axed and there wasn’t an immediate need for tons of writers.

All of this was hardly enough to handle, but one morning while on break at work I got a call from Jaime.  I could tell from the worried tone of her voice that I was not going to like what she had to say.  She started with,

“You know how they say, ‘when it rains it pours?’”  To my knowledge no one has ever followed that sentence with, “well, I found $5 on the sidewalk then twenty minutes later I found a brief case with $5 million.”  Instead Jaime told me that she got a traffic ticket on her way home.

What happened was this:

After dropping me off at work Jaime was on her way back to the apartment when she stopped at a three way intersection outside a school.  If you’ve seen the Hangover you know what school I’m talking about.  It’s the one in the beginning, where we’re to believe that Bradley Cooper is a teacher.  What the movie doesn’t show you is that there is no parking lot for parents to wait and before and after school the place is an absolute mad house.

The intersection in question can easily be eight cars deep in all directions.  There are no crossing guards and kids stream into the crosswalk in a constant flow.  When it was Jaime’s turn to go, a pair of kids play fighting on the opposite side stumbled into the crosswalk.  They weren’t crossing and they weren’t near Jaime so she went.  About a block later a cop flipped on his lights and siren and pulled her over.

It was a bullshit ticket, for bullshit reasons, but the whole event was made worse by three factors.  The first was that we still had Washington plates, which as a resident you have two weeks to change.  The second was that she still had a Washington drivers license which also needs to be changed.  The third was that, while we had car insurance, our card was expired and we had no proof of current legitimate insurance.

He wrote Jaime up for not stopping for pedestrians in a crosswalk and expired car insurance.  He must have felt bad for her or could see the little back rain cloud following our car because he gave her a break on the license and the plates.  The ticket total was still nearly $1000, but he explained that it would be reduced significantly if she took her proof of insurance down to the court house.

By the time the ticket was due we had even more bad luck as our car broke down and had to be taken to the service shop to fix what ended up being five major problems that would occur immediately after moving to LA.  It felt like the cloud would never lift and we would wash away.

After it the rain LA’s dirt and dust covered wasteland begins to sprout green, the smog temporarily lifts and for a least a little while Angelinos appear to be happy and less self centered.

The ticket ended up costing us about $300, the parking tickets were paid and my parents generously paid for the car repairs.  While my situation a Borders would never get better, the tips situation at LAMILL did get better and soon Jaime was bringing home something resembling a livable wage.  It was a lesson to us, as long as you can sit back and wait out the rain the other side is always a bit greener.