DON'T YOU TELL ME

For the most part I destroyed all of my writings of my first twenty years of writing. I had destroyed my art as well, or made it on surfaces that would degrade.  I would paint white paint on rusted metal and leave it out to tarnish and watch it slowly dissolve.

I burned my first book I wrote.  IN Greece in 1994 I took 5000 pages of writing, and siphoned it down into one poem, selecting words randomly from the work, then destroyed the work.  I glued all of the pages of my second book together so that it was a lump then I tossed it. I wrote 100 books in one year, I will not toss it, I've almost learned my lesson.

In Greece I was painting before an audience at a club it started raining.  I left the painting to dissolve in the rain.  I had all of my paintings from Greece ripped off from Panos Loizos, who I thought I would help out, by giving him a dozen paintings to sell and I would receive a thousand dollars enough to visit again, the man never bothered to get me any money whatsoever, and I got ripped off by a charlatan.  I was never greedy, I sold a painting worth at least five thousand dollars for five hundred because Washington Savage a famous Canadian Pianist liked it, but I never signed the work.  I signed none of my paintings for the first twenty years of my painting, but I would periodically destroy them, so it was just as well.

I invited some kids into my storage area in my father's building where I could paint, but never did, a few weeks later all of the work went missing. That's ALL of my work from OCA, This theft taught me that when others steal from an artist it's just business as usual.  I began destroying my own work in a sort of protest. 

As my allergies developed I could not paint.  I gradually within two years of that became a writer more or less, but it took me about five years till I started writing, and technically it wouldn't be for many years until I would start writing poetry. I have in one form or another been making poems for over fourty years, but for the better part of thirty years I have been doing it on my own, inspired by the promise of all the women that poets get.  It's all about the babes.  Men push pencil to get the ladies.  I'm convinced.

For years I signed my signature with an each original unreproducable scribble. On occasion I would place a gold thumb print on a drawing...about twice actually.  I have made under five hundred works of art, including my digital pieces, and sketches outside of school, eighty percent of that was digital, I destroyed most of the digital works, by taking apart the hard drives that they belonged on in friction writing episode where I pretended that the fate of the universe depended on my destroying the information in my hard drives- friction is a method acting role playing, and quite frankly I was happy to see the end of my efforts, with each effort to destroy my work, and my legacy, I asked myself what it mattered, I could become the most famous artist on the planet and everyone I know and love, and all the people of the world are going to die, and so will my memory. I would frequently destroy all of my facebook posts one by one, after posting them.  BUT I DID MAKE ART.  OBSCURITY became to me an art form, cultivating that in protest of the way the world is.

To sum that up, I made about five hundred images most of them gesture drawings, and the more time that went on the more it was a meditation about the status of acceptance, rejection, inclusion, exclusion, importance, vanity, markets, ideologies, becoming one with a market of ideas, becoming popular, fading to oblivion. I had a wonderful piece of myself finding an owl in a tree and petting it, all captured on my camera I had with me...I gave no permission to my professor to duplicate it.  It somehow got lost, but I might find it, it's on a CD possibly somewhere. Now I have decided to make work, and not destroy it. I found a cd with about about a hundred images on it from 2002 to 2004 or so. I was once a promising photographer.  This is a poem about art.  Yes it's a poem.  Don't you tell me.

Poem and image © 2016 and 2005 respectively by Peter Kaleb Theodoropoulos aka Rockwell Wilder