Artists

Sustenance Cooking Studio presents: “ Bare Naked Anima ” –

Sustenance Cooking Studio presents: The art of Michael Ackerman (dwellinart.com). Come play with us. Express your selfon a large community canvas and in conversation. Nosh and taste Vin Fuzion wine. Play time is 6 p.m. till ?     2033 Santa Barbara st.    805-543-2186

Artist’s Biography:

The swirl of low / high lights in my life

As they seem important

In July of 2010

My earliest memories are experiences with my Granddad who died when I was 6.

We always brought something back from the smoldering piles at the dump to fix or make something else out of it. I’d help him at his workbench in the basement. When he dropped a screw or some small part he’d ask me to look for it. “ Old Eagle Eye finds it again “ was what he’d say to me every time I handed the lost part back to him.

I remember searing smoke and rank smells swirling around dirty men and horse carcasses drug from Granddad’s truck, hanging in lines over the rendering plant floor. He asked me what I wanted for Christmas. I said, “ a horse – a walking horse”.

He made a black and white Pinto wooden sawhorse for me to ride.

My father came home from the Korean War when I was turning 5.  I moved from my mothers parents house to college housing in Ames. I met an East Indian boy and a black boy for the first time. The black boy let me know in no uncertain terms who was in charge of the playground. He thumped me.

When I was 9 we lived on Green Bay. I got lost in the woods that surrounded our house and found my way home by dark. I learned to swim in the bay. I had a chemistry set and an erector set. In the next house I installed a Morse key set in all 4 bedrooms, the TV. Room and the kitchen. My friends didn’t have color TV. They watched their little black and whites while they ate dinner in the kitchen. The Boy Scout troop leader put me in charge of things, though I was the newest and youngest in the pack. In snow camp I lit my campfire with one match. Out back of the Oconto Brewery, broken brown long neck bottles unfit for reuse were piled into a mountain. Steve and I had a war running around the mountain throwing shards at each other till one stuck in my leg. A secret I kept till my mid 40’s when my mom and I became friends and shared what was really going on while I was growing up?

I lived in a new house and attended a new school nearly every year. Sometimes I was an “A student” and sometimes I barely passed. I was a corporate climbers brat, kept in a butch till we hit San Diego. In the 8th grade I discovered I had wavy hair. As I let it grow out my father said, “ Go get a hair cut. What are you trying to do be a nigger?” The girl across the street was an Army brat. She dared me to get a clothespin out of her bra.

My father stopped allowing me to go to family reunions in “67.  I ran away.  I never lived at home consistently after that. I was16.  At 17 my mother and I were sitting on the front porch step during a visit. Out of the blue she said to me,

“It’s fun isn’t it”! – I said “What?”  -She said “Sex”. I stopped using pot in ’68. I opposed the Vietnam War. I took my last LSD trip ( my favorite drug ) in August of ’69.

Kathy and I got pregnant that fall.  February1970 I turned 19, we married March 7th and Jessica was born that June.

The only thing I knew how to do was make a surfboard. Our families provided funds for a surf shop in Ventura. This set me on a life long path of Self-employment,

Surfboards – To Certified Welding (Class A Contractor) –

To Designing and Building Homes (Class B Contractor) -      To fine art.

The Calif. State Poetry Society published me in ’74. Procter and gamble sent me a box of all their products and asked me to keep submitting commercials to them. No one in my family or community supported my writing. I didn’t have the balls to keep going on my own. I had a family to take care of.  I succumbed to the American Dream I had been raised in. I became well respected in the business world. I designed and built our family homes twice and held responsible positions in my spiritual community.

My worlds had been built on yes. I was the prime doer in all relationships. At 43, ( 1994 ) I began to wake up. All I knew at the time was that the worlds I had spent 20+ years creating were killing me. I had to get away from it all to survive. By ’96 my many divorces were complete – 26 years of marriage, several business partnerships and 20+ years of spirituality as a Jehovah’s Witness. My addiction and accomplishments made letting go of materialism difficult. By 2002 I had separated my self from others as the identity of who I am, which allowed me to more fully develop the gift of being able to hear, feel and act as myself.

I accomplished being able to be alone – and gave myself the gift of being homeless.

I had no idea I was a painter. All of a sudden, ( in the last year of living in the house I secretly called “ Abyss House” ) painting was what came to me as the only way I could deal with what I was experiencing.  I joked to my friends of the time that “ I was going to paint my shit.  It’ll either be interesting, or a Frisbee to throw off the back deck into the valley below ”. Several years later Pete asked if I’d show him how to paint. He wanted to use painting as a healing like I was. Acceptance Workshops exist, thanks to Pete.

I went from homeless to opening my first dwellinart gallery in the Creamery.

A woman came in one afternoon and said, “ This is like walking into a Rorschach test “

Painting ( I call it suiting up and going in. ) my “ shit “, turned out to be able to touch others life experience too.  It’s a common experience for me to have people either leave the gallery quickly – or – immediately start telling me intimate things.

The acid metal facade and metal city collage on my 2nd gallery created an “ anonymous complaint to the city “  – - -  by a city employee.

The battle became very public by news articles entitled  -

“ To Scrap or not to Scrap? “ – “ Practicing the Art of Civil Disobedience. “  -

“ SLO Artists’ Individuality Shines Through “.

The “dwellinart” Garden St. gallery was evicted Nov 2007, 9 months after opening.

The following year and a half I processed all the events in my life that had brought me to infamy in SLO by writing a screen play, “ Hanging in the Gallery “.

I had learned the power of burning bridges to keep old addictions from having easy access to me. (See the documentary on Google titled “ Bridge Over Evil Heaven “.)

Now, though I know how to create new worlds over old chasms I’m not sure what to build next or why to build another world.

I sought perfection in shaping surfboards, in marriage, in fatherhood, in friendships, in spirituality, in certified welding, in designing and building homes, in grand-fatherhood, in art.

Though I succeed in many ways – failure is continuous for me too.

Victory is easy to deal with.    Failure is the real blessing.      It’s what I do with my failures’ that makes a difference. No thing I make, Nor any of my personas, stays perfect by remaining static. Perfection for me is dynamic, accomplished by continuously adapting myself, and the things I make to a new temporarily usefulness.

The gift is knowing, “ I do not know ” –  It’s letting what’s unknown to me flow in -

Letting it replace my failures.    Letting it teach me.      It’s what I do not know or appreciate at the time that creates what I do that endures in some temporary perfection, —  long enough to make another momentary improvement, another momentary difference, – - -  for my self and others.

I seek to reveal the imperfection hidden in each thing I make. The patinas, the scars of life’s struggle are what are beautiful to me. When the “ thing “ is accomplished it is immediately used up for me. The thing itself when I, or others seemingly use it up is then cast aside – sent to the dump as it were.

All of my today’s accomplishments are tomorrow’s uselessness –

for practical reasons, –  for political/social reasons,  — for spiritual reasons.

The Grandfather I was given paid a lot of attention to me, teaching me self-esteem by making useful things out of anything at hand.

His death taught me to take care of myself personally.

All I knew at the time was the loss.

The Father I was given paid almost no attention to me, dragging me all over the western United States for the sake of his corporate climbing career.

He immersed me into one micro culture after another.

I learned the worlds I had come from were of no value in this new world.

I learned to swim in their waters by accepting them on their own terms.

His lifestyle taught me to thrive in any world I found myself in.

All I knew at the time of each move was pain and fear.

No matter what I do – it will all pass away.

All that remains constant for me – is the doing and learning.

Some of the stuff I make will out last me and be considered useful by others for a long time.

I am thankful for that !

I do not seek immortality by making things that endure.

That is a fool’s errand.

Perhaps the value –

The perfect usefulness of my life and the things I make –

The durability –

The blessing –

Will be found in the things that are continuously used —

And will also be in something I made that ends up in a dump —

Found by a grandfather teaching his grandson that all things and all people are valuable. Perhaps that boy will have a father who teaches him to thrive with those skills in any world. Perhaps he will have a mother who loves him all the way through no mater what. Perhaps he will have the balls to live a life true to himself from beginning to end – by simply loving life his life and all other lives.

I envy him and send blessings to him, his grandfather, his father his mother and all those he loves and those who love him.

If you relate to any of this –

If you become more fully who are by anything I make –

Then I accomplished a little bit  -

And perhaps we will get to play together!

These are some of the events and ideas

that seem important in the swirl of what I experience as “ My Life “,

in July 2010.

Blessings

Michael Ackerman