ob·du·rate: stubbornly refusing to change one's opinion or course of action.
No idea why I wrote this word and definition in my journal. I must’ve seen it somewhere. Sometimes a phrase will just come to me, or I’ll read a striking term that starts cropping up by circumstance. I wish I could say there’s some reason I’ve neatly recorded ‘obdurate’ on these ruled pages, but I really have no idea why it’s there.
These pages are for ruminating. Percolating, even. Lately my mind ponders my most recent “setting out,” the latest installment in a lifetime of fits and spurts, big beginnings that naturally waned into ruts of all varieties. As it relates to my art career, 2021 has proven a landmark year—I left my corporate gig this Spring to make art full time, painting on canvas and building facades alike. It’s been busy, ripe with all kinds of new successes like my sold-out series for 1xRun, and I’m grateful for that.
Throughout my life, there have been periods of time where I would take a break from corporate design work for ten months, maybe a year if I was feeling daring. After a little while, another steady work opportunity would come along and I’d take it. Sustaining the fragile phenomenon of setting out requires bravery, grit, commitment. It’s like learning how to ice skate—you stay close to the edge and hold onto the side. As you get better, you venture out further onto the ice, into the swirling thicket of experts. If their current threatens to overtake you, then you can squirm back over to the wall.
“Obdurate” sounds like an insult, but stubbornness offers invaluable protection. Persistence builds a fortress that preserves the fragile phenomenon of “setting out.” But where does all that conviction come from? It’s just some suspension of disbelief, maybe even a form of idealism. For sure, however, I can tell you this—I was timid when I first started ice skating as a roughneck New York City youth. But by now I’ve taught my daughter how to skate, how to fish, how to swim. Maybe teaching her has helped me feel sturdy enough to leave port for good, exploring foreign waters.
This is the look of a wall I want to squirm back to. As snapped in Dallas.
It’s not failure that stings—we’ve all fallen down enough to know that recovery is inevitable. Everyone stands back up, until that last time of course. I think we (or maybe me) are really afraid of the witnesses. The peanut gallery. The people who watch our vulnerability when we swing and miss.
There’s a real, underappreciated bravery to going all in. Loudly. This Spring, that meant leaving financial security once again to bet on my art practice, with a very young child in tow. Burden has proven the constant over my time on this planet, since I was a young child myself starting college at SVA all self-funded, to more recent experiences like my time as a single dad. Owing responsibilities to others is simply a part of life, albeit an element emphasized to me through the stereotypically masculine upbringing we got as Italian boys on Staten Island in the 1980s.
So this particular chapter in my art practice, perhaps my life in general, feels a bit like that burden fading away. The mental shackles are beginning to loosen. Each ring on the chain is some fear twisted into a novel gnarl. Prioritizing my own path means holding myself accountable to a set of responsibilities that works for me. It means I choose the responsibilities I owe. Some responsibilities, like my family, will anchor the whole operation no matter what, albeit out of love more than duty.
These binds still weigh on my mind, but now I feel a bit of space to wiggle free. Some room for negotiation, and the ability to redefine “value” as it relates to time well-spent and obligations met. Not only do writing these pages help maintain my course, they’re also another element to pursuing the brave act of proclaiming my desires. Loudly.
I’m no academian. I don’t have an MFA from Yale, or even Hunter College. Maybe I’m disconnected from the key-holding art dialogue, but I’m connected to the art itself. Art is for art’s sake. The process is the art—it’s all in the act of doing. I heard this in a Ram Dass lecture once and it feels relevant: “Truth waits for eyes unclouded by longing.”
Ideas aren’t much without execution. Thus, the next logical step on this journey of “setting out” comes down to the “how?” From a mark-making perspective, I’m gravitating towards an impressionistic approach. I’m less concerned with the precision of my linework, perhaps related to those loosening mental shackles. That push-pull between precision and profligacy has nagged at my practice over the decades. It depends on whether art is serving as catharsis or communication.
JM Rizzi. Asemic on Grey, 2021.
Furthermore, I’m re-examining the wellsprings where I find beauty. Understanding my affinity for unconventional beauty from a place of intention, rather than sheer habit. There’s beauty in the haphazard intercourse of decaying walls—marked by gestural writing, pasted-on flyers, advertisements, stickers, the mismatched hues that are meant to cover it, combining together and brewing over the slow burn of time’s petty pace.
This path is not mine alone—it’s well worn by many artists before me. From this source material, they’ve created complete works of brilliance—a burning Turner 8 sunset doused in sumptuous luminosity upon a rusted factory wall. Twombly’s asemic writing, dusty with rubbed-out chalk marks. Joan Mitchell’s large landscape paintings that toe the line between abstraction and figuration. An ideal version of myself, I am a student of this canon. The best case scenario, of course, is that someday others will become students of my canon. However, some people also say the best case scenario to hope for in life is to peak late.
These influences will make the foundation as I continue on this latest installment in “setting out,” together with years of technique I’ve honed through my practice. The next challenge now is to turn the mirror outward so I can build upon my predecessors’ findings, reflecting our ideas out through my artwork.
Writing in my journal, publishing this blog, outright naming my thoughts and dreams, these are the scary tasks that leave my will with no place to hide. Even mining the omnipresent caves of self doubt from time to time offers its benefits. Doubt is always there, waiting to be tapped. Sometimes an artist has to indulge, other times they have to starve the fire of fuel. Whatever it takes to grow a fragile phenomenon into an obdurate one, spastic but stubborn. Getting stronger with every resurgence.
