Kevin Tudish's Blog: A mid-life perspective, page 3

Found art

I learned to draw by copying details from works by Rubens and van Gogh. What marks they used to make an eye, build the contour of a face. The same way you learn to dance by copying what your ballet teacher does, over and over until it sits in your body and you develop your own technique.

While I loved Rubens--Daniel pleading to God from the lions' den (or pleading with the lions)--I gravitated more to van Gogh and the other Impressionists. I liked that they found the subjects for their art in the world around them. Rather than Jesus coming down from the cross, or Samson falling victim to Delilah, the Impressionists studied the landscapes around them, the bar or theatre scenes, the real content or context of their lives.

I still like to look at Rubens, or read a wholly fabricated story, but the kind of art I like to make is from the things I find in my own life. The way I picked up objects that caught my eye when I was a kid--a stone or bottle cap, a pen knife in a souvenir shop, anything that was a new shape or color, or hinted at some new experience. Now it's not objects, but surviving a series of choices, making new ones that might bend the future in my favor. Trying to cultivate a creative life out of the little bit of time I own every week, in a place where parents want schools to stop wasting money on the arts and start spending more on science. Improvising my way through raising a child, or trying to understand the evolution of a marriage.

Art rendered from my own experience of the world, a portrait of my ignorance, an opportunity to understand, a chance to make the idiosyncratic universal.

The struggles of a middle-class white man: Part 1

I live what is by most standards, including my own, a pretty nice life. I make enough money to meet the cost of living in Silicon Valley, and still squirrel some away for my fantasy retirement (fantasy in the sense of it actually materializing some day). I have a smart, healthy daughter. A wife who loves her family.

It's been years since I've felt like one of those Jack-London characters who's caught out in the wilderness with his last match.

It hasn't been one of those lives imbued with tragedy and drama, like getting conscripted into a terrorist army as a child, or having to smuggle my family out of a country where government agents are determined to imprison or execute the lot of us.

In many ways, it's been the routine life that so many American are fortunate enough to live.

It's my life, and it's the place where I find the things from which I make my art.

I've recently finished a book about my present tense:

health, happiness, love, longevity, peace, prosperity, and safety

Well, my present tense, and how it's the manifestation of my recent past, my childhood and young adulthood, my parents' lives, their parents' lives.

A lot of it is about becoming a parent, the evolution you experience when you're trying to figure out not only how to just keep her alive, but also cultivate a full life for her while still trying to figure out your own. How a marriage evolves from the inebriation of two people falling in love to the sobriety of 24/7 child care and making the mortgage.

And it's about the unintended migration from art to science, from fringe employment to corporate life, from endless opportunity to operating only in the narrow range that ensures the status quo.

There are stories everywhere, even in the enviable lives of guys inching along the 85 at rush hour.