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Episode 24: The Water Tower
Every once and a while I sit down and try to imagine what the biggest most important, life changing, exciting, inspiring art project I can think of would be, and how I would do it. I think it’s good to dream, and I always dream big so I have something wild to reach for each year.
When I was doing music full time, this dream was always about opening for a famous rapper like Kendrick Lamar or J Cole, and being on stage in front of thousands of people, with dancers and flashing lights and a crazy outfit that looked like a yellow space suit.
Now though, as an artist, when I think about what my Dream Art Project is right now, its painting a water tower. When I first moved to Portland I was fortunate enough to have met a friend who invited me to come and live with him, in his house. Down on the corner and across the street from the house there’s a giant park – and the biggest water tower I have ever seen up close. I love this park – last winter when it snowed my partner and I bundled ourselves up in our thickest sweatpants and sweaters, tied up our boots and grabbed a giant cardboard box that we’d taped all across the bottom to help it slide, and went sledding down the tiniest hill ever, at this park, in the middle of the night. The water tower was dripping from a dozen places with all the water of the melted snow, and for a minute it really seemed like the entire tower was leaking.
You can stand underneath the water tower and kids play between all its legs, and ride their bikes or roll in the grass beneath it. It’s the scariest thing in the world though to stand across the street and peer up at it and be able to just visualize how much water would come crashing out of it if it ever cracked – but it probably never will.
Anyways. It would be amazing to paint this water tower. And not just paint it a giant blob of green color, like it is now, but to paint it like a dozen different colors in that classic swirl pattern
I’ve been painting for years now… it would probably take a month! Or I would get a giant spray gun and do a lot of taping? Hard to say. But that’s my current big, big dream.