Please Allow Me to Introduce Myself

Reading Feminist Theory for Desperate Connection to Anything 2025. Acrylic on cardboard, 11 x 14"

Hello Art & Artists!

My name is Ron Throop and I am a painter and writer living in upstate New York, United States. The forecast calls for 2-3 feet of snow tonight and tomorrow. The wind is howling and the drifts are up to my window. If anybody out there is rich, very rich, and also a patron of the arts, please consider gifting me a studio in a climate that is not snow hell. For introduction I’ll share with you a chapter from my recent book Making Friends With Wild Dogs: Reflections on Stuckism for its 25th Anniversary. It’s about how I came to be a painter.

Pirate Cook Gots His Lost Daughter Leaf

The year is 1994. I work as a line cook in a rinky dink restaurant on the bank of the Oswego River in upstate New York. Steak and seafood, greasy fries, salty rice and slimy baked potatoes that stay hot out of the oven for an hour, but turn brownish inside and are plopped onto plates anyway. I am in the last days of a topsy-turvy relationship with a woman who is equal parent to a bright and healthy 4-year-old daughter. I am reading everything Henry Miller wrote, and keeping a daily journal that has filled up to several volumes. This is my season in hell with some ecstatic heavenly catchings. I am hyper sensitive and impressionable, both to my detriment and divinity. I learn that Miller would paint whenever the writer’s bloc hit him. He would go on several week jags making watercolors. I am a copycat student of expression. I buy a cheap set of gouache paints and take a crack at painting. The first painting I remember titling was that of a purply maple tree with a blue sky and words painted on: “Pirate Cook Gots His Lost Daughter Leaf”.
Over the next 4 years I meet, marvel and marry my muse Rose. I write often and paint rarely. In the year 2000, I come into a little money and self-publish three books at once. Finally, I am a writer.
With the many marital duties and pastimes, full-time job, house renovation, another child born, and homeschooling my oldest daughter, I still find time to write, and even up my painting game noticeably. I look forward to the painting process much more than the writing one. When I write I am tight, when I paint, I am light. It brings the joy and release of expression without the birthing pains. Painting is free flow. I know I’m not any good. I sit down at the drafting table and draw pictures with watercolors and gouache. I paint text onto the pictures. Kenneth Patchen the poet made paintings in this fashion. Perfect! Say what I want to say in chalk paint and bad poesy. I am a copycat student of expression.
It’s 2004. I build a 7 x 4' room in the basement of our little cape cod. Rose calls it my “pine box”, and I descend to it each night after dinner to paint. I wear earphones and turn up the music loud. Marvelous delusions of grandeur! There is no greater escape. Painting is a fast-acting opiate.
The next year we move out to the country with 8 acres of private land beside 5,000 acres of farms and forest butting up against a Great Lake Ontario. Near total isolation. No friends. No enemies. I build a 12 x 12' cabin in the woods. After dinner on the coldest nights I take my paints and a kerosene lamp out to the cabin and work in the weak light. I have a little propane heater at my feet and shadows flickering on the wall. I paint on nights that I am off from work. I am a homemaker, restaurant cook, painter, writer — in that order of importance. Rose has become the bread winner. Income from restaurant work is supplemental. My favorite subjects to paint are copies of my five-year old daughter’s drawings. Such innocent and mysterious creations. I am still a copycat student of expression.
We tap maple trees in February. It’s March, 2008. I apply to a local juried art exhibition and get accepted. This is the first time I have shown paintings in public. One of my pieces makes the cover of the promotional postcard. I attend the opening and win an honorable mention. It’s strange to see so many people looking at my work, now out of the closet. At the gallery exit, some big bearded guy with a Texas accent introduces himself to Rose and me. I pull my hand out of my coat to shake his hand and a maple tap falls out. He asks me what is that? I tell him about syruping. Then he does the brazen Texas thing and invites himself over to my place to watch me boil sap. He looks at me, then Rose, waiting for an answer with a huge grin. No doubt he just wants to get closer to my wife, kill me, and marry her. He tells me there were only a few artworks in the show that interested him, and it turns out mine is one of them. His name is Dan Leo and I decide to do what no neurotic New Yorker would dare. I invite him over to play at my house.
A week later, while the sap boils, I take Dan and his little boy to the hut to show them some of my paintings. He tells me I need to join the local art association and exhibit whenever possible. At this time Stuckism is nine years old and has an international following. Stuckist groups are popping up all over the world, and progenitors in the UK are getting some notice in newspapers and on TV. I know nothing about this. I am not interested in art or a contemporary art world. I paint what I am thinking. The majority of my paintings are inspired (and copied) from my daughter’s drawings. I title them with my day’s psychological state of mind. The rape and pillage of Afghanistan and Iraq, killings of innocents, corruption in politics, global warming. I am scolding the world with color from a hut in farm woods, NY. My neighbor, whom I will never meet, shoots his guns every day. His yard is a mud pit of half-wild dogs, and what’s left of American culture is a septic tank buried in the ground that you can fill up with crap on the Internet.
But this is reality. I tend a huge garden, care provide for the family, paint pictures and write pulp philosophy in the backwoods of a paradise country hell, while goading my neurons to make herculean synapse leaps of determination that only the minds of gut artists would attempt in such smothering adversity.
I quit my cooking job and we move back to Oswego. To my pine box in the basement! I take Dan’s advice and have a solo exhibition of paintings. It’s a first for me, and also for Mr. Zolo, the retired art teacher whose house gallery I rent for the weekend. A beautiful post-and-beam retreat in the woods. I frame thirty paintings, most of them on paper, matted and under glass, and deliver them carefully across town. Then I do the following without ever reading about it:

“The Stuckist is opposed to the sterility of the white wall gallery system and calls for exhibitions to be held in homes and musty museums, with access to sofas, tables, chairs and cups of tea. The surroundings in which art is experienced (rather than viewed) should not be artificial and vacuous.”

—  Stuckist Manifesto #18

I over-elaborate. I make a holiday celebration of my art, turning Mr. Zolo’s post-and-beam into Ron Throop’s gushing gallery, restaurant, personal library, and fall harvest market grab-a-bag. His house is my house now, exhibiting to all and sundry 15 years of repressed angst and artistic loneliness. I’m going big, really big, and then going home.
Rose designs the postcard. I mail 200 to family, friends, and mostly strangers. Doctors, lawyers, dishwashers, cashiers, college professors, garbage men… Everybody is going to see me out in the open. It’s an exhibition! I cook all week long. Butternut squash soup with rosemary croutons, a hearty chili, several quiches, fresh breads, assorted cookies, polenta cake, meat tray, cheese boards, vegetable crudités, beer, wine, pitchers of ice water, tea, coffee... I place vases of fresh flowers all around the room, a table displays my self-published books for sale and free stuff for guests to take home — books by authors I revere, saved mustard and leek seeds, and a huge stainless steel bowl filled with freshly harvested tomatillos. A man brings his elderly mother to see the show. When they are leaving she says that I am an amazing culinary artist. What?!
Dan is an art professor at the college. He gives extra credit to students who make the trip and write a page or two about the exhibition. Friends and family attend. A couple of Rose’s colleagues too.
The only person to talk to me about the paintings is one of Dan’s students who “got” that I am trying “to say something” with my work. That brief conversation carries me through the rest of the night. A sampling of my artistic, literary and culinary oeuvre. I am packing it all into one marvelous experience. Fill up and take away. Thank you for coming!
We talk about everything under the sun except for my paintings.
So this is an art opening! Who knew? People talking to people about people, as long as none of the people talk about the art in front of the people’s faces.
I don’t think I sold a single painting while everyone ate the food and drank the wine. A muck farmer’s wife took home a huge bag of tomatillos to give to the migrant workers who she said would absolutely love them! Lack of sales didn’t faze me a bit. Everybody got something out of it. It was my changing identity party, an American tradition. Last time you saw me, I was a line cook. Now I am an artist. Easy peasey. I just needed to show, says Dan, says art society, says people talking to people about people.
A couple weeks later I meet up with a restaurant owner asking if I’d be interested in taking over his lease. That same day I get a call from a woman running the local college art gallery. She says I won $600 and a gallery show. For twenty years I have been ready to open up my own restaurant. This is my chance. A fully equipped kitchen and dining room to excel at doing what I have been trained to do all of my working life. Painting was just a pastime. Finally, I can be chef-owner of a restaurant that someone like me would want to patronize.
The art-crazy middle-aged man. I call up the college art gallerist and accept her offer. Then I tear up my corporation papers and liquor license application, gesso some paper and canvases, and begin painting my next exhibition.
2008 is a fateful year for a cooking career to end with a snap! However, Rose is up for tenure at her job, which means big bank malfeasance and sleazy government graft isn’t going to deeply affect our income. We won’t make more, but we’ll make enough. I am a house husband who paints in the basement pine box. Because of Dan Leo I am making new friends. Art can do that. Academics mostly, yet all wannabe punk — like the painter who was a line cook who was a juvenile delinquent. They fell out of college too one day, pretending to be failures. However, unlike me, they aren’t closet Stuckists.
There will be more of my story to come. The point to make is that by 2009 I am resigned to being a nobody who paints. I am more concerned with becoming an artist of life than one of artifice, though I know that a public painter persona is guaranteed to mess with those chances. I was never one to prostitute myself, like a million American art-makers do, and the unfortunate 35 who actually succeed financially by whoring their craft. This is not to say that I have never pined for financial success. I don’t believe a day goes by that I don’t think about it. I try to come up with schemes to turn a trick, to sell my soul, and with a painting for God’s sake! It ain’t gonna happen. Futile striving. By now I should know better. Paintings sell for some fair amount if I want them to, sometimes to strangers, mostly to acquaintances, and never when it’s convenient, which is always. That is my downfall as an artist — denying the goal (to die free) while getting comfy with my objectives (art selling as business). Meaning this: I am still not free.
Is that Stuckism?
So far, yes. I’m on the path. But still have a long way to go.

“I have been in love with painting ever since I became conscious of it at the age of six. I drew some pictures I thought fairly good when I was fifty, but really nothing I did before the age of seventy was of any value at all. At seventy-three I have at last caught every aspect of nature–birds, fish, animals, insects, trees, grasses, all. When I am eighty I shall have developed still further and I will really master the secrets of art at ninety. When I reach a hundred my work will be truly sublime and my final goal will be attained around the age of one hundred and ten, when every line and dot I draw will be imbued with life.”

—  from Hokusai’s The Art Crazy Old Man