FILIAL IMPIETY

I didn't take to drawing naturally. I'm sort of a half-baked academic type. After an undistinguished undergraduate career at State University of New York in Oneonta (where I majored in beer and minored in masturbation) I took the uncharacteristic step of pursuing a graduate degree in what I thought at the time would be a subject that would impress my parents.

"Critical Theory" was vague enough and carried enough hard syllables to suggest a gravitas unfamiliar to my working class upstate family. They never for a moment suspected that I chose CalArts because I heard that art school chicks were "easy" and that the whether never got colder than 50 degrees.

Well, much to my astonishment both the girls and the course material were more challenging than I had anticipated but after two grueling years in Southern California I discovered that I had a latent taste for dense, tautological dialectic and a blatant taste for men.

Fast forward to the present and I'm an art critic in New York City, getting paid to go to openings and writing dense, tautological essays that no one but a desperate adjunct could possibly read.

I suppose I started going to life drawing classes as a form of penance. The only way I could reconcile my trafficking in art critical tripe was by getting a bit of training in the very thing I was trying to debunk.

Who knew I would get good at it? 

When a friend of mine offered to do a video of me drawing I thought to myself, "finally I'll have something to show my parents that they'll understand!"

... sort of ...