"Artist Fathers"
I didn't really know my father, he died when I was nine years old. I don't have too many memories of him. I guess with six children, he needed to work a lot, and I think I remember that he usually worked a night shift. He was in his early thirties when he died which seems to me now to be a really young age to have that much responsibility. I often wonder how my life might have turned out if he had lived. I don't yearn for another life, I'm pretty content, and I feel extremely fortunate, but still I can't help wondering. He was a working class sort of fellow, he seemed to change jobs pretty often, I think he was a bartender when he passed. He might not have had too much patience for a son that wanted to be an artist. He might have thought that there was no future in it. As a high school art teacher I get that a lot from parents. Parents want there kids to be succesful in life; that's understandable. I'm sure my father would have tried to push me into learning some kind of a trade. I wasn't really good at any other subjects but art in school and that got me a lot of extra credit in some of my harder classes.
I was pretty messed up as a kid, although I didn't realize it at the time. Most of my friends growing up in the Bronx and later Long Island City came from single parent homes so I thought that was normal, how things were supposed to be. You sometimes hear people say how art saved their lives and it can sound a bit pretentious but in my case it probably bears some truth. I suppose my father must have instilled some lessons in me, after all I was nine, which is a fairly mature age, but I honestly can't remember them. It seems like I've always had to learn things the hard way. I have three grown children of my own and I've pretty much had to make up my own rule book since one wasn't handed down to me.
Being a father and an artist is a tricky business. As an artist who has a full time day job, I guard my studio time like a rabid dog. I tried to slip away to as many soccer games, t-ball, birthday parties, ec;, as I could, but I'm sure I fell short of what the other parents were doing. My children don't seem to have held it against me but I'm sure it must have been tough on them at times. What can I do. Most artist's that I know lead lives of quiet desperation. We're obsessed with things that the majority of the population can't relate to. In my own way I tried to have it all, and everyone knows that that's not really possible. Maybe I would have been a better parent if I wasn't an artist or a better artist if I wasn't a parent, but I think that I made the right choices. I think my father would be prettty darn proud of the way my children turned out. I think he'd say that I was doing the best that I could and when I think back on it I guess he was doing the same.
