POST # 149: Starters and Finishers

I once had a friend who owned a highly successful, state-of-the-art engineering firm in Greenwich. He employed about 40 people, mostly brilliant eccentrics conventional companies would never hire. He once told me that they could go for a year or two without producing anything, but then, all of a suddenly come up with an idea that more than justified putting up with them. He also understood that his employees fitted into two categories he referred to as “starters and finishers.” The creative types (like me) lost interest once the idea was worked out. In order to get something done you needed to pair them with “finishers,” who were patient and detail oriented but incapable of originality

I am definitely a “starter.” I’m filled with creative ideas.  I am capable of making new and original connections. The problem is that once the creative part is over, I’m ready to move on. This leaves me with lots of brilliant beginnings (if I have to say so myself,) However, the past year or two, I have been lucky enough to latch on to a couple of wonderful “finishers,” assistants who are perfectly happy to develop my ideas. They do not consider themselves artists but are good at what they do and I wish I could afford to hire them full time.

But meanwhile, what do I do with my attic full of starts that never went anywhere. I’m like a novelist with unfinished novels in a desk drawer. If you like, I’ll give you a tour of the attic. There’s a men’s bathhouse series consisting of 4’ paper cut-outs of unsavory naked men with removable towels around their genitalia. There’s a Seven Deadly Sins series of paintings (incomplete, a few sins are missing.) There’s a wall of cardboard boxes, assemblages of local street scenes and people.  There’s a stack of giant cardboard figures of the developer types I deal in my non-art life along with their thuggish  “entourages.” They are waiting for me to come up with a Brechtian play for them to perform. Plus, I have a box of cardboard masks (perfect for Halloween), and a rack of marked-down paper clothing from a thrift shop. And, I forgot to mention the giant Xeroxed photo enlargements of metal detritus from Vulcan’s Scrap Metal yard along with the small assemblage collages I did from pieces of metal left behind on the ground. And, while I’m thinking about it, what will become of all my theatrical pieces for the overhead projector? There’s the Lower East Side one, and one I call “Dance to the Music” where the audience gets up and dances with the projections. Plus, I’ve got 200 paper plates and cups with faces on them stored in the studio cupboard,

 HELP!!!