Painting Post Malone in Late Winter of a Different Year

I woke up with the words “Post Malone” in my mind, unconnected to any image or narrative. I knew it had to do with music but I wasn’t not sure if it was a band or a person. This was two years ago, and the name must have entered my consciousness sideways, via Instagram or the Canes ad on Claiborne Avenue. My knowledge of pop culture has always been uneven, swaths of oblivion dotted with points of hyper fixation. I searched the words “Post Malone” and saw it was a singer with tattoos on his face.

When I see face tattoos, I think of Ryan Gosling in “The Place Beyond the Pines.” In an interview, the actor said,

We thought it would be good to show someone who had lived a life of making poor decisions, so we went on a quest to assemble the worst tattoos, and I went overboard with the face. When I went to [the director], I said, “Obviously I can’t keep this. This is ridiculous,” and he said, “That’s how people with face tattoos probably feel.” He said, “You made that choice, and now you have to suffer the consequences.” So for the movie I had this sense of shame that I had overdone it.

For a few days after seeing that movie, I felt occasional heaviness tracing back to Gosling’s character and I had to keep reminding myself: “Luke Glanton” is not a real person. But I’ve known real versions of him.

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I watched some music and interview videos with Post Malone. There were several clips of him giving his things away to people. In some cases people ask for something, his shirt or even his guitar, and in other clips he says, “Do you want anything?” looking around and down at the clothes he’s wearing. Regarding his tattoos, Post Malone told GQ in a 2020 interview,

I’m a ugly-ass motherf—er. It does maybe come from a place of insecurity, to where I don’t like how I look, so I’m going to put something cool on there so I can look at myself and say, ‘You look cool, kid,’ and have a modicum of self-confidence, when it comes to my appearance.”

I’ve talked to my therapist about my sometimes distracting, not-heroic concern for people I don’t know and people I know or have known.

When I was in graduate school, artists would come, give a talk, then visit each of our painting studios. Archie Rand came to my studio and said two things that stayed with me. First–this has nothing to do with Post Malone–he pointed out that all my compositions were based on the golden ratio.

Egyptians favored symmetry and centering. “You don’t seem like a person who would just accept a patriarchal Classical notion of composition.” he said. *

He was right. I naturally prefer the horizon in the center, the subject in the middle of the picture. Or, I like things uncomfortable, off-balance. I had been ignoring my innate sense of where things should go in a picture and instead unconsciously following a set of rules I had learned.

The second thing Archie Rand said was, “Paint whatever you want. If you want to paint little girls at a birthday party, paint little girls at a birthday party.”

He was talking about freedom and avoiding grooves we can get stuck in, habits of subject and genre. I thought about Archie Rand when I went to the shed in my backyard to paint trees and ended up painting Post Malone.

I mostly paint landscapes, views without people. I paint places I’ve been, places that meant something to me, from photographs or screenshots taken via Google Maps Street View. I almost never paint portraits, though I used to when I was in college. I painted people–friends, skaters and ravers–to spend time with their faces or to externalize something I felt but couldn’t say, something to do with impermanence. I never had much interest painting or drawing people I didn’t know.

Shortly after discovering he was a person, I went to the shed in my backyard to paint trees, but painted Post Malone from a screenshot of the video “Chemical.” I pressed down on the bush to paint his tattoos gently, the way one dabs a antiseptic cotton ball on a child’s skinned knee. It was a fun painting to make, unconnected to my life past or present, to places I had been and left. **

My son came out to the shed and saw the painting of Post Malone, surprised maybe that I wasn’t painting trees or some road in France. he said, half-joking, he could sell it at school.

…

At my next appointment, I told my therapist I had painted a portrait of Post Malone. She understood what I meant when I said I worried about him, his people-pleasing and I hoped the world wouldn’t eat him alive. I told her I was also concerned about his drinking and smoking, his liver and lungs.

Later, when I sent her a picture of the painting, she said she’d like to buy it. I was going to give her the painting anyway, but didn’t know if would be a breach of protocol. “You can have it,” I said. I don’t make a living selling paintings and in most cases have little interest in keeping them around; I paint for the verb of it. She insisted on paying me so I said, “word on the street is you can buy it at my kid’s high school for twenty bucks.” She offered to trade a therapy session for the painting, and I said deal. It was a great deal. Now Post Malone greets me and other people who come to her office to figure things out.

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Post Script:

Every year, I paint a wooden Easter egg for each of my sons, a tradition that usually leaves me grumbling the night before Easter (it’s not easy painting on a small, round surface). I usually paint something the represents that year, like the skatepark or the squirrel we raised. That year I painted the yard cat we accidentally started feeding. We had named the cat Not-My-Cat-Malone or just Malone.

We had two Malone eggs so I thought it would be funny to paint a Post Malone egg. I used gold paint for his grills and after, wondered if there was another Post Malone Easter egg anywhere on earth. The thought made me laugh, not an out-loud laugh, but a feeling of lightness, of living in a small, funny world.

Sometimes I paint to keep certain heavy feelings at bay, to put them into moveable material that becomes an image fixed and relatively unchanging, a thing with edges.

But I’m mostly a writer now.

*This quote by Archie Rand I don’t remember verbatim. The “If you want to paint little girls…” quote is word for word.

**I think these paintings are about people too, though the people are not in the picture.