I used to paint every Sunday.
I had this ritual where I’d get out for an early morning surf and then go to a big quiet warehouse which was flooded with natural light and I’d paint on this rolling wall I built for myself.
My rolling wall had two sides- one for photo shoots and one for painting on - it was like the best feeling ever, getting to paint on a wall for fun with no repercussions. This ritual I had on Sundays somehow became a connective tissue to my wellbeing and ended up becoming an everyday occurrence after a while.
Over a period of time, maybe 9 months or so of straight creative decision making surrounding the life-giving arts of painting, shaping and surfing, I would start to have dreams about surfing, shaping and painting all at the same time. Bruce Lee Enter the Dragon stuff, feel me? In other words, some crazy zen like action started unfolding. The idea of a Shepherds Shirt and a Courier Pant were born - so I made them - they felt like good clothes to do my life in. Presentable and comfortable and they told a story in craft - the heritage the fabric was tied to all the way to the rad people I would cut and sew them with - it was a collective of intelligent craft and art from so many walks of life becoming realized in one thing. Symbolic of goodness; collaboration.
I realized maybe I was better at making clothes than painting and surfing and shaping, so I gave it a crack.
Sometimes my surf sessions would be so amazing that I would need to shape before I could go paint - you know to get the ideas of a tail contour out of my head before I could take on painting over my last frescoe to start a new one. I was true to the ideas in my head in the order that they showed up - at least I tried to be. My hard and fast rule was that I would keep none of my paintings so that I could truly just enjoy making them, getting them out and then moving on. Always painting over them and never caring to share them or save them; I had one wall, one canvas and a million ideas! It was therapy. Just like a surf session, you’ll remember them forever, until the next one.
Kinda sounds like I’m rambling but I’m getting to my point here, ya know, in classic Mike Lynch form with no Ai. 🤖 Point is: we all need that fleeting moment of expression to feel whole. The feeling of making the art and letting the idea out into the world and being stoked on that - that principle alone is how I regenerate and I wanted to share it out loud because it’s the whole reason Imperfects got a start and became a thing. Now, I work with a group of people I trust and believe in and I’m finding new ways to exercise that same principle for new outputs under totally different conditions.
I don’t get to surf much or shape much these days, I basically never paint but I still find those fleeting moments of expression in the human experience and more than anything else, I’m finding the joy in the accumulation of multiple perspectives becoming one. That’s a hard thing to do - to collaborate and become one over a concept and produce upon that. We do that every day at Imperfects and I’m proud of that. This job feels impossible most days because we are challenged by the big bad world of huge commerce and capitalistic Trojan wars - we hustle the real way to build our product and most days, we loose, but despite the financial hurdles and the barriers we continually scale or attempt to demolish, we keep getting up. After all, it’s not about how you fall.
Speaking of Fall, this new Collection Common Ground is a slick one and we’ve got some bells and whistles popping off here. Jump in on Drop 2, we live.
Happy Little Friday, Fam!
Also, I took one photo of those paintings I would do on the rolling wall. I probably did 50-60 of em over that period but this was the only one I really wanted to remember. Naturally, called it Sunday Frescoe.
