Michael D. Davis.

Life is one big, beautiful piece of B.S., and it will never make sense. The day can start out with crying and screaming and end in dancing like nothing ever happened. For me, that’s why I hold art so closely. It is the duct tape doing the Sisyphean task of holding my psyche together.

Art is everything. Everyone is an artist. Art is life. For example, my Ma can make you happy with an insult. Not everyone can do this; that’s why it’s an art. Just yesterday, she says to me, “You remember when I honked the horn on the car and you fell?” I said, “Yeah, that was mean as hell.” To which she retorted, “What kind of moron falls when a horn honks?” We both descended into laughter.

My sister is an artist with how she can organize and cram big things into small places. My sister can cram a shed full of crap into a single tote. You won’t be able to get anything back out, but it’s impressive.

My father is a master when it comes to toast. Although he has retired from sharing this craft with others, there was a time, back in the day where you could sit him next to a toaster with some bread and butter and wait for the Mona Lisa of burnt bread to be crafted.

The thing is, most art goes unappreciated; it is judged and cast aside. Not all art is gonna make it into a gallery; not every artist is gonna make it into a history book, but every art is the same as it makes life worth living. When it comes to visual arts, the painting affects two people: the painter and the viewer, and in very different ways. I am never gonna have one of my paintings in the Louvre, and that’s not the reason I do it. Often enough, I paint something, show it to a few people, maybe post it on Instagram, then I throw it in a box and forget about it. As the painter, putting whatever is inside of me into that painting is the only reason I do it. When I’m done, I move on.

Being the viewer is a whole different thing. I was recently down at the Toledo Fire Station, and as others talked amongst themselves, I stood up and walked over to these two paintings on the wall. One was of an ambulance, and another was of a fire truck, both of them Toledo vehicles. The paintings were great, very technically exquisite, and in the corner the paintings were signed “Jones ’89.”

It was at this point that Joe Boll told me that the paintings were done by a convict in Kansas. He said that another firefighter had sent the con pictures of the vehicles, and he’d sent back the paintings. I thought this was awesome. The paintings were wonderful in themselves, depictions of equipment and the longstanding dedication of the department. Then there was the story of the artist behind them. It wasn’t Caravaggio, or Koons, or Warhol; it was some guy serving time, a guy who probably doesn’t know his paintings are still being admired nearly forty years after their paint had dried.

I tried finding the artist in my usual act of insane curiosity, and I couldn’t find him. However, I did find that Kansas has a big arts program in its prisons. I found an article from The Wichita Eagle-Beacon, Sunday, Feb. 7, 1988, about the art program and linked gallery show. The inmates talked about all the reasons they painted; one said, “When I paint, I’m not here.” An inmate named Tim Prock, serving 45 years to life for armed robbery, said, “I’ve escaped four times. Since I started painting, I don’t need to escape. When you’re painting there’s no bars or concrete or steel. You’re concentrating on the canvas and nothing else.”

The article stated that some of the artists made money from their art, making portraits and other paintings on a word-of-mouth business. They said people from around the country would send them pictures, and they’d paint the portrait and send the paintings back. There’s a possibility that those paintings down at the fire station came from these guys.

These everyday workhorse artists. That’s what I am; that’s what we all are in our own way. We won’t be in galleries or have our pieces sold for millions, but we will find that one way to make toast that makes everything okay. Or the perfect way to roast someone, or cram full a box. It’s these little artistic things that are everywhere that tape together our psyches.

Then again, maybe I’m wrong. As Matthew Krallman, an armed robber from Kansas, once said, “We’re called the artists, for some reason, people think artists know something that nobody else does. It really ain’t nothing. Just practice.”