Untitled 1 by J.Otto Seibold

Happy new-art-for-you Tuesday, friends. It's Sara.

Today's edition came together after eons of emailing, calling and corralling, until finally the stars aligned and J. Otto Seibold and I were in the same place in time and space, meeting at his home in Oakland. After admiring his art collection (I spied two personal photo favorites from across the room—a Sugimoto and a Robert Adams—hung among works of his own and his daughter's), we set to talking about, well, pretty much everything—starting with how we both got to where we were just then, sitting in low chairs in his living room. My arrival, of course, had much to do with 20x200, but neither of our actual trajectories could be clearly defined.

While Jim has had a successful career as a painter and as an illustrator of children's books, he is not someone who has plotted and plodded along from point A to B to C. He is someone who knows leaps and detours: the trusting that once you've left that path that the next thing will come, and that when you get down to it, you should really be doing something that you love—even if it's not what's been presented to you as a career/satisfying life course. Not coincidentally, this is a huge part of why he started making books—so that kids might get the idea that being an artist was as viable and important as becoming a teacher, a doctor, a banker, etc... And so, this is where our talking about life came back to art again and, in particular, the series of works that includes Untitled 1.

In the summer of 2007, when much of California was engulfed in forest fires, Jim's mom was forced from her home and came to live with him. When she moved out, she left an assortment of real estate catalogs behind. Before tossing them out, Jim paged through a few and began to see the photos in the listings as the "mugshots of un-adoptable 10 year olds" and decided to paint portraits of them. As he worked inside his studio, taking what was literally left on his kitchen table to create the work you see here—one of a series of free-falling, unattached funhouses—the world outside swirled along its own path: The economic crash that began to swell at the end of that year crested with the mortgage crisis in 2008. And with that, what initially began as a personal project became emblematic of what was going on in the rest of the U.S. All that a home symbolized—security, safety, stability—was washed away as many lost the roofs over their heads and just as many were left underwater.* Hundreds of thousands learned the hard way that going from point A to B wouldn't necessarily let them reside comfortably at C.

And, so here we are instead, floating in a sea of neon pink, with a wave of flames to remind us of all this. It's a gorgeous print (that looks even better framed!)—I want it for my own home—a small apartment in Brooklyn, which I do not own.

*I'm speaking metaphorically—though floods, fires, earthquakes and other natural disasters, too, of course, have unfortunately taken homes and livelihoods from many.