A clip from “Saving Stuckism: A to Zed”—2025 winner of The Stomach Turner Prize and The Golden Neurotic Award
“Man’s main task in life is to give birth to himself, to become what he potentially is. The most important product of his effort is his own personality.”
—Eric Fromm
Content New Year!
I paraphrased that quote to my daughter last week while she was visiting for Christmas. It’s a beaut, and has been one of my favorite mantras for the past decade. I think I actually said “A person needs to be born again”. It sounded fundamentalist Christian (and we’re both grossed out by that), so she asked what I meant exactly. I told her that we should live to perfect our limitations, which is another way of saying “come into the world with nothing and leave with the same. But life will get very stale if you don’t keep coming into the world. Give birth to yourself without Mom’s help! Human life is a very rare opportunity gifted from an infinite universe. Don’t waste it!” More unsolicited Dad advice, and also unnecessary, I think, until she stumbles on her own two feet enough times to snap out of the trance society hypnotizes us into. In due time I say if she wants to be free. I’m still stumbling, though now I have a stronger faith that the next fall might be my last.
Maybe my great awakening will arrive during the next retreat and view. I hope it’s in a tropical paradise.
Meanwhile, I want to take a moment to congratulate myself and friends on an amazing accomplishment in 2025. “Saving Stuckism: A to Zed”, a full length documentary to inspire unmade artists around the world. If you haven’t seen the movie, please set aside two hours of your life to understand everything you need to know about art and artist in these modern times.
Hundreds of hours went into its making. I think it is the greatest single accomplishment for Stuckism beyond its own invention. If you’re not moved as an artist, then consider any other career where humiliation isn’t both a prerequisite and an ever-seeking goal.
One thing I notice often about artist recognition in my working/middle class bubble of a small town, is the incredible lack of it. The poor reception for “Saving Stuckism” was no exception. I showed it at the college, and true to form, just like the local art teachers who never attend my exhibitions, the cinema and screen studies professors made a wide berth of the auditorium. Nor did they inquire afterwards about the movie, although we were on an email thread for several days before the screening. Art is dead in a small college town because the professors are not giving birth to themselves (the students see this), and the rest of the working class, doctors and garbage collectors, won’t even think about it until after retirement, maybe. I want to thank those who came out of their iPhones in September for original free art and an original free art documentary. Likewise, you are very welcome. I don’t do this for my looks. Tell your friends that when all the artists have left Oswego, there will be nothing left to see or hear in the flesh.
Now for another cliff scene from a movie about artist non-recognition that will segue unhappily into genocidal silence:
Yes, in 2025 I wrote a book! And it has had zero sales. This says more about an insane society than a sane man existing in it.
More from Eric Fromm:
“A person who has not been completely alienated, who has remained sensitive and able to feel, who has not lost the sense of dignity, who is not yet “for sale”, who can still suffer over the suffering of others, who has not acquired fully the having mode of existence—briefly, a person who has remained a person and not become a thing—cannot help feeling lonely, powerless, isolated in present-day society. He cannot help doubting himself and his own convictions, if not his sanity. He cannot help suffering, even though he can experience moments of joy and clarity that are absent in the life of his “normal” contemporaries. Not rarely will he suffer from neurosis that results from the situation of a sane man living in an insane society, rather than that of the more conventional neurosis of a sick man trying to adapt himself to a sick society. In the process of going further in his analysis, i.e. of growing to greater independence and productivity, his neurotic symptoms will cure themselves.
Boy, I sure hope so. More art I say, until it breaks me, maybe.
The book is available for a limited time, until we’re all burnt toast like the Gaza strip that we pay Donald Trump to make happen in our name.
So farewell to the fond happenings of 2025. I am the most fortunate man alive!
Knock on wood.
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The Silent Terror Vignette of a Small Town Beggar
Last week, a collector of my paintings informed me at a party that he’s downsizing his living quarters and will be donating the bulk of my art to the local Salvation Army. He was nonchalant as can be about it. Like telling me how he’s going to update his kitchen. I can’t have that without some kind of figurative suicide happening. If you’re reading this, Dee, please reconsider. I will buy back the lot because I don’t want to die in Oswego with my paintings up for grabs in its only charity shop of purgatory death scent. Honestly, please, I beg of you. I am not attached to the paintings themselves as much as I am to appearances. The Salvation Army can’t be the first choice of handing off Throop originals to strangers. I promise to find a good home for each piece. At least give me the option to store them. I’m not ready for my art to die. Nor am I ready to give up the ghost. Not yet. I feel that I still have a few good years left to format a creative breakthrough.
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I made a couple art zines this week after watching @jompiy make several on YouTube. His are very good. He folds a sheet of paper into 16 equal rectangles using the hotdog and hamburger technique. I wanted to try my luck using loose canvas. Rose suggested making signatures and then sewing them. They look okay. They feel great (I love loose canvas!). Rose and I each sewed one. I’ll get some colored duct tape for the spine to add strength.
I don’t like sewing.
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“A lot of you are getting ready to quit drinking for dry January when what you really need to do is quit social media, go to a bar, and have a god damn drink!”
— some person on social media who is probably drunk alone at home
From now on I plan to direct all my public thoughts and paintings through this platform (Substack), and also share some of my professionalism on international social media that pays me back for making the effort to be social (Steemit, Blurt, and Ecency). In order to remain an expressionist and not abandon my privacy to present and future thugs of the universe, I must build a protective wall for the people looking in on me, those who are curious about my progress or individuality, as a sometimes activist artist existing in a political world. No one needs to know my private life. I don’t want to look into any one else’s closet either. If I like their art, I will find them here or there, if I even bother to look. On Christmas night some Facebook friend posted a smiling portrait of Donald Trump, like he was her highest imagination of Jesus Christ. It hit me like a brick. I don’t want to see anymore images of ugly Betty Crocker casseroles, the getaway weekend in New York, her teen magazine love for a multi-millionaire thrower of footballs… And so many ignorant political posts! This is how she would prefer to organize society? This is all she’s got to give? No less than her slobbering labradoodle if he was offered the franchise? I do not wish bad happenings in her world. I know she wants to be good. I know that she loves her labradoodle and is going to host a clogging artery super bowl party. She provides many visual tokens of her loving family to prove how well she’s faking it. We all do! Both dogs and fascists can express love. The fascists though, better love from prison. And my old Facebook friend, who is both a dog in taste and a fascist in spirit, can go express her Facebook life from figurative hell.
So I’m off the Zuckerburg narcissistic-voyeur apps. I no longer want to give the world my instants. As a private individual, I am just as interesting as you, and that is already saying too much. However, as an artist, I am one with my expression. I don’t even know what that means except that I wear my heart on my sleeve, and feel the need to fling it off from time to time. The Internet empowers me to show the work, while acting as a helpful ledger. As long as electricity remains, I have proof that I exist. “I post, therefore I am.” But I don’t need to give a perverted, red-haired asshole my content. What the hell was I thinking for the past 15 years? It makes me shudder with embarrassment.
I will keep my website, preferring to have nothing else Internetted in the future, but that would take some measure of “in the black” income, which I don’t think will arrive in my lifetime. Meanwhile, I’ll search for a free one in the early days of 2026 and pay my dues for the visual business card, even if nobody ever bothers to call.
Housecleaning is top on my list. I need to clear out the studio to free up shelf and table space. Maybe I’ll find room for a couch to nap on, keeping me close to my art for more hours of the day. It’s a walk-out basement. Some touch-up would make it a more livable and workable space.
For Christmas my daughter gifted me a walking journal to write reflections of my evening perambulations. Winter nights on Lake Ontario are bitter cold with high winds. I have inherited my grandfather’s Eddie Bauer down parka with wolf fur hood and his pair of down snow mittens that actually make my thumbs sweat in sub-zero conditions. Most nights I will make the effort to get off the cozy reading chair and take a walk into the howling wind. A 15 minute adventure, just to prove that I can move.
I am going to cut Google and Apple music out of my life as well. I want to play CDs and record albums. I don’t need the help of a billionaire to search the Internet for me. Best to remain an incognito peasant and potential mortal threat to his future. Ecosia is a somewhat sustainable alternative.
Tuta is an encrypted free email and calendar service that does not use AI. Kill AI.
Test it, please. I think of it as letters written back and forth in invisible ink. And no ads!
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Now for a final mantra…
Art is only a means to contentment via the practice of love. Raising chickens is also a means to that end.
Contentment is the philosopher’s stone. Why bother with life if you’re not pursuing it? Happiness is not contentment, and neither is it a pursuit. I wouldn’t even want a life of just happiness. I don’t think it’s possible. Degrees of happiness cannot be measured without their counterbalance of many sadnesses. How would I know if I was happy-go-lucky if I didn’t experience melancholic-go-cry-baby once in a while?
These days I am worried about my obsession with painting and pushing out of the way the world that longs to love me. I am malcontent, and my art practice often proves this. Sometimes I leap for joy in the process, and there is real satisfaction after some works completed. But overall, I haven’t found contentment through art, and yet I keep to it obsessively, day after day. Maybe I push because to stop is to fail and look in the mirror. I think this is a Bob Dylan problem creeping up on me. After gaining the world, why does he still perform his soul away day after day? An 84 year old multimillionaire craving the spotlight is just another disease to stay alive at the cost of contentment. So is an over-fifty one. I have allowed the nefarious triumvirate —vanity, money, and power—to lock in on my death trajectory, and lately they are cancering up my existence good and proper. Basically, I am not taking time to smell the flowers, and welcome these many free moments to reflect. Instead, empty time becomes a guilty reminder that I should be painting with so much free time on my hands. A vicious circle. The daily fear of giving birth to myself or painting a picture in a cold room. Jesus, just writing that states the obvious. Me and Bob Dylan are redecorating our tombs!
Please continue to be my friend and acquaintance.
Content New Year 2026!
Ron
