Paul Thorsteinson
About
Hemingway Said It Best
As a banker in the early 1920’s, Ernest Hemingway had a special ritual. Every day around lunchtime, he would opt out and refuse to eat lunch with his coworkers. Instead, he would go to the museums and look at all the paintings on an empty stomach. When they asked him why he did this, Hemingway replied, “Whenever I look at the artwork with an edge of hunger, I always see more.”
I know as an artist, I refined my talent through hunger. A lifetime of it. I prefer to live hungry. Maybe something I am much more familiar with than an ordinary person who experienced an ordinary life.
If you don’t know me and you are looking at this site for the first time, you might be surprised to discover I made everything pictured here while I was in prison.
You might be even more surprised, that I came to prison when I was a teenager and have been in prison for more than 20 years. I wasn’t meant to be free past the age of 18.
Like art, however, I learned the world is how we shape it. I rebelled against my incarceration and in an act of righteous defiance to cruel fate, I usurped a crippling destiny and taught myself how to live again.
Finally out of the rut of concrete and depression, I was filled with purpose and a desire to live life to the fullest. I taught myself how to paint. In the woodshop, I taught myself how to build. At home, I would write stories and detailed poems. Because the moment I rejected my perceived incarceration, I was finally free.
The experience changed me. Like most people who go on important journeys and see sights that others couldn’t imagine. I had something very important to say. I hope you enjoy the art because for me it’s more than just art. It’s a second chance at life. It’s proof we can do impossible things.
Painting isn’t an aesthetic operation; it is a form of magic designed as a mediator between this strange hostile world and us, a way of seeing power by giving form to our terrors as well as our desires.” – Pablo Picasso
I believe in art. I believe in becoming a translator of truth and unlocking all of the unexplored tracks of our creative potential with a fistful of keys. Setting those mysteries free with a turn of the lock. Unlocking those doors one painting, one poem at a time.
Some of my happiest days are the ones where I have charcoal smudges on my face, acrylic crusted underneath my fingernails, and color stained blotches spreading abstractly across my ruined state issue clothing. Those days, my eyes are unfocused and blurry from long bursts of manic energy quaintly referred to as the zone. The best part is when I find myself inwardly smiling as I reflect upon a newly acquired masterpiece that leans against my back bedroom wall.
Art has been a trial by fire as well. Full of pain of past mistakes, the loss of close friends, and the isolation from my family and loved ones. However, I choose to not let those things break me. Instead, I use them as my muse for my creative motivation in defiance to the fire that consumes my memories. While I know that fire was meant to destroy things, being an artist, I have challenged myself to be a eater of fire.
The pain and the loss and the isolation become merely the color tones on my palette as I design my divine breath in a plume of orange and yellow flame. Because when you consume fire, you learn how to shine in even the darkest places.
What’s above should work to balance out that blank footer and help us with the relocation of at least one of the text blocks.
