From The Desk Of Paul Oddo
Hi, it's me, Paul.
This is my newsletter. It's the first one of these, so it's going to be longer than the ones I plan on sending out in the future. The goal is for them to be monthly. Maybe the occasional random one if there's something special I think you might enjoy hearing or knowing about. I hope you're happy to be receiving this. It's a lot of words and pictures, which I've tried to make enjoyable for you. If you're not happy to be getting this, my apologies, and if that's the case you also might be wondering WHY you're getting it. If you didn't ask to be on this list then the reason you are is that at one point you purchased something from me via my website, so your email is included in this first round. I deliberately haven't scanned the list, so if it comes as a shock to hear from me, in the sense that you’d rather not, you can easily unsubscribe at the bottom of the email, and again I apologize for any trauma receiving communication from me may be causing you. I truly wish you well. Unless we’re on bad terms, in which case I still wish you well. Our rivalry may continue, but with any luck, this can be a reminder that we once lived in relative peace. Perhaps with more time and reflection on both of our parts, we might yet again.
My hope here is to bring you up to speed with what I'm doing and working on, plus a chance for me to share any fun things, not necessarily "me-centric" that I think you might find interesting, fun, or funny. The plan is to make these relatively infrequent and worth your time. Basically, I'm shooting for "not annoying”, which should be a goal of all of ours, to some extent. As mentioned above, this is going to be a bit longer than the future ones for a couple of reasons. One, I'm trying to sum up my current situation and how I got here, which is fun and good, but it's a lot of info. Second, I'm going to be a little more verbose and descriptive with my intent and intention. If I do this right you should be able to quickly scan it and find fun things, but also get value in taking your time with it. I understand much of our screen time is spent either on the toilet, putting off getting out of bed, or falling asleep, not to mention driving 70mph on the freeway, so whatever your situation I want it to be fun! You might be about to die, which could be said about any of us all the time if we're honest.
There are a plethora (which I looked up, and it means, "a lot") of ways to keep tabs on each other. Facebook, IG, Twitter, TikTok, not to mention texting, phone calls or just following somebody around in a car like a psycho. Each method is valuable (and useless) in its own way. I'm choosing to write this and send it to you because I find it to be a comfortable level of intensity. If you read this, that's great and I hope you enjoy it. If you skim it and like the pictures or links, that's fun and fine also. If you choose to ignore it completely, no worries (fuck you - I say that knowing you won't have gotten this far anyway. It doesn't hurt me, and no hard feelings. What? You don't laugh?). The thing to remember while reading this, is I'm figuring it out as I go along. So if this appears clunky or disjointed that makes sense. I do and make a lot of things. I'd love to show all of them to you and hear what you think. However, I can't bring everyone to my studio or comp all your tickets to a show at a less-than-comfortable or convenient venue, so that's what I'm trying to offer. A glimpse into all that stuff. If you want to know more, you can simply ask and I'll tell you.
As mentioned above, you're getting this because you are or were a fan and supporter of what I do, if not now, at least at one point in time, and even if you dip out or rear-end a car after reading this paragraph, I want you to at least know that means a lot to me. After many years of trying to figure this out, my creative work is how I pay my bills. I'm not rich by any means, but I make art and do comedy for a living, and because of that I’m the best version of myself I've ever been. In my past, working jobs I felt trapped in and being involved in unhealthy relationships (for which I own my own portion) made me a difficult, unhappy person for far too long. I needed to go through all of that to gain the understanding I now have. In one way or another, large or small, you've been a part of that development and I appreciate it.
Under pressure, people reveal their true selves, like a drop of water on a microscope slide. The droplet on the glass looks one way before being put under the covers slip. When squeezed between the two surfaces, the behavior of the contents in the droplet doesn’t change, the pressure simply allows for a more accurate examination through the microscope. A crisis can compress you into doing and understanding what is truly in your nature to do. That's how I have come to the place in my life I am now. I took the scenic route, and I'm thankful for it.
I live in Austin, Texas currently, but I was in NYC for many years. From the time I arrived in 2007 until late 2019, I'd best describe what I was in as survival mode. I lived in a way that made long-term thinking and planning difficult to conceptualize. For more than a decade I lived in a mindset that I can now recognize as being perilous, and one that prioritized short-term gratification over delayed or deferred because of how chaotic day-to-day life was. Being able to zoom out from that now, although I was in charge of my own reactions to the events of my life, as we all are, I can see that my experience wasn’t unusual. In a lot of ways, mine was a semi-standard NYC experience, especially from the perspective of a non-native person moving there from far away, which again, is common, but no less real than my own. During those fast years, falling asleep exhausted, afraid, and anxious, I'd frequently envision myself as a man trying to build a life out of the wreckage of a ship he crashed into a foreign planet on. I had dozens of jobs, did hundreds of shows, and won $10K in a comedy competition.
I wrote (and illustrated) a book and released an album of stand up.
I had tremendous highs and desperate lows. Met wonderful people who became lifelong friends. I experienced love and loss, all while skimming the treetops and barely making rent every month, for years. I wouldn't trade the time I spent there, but most of it was best categorized as confusing, frustrating, and intense.
In late 2019 I was reeling from the collapse of a six-and-a-half-year relationship/ending of an engagement. My method of dealing with that was by doing a lot of pushups and making/performing a one-man show I wrote called, "Elsa".
The show centered around the origin, duration, and failure of that relationship, as well as a pet cat we had that got injured, which we helped to fix. The show was an examination of something that happens to people, not just to us, but a larger concept connecting to memory and love, and perception. It covered my experience up to that point pursuing comedy and an artistic life while trying to keep my head above water in New York. It was also my way of trying to understand the loss of important things in my life. Not only a relationship and a version of life that I loved and identified myself with but also the transformation of my very concept of love, as well as digging into how memory can't be trusted at face value. Sounds hilarious, I know. It did have a lot of comedy, but was very heavy, to be sure. It was (and remains) the best and most true stage performance I've ever created. I was on a trajectory to take the show to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival, in Scotland. A month-long performing arts festival where the plan was to run the show enough times to hammer the whole thing into its final shape, but the pandemic sent all that in another direction.
When everything shut down I didn't know what to do, much like the rest of the world. I had been making my living by performing and bartending, but neither of those was an option anymore. Before we knew what might happen with financial assistance, I decided to begin painting in my apartment in Astoria, Queens. I've always made art, but never thought to do it for money. This seemed like the only way I could think to generate some income. Using social media to update people on my process, I started painting a jellyfish on a black canvas I had been carrying from apartment to apartment for about 10 years. Before I finished it, it sold.
A Light In The Darkness, acrylic on archival board, 2020
I started another and that sold too.
Compass, acrylic on canvas, 2020
And another
Victory, acrylic on canvas, 2020
And another
Bloom, acrylic on canvas, 2020
After my 4th jellyfish painting sold, unemployment came into the picture. I was approached to make a large painting of an octopus. I had never done a large, detailed painting of that caliber, mostly due to the total focus I knew it would require. With the absence of distractions or options to perform, combined with the financial assistance removing the pressure, I gave it everything I had. I built and stretched the canvas in my apartment and chose to dedicate 100% of my focus to a painting like I never had before, curious to see what I could do. It took me more than a hundred hours, and along the way, I began live-streaming my painting sessions on Reddit, which had debuted a new feature called RPAN, short for Reddit Public Access Network. Late at night, listening to music and working on the painting people started joining in. A lot of people. At first, it was several hundred, then several thousand. I would speak to people as I worked. They would type questions to me and I would answer by speaking to the camera. It was a lot like doing crowd work or bartending. It got to a point where it wasn't unusual for me to have an audience of 10 to 15 thousand people at a time, and total session numbers in the hundreds of thousands. Regulars would tune in nightly to watch the progress of the octopus painting. They were with me the whole way and often saying such overwhelmingly kind and positive things that I was honestly at a loss for how to respond. I finished the painting live on Reddit.
Undeniable, Acrylic on canvas, 2020
The client who commissioned the painting loved it and had it shipped to their home in Washington DC. The people who followed along with the making of it on Reddit, as well as on social media asked about prints being sold. I had never done something like that, so I looked into it. This was a life-altering process for me. As I understood it, there are rich artists and broke artists. Rich artists are either lucky enough to be chosen by the art scene, or a trust fund type, often both. The rest are without hope of ever making any kind of living. One of the reasons I never wanted to do art for money. I used to give paintings to people as gifts, but I never considered selling my artwork because I didn't understand how to price it. If pricing by the hour then I'd need to charge a wildly high figure for it to make sense financially. The octopus commission was more than I had ever sold a painting for, but not proportionate to the effort or time I put in. However, I had the luxury of not needing it to be. The financial assistance I was getting during the early days of the lockdown allowed me to take my time and not worry about the paycheck. I was able to focus on pushing my ability and seeing what I could make. Like a rich kid! After doing research on prints, I found a shop in Brooklyn that made the highest museum quality giclée (a word I needed to look up) prints available. Each print cost about $100 to make. I set the price at $300. I took pre-orders and set a Limited Edition run of 25. All of them were sold in pre-order. In one day. When the final order was confirmed I sat on the floor in my apartment and forced myself to feel and remember that moment. It was emotional. It made me believe this could be something. I gained an understanding I never had before.
Soon I got another commission, this time for an owl. Again, I went all out and I made it while live-streaming on Reddit. Over 500k people saw the process that painting.
Archimedes, acrylic on canvas, 2020
And for a second time, I ran prints. This time 50.
All of the prints of Archimedes sold, and I continued painting. Still not really knowing what the end goal was. I've never thought of myself as a fine artist, and I've always been conflicted about being one, but that's a diatribe I'll save for another newsletter. I went back to jellyfish for my next painting. Streaming live and deciding to take all the time I needed, I gave this one waterfall edges. In the composition, I hoped I might capture the delicate balance of cooperation that I felt around me in the tentative streets of New York at that time.
One For All, All For One, acrylic on canvas, 2021
I ran prints of this painting. Limited Edition of 100.
I also offered a select number of Special Edition Embellished Prints with gloss and iridescent paint added by hand.
All of the Special Editions sold. There are still available Limited Editions (I got cocky) but I've sold out of my stock. So if you want one, let me know and I can add you to the waitlist.
Then I dove deep. I wanted to create a painting that embodied my 14 years of living in New York because I knew that time was coming to an end. The image of a peacock in a grove of cherry blossom trees came to mind one day. There's a much longer story to tell, but I'm already asking a lot of you here. I built a 6-foot by 4-foot canvas and designed a composition in a perfect rectangle using a geometric Fibonacci spiral. Then I spent 300 hours over about 3 months painting the most intense thing I had ever done before. It broke my heart to make that painting and I still feel uncomfortable being near it. In the end, over a million people watched the creation of Something of Emotional Significance.
Something of Emotional Significance, acrylic on canvas, 2021
I made prints of the painting, as well as Special Edition Prints with rose gold and silver leaf.
I was even able to make some full-sized Special Edition prints.
When I finished Something of Emotional Significance the pandemic had subsided to a degree. My lease on my apartment was ending. Stages were beginning to open and comedy was happening again. A kind of renaissance is taking place in Austin, so I crated up the peacock and I decided to move.
When I got to Texas I wanted to bookend the chapter of painting sea creatures and birds with a companion octopus painting. I wanted it to be an inversion of my first. Undeniable was brooding and ominous. I had come a long way in my artistic understanding and progression. I had seen light and hope as a result of all of that, and I wanted to make something that represented that idea. So I built and stretched the canvas. The same size as my first. I spent 300 hours spread over a sequence of months, most of which was streamed on Reddit to enormous audiences of people.
In the end, what I made was Revelation.
Revelation, acrylic on canvas, 2022
I made and sold Limited Edition (50) and Special Edition (25) prints.
You might have bought one of these and are waiting for it to be delivered. I appreciate your patience, it will get to you I swear. I'm still making the Special Edition, Hand Embellished ones. Prints are still available, but if you'd like one I'll need to add you to a waiting list. Just let me know if you're interested. Each of the prints will be accompanied by a digital certificate of authenticity in the form of an NFT, which will come later and have special features of its own. I will be rolling out a video series showing the step-by-step process of making this painting very soon.
I finished Revelation at the same time that Reddit decided to pull the plug on their experiment with live streaming. RPAN, the method by which I was showcased to literally millions of people, is no more. It taught me a lot of things, chief among them is to believe what I make is valuable to people. That took a proper sandblasting of positivity for me to understand, but it finally sunk in.
During these past couple of years, I’ve spoken to many friends of mine. They’ll often ask if I do art now instead of comedy. I tell them that I do art instead of bartending, which is the truth, and sometimes I have a hard time believing it myself.
In early 2022 I got a call almost the day after Russia invaded Ukraine. Not long after I went to Eastern Europe to do my 3rd tour doing stand-up comedy for the US Military and NATO forces.
No matter what happens in my career, I will always be amazed that I have been able to do those shows for those people. Nothing makes me prouder to be a part of, and every time I go I am driven to become more successful, and better as a comedian so I can give the audiences a bigger thrill the next time I perform for them.
I have more to tell you. Specifically, about the current projects I am working on, which are very fun and different from anything I have done before, but I need to wrap this up. In the next email, I will explain these last things in greater detail.
I'll leave you with these brief descriptions and photos:
This is painting number 2 of 8 in a series called, Time and Reflection.
Chucks
Polaroid painting 2, Series 1, 4X(original size).
13in x 15in
Acrylic on wooden panel, with epoxy resin glaze coat, nested in a handmade frame.
It and two others are sold, but 5 more will be available soon.
And
This is the first piece in a series called, Modern Romance.
Paramour
7”x3”x0.25”
Acrylic, colored pencil, and epoxy resin on wood.
This is a replica of a cell phone that I made entirely out of wood. I will explain more about this process and its purpose in the next newsletter.
Finally, I am posting the 1st page of an ongoing story that I'll be sharing only with the readers of this newsletter for the foreseeable future. I may only release one page at a time, or I might release more, but I won't be sharing them on my website or on social media. Only the recipients of this email will see what I am making for now. I'll post it after signing off, which I'll do now by saying once again, thank you. Not only for taking the time to absorb all of this but for being a fan, friend, or just a person in my life I know or have known. As mentioned earlier, we might not know each other well. Maybe we do. Maybe the nature of our relationship has changed over the course of time. Regardless of that, I want you to know that I wouldn't be the person I am today without you, and no matter how that relates to you and me, I mean that in a good way. I'm still figuring all of this out as I go along, but we all are. The conflict I have with myself these days is new to me because it's a hopeful conflict. I spend my days deciding how best to apply myself to work I understand, and work that matters to me. This was probably always available, but I don't think there are shortcuts to certain wisdom. I see possibilities and I enjoy what I do, even when it makes me mad. I feel like a fucking clown saying that, but it's simply the truth. I'm happy to not feel the crushing weight of aimlessly scratching around for a foothold. I know what I am doing now, or at least how to operate. It has been a long road, but I can finally see the way forward. You have helped me. If you are reading this, I do mean you personally. I'm thankful for you and I hope that by way of what I make and do with my life, and the things yet to come, I can help you be happier with yours as well. I'd like to. That's why I have stressed over writing this all down and sharing it with you. Because I mean it.
From Austin, Texas. Here's wishing you all the best.
Sincerely
Paul Oddo
I promise that these won't always be this long.
Here is the first page of the Call Of The Void
