Profiles in Fecundity

Until about a year and a half ago, Timmy Black was practically a non-entity within the conventional art world. He bounced around the world of adjunct professorships, held a few mid-level positions in the world of graphic design, did a fair amount of boilerplate illustration work and even did a short stint as an upscale au-pair for a family of diplomats. He did all this while maintaining a practice as a painter.

Timmy had a reputation among his colleagues for spending a lot of time drinking coffee in small, stuffy diners in downtown Los Angeles. He was something of a teetotaling Bukowski, warming worn out barstools and holding court like an exiled monarch. He was also known to be a good listener and whenever a fellow artist needed to get something off their chest, Timmy's ear was always available (so long as you would keep him flush with a few donuts).

When someone suggested that he use his formidable talents (including his talent for having lots of time on his hands) to create some sort of archive of art-related anecdotes, he laughed. Ambition, you see, is not exactly one of Timmy's signature traits.

Then, one day, as part of my work as executive director of the international artist collective The Plausible Deniability Project?, I scheduled a brunch with Mr. Black at Tito's, a small hole-in-the-wall near the Los Angeles River, a place whose unlikely specialty are plantain beignets. For some mysterious reason, I made the strange and invasive decision of bringing along one of those old-fashioned analog tape recorders.

I actually forgot about the recording until I returned to Paris a few weeks later. When I finally played the tape for my partner, the poet Charlotte Barghouzhi, I was struck by how fluid and compelling a storyteller Timmy is. Charlotte, whose fluency in social media practice is rivaled only by her incredible talent as a writer, suggested that we turn Timmy into a podcaster.

I'll confess that it wasn't easy prying Mr Black away from his pancakes but in the end, of course, we prevailed. The rest, as you know, is history as The Lives of Contemporary Artists has released, to date, over fifty episodes.

Many artists have reached out to us with their stories and we are thrilled by the engagement. We encourage anyone working in the creative community to share with us your ideas and your experiences as we look forward to expanding this improbable enterprise.