they were saying. If I couldn’t, my mind wandered out the door. Although I drew for years, what I really wanted to do was paint. Miró and Kandinsky are two of my favorite painters, so I assumed that since I already drew in the abstract, I would paint in the abstract. But no matter how many times I tried, I could never connect with it, I just didn’t find it as satisfying as drawing. Yet I wanted to paint. I wanted to paint so badly that for two years I used paint-by-numbers. I loved the process of brushing paint on canvas and completed almost twenty of them: flowers in vases, flowers in fields, ballet dancers, pianists, you name it. It never occurred to me that I might like painting real-life objects as opposed to abstract pieces. When Mike Shine arrived that night in that dingy beach motel and coerced me into taking on the brush in this new way, it opened a chapter in my life that I didn’t know was there to open. He not only encouraged me to paint alongside him during our four motel visits, he encouraged others. During that same week we threw a few small impromptu dinner parties inside the various rooms he was staying in. Mike encouraged all of us to participate in group paintings which let us play like children. On one occasion we produced a painting of Captain Crunch and on another the Nestlé Drumstick ice cream cone. It was pure, stupid fun. Mike presented painting as something that can be done loosely and playfully and without a lot of heady thinking. He made it accessible and attainable. I mean, painting Captain Crunch and an ice cream cone? Can it get any less serious? Yet, serious it became. Because had someone like a tarot card reader or a clairvoyant told me during that crazy week of guerrilla painting that in a year and a half I’d be showing my own paintings of real-life objects, I would have told them they were nuts. It would have made no sense to me on any level. I had no idea that Mike’s actions had lit a fuse inside of me. The day he left town I began painting and I didn’t stop. I couldn’t stop. I painted on any materials I could find: chunks of cement, large flat rocks, driftwood I found lying on the beach, old plywood and finally thick fibrous paper, which is where I eventually landed. I painted every day, some times eight hours a day. I got so much joy out of it that I lost myself in it. In one seven-month period I completed over ninety paintings. I wasn’t doing this to set a land-speed record, I was doing it because it made me feel good and it made me feel connected. And then one day Gina, the woman I’m lucky enough to spend my life with, suggested I start painting images of my skateboard collection. I have an extremely rare collection, one of the most rare collections in the world dating back to the beginning of the sport, with homemade boards and repurposed roller skate trucks and wheels. But my collection had been sitting in darkness and unseen for decades. Even though it was something I had wanted to share with the world, I couldn’t find the venue to do so. She suggested painting individual pieces of it might be a way to share it. At first I thought it was a bad idea but then it began to grow in me and I decided to give it a shot. This was mid-September 2023. By February of the following year, a gallery owner named Charles Smith asked to show those very same paintings in his gallery not far from my home. And then a year later another show with gallerist Charles Adler in Santa Monica, and then group shows in Venice Beach, Hermosa Beach, Japan and then in Orange County at the Ohana Festival. This crazy journey that suddenly sprung up in my life unexpectedly and without any advance warning at all began as the result of my allergic reaction to an ugly little motel room in a tiny town on the coast of California. No. 150 STACY PERALTA, GINA MIKKELSEN, COOPER SHINE
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