Richard Negri: Art as shared freedom

It’s late Friday in Ojai, and the workweek’s finally cooling off. The union training program I help run has been prepping all day for a big event, but my part is mostly done—ish. The phone could still ring with some contractual or jurisdictional fire. I light a cigar, pour another cup of black coffee straight from the pot, and put on the paint-stained apron my wife gave me for Christmas.

Last time I bought supplies, the cost was covered by a single painting sale. I remind myself of that as I grab a 16×20 canvas. Sure, I hope they sell. But what I really want is for someone out there to feel what I felt—to see the joy of being alive in color and motion. I think about how art isn’t only freedom for the one who creates, but for the one who receives it. Creation as defiance. The dialogue between artist and audience as liberation. It gets heady fast, but it’s what keeps me painting.

I put on my YouTube mix called “Paint me, man.” Mostly jazz from before I was born—Mingus, Grant Green, Blakey—the kind of swing that insists you keep breathing. I play a lot of it on bass myself. The algorithm slips into Cuban revolutionary songs, and somehow that always feels right. Then “Chitlins Con Carne” comes on and I laugh, remembering the solo I once obliterated in front of a packed house in L.A. a few years back.

Brush in my left hand, black paint loaded—it feels good, like holding a page with a good poem already hiding in it. No texts. No emails. “I love this shit,” I say to no one.

It had been a long, brutal week—ICE raids, friends tear-gassed at protests, another headline that bent reality toward despair. The face emerging on the canvas looks tired too. I tell her I love her. Grab red acrylic, fling it left-handed, then roll over it. It makes me laugh—always does. Anarchist. “F** you, I’m in charge.”* Painting without rules, audits, or permissions feels like privilege—and salvation.

A friend and collector in Florida, Courtney, once bought a piece like this. I text her a photo:

"Finished or not yet started?” She replies, “Sit with it, man. Let the painting tell you when she’s done.” My wife glances in: “DON’T TOUCH IT. I LOVE IT. IT’S DONE.” Wow. Just wow.

Next morning—groceries, acupuncture, croissants—I come back to the studio. “I just love you,” I tell the painting. She stays quiet. I open Instagram, think of a poem, maybe a caption about politics or resistance—nothing fits. So I write the story, sip coffee, and post it.

By afternoon there’s an email from a woman back East. She tells me about her younger self in the West Village—poetry readings, protests, the red beret she rocked while sipping coffee like it was an act of rebellion. She says the painting pulled her back into that version of herself—the one who believed art could still make beautiful trouble. She bought it. I shipped it that day.

That exchange stays with me. Right now, radical resistance isn’t always about marching in the street. Sometimes it’s the quiet, audacious act of imagining and making—art, music, writing—in a world that keeps trying to flatten imagination. So many people sit in uneasy solitude, afraid of being erased or misunderstood. Art becomes a small, stubborn rebellion against cynicism and despair.

I’ve come to see art as shared autonomy—a relationship built on imagination, not possession. A painting can be a key out of the everyday prison: bills, news cycles, politics, pain, the ache of history repeating itself. In that shared space between maker and viewer, we breathe cleaner air. We remember that being alive has worth beyond survival.

Everything I make carries that thread. Whether anyone names it or not doesn’t matter much. What matters is that I feel it—entirely.Art as an act of freedom: mine, and theirs.