You grew up here in Lexington.

Yeah, my great-great grandfather built this rocking chair. He was a carpenter here. He built it, and my great-great grandmother rocked 9 kids in it. My grandmother had it reupholstered because I think you could see through the bottom. Many generations on my mom's side, and my dad's mom's side. 

Congratulations on the show, John. Tell me about it.

Last summer, my wife Jenny and I went out to Oregon for the first time in a long time, our longest road trip since we had kids thirty-four years ago. Since Jerry Garcia died. We saw my brother and his wife and kids — we hadn't seen all of them in years — and friends in Portland and friends and family up and down the Oregon coast. And the artist Laura Lee Cundiff gave us a tour of a handful of really cool beaches with big crazy rocks. It was nice to have an excuse to touch base with everybody and cruise the coast like we used to when we followed The Dead around. I took a whole bunch of pictures of Oregon and thought, I'm gonna go do an Oregon coast show. And this year is kind of a victory lap of a forty-year career in art where I didn't say no to anybody, as much as I could help it. Especially if it was for good causes.

What does that mean — you didn't say no?

I did everything I could. Drawing, painting, block prints, signs, banners, posters, menus for restaurants, birth announcements for friends, tattoo designs. Paying for car repairs by doing pointed political cartoons for the owner of the repair shop. I only did that a couple of times, then I thought, this old ass Volvo isn’t worth it. (Laughs) I’ve done tons of stuff for poets and poetry.

Forty years is a long time to be saying yes.

The first twenty of those forty years we had young kids and I had a day job. I was an art director at a TV station, and I would do block prints when I could because that's what I majored in. And I minored in graphic design at U.K. Took me thirteen years to get a four-year degree. I flunked out, travelled around, worked at lumberyards in Nashville and Los Angeles. Then a friend dragged me to a Dead show and I loved it, then I went to another and Bob Dylan played with them. I just fell in love with the Dead and started hitchhiking around. And I saw people selling really crappy artwork. And I thought, well, I could do that, and that's how I got back into art, borrowing ink and paper and making handmade (cassette) tape covers for people and sold them (at the shows), eventually finding my way to screen printing. 

What about Oregon is significant for you?

Not having been to the West Coast very much, and then just falling in with a bunch of freaks and hippies. This family of Deadheads from Connecticut had rented a Penske moving truck for a day in Massachusetts, and they picked me up hitchhiking in Idaho, I think, and we went to Oregon and it was just magical. The trees, the rock formations, the people, and all the little weird buildings tucked into the hillsides, you know, I fell in love with the place. The light is different. And Oregon seems like a perfect combination of Kentucky and Northern California. So, it was a nice excuse to go back and spend time with these pictures to inspire the paintings. My brother wants one, so he gets first pick. He has lived out there for quite a while in Newport, Oregon, and he lent me money to build a studio garage years ago. I built a whole building by myself. So, he always believed in me when he was alone in that. 

He’s older?

Emotionally, yes. He's three years, three months, three weeks and three days younger. But he’s more mature. And then my two boys are four years and four days apart.

Did your sons ever travel with you to The Dead shows?

The older one went to thirteen dead shows by the time he was 4, and then Jerry Garcia passed away and we all had to go get jobs. (laughs) We were doing pretty good selling my artwork on t-shirts, just screen printing at campgrounds. That's how Homegrown started — screen printing on t-shirts in hotel rooms, and campgrounds, and parking lots.

What was on the t-shirts?

A bunch of different things. Art of mine, some of them Dead-centric. Like an ink drawing I made of Jerry Garcia with a million things in his hair. We made stickers of that, and I think we made 50,000 of them over several years, me and my friends. We traded them as much as we sold them, so we never had to buy a hot dog or a beer or a falafel in Grateful Dead parking lots. The whole thing really opened up my mind and, you know, everybody's got trauma from their youth, so it was fun to dance it out in Calaveras County, out in the dusty hills with Santana playing with the Dead and seeing all kinds of things you've never seen before. Feeling like Dorothy, everything's in color, all of a sudden. There's a guy wearing a giant turtle shell, and people walking around with boa constrictors and just hanging out in Santa Cruz. Weirdness, beauty and cultural history all up and down the coast. I would like to spend more time doing that.

In the center of the studio was a painting in progress from that Oregon trip — a landscape of trees framing a view to the ocean and a sky of swirling blue and white strokes. It’s featured at the entrance at LuigART Studios.

What's your medium here?

It's all acrylic. I've taken forever to learn what I'm doing because I studied print making. I didn't study painting, and I don't like learning the rules of things. You know, I had to be kind of an Irish contrarian, ignoring advice so as to be able to clearly hear the voice of the muse.

Tell me about this painting. Is it part of the show?

It’s one of them. There are 16 paintings I've been working on for months.

But how do you choose what to paint?

You try to see into the future. Which is what you try to do with politics and art and investing and everything. You try to see what would be more successful, what's gonna play to your strengths or what's gonna be a challenge. I've gotten to where I kind of don't mind trying anything. This show is divided into the Oregon Coast series in the front gallery and then in the back are several pieces from my Iceland show and from my Last Full Moon Poem show.

Yes! Tell me about the full moon poem.

It was a long poem and it became a song, but two to four lines from it were painted across each of 25 canvases. Many friends of mine got pieces of that, which I love. That connective tissue between us. And then there's a block print of the whole poem. I had to carve it in backwards and it’s ninety lines. And it's a song about my death and funeral, or the death and funeral of some creative type, about being confused by not being able to work my body, but then my mind can still fly out and go on a hunt, like it does when you're doing some creative process. Like when I sit on my front porch, and there's a nice view of the neighbor's trees, and I sit there and stare at them and just kind of send my brain out, searching. Especially when I'm working on my novel, I just send it out searching for ideas, words, lines, designs. So, it's kind of like the creative process, and the positive hope that it might continue on beyond death. In the song, my mind becomes a hawk, sailing out, looking for food, looking for ideas. But I’m ready for my hawk to hunt for musical ideas. I’m ready for it to bring me what I need to finish my novel off right. Bobbie Ann Mason, Silas House, and David Arnold are dear friends of mine, and they all read it and separately gave me pretty much the same feedback, which was cool. VERY cool. So, I have a lot more work to do, and I'm really excited to do it, and I'm keeping their advice and things they said in my head, ready to go. But I've got to buy a new laptop first, because my old one's dying. So I need to have this show. And then I need to stop saying Yes to visual art. I also need to finish my stop-motion film

A stop-motion film?

Yeah, sometimes it's stuff moving around in my old gallery, down on North Lime, by the old donut shop. It started, I think, when I was across the way, where Arcadium was, and then I couldn't afford that place anymore, moved across the street, so the stop-motion movie followed the painting of that building, and moving into it. And then I had a 25th anniversary for Homegrown Press, where I had an hour before to set up. So, I just push-pinned a bunch of my posters from events I'd done and stuff, all over the wall. And then some friends came over drinking after gallery hop that night, and I started moving things around, and moving the people around, and they were doing silly things, and so it became a giant mural of a whale made from my posters and prints moving around and transforming on the wall. So, the stop-motion movie goes through all that and more. There are dream sequences where I have a foot-long beard and I'm running through Raven Run, being chased. There's a dream sequence where I'm dancing with the inestimable Melissa McCart Smith in the greenhouse at Michler’s that got taken out by the tree. All the clips and pieces and raw photos on my computer, on an external hard drive. So, I want to finish that before I die. That's my only deadline. (Laughs)

Death is definitely a deadline.

I really, really want to leave stuff behind for kids, for young people that want to be creative. The world isn't really going, Yeah, do that. That's fine. That's a good thing to do. I’d like to share what I've learned. Maybe write a nonfiction book about being an artist and how I've gotten to hang out with people I loved and admired because I did artwork, because I didn't say no. Including Wilco and a ton of Kentucky writers and Larkspur Press, and cool restaurants, and a hard cidery in the mountains of Virginia. This year, because I couldn’t say no, I did the poster for Wilco at the Burl, and my son's wedding invitation — which is probably the best thing I've ever done. [It’s] probably the last thing I'll ever do in ink, because I'm getting old and shaky and ink is difficult.

When you said, "because I couldn't say no," I immediately associated that with a negative thing.

I consider it a challenge. Every once in a while, I make decent money. Every once in a while, somebody, because they could, would pay me decently for projects. But a lot of times, I've done stuff just because it's a good thing to do, and it makes society better. You know, some artists rail against artists who do stuff for free, but it's not always just money that you get in the bargain, though we won’t talk about “exposure”.

I think a lot of artists understand that. But it’s hard.

I've spent a lot of years hiding from studio landlords, then hustling and selling paintings for a quarter of what they're worth, just so I can pay my bills. And it's been a heart shaking stress pretty much ever since I quit my day job. This is a great city for being friends with artists and creative people. But you could maybe live in a better city for people buying your art, though that’s maybe just my experience. But back to the paintings. I have this thing I’ve been doing off and on for years, but much more purposefully lately, where, at the end of the day of painting landscapes, I still have paint left on the palette there. (Lackey gestures toward a pedestal by the easel which holds a mountain-shaped blob of layers and layers of paint.) You can see it's built up over years. So, at the end of the day, I have a bunch of paint left, and I don't want to just scrape it off and throw it away, so, I take a blank canvas, and a big brush, and just go nuts, so I can go home. And so it's led to this show of abstract surreal paintings, which I will be showing next month in a two-man show with the very talented Graham Pohl at Artists’ Attic. Goes up in September.

At the TV station, you were a full-time employee, presumably with health and other benefits. Can you talk about what you have sacrificed by choosing to live a life as an artist?

The people at the TV station were great people to work with. I see them now, years later, and I love those people. We were going towards a common goal, and we wanted quality, and after I quit, every time I'd see a bad lower third on the TV, it pisses me off. (Ed. note: A “lower third” is the term for the graphic design on the lower third of a screen that is often used by news programs that includes text and graphics.) I’d almost want to go down there and do some stuff for them for free! But in trying to be an artist for a living, who took projects because they were good for people and community and not necessarily good for money, I’ve endured just a lot of stress. 

How do you manage stress?

I trail run, but it's starting to beat me up. Also, I paint. That’s the big one. I’m hoping I get the same thing out of writing and making music. I think I will.

I'm trying to figure out what you haven't done. Let's see. Poetry, music, painting, print making, fiction writing, filmmaking, or animation, graphic design. Do you sculpt?

A friend was in town for Wilco, and he asked if I’ve ever done sculpture. I said, if I could clone myself, that'd be one of the first things I would do. But I'm never gonna have time before I die, probably.

You’ve mentioned death a couple of times.

I had so many friends die during the pandemic. Two thirds of the creative mentors and friends that I've had in my life have died in the past ten years. When I was young, I used to read those poems in The New Yorker, and it'd be some old poet writing about dead friends or a dead wife or something, and I'd think, who wants to read this stuff? And now it's kind of my job. Because I can. I can help soothe. I can pay tribute to creative people I know and love who slip or are slipping these earthly bonds. And the other thing is, I've been making art for everybody in this town forever. I mean, there's tons and tons of things I've done. I can't even remember. I don't look back very much. People don't say much about the art, but these days, I put up those poems on Facebook, just kind of lamenting what we're all lamenting, or trying to make sense of stuff, or pour something out, so I don't just lay there and have a heart attack in the middle of the night. And then I have people come up whenever I go out to a bar, or a show, and just very seriously get in my face, and look me in the eyes and say things like, I can't tell you how much I love and appreciate your poetry, and then half the time they tell me they love me. It feels like it's communicating with people, it's doing something for people. And I'm trying to maybe come up with a philosophy that could be helpful to people that don't ascribe to religions to tell them what to do. Just a way for the world to go a little better. I mean, it's hard to communicate, especially these days. It's hard to communicate with visual art. And I got a little time here. I want to make an album. It's been fun working on this novel for most of the past 18 years. So, I get to understand what my writer friends go through. I get to walk around in their shoes, and I love that, you know? I want to understand. I mean, most people don't understand what artists go through. This is a privilege.

Is it possible that putting it on Facebook is the reason it’s getting such good responses? As opposed to putting it in a book, where the audience might be smaller.

In a perfect world, I wouldn't do it, but the world's beating it out of me. I'm laying awake in the middle of the night, freaking out. But quite a few people keep bugging me to make books. Plus, if we do Homegrown Press, a real press, I get to make the covers. So, I want to have a real press, and it would give Jenny an excuse to work with our grown sons, which, I mean, she smiles at me sometimes, but not the way she smiles at her sons. 

That's lovely.

Yeah.