Meet Jimmy Mccaffrey

We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Jimmy Mccaffrey a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Jimmy, thanks so much for taking the time to share your insights and lessons with us today. We’re particularly interested in hearing about how you became such a resilient person. Where do you get your resilience from?

I’ve suffered with mental health challenges my whole life, struggled a lot academically but was fortunate enough to have an incredible family/ support system that guided me to partake in healthy outlets for instances when my emotions were too much for me to handle. In so many cases, both art and athletics save kids. When I struggled from recurring manic episodes in my late twenties, it was my passion for art that was initially responsible for improvement and growth. My artwork and creative exploration, at a time when I had nothing else to look forward to, helped me adopt a more resilient outlook in real time. Painting helped me to stay focused and motivated rather than continuing to spiral out of control. Painting kept me grounded. My confidence was restored little by little, I started to slowly trust my cognition again. That said, I still had a ways to go. I came to a very rocky bottom at the end of 2019 last into spring 2020 when I finally committed to get the help I needed in order to facilitate a recalibration or relearning of my very own person, meaning literally learning who I was, not who I thought everyone wanted me to be.

Great, so let’s take a few minutes and cover your story. What should folks know about you and what you do?

Yes, I would be interested. I recently put this short biography piece recently, which I think will be really helpful for the interview’s purpose! please see below:

I’ve always been an artist, the programming was just left on idle like an early 2000s trance-inducing screen saver… with that said, not until I was in my late 20s did I allow myself the freedom and self-respect to recognize and embrace my deep love for creating and engaging with other creative people. I never embraced my “otherness,” I felt that I’d be ostracized or that I would just spend too much time on something that I couldn’t make a living doing. I couldn’t open my own treasure vault because I wasn’t certain enough of what I might find, to be honest. I did very little besides play football from ages 9-22. I could run really fuckin fast, like unbelievably fast—and in our ironically dystopian achievement-based society, we are conditioned to find what we are BEST at and just never even explore anything else.
We are taught that winning and being the best is the aspiration, that’s the goal. But luckily, the fate has no horse in that race. As fate would have it, hitting a very low point in my life was a catalytic trampoline for embracing my love for activities that stoked my fire for improvisational creative expression.

At the end of 2018 I had a mental breakdown. At that point though, more than half a decade ago now, I was careening, with my mental health in a very bad way and worse, I couldn’t even mentally conceive a safe situation, in which I pursued a conventional career; not without the continued deterioration of my mind state. It became clear that working in corporate America exacerbated my symptoms and I was unable to effectively manage and subdue recurrent, intense bouts of mania, with acute bouts of severe depression. It is apparent in any photos of me from that period that I was extremely unwell. I was bloated, resentful, and aggressively pessimistic. I was completely addicted to everything…I was sick. Ignorantly and selfishly I had assumed the mindset of a man who didn’t have anything to lose. I was 28 years old and had just received
a very large commission for brokering a real estate transaction in December 2018. That was it— I was given enough rope to hang myself, and proverbially that is exactly what I did. I lived off that money for the next year. I spent on only a handful of things: books, sports betting, junk food, rent, tobacco, beer and an ungodly amount of art supplies. I got my pot for free. I had everything I needed to both numb and lose myself all at once. I became extremely reclusive. I lived alternating weeks between my apartment in Tribeca, drinking myself into an oblivion, both with and without the company of friends, and my escape home, at my grandparents house in Fall River, MA. I kept a chaotic studio in a barn at their house, which became my birthplace as an artist.

After facing his own mortality and enduring several bypass surgeries, my grandfather had eccentrically commissioned my uncle to build a big red barn for his cars. It was hyperbolic in nature, the placement, the scale, the color, none of it looked right. It was peculiarly positioned in the front yard, completely obscuring any view of their house—the barn was deep matte red and the house was dark green. The Christmas House. It was bizarre. But so was I. At the time I was unaware that the red barn was exactly the temple that I desperately needed to begin to heal myself. I painted in an unfinished loft upstairs above the garage portion. It was being used to store my uncle Joey’s belongings from his life post-divorce. I unintentionally covered so much of his shit in paint. I still feel awkward about that.

Although I was very sick throughout that 18-month period from late 2018 to early 2020, I took a deliberate approach to recovery and sought out the medicine I needed. I read 94 books in 2019, including every Pulitzer Prize novel from 1972 through present. That year changed the way my cynical mind viewed the world, which opened my heart to a vast array of new possibilities. In retrospect, it was a bonafide rewiring of my mind. In some respects, change was inevitable from ingesting that much quality literature over such a short period of time. Similar to hypnotic suggestibility, I allowed the creativity and greatness of those works to permanently alter my perspective of the world and the infinite number of abstract parallel worlds. In the autumn of 2019, I began painting abstract works which in many ways were raw, extremely intense regurgitations of my inner struggles, highlighted with accents of my newfound appreciation and gratitude for life’s offerings. With this newfound warmth, I developed a routine to maximize my time practicing art and creativity. It entailed staying up all night, every night, painting abstract series alongside oil portraits of my friends, writing and reading—almost like circuit training class but for expressing myself. These sessions only ended when I became so utterly exhausted that I would fall into these little “micro sleeps,” where I’d gloss over and momentarily shutdown for about 30 seconds and come to completely unaware of the context of my last thought. While I was painting at my grandparents’ barn, thankfully I drank far less than I did in the city. That said, I smoked a shitload because I still couldn’t tolerate myself at that point without a chemical lobotomy. Although I had only been painting for roughly 8 months and was less than a year removed from an intense mental health crisis with wide ranging repercussions, I began to see the light.

I could actually envision myself forging a path forward in the arts. I didn’t give a fuck. For the first time in my life I decided to admit that I needed help. I revealed the extent to which manic depression crippled my life and robbed me of my well being. Ironically, the word painting doesn’t exist without pain, and becoming an artist gave me a safe haven for me to bare mine. I always had something to say, gnawing at me, keeping me up, eating me alive and I never knew how to say it until I picked up a brush and expressed it all with little conscious thought and lots of cosmic intention.

The standards I set for myself on this new journey were unrealistically high and unhealthy. However, my attitude that nothing was ever good enough led me to experiment prolifically and wildly with the medium. I would lose myself in onslaughts of angry and euphoric paint slinging while testing everything about every medium and experiencing being humbled by severe trial and error. I built unique application tools from the materials in my grandfather’s printing shop—he had a little creative hovel where he worked his craft for decades and it was now annexed to the barn. I loved sleeping on the ground in his print shop. It wreaked of cigarettes and I fuckin loved it. Brought me back to better days when all I wanted to do was be like him. I was kid again, a man set free.
As far as my origin story, those are the focal points. I was sick, I worked very very hard to not be, now I’ve temporarily for 4.5 years succeeding a beautiful existence with my wife in the Mission. All started with the mindset that without the ability to shake off the “no,” I wouldn’t be resilient enough to get a grip on myself prevent the outcomes that are, to the further extent, super fucking dangers lol. manic and depressive episodes fuck up everything is worked for.

If you had to pick three qualities that are most important to develop, which three would you say matter most?

1)I work as hard as I possibly can physically and mentally to keep painting as medicinal anecdote..: for me it’s like a stimulant.
2) Trusting people early and often, even if it’s not the safest move. The more you trust the more open you can be. The more open you can be the, the more honest a dialogue can be.

Thanks so much for sharing all these insights with us today. Before we go, is there a book that’s played in important role in your development?

I have two:,

“Ninth Street Women”
“Just Kids” Patti Smith

Both books reinforced the same thing to me personally. They acted as sparks to my already huge desire to express myself. But before reading these two books, I never had seen or read firsthand accounts from artists who were still alive and famous enough to tell the tale. These stories of Hartigan and Frankenthaler and Lee fucking Krasner and what the abstract women like that sacrificed for the great good of their artwork and their peers. That movement was fucking heroic and so was Patti Smith. Both of these biographical but very well written and interesting anecdotally, reinforce my now favorite art quote by Ralph Waldo Emmy— “The artists must be sacrificed to their art. Like the bees, they must put their lives into the sting they give”….that changed the outlook for me in 30 seconds or less.

Image Credits

Andy Antezana our gallery manager at strike slip took one of them of me making the trash collage