Interview by Jeffrey Gillespie
for Lutinous, December 2007 ©

photo by Enrique Sotomayor

Q: What is your sense of who the audience is for your work?

I'm only really aware of who the audience isn't.... Some time ago, conservative persons liked figurative or representational art, and it was the Manhattan sophisticates who liked deKooning. Nowadays, superficially similar abstract-expressionist works are called for to coordinate with Lazy-Boys and Pottery Barn artifacts, while critics' darlings are John Currin, etc.

Q: What is your context? Do you feel an affinity with other specific artists, and if so, why? I know you cite John Currin as an inspiration as well as a few others (Freud, Schiele, Klimt) could you speak to that?

Skill is a good thing. I like it when someone is capable of saying "hmm... just because I made this doesn't mean it's all that great. Let's try again!"- not being necessarily satisfied with a first attempt. This stuff is hard and it takes a long time to get right. You've got to wonder, "Do I really need to bring this into the world?"... or you can be so totally prolific that it doesn't matter what you do, because something good will eventually happen by default.

Q: You left art school despite having been given full scholarship, why? What do you feel that has done for the work?

I always had strong drawing skills but I could not get my head around painting, so I "made up" my own technique of putting on paint; happiness ensues.

School is impossible for me for a few reasons! When subjected to institutional environments I get these racing, obsessive, crazy dialogues going on in my head, so I go out somewhere and sleep in my car.

Q: What is your standard for evaluating your own creative work and the work of other people?

Everything derives from my complete reactionary nature and sensitivity to extrinsic properties. I often say that I'm not really a creative person- I'm a critic just looking around and being judgmental. Not a single thing I do is new- each new thing is merely a new iteration of some old thing I admire. In art school people were annoying, always posing (frostily) and writing pretentious artist statements, wracking their brains for something New to do. Terrific, do whatever you want. I'm like Tigger, bouncing on people's heads. I'm going to paint pictures of my friends. Let's be intellectuals some other place, since visual art is suboptimal for this.

Q: What do you think of the notion that creativity is linked to madness?

Oh, no. It is sad, I feel so much embarrassment on the behalf of those folks who embrace this stereotype. I know people who have deliberately done mad (stupid) things in order to induce madness and thus amplify their street cred.

Which is crazier- actually having a problem or thinking having a problem is a good idea? Actually, maddening things come on down the road without too much help- all these bland, artless people we don't want to become put immense effort into getting and staying that way. Artists should focus simply on adding to their oeuvre!

Q: How did the idea for "The Olympians" come about?

It is a good place to begin: it has been done so much before, it is a pretext to paint nudes, and it allows to me to have shows with such titles as "The Wisdom of the Ancients". Olympians are vigorous, good-looking, and kick-ass, and represent essences of important things. Painting navel-gazing, withered, dirty nihilists doesn't interest me, since I am a navel-gazing, withered, dirty nihilist! Sort of like Toulouse-Lautrec and the whores, so the story goes.

Q: In making your art do you start with the materials or the form?

Everything is planned completely, and I know how it will look because of my expectations of the technique. When the work is complete, 77% of the piece is accidental or incomplete compared to what I had in mind, because I get impatient or run out of energy.

Q: You are also an accomplished musician, could you speak a little bit about how that informs your visual art and vice-versa?

Music is more powerful to me, perhaps because I don't understand it as well, but it exhausts itself in a certain way which is not good.

Q: Also if possible, could you speak a little bit on the idea of how "removing things" informs your process, whether it be from an expanse of sound or from a visual work?

Subtraction seems to be my personal life theme. These paintings are done by starting with a panel with paint on it, then taking away, ala Michaelangelo and marble; with music, volume dynamics and short works with undeveloped motifs predominate; when I am desolate, I throw things away or do something funny to my diet and live monastically and minimally. When I succeed and become preeminent, I abdicate.

Q: As a dealer I have always viewed the nude as the epicenter of art since antiquity and find the movement away from identifiable form to be most disconcerting, I always saw Pollock et al as rapists rather than as artists. What is your feeling on staying with the figurative nude despite the trend towards what I have heard you refer to as "decorative hay"

There's a trend in evolutionary biology, I suppose, called paedomorphism, which is a trend easily seen in domestic animals. Before I go on I must point out I have absolutely no idea what I'm talking about. Anyway, adult domestic animals resemble the babies of their wild counterparts. Humans are like this. Human adults are ever more child-like, adults reading comics and playing video games, or grown women with pigtails, for example. I see people here in Portland biking around in Dog suits. All I can say is that, whatever is on the cutting edge is there probably because it is playful or fosters a juvenile sensibility. This of course is presupposing we will continue to become more paedomorphic. Currin's work is mischievous. My guess is religious art, if it is to survive, would have to become more playful or juvenile, which perhaps explains the rise of "Christian Doom Metal" music, etc. Decorative hay incorporated into crafts is terrific because it reminds us of Kindergarten.

Q: Do you believe that brutality is a relevant inspiration to art? That the deconstruction of women applied by Picasso and others is about fear of women or about fear of tradition?

I seriously doubt Picasso was afraid of women. Picasso was very inspired by tribal masks, which are heavily apotropaic, like gargoyles presenting an image of evil for the purpose of warding off evil. Like Sigmund Freud, the very fact that so many people want to take Picasso down a notch bespeaks his relevance (and he was relevant because his work was).

Q: What is your opinion of Maximalism in art, of artists returning to the old Florentine ways of painting, including going so far as to grind their own paints?

I'm glad there is renewed interest in how people used to do things.

Q: Do you think that sculpture is important for a young artist prior to moving into painting, because it teaches form?

I have not sculpted a single thing since silly-snakes in elementary.