Arturo, 2008

Arturo, 2009.

Oil on Canvas, 48" x 36.

This is a portrait of my dear friend Arturo. It was a gift for his 60th birthday. I wish the image was better but he wanted it before I could shoot it properly. I can't stress how important it is to take good images of your work BEFORE it leaves your studio. 

I worked on this one for about three months, and it is my first portrait in a decade. I asked Arturo to think of someone he loved when I took the reference photos for the painting and I think I captured an interesting mood. He refers to the piece as," The new me. What I aspire to be."

I was playing around with Robert Doak's Flemish white and copal medium(among many other ingredients). If you've never been to Doak's place, you must spend an afternoon over there. The man knows his painting and his Flemish White recipe has been written about and celebrated by artists like John Currin. I learned more about oil painting from him in two hours than at 5 years at the Museum School.

I used many applications of thin fleshtone washes mixed with lead glass powder which I think adds a luminosity to the skin especially on the right cheek and the contour lines around the head.

In the end I see this as a portrait of punk, as Arturo was witness to its birth and its ups and downs.

The Simulacrum

Drums and Roses, 2009.

oil on canvas, 18" x 14".

Fuck Plato, Nietzsche, and Baudrillard, distortion, truth, and the hyppereal. When I attempt to copy reality, or in this case depict a performative idea, the painting is subservient to the process of painting. The process of painting has a consecrative impact, a crystallization. My goal as a painter is that the copy, the depiction of reality, should resonate with an afterglow of discourse and meditation.

Self Portrait in Autumn, 2009.

Self Portrait in Autumn, 2009.

oil on canvas, 18" x 24".

A self portrait I completed in Spring 09. I'm portrayed sitting in a art nouveau bed and breakfast in Atlanta, GA. I like the mood of this one but it's a bit weird. Most people ask what the brass fireplace cover is. Since I've never seen one before I don't take that question personally, however it is a bit discouraging. 

My favorite area is the front corner of the bed. This kind of accidental moment can really make a painting. One of my teachers at SVA, Jake Berthot, used to try an emphasize being sensitive to moments like this and leaving them alone. I ran into Jake at the Turner show at the MET a few weeks before I went to Australia to score and paint a sunrise on the opposite side of the Earth which made me feel like the trip was blessed. 

My cousin Katy, who is a poet, sent me this quote after a night on the roof of the studio.

"We're made so that we love

First when we see them painted, things we have passed
Perhaps a hundred times nor cared to see;
And so they are better, painted--better to us,
Which is the same thing. Art was given for that;
God uses us to help each other so,
Lending our minds out."
--R. Browning, "Fra Lippo Lippi"

Static Age, 2006.

Static Age, 2006.

oil on canvas, 24" x 18".

Just a couple of American boys sitting in there car listening to music, this painting is based on my love of the language of punk. During my adolescence it was my sacrament. The CD the soldiers are listening to is a re-issue of The Misfits Static Age album. 

This is the static age we live in

Our eyes criss-cross, hold and gaze

This is the static age we live in

The painting is based on a photograph taken by my friend Jon Bush. John and I bartend together every Thursday and often talk shit about our music likes and dislikes. In 2004/2005 Jon went on tour with The Vandals to Iraq. He had all sorts of photographs of soldiers and band members hanging out in Saddam's palaces, and holding automatic weapons. But I liked this photo of the guys hanging out in a Humvee. I added the CD. 

The painting was first exhibited in a show curated by Joshua Altman at Stux Gallery, and then in a show curated by Dina Pugh at Jack Hanley Gallery in San Francisco. 

This painting has been described as photo-realistic which I think is funny because most of the painting was done with my fingers, and a rubber tipped eraser brush. Note the folds on the main soldiers leg. I think you can see a four fingered swoop. This painting was made rather quickly, about a week.

Skater, 2006.

Skater, 2006.

oil on canvas, 14" x 18".

This painting was based on a photo I took one summer afternoon in Thompkins Square Park. A bunch of skate rats were riding a rail they put in the center of a basketball court. There was an amazing light which I have not seen since. I tried to capture the light through the leaves by using my finger tips to erase streaks of under paint in the background. Fingers are a painters best tool. I then softened the streaks with a large soft watercolor brush. I have about ten of these of different sizes in my arsenal and use them all the time. 

If you think about painting in terms of athletics, I felt like I was in top form when I made this. It took two sessions and it has a economy of mark making that I don't have unless I've been painting a lot. It felt effortless. The only other way I can describe it is in terms of music. If I've been playing a lot of guitar, I feel a certain fluency in expressing myself through my fingers. Unfortunately I have not been painting a lot in the past few weeks, and I feel out of shape.

Edvard Munch, directed by Peter Watkins, 1976

Right up there with John Maybury's Love is the Devil as one of the best artist biopics I have seen(I thought Basquiat was dissapointingl). The film chronicles Munch's life through a narrated montage of flash backs. Much of the narration is taken from Munch's comprehensive journals in which he refers to himself in the third person.

Watkin's seems heavily influenced by James Joyce in his powerful use of free association. While painting The Sick Child Munch re-imagines his own illness, holding hands with a lover, smoky bar scenes and so on. I found the pacing to be very much like the way my mind wanders.

It is interesting how vilified and defamed his work was throughout his career. Critics considered him a madman and a degenerate. But he had a major influence on a generation of artists and writers. I really enjoyed revisiting his self-portraits , areas of focus, like the face, perfectly rendered, backgrounds sketchy and scratched. 

I think I'm going to steal Rose's copy or buy my own.

Two Men At Twilight, 2007.

Two Men At Twilight, 2007

oil on canvas, 48" x 36".

This was my contribution to Dan Cameron's Unsung at Nicole Klagsbrun gallery in March 2007. It remains one of my favorite paintings and offered many challenges and rewards. The title is based on a Caspar David Friedrich painting Two Men Contemplating the Moon. I chose to undertake this homage to Friedrich after visiting a psychic in an attempt to contact dead romantic artists. An essay about my psychic experience was published in Peter Gregorio's Vector. 

According to intuitive consultant Steven C. Robinson, Friedrich has a psychic hand pushing me towards the canvas as I paint. This painting was an attempt at creating a contemporary vision of Romanticism. My version is based less on the beauty of nature, and more on an existential vision of fleeting moments of fellowship, the magic hour, and the simultaneity of good and evil, existential romanticism. I was looking at a lot of Max Klinger at the time. 

Abandoning my affections for magical realism which I enjoyed immensely during my twenties, It has become my imperative to portray crystalline moments of magic in the every day.

One of what I consider the successes of the painting is the rendering of the cemetery grass. The under painting was the most ugly mustard yellow you can imagine. Feeling possessed, I had no idea why I chose this color, and I was feeling that the painting was going to be an ugly failure. Luckily, through my patient layering of glazes, a process which I call a retrograde striptease, I was able to transmogrify the pigment and medium into grass. I do feel that this process is alchemy, and this is my attraction to this form of realist painting. Often times I'll work as if in a delirium, blindly fumbling my way through a painting, suffering through moments of self doubt and ecstasy. It is this process which attracts me to painting.

Critics of painting and realist painting do not understand this process or art because they have never suffered and broken this fever.