1. Were you painting it for a buyer, or for yourself?
I am in process most of the time. I have been commissioned, but it’s usually somebody who really knows my style and knows what they’re gonna get. I spent a lot of time on works that have a more realistic look; paintings in my style which may feel impossible, but I’m very confident I can go into a situation where I paint for hours and deliver something I like — painting on ceramics for a benefit. I mean, I love painting large ceramic plates, or painting live, which I’ve done only a few times. I hate that. I think it’s the worst thing ever, but it’s landed me experiences that I could not have planned: meeting my son’s mother, for instance, painting live, having the drunks paint on the art, and then telling her I could easily come back the next day and fix it.
And then other times I’m just flipping through the stacks where I’ll paint one painting after another and just lay them out all over the floor to dry. I don’t have a drying rack in my small studio. I paint by taking one color and going through all the stacks and adding it where I think it needs to be. And then also, lately, because in the last 10 years I’ve had to limit the number of large paintings, I started working on paper and old vinyls, for my very first painting assignment at SMCDAA from 1994–1997.
2. What does a rough edge do that a clean edge doesn’t?
That’s a tough question. What does a rough edge do that a clean edge doesn’t? Those edges happen from tearing and moving art around. A lot of my art gets beat up in the process of taking it to the street and back, or in this case moving. I bundled stacks — a provenance. I like the process of making lots of pieces at once. Once I get started I don’t like to stop, and I work in a way that doesn’t really enjoy doing one piece at a time — although I have done it in a way where I’ll take a part of the painting that I’ve been working on a long time and then just focus on creating something, a shape, a figure, an object. But yeah, it’s just a tool.
3. What did you understand about this piece in Montreal that you didn’t understand when you started?
OK, I like this question. I have exactly been making work like this for 30 years. I think I’ve improved, or I’ve had more practice getting in the zone, and what I really love about this series that I did is that I really got into flow. I won’t say a trance, but I really disappeared when I started working through these pieces. I don’t know what it is, but at the beginning — maybe because I’d never spent so much time in a cold, dark place (Quebec City) — a funny story: my son’s mother got me a storefront built in the 1840s, and I filled that sucker with art in six months! I painted all the paneling, I painted on every piece of canvas. I’d basically just cover the walls with art. I mean, I worked in there for months while I was waiting for my son to join us in this world, and I remember bringing my son’s mother down to show her, and she started crying. I was like, wow, she’s really touched, I’m so moved — but then she said, “No, no, it’s so dark, are you depressed?” And I said, “No! How could I be? Let’s just get some brighter colors.” And that’s exactly what I did. I got yellows and oranges and PYROL red.
It was kind of gloomy. In hindsight I realize now I wasn’t really doing color. I worked with the relationships and forms that I had on hand. I don’t — at least at the time, I mean, I do now. I mean, I always describe my process like someone who’s painting as if I have a coach calling out the color in the back of my head: we’re jumping at yellow, or we’re jumping into blue, or we’re jumping from purple, or we’re jumping on an earth tone. So I said, well, let’s get some bright colors, and I just went to the art store and bought a bunch of bright colors and brightened everything up, and I love the results.
So I like that I started dark and worked light, and I often do that — like just today. One of the pieces in this series I added some white watercolor crayon to it — I just drew it on the dark parts of the piece, some white decoration on it like a cave painter might do, and I love it. So I don’t know if that answers your question, but yeah, I’ve been doing it so long. I love that experience of walking away from works for months and then coming back to them and seeing them with fresh eyes.
4. From the critic: isn’t this just the same painting you’ve always made, and isn’t that why it never sold?
I’ve painted different messy paintings for 30 years, not the same messy paintings — although some of my messy paintings I painted on for years. I mean, I have canvases, vinyls that I’ve been painting on for 30 years, since 1994, 2004, 2014, 2024. That’s 30+ years they’ve been around. I did the Venice Beach Boardwalk for four years, and I heard the comments from the pontificating boyfriends mansplaining their girlfriends, saying, “Oh yeah, he’s just doing Basquiat,” or some guy on drugs saying, “Oh, it looks like somebody took some acid and had a bad trip.” Or my favorite one: my first day down on the boardwalk, I heard somebody say, as I was under the table arranging my paint, “How you doing with your fake art?” — not knowing that she might’ve been talking to the guy next to me selling impressionistic oil paintings, copies of the masters made in China.
Yeah, the only thing I care about is when somebody gets my heart and it brings them joy, and I love hearing from young adults who contact me and say, “Hey, I grew up with your art in my house since I was a little kid, and I love it.” That’s pretty cool.
Leave a Reply