Artists vs. Musicians

So now I have to figure out what Soundgarden has to do with crusty paint rags and old paint tubes. I’ve been comparing a lot in my head artists throughout history and modern day rock stars, leaving aside the obvious similarities between art and music in general, but focusing on individual personalities. 5 or 6 years ago, before this whole reality TV thing, the big thing was shows like VH1 Behind the Music and E! True Hollywood Story. For some reason though people started to become more interested in the asinine personalities of everyday assclowns than the personalities of inspiring/creative/talented individuals.

My personal favorite was Behind the Music, stories like Def Leopard where the drummer lost his arm in a car accident but kept playing. Or Chris Robinson, lead singer of the Black Crowes explaining how him and his brother Rich (the guitarist) had to take separate tour buses because they fought so much, apparently because Chris was taking acid every single day. And who could forget the E True Hollywood Story of Chris Farley, with his addiction to food and prostitutes. The only contemporary artist who could compare is Jorg Immendorf. While in the middle of this blog I happened to find out how Immendorf was caught with 7 prostitutes (3 more on the way) and a ton of coke in a hotel room. Leave it to the Germans to prove that booze, women, and drugs still have a place in the fine arts. And I got to thinking how artists just aren’t insane in a cool way like they used to be. Back at the turn of the 20th century they would have had Behind the Artist: Vincent Van Gogh, or Gauguin, Toulouse-Lautrec, or any of those insane passionate bastards. Trying to unlock the mystery of who attacked who with a razor blade during an encounter between Van Gogh and Gauguin, similar to the beef between 2-Pac and Biggy Smalls.
So I decided my new characters would no longer be dolls (not that I ever referred to them as dolls) but Rock N’ Roll Action Figures. So I’ve been collecting reference photos and comparing specific artists and musicians. Like Trent Reznor, or as I like to call him, the modern day Munch, somebody adored by women but their entire body of work is about the evils of women. The only difference is that Munch’s sister and mother died at any early age, and Trent probably got dumped in high school by some whore. Advantage=Munch. Come on, a girl tried to kill herself because of him. What a genius.


"You give me the reason.
You give me control.
I gave you my Purity.
My Purity you stole.
Did you think I wouldn't recognize this compromise.
Am I just too stupid to realize.
Stale incense old sweat and lies lies lies

It comes down to this.
Your kiss.
Your fist.
And your strain.
It get's under my skin.
Within.
Take in the extent of my sin"
-Trent


"give me my money in stacks
and lace my bitches with 9 figures
real niggas fingers on nickle plated 9 triggas
Must see my enemies defeated
i'm cashin'
while they coughed up and weeded
open fire
now them niggas bleedin"
-2Pac

The Initial Idea

Rewind 6 months ago, once again I was on a run (jogging), this time listening to Soundgarden’s Superunkown. After I was done, walking back to my apartment was when the idea hit me. “I’ll do a series of paintings based on the album Superunknown,” said me, and the image that popped into my head was a Chris Cornell doll standing on a mountainous landscape of flowing paint rags, obviously inspired by my last drawing of the Crime and Punishment series seen above (and I’m also guessing the song My Wave). I always thought of that drawing as a transition into whatever I was going to do next. All I knew was that I wanted to incorporate the process in a more literal way, incorporate all of these rags/gloves/paint tubes and such into the imagery. In Johnny Paintbox (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SbZp09_LHKM) I felt like I was able to express all of these ideas I had about the painting process, ideas I wasn’t able to convey in an actual painting, but found a way in video. Now it’s high time to try and bring some of that into my painting, everybody’s favorite, paintings about painting, what fun. Who knows what will come out of this, all I know is the idea survived a 6-month no-painting hiatus and that ain’t not bad

I also like the phrase Superunknown; It’s when you REALLY have no idea what the fuck you’re doing, like now.


“If this isn’t what you see
It doesn’t make you blind
If this doesn’t make you feel
It doesn’t mean you’ve died

If this doesn’t make you free
It doesn’t mean you’re tied
If this doesn’t take you down
It doesn’t mean you’re high

If this doesn’t make you smile
You don’t have to cry
If this isn’t making sense
It doesn’t make it lies

Alive in the superunknown
First it steals your mind
And then it steals your soul”
-Soundgarden

Background: Crime and Punishment vs. Real Life

So I had this teacher in grad school. Let’s call him Larry. Well, to put it bluntly, Larry was an asshole to me when I first got there. Not completely unreasonably though, I came late my first year and missed orientation. Not that I skipped it, let’s just say I had a good reason why. So without going into specifics, Larry was an asshole, but he was also an asshole to most “first years,” although not everyone. I think it had to do with the way he was taught. He went to school during the height of abstract expressionism, where I believe that was how everyone taught: you belittle the students, make them think they know nothing, so you can build them back up again how you please.

So my first year was filled with a lot of resentment, and it wasn’t just directed at Larry, it was directed at the other students, who I accused of sharing one big brain in an attempt to make this guy happy, recycling ideas and phrases he threw at us. It was directed at school in general. And it didn’t help I was doing some of the shittiest painting I’ve ever done. It was the first time I ever questioned why I was painting.

Anyway, I was thinking about that event in relation to Crime and Punishment, because to me, the main idea of the book is the psychological effect of a decision one makes. How one decision can end up changing the way you see other people as well as yourself. I wanted to have these paintings come to represent an emotionally intense state of mind, with these dolls, based on the characters in crime and Punishment. Not that I set out to make reference to this personal experience, I just made the connection. In my opinion, this was a very successful body of work, and consider it to be the first time I really took an idea to it’s conclusion, milking it for all it’s worth and getting to the root of the idea. It might even be more accurate to say that I resolved the work. I answered the question “Where the hell did that idea come from?”



“In 49 years there must have been many tens of thousands of pieces of good advice I have been given, but I can recall only these two. The inescapable conclusion: we do not hear advice. We do not want advice. We particularly don't want advice we have not asked for. The only advice we register is when something is said that we already know but need someone else to confirm.”
-Kentridge

“Day after day
They take some brain away
Then turn my face around
To the far side of town
And tell me that it's real
Then ask me how I feel”
-Bowie

Background: Dolls

So anyway, when I was doing these paintings and making these dolls one thing I kept saying was that I didn’t want them to be too literal. I didn’t want the work to end up being an illustration of the story, that’s what illustration is for. I wanted the dolls to capture the essence of the character, something about their personality, and have them be a physical representation of their psyche somehow. Each character in the story is very important and each represents a part of Raskolnikov. When creating the characters for the paintings I took into consideration their relation to him and the effect they have on his psyche as well as their own characteristics. This determines their size and materials used to make them (I got the size thing from Max Beckman)

But something happened along the way. The last few lines I actually took from my Grad thesis statement, which felt more like a defense then a statement (some people really know how to suck the “fun” out of painting). And although I put in all this time and effort to come up with reasons for why I was doing what I was doing, when I started to make these creatures they kind of took on a life of their own. I was having a blast just ripping all these toys/dolls/action figures and putting them back together again with nails and wire and glue, burning/melting them, smashing them apart just to glue them back together again, once again tapping into my more twisted juvenile side, my best Dr. Frankenstein impression. The end result were these little monsters, it was like these toys had found their way into my subconscious, wandered around for a while and stumbled out that way, only to do my bidding as models.

So this is how they came about. I’ll go into them more later since I still employ this technique of making my models, and I’m spending way too much time on this background. I’ll probably repeat myself anyway, the department of redundancy department.



"Well, I’d rather stay here
With all the madmen
Then perish with the sadmen roaming free
And I’d rather play here
With all the madmen
For I’m quite convinced they’re all as sane as me"
-Bowie

Background: Crime and Punishment

Since all paintings are a result of the ones that preceded them, I feel I should give a little background on my last body of work, which was based on Dostoevsky’s novel Crime and Punishment, which would be my second attempt at using literature as a source, the first being a failed attempt at Apollo and Daphne. And although I could say that I really should explain the works before that, and so on and so forth, back to the first drawing I remember doing in the first grade (a drawing of a snake with a hand reaching down to grab it that my teacher turned into a tree, that asshole), I'll save me the trouble and just stick with the mosr recent.

My initial idea was to do a series of paintings based on Dostoevsky's novel. The idea just popped into my head as they usually do. Originally I thought the intensity of the book would really fit my painting style and I was looking to bring the intensity, light and color wise, back into my paintings. I also thought the few characters and settings would make it fairly easy to put together in the corner of my studio. I thought I would have a lot of fun with it. “Fun,” an interesting word when it comes to art I guess. One of the things I remember from my first painting class sophomore year in undergrad was a remark someone made during a critique about one of my paintings, saying that it was obvious from looking at my work that I was having fun. I remember thinking it was a weird thing to say, I mean isn’t everybody having fun? If not then why are you even here. It’s not like you went into art for the money, this isn’t accounting. It became one of those things someone says that never leaves you for some reason, and is called to the surface every now and again. Like somebody once told me you weren’t supposed to eat after 7pm, and for some reason I always fuckin think about it, daily even I believe. But I was always amazed at school during critiques how people were able to verbalize things that I guess I took for granted. Like using the word “ambitious” as a compliment about a big drawing or painting. It just made sense to me to do the biggest possible thing I could do. Bigger was better, if you can do it 6 feet, you can do it 2 feet. It doesn’t work the other way around. I think it’s especially important early, before you have intent and content which dictates the size, shape and everything else. That’s what school is for me, you gobble up everything the teachers throw at you; try everything while you have them at your disposal. When you leave you can do what you want to do, knowing you have some abilities in case you go through some drastic change, which could happen, you think? I’m still gobbling. I’m like a snowball rolling down the hill, sucking up everything in my way, which leads the way to being able to pick up more stuff. Like some of the books I’m reading now, I couldn’t wrap my brain around 5 years ago before I got some other knowledge in there. Prerequisites that are unspecified, so just swallow everything in your way.

I also feel more comfortable talking about my work now that I’ve left school. I don’t know if it’s because of or in spite of school, with its formality and big word users. I don’t go out of my way to use big words. I let them find their way into my dialogue on their own. Sometimes I’ll say something and think, “Shit, I didn’t know I knew that word.”

But anyway, Dostoevsky: my original plan was to set up scenes from the book in my studio and paint them from life. I went to the Salvation Army and got a crusty couch, got a coffee table and a lamp, boom, Raskolnikov’s apartment. I also had a roommate, Matthew, who would make the perfect Raskolnikov (at least the way he’s described in the book, I usually breeze over those and form my own image). Matthew was a tall, gangly intellectual type with longish hair and glasses. He also was (and still is) English, which is closer to Russia than anyone else I was roommates with. Wait, where is Sri Lanka?

So it seemed like a perfect fit. Only, it didn’t really work out. Something was wrong and I didn’t know what it was, and it had nothing to do with the fact that Matthew insisted on reading and could not sit still for the life of him. I was enjoying painting from life again instead of photographs, but it just didn’t feel right for this theme. Although I still didn’t know what I wanted out of the paintings I knew this wasn’t the way to go about it. It seemed corny and insincere. Then I tried painting from my head, which was interesting and beneficial, but I always feel when painting completely from imagination that I can only take a painting so far. With nothing to work/ bounce off of, the painting felt empty and incomplete. So not wanting to paint from life or imagination put me in quite a dilemma as you could imagine. So I was stuck until I was saved by the contemporary German painter Johannes Heisig (who ditched me in Berlin when I told him I didn’t speak any German, but we won’t hold that against him. The Germans are a curious creature.). Anyway, to make a long story short (too late), while I try and explain in one blog entry my last series, something I’m trying to do throughout this entire blog with this series. I was on the crapper, looking at a Johannes Heisig book when I came across a painting of Barbie dolls. And that was it. I had an epiphany, where all great epiphanies occur: on the toilet. I thought I would make my own models, make these characters, set them up in various scenes and paint from them. No more painting from imagination, no more trying to get Matthew to sit still while he reads seemingly the most interesting book in the world about Bach. So what started as a means to paint these scenes began to dictate what these paintings were to be about, and in a way represent what painting means for me.