December 2008 Archives

Back to the studio. I can't seem to get there as often as I want.

As you can see from these, I've been migrating away from the T&A focus of the paintings I've been doing. I've become really insecure about my work. I have no idea what I'm doing. I'd like to say I've reached a turning point, but I'm not even sure of that. I don't know what's going on.

What I think is happening is maybe I'm not infusing my paintings with the feelings I want them to be infused with. To me, these paintings are about love. They're about beauty. They're about being human. I focus really specifically on the things I do -- on human figures, minus backgrounds, minus props, minus pretty much everything -- because they're what interest me, and they're what I can paint. I'm not a portrait artist, by and large, so I only glance off faces. I'm interested in people. Recently I read something David Hockney once said when he was showing some landscapes he'd painted. He said he thought of them as figurative paintings. "Where's the figure?" Hockney's guest asked, and Hockney pointed to them.

The trouble is I guess I'm not communicating the viewer as a participant. Back at SVA, during the final group critique, someone -- I know who, I'm just not naming anyone -- when I said I thought of my paintings as being about two people, about love between two people, they wanted to know where the other person was. They forgot that they're looking at the painting. Creating it to a certain degree. I was trying to get at the feeling you get when you're undressing with that special someone. You don't see them all at once, out there, laid out like the Maja or Olympia. You're up close, getting little details here and there.

Now, I didn't -- don't -- approach this intellectually. I didn't think up what I wanted to paint and start painting it. These paintings are based on my drawings starting a few years back, and those drawings grew from my feelings at the time, and something within myself I was trying to explore. The style and the subject developed together, and they developed as I was feeling my way around.

But there's a problem. The problem is, being a fat middle-aged white guy, when you start painting naked people, the most easily available naked people are young women, and immediately you're entering into a territory fraught with tensions and entanglements, most of which are entirely invented by the people involved. I mean, there's nothing necessarily requiring that the naked person be under the power of the clothed person. There's nothing requiring that the man be in charge. Nothing but history. It doesn't matter if the personal isn't the historical. Lots of people assume it is, can't escape it.

I mean, really, if I were a young Frenchman and said that these paintings showed my desire to make love to the world, it'd probably be okay. And if I were an overweight Earth mother, it'd be okay. And if I were an arch ironic Japanese illustrator/toymaker/video artist, hell, it'd be just fine. But I'm working in an area where people honestly believe that all those beautiful paintings from the Renaissance are actually just the exudate of the oppressive patriarchy. There are people who claim that Beethoven's Ninth Symphony is aural rape.

And if people can think that about those, what hope do I have?

So I'm kind of tired of being classified as a pervert. It's not who or what I want to be.

And you know what? Maybe I am a pervert. Maybe this is all about patriarchy and sex and fucking young women, about forgetting that I'm fat and middle-aged and balding and thinking I'm some kind of young stud out having a fun time instead of a cranky, nerdy old guy with a wife and kids in the suburbs. Maybe that's all it is, and I'm trying to fool myself. Maybe I'm trying to leverage what little bit is left of the Old White Male hegemony to get myself a piece of tight little twat. Who knows?

I don't fucking know. I have no idea. I don't know what's going on inside my head or how it relates to what I paint or if any of it matters. It's all crap anyhow. Putting colored vegetable juice on a flat surface for people to gawk at -- I mean, how stupid is that?

Maybe I should just become a lousy abstract painter. What the fuck difference does it make?