This is one of the first of a series of “Iconscapes” that I continue to create today. In 1994, when we were living in Echo Park just after both being at UC Irvine, Andrew had just gotten into graduate school at the CUNY Graduate Center. On the road trip from CA to NYC, I was driving our Daihatsu loaded up with luggage, listening to the Beach Boys, and particularly Pet Sounds. I had previously had a solo show in Los Angeles, where I had seven different narratives, in seven different styles, to create an uber-narrative called “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell!” after Blake. I was creating, thinking in Post-Modern scenarios, about how style relates to content, and speaking in other formal languages for their baggage they carry to convey ideas, etc. But when I was creating this show, I was also reading the first of the John Richardson Picasso biographies, and I was inspired how simply if Picasso painted a still-life, if he wanted to paint a still-life. If he wanted to paint a portrait, he would paint a portrait. He vacillated from different stylistic languages that while relating to other art histories transcended them via Picasso’s idiosyncratic vision, with ease. Why was I art directing myself? Why, like in previous works for my last show, would I draw Rimbaud as the Comte de Lautremont’s character Maldoror, in the style of Rodin as signed by Verlaine? How could I simply draw and paint what I felt, “naturally”, culling form from my unconscious in addition to my conscious mind in such a manner that would also hopefully have relevant content? When in Brian Wilson’s great song “You Still Believe in Me,” when he sings “I wanna cryyyy…”, and continues expanding the word in his emotional singing, the sound of the word also becomes the sound of a real woeful crying, and the signifier and signified become one. I’ve always wanted to do this in my painting and drawing, fuse emotion and form with content—I think the Great Masters achieve this; indeed, it is what makes them become great. When you look at a Rembrandt, the synesthetic emotions you experience are created by the form of the painting of the work, which together, along with the viewers conscious interpretation of the meaning of the allegory combine to create a moving, visceral and cerebral journey.
I began upon arriving in New York to create many automatic drawings and paintings, allowing myself to “let my hair down” and not think too consciously about what I was creating, or what style it was in. Picasso said something like (I’m paraphrasing here) if you draw a circle without an aid of a compass, its imperfection is your style” and “if you copy the old masters, how it’s not like the old masters is what is YOU about it”, and I believe this is true. There is something very tangible about the “signature” of an artist—if you know De Kooning, when you see a De Kooning scrawl on a napkin you know it’s a De Kooning. When Buddhists think about the “I”, they think about whether the “I is being of the mind or the body—if you hit your hand with a hammer, and say “I can’t believe I did that, who is the “I” you are talking about? When someone kills your avatar when playing a videogame, you say “someone just killed me” but who is the “me” you are talking about? When making a picture, thinking your thoughts, hopefully how it’s not like the photo or scene you may be looking at is what is “you” about it. And when you paint abstraction from the mind, perhaps how it exceeds ideas of abstraction in art history, how perhaps it doesn’t relate to things you may consciously know, is what is “you” about this essentialized image that one may relate to in a close, emotional and experiential way.
In any event, I bought inexpensive linen (but good quality) prestretched canvases, and I tried not to be too precious. I had also been keeping sketchbooks, encouraging myself to be as active and free with them as possible, and this image emerged. We were living on the corner of Kent and Williamsburg in Williamsburg, Brooklyn in the early 90’s, which had already become somewhat gentrified, but was still remote, with crack vials and prostitutes on the sidewalk (it later became a cool indy art gallery venue Secret Project Robot, where my NYU students held shows via my classes, along with the basement venue Monster Island—the building was subsequently demolished and now is a Whole Foods!). We felt isolated and literally cold, it was a difficult transition period, both in my life and work, and I think this image appeared more as “Police Robot Man” in my sketchbook than a word, and I wanted to keep that spirit alive when I created this image, in one stop probably, that became one of my favorite works of all time that I have created, as hopefully it conflates the word with the image and the feeling to make a small painting that has a big impact.
I gave it to Andrew for one of his birthdays, and it was also shown at the Knoedler Gallery (by the GOOD people there!) at one of their last project room shows before they closed—I was happy to be vindicated by the oldest gallery in New York, originally a gallery that was a satellite of the Paris gallery of Theo (and Vincent!) Van Gogh. I of course am so glad that Stuart Comer also appreciated this work who curated me into the 2014 Whitney Biennial, and I placed it there near my Buddy (Robot Gorilla) painting to hopefully exclaim the sentiment that perhaps the might be feeling, seeing (in the painting next to it) King Kong at the base of the World Trade Center (an allegorical painting for the horrible events I witnessed), and a soul of a person that perhaps could be carried aloft, like one of the dead by the angel in Michelangelo’s Last Judgment.
Inspiration
Marsden Hartley, Portrait of a German Officer, 1914, oil on canvas, 68.x x 41.4”, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
I have long been inspired by Marsden Hartley’s “abstractions”, some of the first of their kind in America, inspired by Modernism in Europe but also Native American art, that synthesized symbiology and language in coded images (to speak for his love of a German soldier, among other loaded paintings)
I first investigated manifestations of the unconscious painted as abstract "landscapes"—works that I designated as Iconscapes. These abstract paintings that were exhibited in the 90’s, and have become a component embedded in my current figurative art (and I have gone back to creating some Iconscapes more recently, also included in this show). From my Knoedler Press Release, 2011.
My work emerged in the early 1990s with figurative narrative images rendered in highly crafted drawings and paintings of different styles to suit the content of larger allegories. Upon my move from Los Angeles to New York in 1995, I strove to find the emotive essence that fueled my earlier post-modern work by taking my cues from modernity, creating automatic drawings and instinctive gestural painting in the hope of harnessing the unconscious imagery emerging from micromanaged moments and from the negative space of paintings from the old masters to the New York School. As a son of psychoanalyst and a semiotics major from Brown University, I believe in the power of iconic, essentialized forms to signify complex ideas and feelings in the cognitive mind of the viewer, and that, like the discourse that informed the works of the modernists inspired by Picasso and the Surrealists, I strive to depict the inner consciousness within the plastic space of the picture plane. Being schooled within post-modernity, I also acknowledge the importance of works being able to relate to the world outside the canvas, and I play with the idea of suggestive source material, symbolic uses of color, the power of signs to bring about complex ideas of culture, and creating work that is conscious of how it performs within the context of art history and our time.
The first Iconscapes begin when I eschewed the nuance of appropriated style, for which I had first gained recognition, in favor of raw, intense, and textured abstractions. These gave rise to the vocabulary of the "circle" paintings whose tightly-wound bands of color create an oscillating effect that varies in mood and space from one to the next. I was also creating "expressionist" works inspired by source imagery, where I refer back into figurative paintings with gestures that hope to transcend the underlying subject matter to reveal emotive moments of synaesthetic form and color. This work lead to paintings that aspire to grasp symbolic forms of the unconscious in illusions of three dimensional space while I reacted to the politics and the mood of the end of the 20th century.
My stake in cartoons is that I believe that part of their power exists in our dreams, where we probably see iconic images of ghost-like smiley faces that we project onto (that’s grandpa!, etc). Our minds have simplified forms as memory devices that metonymically stir up language and experiential associations. I wanted, with my "iconscapes," to render these into life–with plastic space and volume, like a Gorky painted with the "reality" representation of the Renaissance–like a painted, three-dimensional dream. I would think of memories and dreams while I painted, hoping my hands would conjure them up, hoping, like when a kid tries to erase an etch-a-sketch board to see what made it work, to erase consciously realized representation to find the ghost that haunts it from behind.
We see faces in everything, I believe, as a survival skill as human being animals. Good compositions look like faces because of this, and Scott McCloud, in his great book Understanding Comics discusses how when we have very simplified forms, like a "happy face," we can "suture into" these forms, transcending into and becoming them.
In wanting to make my work vacillate, and have a life of its own, I had a great epiphany one evening walking to my studio after teaching this notion at the School of Visual Arts in my comics class. What if you made a painting that had a shape or form that was like a simplified face that you could relate to, that you could "suture into," but then also repeat that form in a vacillating manner with color and texture, widths and shapes—would it start to "move," and could you, given the design and palate of it, also imbue the work with synaesthetic feeling? When you map out a puppet form of a face before you begin to render sometimes in fine art and in comics, you create a vertical line where the nose and center of the mouth may be within an oval form, and a horizontal line where the eyes would be placed, forming a cross-like design, the perfect Golden Ratio. Realizing this a fundamental design element in a sketchbook for this painting, I realized that there was a holy spiritual notion in this, symbolically speaking—that there was a "cross within all of us." Not that I’m religious, but just spiritual enough to go with this notion, which had generated along with it a halo like affect, and hopefully optimistic palate that while the painting hopefully has a life of its own, and starts to undulate the more you look at it, suture into it, that it could fill the viewer with a bright sensation of spiritual uplift, a little sublime transcendence. This is a key painting for me, as it serves as the basis of much of my work sense this I painted it and now, as I hope my figurative works still break into abstraction in micro-managed moments, with pockets of atom-like undulations unconsciously created, like atoms, to make the painting come alive.
This is one of my most favorite paintings I have ever created and a seminal work that I have with me since I first painted it. We were living on 87 Christopher Street in a tiny apartment with the bathtub in the kitchen, and I talked my super into letting me use the basement furnace room as a studio. It was meager, but romantic. In this time in my ‘20’s, I was spiritual searching (really, a lifelong pursuit), and growing up with a non-religious Jewish Father and Southern Baptist Mother I was a religious mutt, and my way into Catholicism and Christianity was Jesus Christ Superstar, the musical.
I was sincerely listening to this great music (the movie soundtrack music), painting this image from the cd cover, kind of like Woody Allen looking into the winky-dink of Jesus in Annie Hall, wondering what it all means, but wanting to believe.
This was from a picture of Palm Sunday from the CD booklet, and I wasn’t sure if I liked the initial rendering I created. But then, I allowed myself to “go for it,” listening to the music, allowing for automatic painting to be become abstracted, (as I was hoping my figurative work was becoming), allowing its ecstatic ecstasy to come through. In the end, unconscious figures immerged. I think of a floating bunny form showing Christ a bird—and then discovered the Raphael’s Madonna of the Goldfinch and the symbolism of Christs’ Passion. I also see a sheep on the right-hand side, many figures, and the whole composition on the right seems like a profile. The work gives me hope and acting as a talisman of good energy and all that I strive for in my painting.
In the late nineties, I had begun to show these circle “iconscapes” at Jay Gorney, Luhring Augustine, and other prominent galleries downtown—this painting premiered in 1998 at the first “Painting Now and Forever” show at Pat Hearn/Matthew Marks gallery.
I had begun my career creating comic like images of tightly rendered drawings appropriating different styles and gestures for their historical baggage and weight to bring that content to my narratives. However, I had an epiphany when driving across country to come back to New York City after living for a year in Los Angeles upon graduating with my MFA at UC Irvine. Andrew, my partner (now husband!) had just gotten into graduate school in NYC, and I was driving our humble Daihatsu, loaded to the brim with our belongings, and listening to my favorite music, including Pet Sounds by Brian Wilson and the Beach Boys. I had been successfully exhibiting, but had become tired of appropriating different styles to create my work, and had been reading the first of the John Richardson biographies of Picasso, where I was excited to read about how Picasso would change styles and genres not to quote something of the past, but merely when the mood would strike him, famously upon going with a new girlfriend, but more than this, to investigate everything there could be gained by seeking new territory and keeping himself engaged and interested. I thought “why am I art directing myself” to create images? Why not just make something because I feel like it? And what was the through line that was consistent throughout the work—what was the “me” about it that you could tell I did it (as I was convinced there was, beyond mere conceptual conceits). Picasso said that if you draw a circle without the aid of a compass, its imperfection is what is “you” about it—and if you copy the Old Masters, how it isn’t like the Old Master you are copying is what is “you” about it. Thinking about this, but moreover, being moved by the music I was hearing made me change gears.
Brian Wilson, when he is singing the song “You Still Believe in Me” goes into a reverie when he sings the line “I want to cry” holding the word cry, and making it lilt, as if he sounding like someone really crying—where the word itself becomes a sound that connotes an emotion that becomes the thing he is writing about—the signifier becomes the signified without any breach of the two in a melded semiotic sign. How could I make a work that isn’t an appropriation of another thing that IS the thing it is supposed to be, where the signature of the work—my hand, came through without being part of another genre, to be a thing in itself? With a post-modern “death of the author” the art world I grew up in didn’t acknowledge that there was something personal to a work, that it was part of a pre-existing order of an artistic language that was understood to be a part of a power system, a chain of events projected onto objects and art making were language was like a software system inserted into our hardware of our brains. That the artist didn’t necessarily have autonomy, couldn’t make something “original” or that had an authentic voice. I believe that everything does come through something, and of course, we understand things via the way we are taught to understand them and through the filters of what we already know, but if you know De Kooning, and you see a De Kooning scrawl on a napkin, you can TELL that it’s a De Kooning—there is a “signature” to how he makes a gesture, and the nuance of his line (in addition to his subject matter that can be consistent).
Upon arriving to New York, I started doing a lot of automatic drawing and painting, trying my best to eschew preordained styles, known ways of doing things, all that I had learned of copying the masters and styles and genres. What if I could make an image that had its own kinetic energy onto itself? That had a “life of its own”? I know that batteries derive their own energy by having coils of wire wrapped again and again over a core element, what if I could do this with images, creating something that could undulate via the form and light, color and texture of wrapping it into a circle, without an aid of a compass, again and again so it would have a life of its own?
This began a whole series of these gestures. Coming from comics, and teaching them to, I love, teach, and cite the book Understanding Comics by Scott McCloud often. In it, he discusses the “power of the icon” where he mentions the power of the “happy face” or simplified, essentialized structure of an iconic face is its relatability. This is true for three reasons of human phenomena: the first is that we see faces in things as human being animals as a sort of survival skill—we need to see our mothers face to recognize her as Mom, when feeling thwarted, if you look someone directly in the face you can “stare them down”. The second is that we have a good idea of what other people look like, but a very fuzzy notion of what we ourselves look like—after we brush our teeth looking in the mirror in the morning we forget what we look like and might as well be a brain in a jar! The third is that we also animate inanimate objects—McCloud discusses when you use a crutch, it becomes a third leg, when you are driving a car, you become one with the car—when someone hits the car, you don’t say “someone hit my car!” you say “someone hit me”! So, when you see a circle, or an iconic form that could be a face, first you may recognize, even in your inner mind, that it could be a face. Because you don’t know what other people look like, but you know what you yourself look like, it could be YOU. Because we tend to animate inanimate objects, perhaps once you relate to it as your face, you can BECOME that face, in an act of transcendence when you then FEEL the aesthetic way and world of that iconic face and inhabit that world.
When Chinese monks did their screens and scrolls, they wanted to become, suture (or mask into, McCloud would say) the iconic image that they were drawing the figure as, to be transported in an act of maw, a sublime state, into the more complex world of nature they were also drawing in order to feel that nature, and wanted their viewer to have a similar experience. When you are meditating to a Tibetan thangka painting, you are supposed to concentrate on the very iconic figure of the Buddha within the painting, becoming them, and transporting yourself into their world to understand and to feel what that cosmology is all about to become more Buddha-like in your own state of being. When a cartoonist is drawing a figure, they often suture into the figure they are drawing, becoming them, relating their thoughts and feelings into the figure in a meditation—when they are drawing a figure that is smiling, they find themselves smiling and so on. This is something that I teach every day when I’m taught comics at the School of Visual Arts where I was the head Comics teacher and “Cartooning Coordinator,” and now at the Roski School of Art and Design at the University of Southern California (where I started a Visual Narrative Art Program), and why so many of my students have an effective life in the meditation of what they are doing creating works for others to suture into in the published work they create for the world.
I was hoping that, with these circle paintings, and now in the micromanaged moments that often subliminal faces and eyes, etc., appear in my work, that it allows the viewer in a similar fashion to “suture in”. Maybe in this circle painting they see an “eye” or “face” subconsciously and focus on the center. As they do, as their inner minds struggle to locate themselves into one “face” or “head” or another, the image begins to vacillate in the viewer’s mind. As it does, they become compelled to suture in, feeling the ineffable emotions the palate evokes, the energy of the texture of the lines, and whatever narrative they might project onto this experience and the aesthetics of the image.
I think in some sci-fi scenario, if we were able to project our dreams and see what they looked like, our dreams might be of “smiley faces” or simple forms like this—our imaginations can’t make up things better than they appear in space, and so our unconscious might think in symbols—and then we project meaning onto that form— “oh, that’s grandpa!” when we think after about what we “saw” in our dream. I think this is the power of comics and iconic images—it is an intrinsic language of our inner minds and thoughts—why sometimes a Disney cartoon can reach us in a manner that a more realistic, subjectively rendered CGI character can’t –that the icon speaks to both our conscious and unconscious at the same time. This is the power of most of Picasso’s “cartoons” as he was painting psychological iconic figures, and something I was trying to bring to the table and explore with these images.
In 1999 we had given everything we knew up to move to Andrew’s grandfather’s broken down cabin Riverside California, in the middle of a desert that had long been the home of many poor man’s castles—nestled throughout the unincorporated neighborhood of Meadowbrook were eclectic small homes with little plots of land that had ostriches, goats, horses, crystal meth labs, ZZ Top characters that would give you looming looks. We had been doing well in New York City—sort of. I had my solo debut at Jay Gorney Modern Art, then a prominent gallery in Soho on street level when Soho was hot and Jay had a hot gallery. My teacher Lari Pittman and UCI confidant Cathy Opie showed there (she humbly worked the cage when I was in grad school before she soon became famous) and I showed newly devised, roughly-hewn figurative paintings next to "figurative abstract" paintings I deemed Iconscapes, as I am a son of psychoanalyst and have a long standing penchant for the unconscious, and wanted to project this onto my figurative works, having them break into abstraction, and my abstract works come together as unconsciously derived figures, like living dreams. This became a notorious show, hopefully ahead of its time, as collectors, who were engulfed with the Art and Fashion era of art—where most painting had to look like photos— and those who knew my work knew me for tightly and smartly rendered drawings and paintings that had appropriated styles to conjure post modern antecedents embedded into narratives. But artists, especially painters, loved it, totally "got" what I was doing—there were Marsden Hartley, Soutine, and Nicholas De Stael shows uptown, for some collectors, this didn’t translate downtown, where especially early in ones career, you can be judged more about how accurately you can portray something in your rendering to look "real," or like a photo, that how one can veer away from this and show you the good stuff of emotion, painterliness, and abstraction projected into figurative forms and outwardly content like most of the best of art history. In any event, I actually had done fairly well for myself, making a name however notorious, and had begun to show in some other honored galleries such as Luhring Augustine and Mary Boone. We had moved from our tiny squalor on Christopher Street to a 1300 square foot space for $1300 a month on 46th st, between 5th and 6th avenues—a no man’s land a night, and during the day, squalor with businessmen and tourists. It was a strange place—construction workers would ask us "why do you want to live here, this isn’t Africa" looking at holes in the ceiling, but we had a vision. However, the vision was thwarted—one of the first days we moved in, something fell on our poodle puppy when we were moving stuff for the floor people, and killed her. We came back from the vet with blood on our clothes, devastated, when two evil, dead looking men invited us into their apartment downstairs. Showing us this red, velveteen wallpaper they asked us which we liked best, and asked us "what we did for a living." They were clearly mobsters, but not the cool kind you see in movies—they looked like they would, and probably did, kill people, and they were opening a bordello underneath our apartment.
I’m pro-PC, pro-sex worker in theory, but these tired, haggard looking women would appear every night up our stairway, and there would be loud, demonic disco music playing all night. Andrew fell into a deep depression, and I was having a Holden Caulfield "mendacity" moment with the artworld—I didn’t want to make work that was merely about expressing myself to this seemingly very rarified audience, and wanted to be more like my heroes, the poet Arthur Rimbaud, Cézanne, Van Gogh, Gauguin, and the rest. So I pulled myself out of the artworld, taking all my work out of all the galleries, and with Andrew’s encouragement, we packed our bags and moved to California, where we had to wait a summer for the poor woman and their children to leave our new place—they hadn’t paid rent in months and Andrew’s mom, who sold us the cabin, which was her settlement in a divorce from Andrew’s delinquent dad. She was a truant landlord, and hadn’t been there in a very long time—this family had literally thrown garbage out their window and were living in over nine tons of it—old diapers, swing sets, cans and tires that Andrew and I cleaned out, planted trees, painted and repaired the home while I worked as a teacher at my UC Irvine, my old grad school. It truly became a beautiful place that we transformed, and the spirit of Andrew’s grandfather was felt, in addition to the spirit of the nature of the place, which we cultivated, and raised chickens and ducks from hatchlings, and got another German Shepherd, Rachel, to be a companion to our dog Julian, and we felt transported. I began painting "en plein air," like my Impressionist heroes—the content of the work I felt was that we were two gay men, living together in a rural nowhere California, forging our lives together and our future, while not quite "off grid," in the boonies of sorts. This painting was created in the apotheosis of this time, where, like Monet in a blighted Giverny, I was using the landscape to project my thoughts and feelings onto the place, really as a meditation for myself, something the Iconscapes painted in Gotham hadn’t achieved—with Nature as my backdrop, I was able to reach blissful other realms, where in this work I see unconsciously derived figures ascending into a heaven, with our dogs and chickens in the foreground. I love this painting and while I enjoy now living in NYC and visiting our even more beautiful cabin often, this work will always represent an ideal and a vision that I will continue always to strive for and hopefully someday reach.
After a year of living there we realized how truly romantic, but utopic, it was—if the people at Walmart knew what we were about theywould probably club us, and if I was wired to "do this," be a fine artist, I better get on with it and realize that wonderful beauty that can be the artworld and its people—and came back to New York with my tale between my legs, the prodigal son. Ultimately I’m glad we moved there to create a foundation for ourselves, it is our getaway and hopefully our future, and our heart and soul resides in this incredible place which hopefully is also in this painting.