Love/Liebe

In 1999 my husband and I moved to a 1300 square foot loft on 57th East 46th street, for $1300 a month, an incredible value, even then. However, the place was dilapidated, despite our best efforts, and ultimately was haunted! We were moving stuff for the floor people the first day we occupied the space, and something fell on our poodle puppy, killing her! Upon returning from the vet, with blood on our shirts, menacing men brought us into the apartment underneath us, asking our opinion on their gross red velvet wallpaper—they were literally mobsters, opening a bordello! They asked us what we did—I exclaimed I was an artist, Andrew mentioned the truth—that he was teaching at the John Jay School of Criminal Justice—we asked them what they did, they replied, “ah, travel?!”. We are “pro-sex worker,” etc., but the sight of haggard looking woman coming in at night, and demonic disco music playing underneath us was too much to bear, and with the mob’s trying to move us (and the police were in on it, too), Andrew fell into a deep depression, and I was having a Holden Caulfield-like “mendacity moment”, thinking is really “rich white people” the audience I wanted my work to speak to? Despite having young success in the NYC, showing at exalted art spaces Jay Gurney, Mary Boone, Pat Hearn and more, I pulled all my work out of the galleries and Andrew and I packed our bags and moved to his families’ cabin in the desert of California. McDermott and McGough ended up moving into our place, and another friend opened an art space below after the mob was finally chased out, but I thought I would exile myself from the artworld, and like heroes Arthur Rimbaud quietly retire but still make art in the provinces’, like Cezanne! I learned my lesson, however, after a short year, and moved back to NYC, the prodigal son, with my tail between my legs, thinking if I was “wired to do this” that there were great people in the art world and to work hard and humble. This painting was done in plain air, and a haunting reflection of a time that despite its despair was Romantic, in a bleak way that helped me become the artist I am today.

I was walking from the Gemaldegalerie to the train on my recent “flaneur” trip to Berlin, and although the park at Gleisdreieck is relatively new and popular, at dusk on this lonely day it was a bit destitute, save for friends enjoying the last light skateboarding and fraternizing, warmth in the cool night of day. With the cranes in the background, it reminded me of when I first came to Berlin, on a trip after college, just before the wall came down, a dystopic hodgepodge of new and old buildings rising from the rubble of history into a new tomorrow.

After exiling myself from the artworld in the late 90’s, I returned, the prodigal son, with my tail between my legs, hoping for a new future. I began humbly, working in a studio provided by NYU where I was teaching, and looking for a new direction. This work was a memorable breakthrough for me. I was looking at images from magazines, as my history then and still involves sometimes appropriation, but the thing of this work was that my painterly verve superseded the image, using the original photo as a Proustian madeleine moment as a talisman to project my feelings into my brush. When I finished to painting in my reverie, I was astonished that this image emerged, to me it had a life of its own, transmuting my feelings into the image to come out with something new, and a romantic feeling of how I was at that moment.

Like Blueboy, this painting was created in my NYU studio, when I had returned to NYC to forge a place for my husband and I to live again. It was a lonely time, and using magazine images to cull feelings and subject matter this work emerged, lost in listening to Radiohead, which felt right at that moment. This work has lived on my walls for years, reminding me of that moment, yearning for a better future and hoping through determination and hard work that both my art and career could fruitfully continue with a belief in self and the romantic longing for better days.

This is a picture of Lawrence Olivier, actually as Henry V from his famous film. I repurposed the character, as I love Olivier but also Hamlet, and at this time was making images to fit a sci-fi fantasy take off of Hamlet—Hamlet 1999. At the time (and still!) I have a thwarted view of power, skeptical to a fault of “absolute power corrupting absolutely”. Of course the adolescent Hamlet is much the same, and defies his power whilst at the same time confronting patriarchal power—his evil monarchy of his time. Olivier was also gay, or at least “Hollywood Bisexual”, and like Montgomery Clift, brought a new sensitivity to his portrayals of maleness—even his Henry V is both feminine but powerful, lovingly loquacious in his dandy-ish manner. Olivier was also one of the greatest, most influential, and powerful actor—and director—he created this film (and his Hamlet), and his foppish take on Henry was so moving that Churchill used it as propaganda to motivate his masses in WWII. A great artist in a great film by the master Shakespeare, I’m hoping my take can hold a candle and still resonate with deeper meanings. Another image from the same series was in my infamous Jay Gurney NYC solo debut, where I freaked out the art-going public, weaving emotion and abstraction through appropriated imagery in a way that was then misunderstood but now hopefully ahead of its time.

This is an image that we have lived with for years, of a neighbor who (still!) lives across the street from our cabin, Andrew my husband’s family vacation home that we had just acquired. In Riverside county, we live in an unincorporated neighborhood called Meadowbrook, that has a lot of poor man’s castles, dusty white people, and a subdued wild life that seems just outside of the symbolic order. This kid was a meth addict (and still is in and out of jail, now missing teeth) but at the time was also friendly, but a bit menacing—we still aren’t sure if he is a good neighbor or a would-be troublemaker. He wore metal t-shirts, and I knowingly “misspelled” the famous band’s name, as I hoped this person wouldn’t bring us sooner to our fate. The original cigarette, his own, is missing, but I replaced it with this Marlborough that I smoked, placing myself in a doppelganger’s avatar, knowing the mask of the figure could be any person’s own death mask, of mortality, but also of youth.

This is a picture of Montgomery Clift, the great pre-method actor, from the last scene in the underrated film Raintree County, where he plays a hapless union soldier, suffering for his misbegotten wife played by his real-life dear friend Elizabeth Taylor. In this scene, he is lying in a field, which reminded me of my favorite Rimbaud poem, “The Sleeper in the Valley” which describes everything in this beautiful, dystopic meadow, which at the end reveals a dead soldier in the midst of living nature. Monty Clift was a gay genius actor, that inspired the Method actors Brando and James Dean, who brought an extraordinary emotion and sensitivity to all hoe portrayed. In these paintings from the 90’s, I was allowing my own emotions to unleash themselves in my brush, taking film stills as mediums to meditate upon to transmute my unconscious into the image, having something else happen in the abstraction of the image. Like a phoenix rising from the ashes, a horse seemingly appears in his beard, a subconscious figure also emerges on the left, all brought about without my knowledge in the moment of my muse, which after it left my mind, I stopped painting, Cezanne-style, allowing the raw canvas to show through. This is the last of the figurative paintings I lived with on my wall that first premiered in my notorious Jay Gorney solo debut in New York in 1997, where I installed figurative works that broke into abstraction alongside abstract figurative works (if this isn’t an oxymoron). This was new to my audience, but also the art-going audience in NYC at that time, where figurative painting, unless it was John Currin or Lisa Yuskavage, was outre, in a moment that Art and Fashion thrived and photorealistic appropriation was the norm. Although Soutine was uptown at the Jewish Museum (along with upper east side great exhibitions by De Stael and more), downtown people couldn’t understand what I was up to—but the artists, especially the painters, did, and I like to think that this was ahead of its time, but also following time, as the expressionist zeal of my painting was seeded by my early love of the German Expressionists. This painting in particular is very personal, as it was my gift to my now husband Andrew for supporting and understanding my experimentation and the Gorney show, and this painting lived on our walls for years. I mistitle it Red River, as this was the first Monty Clift film, where he challenges John Wayne his adoptive father, and perhaps like myself, he is waxing nostalgically for his youth, thinking of his roots in his older age, soldiering on…

I used to have “electric dreams” in my youth (and sometimes still today) and this was from the beginning of a comic-like narrative I created at the time, trying to synaesthetically bring about the feeling of my memory of falling from space towards the earth, an ethereal ecstatic motion of movement through the atmosphere. Dream Space and Time is always different when put into language, hopefully aesthetic languages can make those memories more palatable than mere words, and the word/image combination jettisoning closure upon the viewer that helps to enact similar sensations in their own imagination.

On my recent travels through Berlin in Kreuzberg, I was delighted to see a large queer contingent of activists and party-goers, underneath the aluminum foil blankets given to the children immigrants in cages, repurposed as poignant flags and reminders of the far right in America, bringing the global dialog to these locals opposing the German Nationalists. The commiseration of these gender-bending individuals was heartening, and by painting them I was reminded of my own youth and leftist activist leanings, stepping into the painting to be one of them, one of us.

19.5 in

Julian was our German Shepherd who lived about 14 years, and Rosa his constant companion—a sort of wife—who also, while outlasting Julian, just recently died last year at about age 14. We loved these dogs so much; truly they were like our children. We got Julian when we were living in midtown at a dangerous, deserted loft above gangsters that were running a bordello that the cops were in on. He was for protection, but Andrew had also grown up with shepherds and loved them, and I always wanted one too. Julian never took to the city much, but loved being inside nesting with us like another roommate, and he and Rosa slept in our bed and shared most of our waking moments with us as family. He was smart and kind—never chewed through a toy, and the blissful time we lived in the California desert we raised chickens and ducks from chicks and ducklings, and Julian never harmed any of them—it was one of those pictures where the little chicks would jump and rest on his head. In fact, for a short couple of years we had adopted an aged cockatiel a friend’s friend found outside their window, and it would ride on the back of Julian shrieking "Julieeeen! Julieeeen!" and Julian kept his cool.

In the movie Rembrandt, with Charles Laugh ton—who really looked like Rembrandt—loses his beloved wife Saskia, when it is time for her funeral, he is painting a portrait of her, and his friend rushes in and exclaims "Rembrandt, why aren’t you at Saskia’s funeral!" and he shouts back "Go Away! I’m trying to paint her while I still remember her!" This painting is a momento mori—Julian had just passed away, and I was mourning his loss by painting him while I still remembered every aspect of him, petting him through each stroke of my paint and thinking deeply about our companionship (and my love for our apricot poodle, Rosa too, who adored him). This painting isn’t for sale, but when art world people come to my studio, many times way more than any canny postmodern "smart" art that I may have on my wall they turn to this and ask and love after it. I sometimes really do believe at the end of the day painting what you love, the old trope, is really true and important. Sometimes the image is really just a talisman to bring out what is best and most emotional in you, and as you are transcribing with your brush, something truly special comes out.

On my recent flâneur trip to Berlin, I was drawing a watercolor of the famous Mercedes Star, and I overheard a large event that was happening on the other side of the Kaiser Wilhelm church and went to investigate. Alas, it was the climax of the Berlin European Athletics Track and Field awards, with many happy heroic women athletes receiving that night’s medals. Even more interesting, perhaps, was turning around as the Berliner crowd was leaving the stands. The wonderful array of peoples, there to celebrate their athletes, was just as invigorating. To see the good spirit of the city, and excited and tired peoples warmed my heart, with the church in the background it was a fascinating array of old and new, the tired but happy people of Berlin, calm but celebratory, so different from the frantic energy of the States right now, I wanted to be a part of it all in this great city.

The excitement of Kruezberg on a weekend night was contagious, I yearned forever to live in Berlin, and seeing the youth of all ages out on the town on an endless summer eve was enlightening in every respect. I loved the party-goers, coming to and fro concerts, bars, and meetings with friends. This young woman was dressed for the occasion, but in a quiet contemplative moment amongst the hubbub, she seemed to have total agency in how she dressed for success of a fun evening, beautiful in her power to present herself but also in her thoughts of the moment, alone amongst the crowd.