This is from a photo a friend took of me in 1983, when we are on a road trip from CO to Ventura to see the @gratefuldead the summer before my senior year in high school, were I ironically was posing “as a GQ model”, switching out my Dead tshirts for a madras sport coat,posing on the rocks near the Cliff House in SF. I did a painting of this in 2010, and a friend asked me to another version now 10 years later-now as I’m 54, another milestone marker by revisiting the image once again.

I searched for the original photo, which was in an album that I couldn’t find. But I thought this was a sign that I should look at the painted image again, and paint through it. So fI took a high res image of the 1st ptg , and really looked into it–I love Cezanne and how he was able to project his subconscious onto landscapes like Mount St. Victoire, and have is unconscious spill out over those forms. For this, the original was already so fluid, that it was cool to be be able to work into the original image, and to bring out the forms I found there.

I listened a lot to the Dead while painting of course. The photo I was moving a bit, and it was a little blurry, especially around my face, and in the 2010 ptg I recorded this movement as I did once again here, there are many eyes actually in this (and the other images), but also I think I was projecting my current self into the avatar of my youth. I finished the work actually listening to other music I loved then (I was the president of the high school radio, and spent my summers going to concerts at Red Rocks) of Talking Heads, and ended on U2 Under A Blood Red Sky-which I went to with a friend (and appear for a millisecond in the MTV video!).

My friend happens to be the editor of GQ–so the amazing serendipity is that he also is a deadhead–and that hypothetically, as the work is now in his office around the time of this cool @tchalamet cover, that I might have consciously or unconsciously influenced–finally coming full circle!?