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.