My American Dream: Capturing a Glimpse of Elaine and her Circle
Unerased de Koonings, 2019 Oil on linen 36 × 33 inches
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Unerased de Koonings, 2019
Oil on linen 36 × 33 inches

It was fun to reinterpret this famous 1953 b&w Hans Namuth photo of them, taken on Leo Castelli’s improvised studio porch also in East Hampton. When Rauschenberg erased his de Kooning he ushered in a whole new era, killing the metaphorical father, bringing about Duchamp, appropriation, pop art, and more about Marx than Freud and Jung. I’m hoping we can have our cake and it eat too, making work that relates to the world outside the picture plane but still have a role about the unconscious and the ineffable, and ideas about beauty and transcendence in art and painting. Willem obviously is going strong, but the ideology from which he sprang not so much… Fortunately we are now recognizing the women more and more, especially Elaine’s legacy in the books of Nine St. Women and the Cathy Curtis bio, but her art is still greatly underestimated… I want to forefront her, but also her work and the unconscious world of the ab ex artists… This Woman ptg, Bill later painting over and ultimately destroyed. I think, beyond everything else, the figure was a frame to hang his subconscious onto, opening up different worlds that transcends the figure, it was cool to, without looking at other reproductions to find my way inside the work, building into the dream like otherworldly space…