I first began this series in a smaller format for my Marriage of Heaven and Hell! exhibition at Richard Telles Gallery, September 1994. One of seven intertwined narratives in the show, the pet paintings were the same size as the Fotomat photos they were based upon. My friend, artist and AIDS activist Renee Edgington (now sadly deceased) had a friend who died too soon of AIDS related causes, who had worked at a Fotomat, and had surreptitiously duplicated photos he enjoyed of people and their pets that had been brought into his shop. At the time, I thought them perfect avatars for people, specifically gay men who were living through the AIDS crises—not to satirize them, but as pet ciphers for both my own fears and feelings and my friends. Pets work as we project our own emotions onto and relieve anxiety (“Fido looks so sad! Poor Fido!”) and thus transferring our feelings upon them, and I was doing the same as I painted representations of these cats and dogs. I would bliss out the background, picking out key colors to be able to create a synaesthetic liminal emotive space for the pet. The series was effective, and truly edifying as a painter to paint, that I decided to scale the paintings up for bigger pictures.

I had been reading the first John Richardson biography of Picasso that had recently been published, and realized, working before Post-Modernism, if Picasso had an idea to paint a picture in a specific style or genre, he would just get up and do it, and maybe change his whim for the next picture. I had been “art directing” myself to paint in specific styles and themes for their post-modern contextual content, employing the baggage of painting and genre to work towards overarching ideas rather than just enjoying the meditation and pleasure of painting. I felt that the idea behind the paintings was solid enough to trust—I had the emotive content that was important to me, as I was able to cathect my feelings at a time where I had friends who were dying, and was scared myself of HIV, which would help me choose colors and have my instinct drive my brush as much as my conscious mind. Also, I was interested in elevating kitsch, to be able to make hopefully REALLY good paintings of this subject matter, loving the history of animal paintings for the larger context of all of what they can provide. My best friend Dan Knapp (who recently passed away as I write this) helped me build the wood stretchers, and prime them in his LA shop. I was also bequeathed by my cousins the Henley’s much of the materials that David Henley’s stepdad, the WPA artist Fred Shane used—some of the jars of mediums didn’t have labels, and so on, and it was fun to explore the alchemy of his lotions and potions of painting. I created a whole series of these works, a few in larger formats, that were painted in 1994 and 1995 and exhibited in a three person show in 1995 at Richard Telles (along with Megan Williams and B. Wurtz) called “Stretch Out and Wait”, after the Smiths song and the feelings of these works. The show was successful, and one of the large paintings of an angry poodle was on display at LACMA in a room of contemporary painting acquisitions from about 2000-2005 (“Refiguring Painting”). Another pet painting ended up in the permanent collection of SF MOMA, via collector and dealer Clyde Beswick.

These works are especially significant to me as they were my first “real” paintings in that I was able to “let myself go” and “really” paint, enjoying the meditation and the process of putting color and form together with emotion and my conscious and subconscious, without adhering to any rules, or feeling encumbered about the negative political implications of painting which were so prevalent at the time. To make a painterly painting seemed radical in the Post Modern early ‘90’s, where content was key and beauty was mistrusted, as was the patriarchal antecedents of painting. It was edifying to make these pictures, which had a deep meaning to me as a gay man who was surviving the massacre of AIDS all around me, but wanting to keep my sense of humor, and serious thrust of what it meant to be an artist and a painter.