04—14_ hiding in williamsburgI moved to Williamsburg, Brooklyn, in 2000, wanting but unable to connect with art since leaving art school.
I had how but no what.
Lying on the street, directly outside the back door of my apartment building, was a single torn out page of ads from a vintage ’80s porn magazine.
One side was filled with varying degrees of disturbing small ads, while the other side had a series of black and white images of women, with the headline The Biggest Tits In The World.
Ads for VHS tapes: under each of the women’s picture was a price, “item number”, first name and chest size.
In a rage over the inhumanity of these descriptions, I felt I needed to do something to apologize to these women, which led to 4 large scale black and white portraits, my first real paintings since graduating from art school.
My anger toward these ads and the mindset of the men both producing and receiving them became a primary subject matter over the next two decades.
Distrust, confusion, complicity, lust, shame, clichés of masculinity, femininity, love, sex, romance, violence, desire, cruelty, male/female relationship structures and power imbalances, all fused with my complicated family history, with pop culture and art history.
It was my secret.
Working as the design director at a fashion magazine in midtown Manhattan, I rented a large studio in Greenpoint.
I’d wake up 4am on North 9th and Wythe, walk to the studio, work for a few hours, go to the office, take a lunch break to go back to the studio for an hour, or fake afternoon meetings with photographers and agents to get a couple of hours painting time in before returning to finish the day’s magazine work.
I wanted to work without thinking of showing or selling.
Only five or six people in my inner circle knew I was painting at all.
For a few years I painted almost exclusively in black oil paint on white canvas.
I wanted everything to look like Joy Division sounded.
Rauschenberg’s silkscreens but also Richter, Close, Baldessari, Calle, Viola, grids, concepts and post art school deep skepticism about chance and art marks as an accepted sign of soul baring in a post Warhol universe.
I taped black garbage bags over the studio windows, everything was projected, traced and then swiped in a Richter-esque attempt to mechanize and remove the hand.
After ten years I hit a rut, realized I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life in a dark room and stopped.
I moved out of Brooklyn, left the studio and destroyed much of the work.
