‘The dream was always running ahead of me. To catch up, to live for a moment in unison with it, that was the miracle.’-Anais Nin

‘Know thy self, know thy enemy. A thousand battles, a thousand victories.’ -Sun Tzu

Sometimes the greatest wisdom lies in knowing when the very enemy is thyself. I saw a movie about the life of Gauguin. Not a very good one by any stretch of the imagination, and still I felt bad for the guy. Actually, I feel bad for a lot of the great painters: Van Gogh, Gauguin, Lautrec, Rothko, Pollock, Basquiat. Not the for the reasons you might think. The ironic part is that I feel bad for them because they sacrificed everything towards their art, and the cost was too high. I think the romantic notion of the tortured artist slaving away for his/her craft at the expense of all else is just that: romantic. It doesn’t operate at all with reality, it doesn’t make for a very full life. The worthwhile part doesn’t come until far later when everyone is dead and the passage of time and opinion can change the merits of what was produced. One thing the passage of time has taught me is that life is often hard without any outside input, and sometimes it’s just hard because we’re choosing to make it that way through our actions and perceptions alone.  I look at these guys and think they were quite brave. Certainly extraordinary painters, but they seemed to make some things so much more difficult than they needed to be. I don’t get artists like Gauguin and Pollock because they ran roughshod over seemingly everyone who gave a crap about them in their pursuit of painting. I guess I don’t understand the lack of perspective on that one. Rothko and Basquiat I don’t get at all. At ALL. They both had everything any decent painter lived for and they still couldn’t get it together. I understand there may have been a lot of self-induced pressure to work, but by that point they had gobs of money, and there was certainly no one pointing a gun to their heads making them pick up the brush. You’ve earned your living. Don’t want to do it? So don’t. Walk away. People say Basquiat had a lot of pressure as a black artist working in the elitist white contemporary art world. Give me a break. Jesse Owens, Jackie Robinson. Both had a hell of a lot more pressure on them than Jean-Michel ever saw in even his wildest heroin-induced dreams, with far less income. I didn’t see them shooting speedballs.

Cut from a different cloth I guess.

For me art is one persons reflection or take on the human condition. My sense of the human condition is predicated on our interaction both with our world as well as the relationships we form with those within it. So if you’re sacrificing any sense of normal, worthwhile, decent interaction in whatever form (your family, your relationship, your friends, your lovers, parenting your children, your working relationship with collectors who have stood by you), just to be off painting, what is the point? What you are painting and presenting them becomes a singular, solitary reflection of your take of the world. All of which is fine. It’s just that I’d like more interaction with what I’m trying to do and the world at large. The whole notion of it being the artists lot to slave away in torture, anxiety and solitude in order to produce work worthwhile is a romantic load of bollocks. Visions and callings are for monks and martyrs, an artist is neither.

I don’t want my art to consist of tons of self-imposed solitary confinement and worry. I’d like my lifetime to have more substance and weight to it. To have much much more than just art to it. To be full of colorful people, characters and memories (currently getting very little of any of those, but alas. Another post). Anyway, I always, always admired the painters with loads of talent and innovation who had their shit together: Twombly, Reubens, Jasper Johns. Yoshitomo Nara and Murakami. Even Julian Schnabel. They worked hard and worked steadily. Amassed fortunes and just generally went about their business. It’s not about the money, it’s that they didn’t give up or alter their voice in the pursuit of it, and more importantly, they didn’t go around the bend because they got frightened by the pressures that came with the very success they’d wanted in the first place. That’s the path I’d like my work to follow.

People often ask me about the nature of my work. Questions: Why the single, solitary figure? Why portraiture? Why not the entire figure, or more than one figure/person in the work? Why the white background?

Answers: Those are things that I might get to in time. Who knows? But I like portraiture and I favor it because people interest me. The interaction I have with the people that I paint interests me. Ultimately, the human condition interests me. That’s not to say I don’t find other things of interest; this is specifically about my work. I like to paint people alone and absorbed in a thought or moment because I can identify with that frame of mind very strongly. I think everyone can.

People see one figure and my work strikes them of isolation. There is an element of that present in it but mostly I’m very preoccupied with that Buddhist notion of infinite time and space within a single given moment. That the mind makes everything, all opposites. But if you hold no mind and no thought then the concept of time doesn’t exist, thus one moment and a thousand lifetimes exist as the same thing and in the same moment. So while my work is often about one person at first glance, it is also about myriad possibilities. I see that person occupied by their own mind, their own head-space in that single moment. That moment for them can consist of galaxies of thought. Everything from the trivial to the difficult and meaningful.  Current situations, dilemmas, other people, how they’re posing for me, what they think of it. That space in that single moment is crowded. Isolated, but not isolated, if that makes any sense. So my paintings are no longer really about isolation, because they’re about the correlation between the model and their own frame of mind, as well as the correlation between the model and myself. The works are loaded with weight in that regard. Because it’s not just the person, it’s what I think about and how I see the person and if you listen deeply that speaks volumes. In everything that I do there are two people involved and two people reflected and manifested: the model, and myself. Every work speaks about that dynamic, that relationship.

The white background is my own take on watercolor. The problem with watercolor as a contemporary art form is that a lot of the work done in the medium looks tired and stale. I’m not interested in making works that have to make sense, that do what the medium is ‘supposed’ to do.The white backgrounds are an indication of me making the work solely for myself. I put in what the image needs, for me. No more, no less. It’s the difference between painting and illustration. In illustration, everything has to make sense. In illustrating it’s all about using your own talent in the pursuit of the vision according to the client. In painting, it only has to make sense to me. That’s protecting my talent for myself.  In my painting the only vision I pursue is my own. That’s how I keep going, that’s how I don’t burn out. My personal work is just that, personal.

Image: Keinyo White Ltd. ©®