In the last Iteration, I talked about how seeing the Philip Guston show at the National Gallery left me feeling a little envious of such a strong personal story, something that my own work just didn’t have. I talked to Sean about it over the weekend and shared some of what I had been feeling and he was quick to disagree, saying that he thought my work was very personal. He said that in his opinion, my work is a reflection of how I see and experience the world. To him, all of my anxieties, my fears, even some of my childhood traumas are all right there on the canvas. “I know you don’t see it,” he said, “but what could be more personal than that?”
I spent some time looking over a bunch of my work, going back to when I started painting again in 2007 and I started to put some of the pieces together though the lens of how Sean said he saw it. I think my work, especially my narrative work, definitely has recurring themes that run though most of it—war, power, money, greed, corruption. But what I’ve always seen as simply a fascination with the source material may, in fact, be something much deeper. For example, I’m old enough to remember hiding under my desk during the duck and cover drills in elementary school. And in junior high and high school, the Cold War was still very much a thing, as was the threat of a Russian nuclear strike. When you add in things like Reaganomics, the military industrial complex, the saving and loan crisis, Iran-Contra, AIDS, televangelism, you end up with a pervasive, underlying anxiety in how I moved through the world as an adolescent which, I guess in some ways, I’ve just never really been able to shake.
My parents got divorced when I was four and I blamed myself for it for years. What was so wrong with me to make my dad want to just leave? He stayed friends with my mom, so the only explanation my young brain could come up with was that it was me he left, not us. Plus, early on, when it was my time to be with him, he would drop me off with my grandparents. It actually got to the point that my grandmother had to confront him about it, telling him that I was his son, not theirs, and that I needed to spend time with him. And to be fair, I don’t think it was because he didn’t love me. I just think he didn’t know what to do with me. When he married my stepmother, Linda, it got better. She was the one who spent time with me during the day while my dad slept because he worked nights. She was the one who taught me to draw and paint and, along with my mother, really encouraged me to pursue creativity. But my relationship with my dad was often difficult and that reinforced and maybe even compounded the fears I had around abandonment, which I think often shows up in my work as well. Maybe one of the reasons I have such a hard time valuing my own work and am so reluctant to call myself an artist is because my dad was so relentless about telling me that “artists are a dime a dozen.” He didn’t value what interested me and because I valued it so much, that meant—at least in my brain at the time—that he didn’t value me.
While it might be more subtle than my narrative work, my graphic work, which I have repeatedly called decor rather than art with a capital A, is built on a deep underlying tension. And when I say graphic, I’m referring to graphic design not graphic as in violent. On the surface, the work adheres to a grid, but the boundaries of those grids are skewed, burning, tearing, and otherwise coming apart at the seams, which again is me struggling to hold on to control—in my art and in my life. Even the circles and dots that appear in the work have meaning beyond just being clever design elements. I’m trying to connect the dots in my life, wanting things to be whole. The circles represent that desire and aspiration for wholeness. I’m starting to think that all of my work, regardless of whether it’s narrative or decorative, is just me trying to reconcile my place between order and chaos.
I don’t quite know how to end this one. What I do know is that there’s a lot more to uncover and process around this and even with some of these newfound realizations, I feel like my work is going to continue to evolve as long as I can stay out of the way and let it. That’s my hope anyway, or at least one of them. Up to this point, I’ve tended to make pretty intuitively, which I think is one of the reasons that I didn’t really see the connection between the work and my own story. I just hope that I can keep it that way, rather than starting to second guess myself and potentially get stuck thinking about whether the work feels too personal or not personal enough. I know that’s a possibility but maybe consciously trying to keep that in check and making sure I stay in the doing, instead of getting stuck thinking about the doing, will allow the work to keep going where it needs to.
I recently came across the work of an artist named Christopher Konecki who, in addition to being a fantastic muralist, makes incredible miniature sculptures inspired by vintage hotels, traffic signs, graffiti, even bowling alleys. I’ve found about a dozen pieces of his that I'd love to have in our house.