Every painting is decorative.
Manufactured desire is equally as enticing as fabricated environments. Every few weeks for the past fifteen years, my close friend the photographer Arne Svenson and I meet for lunch at the Olive Garden in Chelsea; we call it our “Ladies Luncheon” because our spouses are professionals with day jobs. With some of the finest restaurants on earth within a one-mile radius, we go to Olive Garden because it has the kind of watered-down, one-size-fits-all environment that is an ideal forum for our very real conversations. We talk about the art world, share career triumphs, and have supported each other through the deaths of parents all over bowls of overcooked spaghetti and meatballs. I love scripted, corporate hospitality and planned environments because they make those tender, unexpected human moments all the more poignant.
As I type this, I am sitting in a cobalt-blue neon banquette under a fake rainforest at the Peppermill Resort Spa Casino in Reno, NV. Casinos relax me because they are the most honest places on earth; everyone knows that the house always wins. No lies. Casinos are also planned corporate environments that appear to run effortlessly while thousands of workers labor in concealed hallways, offices, and stations operating the controls. Any experience that puts a wide gap between what you pay to see and what is hidden attracts me. This division between front room and back room is why I don’t like restaurants with open kitchens. When I go out for dinner with my wife or friends, I want to be immersed in a carefully orchestrated front-room experience, not see pots of boiling potatoes; I’ve worked in enough restaurants. Although I labor for months in my studio, my exhibitions are strictly front-room experiences. No one is allowed into the kitchen. My videos are styled after cooking shows for this reason: to give people a glimpse of the boiling potatoes.
Gambling is manufactured emotion.
—Jack Binion, casino mogul
Art History
The only thing that truly belongs to a painter is the history of painting. I study art history for one reason: permission. Knowledge can make you formidable, but knowledge paired with permission makes you twelve feet tall and bulletproof. Learning about painters who came before me, both trained and self-taught, Western and Eastern, is not only my responsibility but also pure joy. Painting isn’t a nebulous, anything-goes activity but a cumulative practice that requires discipline and scholarship. The notion of the artist as a lightning rod receiving visions from tree trunks is hooey, though there are exceptions like William Blake or Martín Ramírez. The rest of us go to our studios every day, lock the door, and make stuff.
I live in New York City because I am curious about everything, and I want to get there by subway; a MetroCard is a passport to the universe in its totality. New York is also one of the world’s great walking cities. My favorite walk is from our apartment on the Upper West Side through Central Park to the Metropolitan Museum of Art on Fifth Avenue. The Met is the reason I moved to New York City; I am sitting in the Greek and Roman galleries as I type this.
My idea of a perfect Friday night is a late-afternoon walk across the park to the museum with Katie. We enter through the street-level door, unknown to most, and head to the cafeteria for early dinner, a glass of wine, a slice of pie, and coffee. Then we roam the halls until they kick us out. As we move from gallery to gallery, the paintings light up like lanterns, begging our eyes to sop up everything they have to offer. I proposed to Katie in front of Albert Bierstadt’s The Rocky Mountains, Lander’s Peak (1863) in the American Wing. As we gazed at the painting, I compared her attributes to colors (the clear blue of her laugh, her dark chocolate eyes, her pale rose lips) and said if I could fit those colors into a single tube of paint it would look like this. From my pocket, I produced an actual paint tube, uncrimped the end, and dumped a diamond ring into my palm as I dropped to one knee. The security guard gave me a thumbs-up. I chose the Bierstadt because it will hang forever. I want my children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren to be able to stand in the same spot that we did and feel us beside them, our histories bound in a fixed view. The universe might be totally unknowable, but one thing is certain: painters will walk to the Met.
In a Hurry? Take Lombard
Art is the intensification of slowness. There is rich poetry in antispeed. I love bad Internet connections, tollbooths, and long lines because they are forced interruptions in the blur of getting from one obligation to another. One of the things I miss about old-fashioned record players is flipping the album from side A to B, because that mechanical interruption gave me a full second for the music to ring in my ears while I anticipated what was to come. Many novelists write in longhand on yellow ledgers for the same reason, because it offers a built-in clumsiness.
Painting is a collection of organized interruptions: fractured planes, broken colors, and shifting lines. Real awareness doesn’t come in long dial tones of looking, but in the moments of clarity when the eye is halted and restarted, noticing things it may have missed before. My two favorite streets in America are Lombard Street in San Francisco and Chalmers Street in Charleston because they represent antispeed; whenever I’m in a hurry, I say, “Let’s take Lombard.” In college, when stuck on a painting, I’d drive my car to Chalmers Street, the oldest remaining cobblestone street in Charleston, and drive from one end to the other, one bump at a time. In this rapid, streamlined world, I took solace in knowing that speed wasn’t an option.
Art allows us to think slowly because it is made slowly, which is why copying others leads nowhere fast. My paintings are frequently imitated, and you can see many examples on the Internet. Painters have always borrowed from each other—I certainly lifted motifs and color ideas, but I have massaged them into my own visual language over tens of thousands of hours of labor. Give your work time. It doesn’t matter where you got it, only where you take it. Be clumsy. Con artists take shortcuts; real painters take Lombard.
Do you skate or are you just wearing those shoes?
—Tim Kerr
The Third Thing
My love affair with Ireland was minted in poetry. For as long as I can remember, the works of John Hewitt, Seamus Heaney, Thomas Kinsella, Derek Mahon, and W.B. Yeats have held a secret place in my imagination, and, after winning a Fulbright Scholarship in 1997, I chose to live and paint in Dublin for a year. In addition to Fulbright funds, the Irish Museum of Modern Art granted me a spacious, skylit studio in what was the seventeenth-century Royal Hospital Kilmainham. I kept an apartment in the Rathmines section of Dublin but slept on a cot in that studio most nights. Once a week, I put a drawing pad and toothbrush in my backpack and boarded the next train at Heuston Station with a one-way ticket. My intention was simple; as soon as a place looked interesting, I got off and walked.
Ireland is a country best seen on foot, and it rewards those who are willing to smell and touch every detail on wayward lanes braided with damp hedges beneath downy skies. Walking in Ireland taught me how to break down the landscape into composite parts and relate those parts to the human body. For instance, the foreground is visceral and immediate, my sneakers on wet grass. Middle ground is farther away; I could easily walk there but first must visualize being there in my mind. Background is too far away to walk, so I can only project myself there in my imagination. Three layers of spatial information are compressed into a single view. The greater the distance, the more it is internalized, because I have to imagine being there while standing here.
A landscape painting should relate to the body parts of the solitary viewer, with the bottom corresponding to the feet, a midsection, and a top that refers to the space around the head. My paintings arise in the same way we experience the actual landscape, through a collision of personal experience and empirical observation. Art happens when the intellectual and the visceral collide so violently that they fuse into a third thing. Ireland impressed upon me that there is no room for the landscape in a landscape painting; it must be ripped out to make space for the third thing. Only the viewer can turn it back into nature. A landscape painting is complet
e when the landscape vanishes.
TOWERING
Tyzack
In 1987, my senior year of college, the world-renowned environmental artists Christo and Jean-Claude flew down from New York City to Charleston for an award ceremony and lecture. My professor, advisor, mentor, and friend, the British painter Michael Tyzack, knew Christo personally and asked me to drive him to the airport to collect them. Their visit was a big, hairy deal, as Christo and Jean-Claude were just coming off the success of their Pont Neuf piece in which they wrapped the loveliest bridge in Paris in sand-colored polyamide fabric, a piece that was seen by over three million visitors.
As Christo and Jean-Claude walked off the plane, I was struck by how delicate they were. After a warm greeting, we walked to Michael’s station wagon, and my years of bellhopping in hotels paid off as I efficiently loaded their bags and chauffeured them downtown for a Lowcountry lunch of barbecue (mustard base), chicken bog, buttery biscuits, and sweet tea at our favorite joint on King Street. Christo and JeanClaude were so kind. I was a tall, goofy twenty-yearold nobody sitting face-to-face with two international art stars, yet they spoke to me with respect, made eye contact, asked questions about my work, and listened to my responses. They even gave me their private number to call when in New York. After lunch, I ran to my studio and painted all night long. I couldn’t wait to meet more visiting artists.
Later that year, a midcareer painter who Michael also knew and who had appeared in a recent Whitney Biennial, flew to Charleston from New York for another lecture and exhibition. Once again, Michael chose me to drive him to the airport. This time was different. He welcomed our visitor and introduced me as his finest student. She responded by shoving her luggage in my face. She was arrogant and spoke to me like I was a small animal in a petting zoo. She was clearly part of that tribe of crabby, dreamless urbanites who think that all Southerners just crawled out of a storm drain. Later I went to Michael and confessed my disappointment, a combination of shallowness and anger. I felt like a phony. He winked and said he was teaching me a valuable lesson that I’d have to figure out on my own.
Twenty years later in 2007, as he lay dying of cancer in his James Island home, Michael’s wife, Ann, held the phone to his ear so I could say a tearful good-bye to my friend. Michael could hear me, but couldn’t speak. I talked about our days together at the College of Charleston, how I felt that anything was possible because he had my back. I remembered how, when the fine arts building closed at ten o’clock, he gave me the keys; when I wanted to work on several paintings at once, he got me a private studio; when people complained that I was hanging my paintings in public spaces without permission, he dealt with them; when I needed a car to transport work, he lent me his station wagon. I never heard the word no come out of Michael’s mouth, and it made all the difference.
I told him that he was my other father and that I’d finally figured out what he was teaching me all those years ago. Michael didn’t bring me along to have me help with the luggage but to show me how a professional artist treats a nobody. Christo and Jean-Claude had nothing to gain by showing me kindness and respect. They did it because that’s what pros do. The best artists are also the nicest.
Take care in how you address fellow painters, regardless of their age or résumé. To this day, I answer every email I receive, make time to speak to artists who approach me, see their shows when I can, and treat every single one with dignity, because painting deserves our best selves. Working in the arts in New York City for thirty years has enabled me to meet a lot of famous, successful people, and they have one thing in common: good manners. They are consummate professionals with nothing to prove outside of their craft because everything goes into it. Nothing is left over. The dicks are the ones who have something to prove outside of their work, and I’ve met plenty. To them, I say, Thank you for showing me how not to behave. Some people make me feel older and wiser, while others just make me feel older. I don’t care if you are having a lousy day—you are still representing your work, so put a cork in it and act polite.
If you ever visit the College of Charleston campus, you will see three paintings prominently hung in the entrance to the School of the Arts: William Halsey on the left, Michael Tyzack on the right, and me in between.
Family Tree
It’s fascinating what you can learn with Google, a cappuccino, and thirty minutes. Here are my teachers’ teachers. I am not fit to eat off their buckled shoes, but it’s still neat to see how all roads lead to Uncle François.
My Hero
My obsession with the Canadian pianist and philosopher Glenn Gould began on June 9, 1986, during my junior year of college. I know the date because I wrote it on the back of a drawing that I still have. Late one afternoon, Gould’s 1981 recording of J.S. Bach’s Goldberg Variations came on WSCI, the local public radio station. (He also recorded it in 1955, but I prefer the later version for its X-ray clarity and slower tempo.) I set my brush down, sat on the windowsill overlooking George Street, and listened to the entire piece. Gould’s performance had an almost Dixieland buoyancy as well as astounding transparency; you could even hear him humming in the background. I was bewitched.
I went straight to the library the following morning to read everything I could about this fascinating creature. There was no iTunes back then, so obtaining recordings was nearly impossible. The college’s music library had one copy of J.S. Bach’s Toccatas, but it was scratched, so my friends drove me to North Charleston to the Paragon, the only independent record store in the area, so I could comb through their vast selection of used records and bootlegs in the hopes that something of Gould’s might appear. The Paragon was run by an emaciated albino named Bobby, who looked like a naked mole rat. Rumor had it that Bobby would trade rare albums with college dudes if they masturbated for him in the back room; a guy in my dorm was said to have gotten his Ramones outtakes with the “five-finger discount.”
Once I’d devoured every book on Gould, I had to get as close as possible to standing in his shoes. After a 1994 opening of my work at a gallery in Detroit, I rented a car and drove alone to Toronto, where Gould was born, lived his entire life, and died. I sat contently in the lobby of his apartment building on St. Clair Avenue West (he had apartment 902) watching neighbors come and go, ate “scrambles” washed down with Sanka in his favorite booth at Fran’s Restaurant across the street, and spent hours drawing trees by his modest headstone in Mt. Pleasant Cemetery. I still keep a laminated leaf from his grave over the doorway to my studio. At night, I’d drive up and down Yonge Street with Gregorian chants blaring on the stereo and the heat turned up to max, because that’s what Gould did. My research also took me to other parts of Ontario. In the town of Orillia, ninety miles north of Toronto, I ate chop suey at Shangri-La Gardens, Gould’s favorite Chinese restaurant, which played his recordings on the jukebox at an assaulting volume, and walked down a private road to his family cottage in Uptergrove on Lake Simcoe, where he escaped the world and practiced. Yeah, I was stalking a dead guy. From there, I drove through mighty Algonquin Forest to Ottawa and met with the director of the music division of the National Library of Canada, who gave me access to Gould’s entire recorded and written archives. As I was neither a historian, a musicologist, nor a writer, the staff didn’t know what to make of me. Why did a weirdo painter from New York City need to see Gould’s prescriptions and hold his shoes? I had no idea what I was looking for, yet I’d recognize it on impact. I was desperate to see what an artist’s life looked like.
The musician and scholar John Roberts, Gould’s oldest friend, happened to be doing research in the library that week and took an interest in my studies. We talked for hours over coffee and met for dinner whenever our paths crossed in Ottawa; it was the closest I would come to having Glenn Gould sitting across the table from me.
My work got the attention of the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, and they interviewed me on television and radio. In 1999, the Glenn Gould Foundation commissioned me to create a series o
f paintings to be exhibited during the Glenn Gould Gathering, a symposium of musicians, historians, and enthusiasts from all over the world. I hung out with Ray Roberts, Margaret Pacsu, and Lorne Tulk, all prominent figures in Gould’s life. I even sat down at CD 318, his beloved Steinway, with his piano tuner Verne Edquist, who, like me, has synesthesia. Verne sees color in sound, while I see color in words.
Glenn Gould famously said, “The purpose of art is the gradual, lifelong construction of a state of wonder and serenity.” The patience and commitment embodied in that statement continue to inform every part of my life and career. Gould valued solitude as the prerequisite to the creative act and wrote copiously about the role of the artist in society. He believed that the ideal audience-to-artist ratio was zero to one and viewed technology not only as protection from the wildness of nature, but from ourselves, for behind that protective layer every individual would be free to construct his or her divinity.
For Gould, technology and its role in the dissemination of art was not just a philosophy but a moral calling, so he retired from live performance in 1964 to devote his remaining years to studio recordings, sound documentaries, and essays that explored what he called creative lying. He even postulated home kits that would allow listeners to custom design their ideal classical recording by combining various performances according to individual tastes, moving the spectator from passive receptor to active participant in shaping the art form. He was exploring relational aesthetics and personalized music channels decades before Pandora and Spotify were invented. Gould despised live performance for its “non-take-twoness” and spent countless hours crafting his recordings, splice by splice, until they got as close to perfection as possible. He treated the recording booth like a painter’s studio in which the artist worked in cloistered solitude, releasing only what was ready for public consumption.
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