Fuck the Orthodoxy!

If you decide to try to teach yourself to oil paint, you're going to do a lot of reading and watching Youtube videos, and in the course of this self-education you're going to come to realize that there is an orthodoxy to the whole thing; a few ways that things are 'supposed to be done.'

A few of these 'rules,' for example, are:

• Start by painting the large forms, and when the large forms of color and value are in place, then you can get smaller and more detailed.

• It's a mistake to 'draw with paint'; the correct approach is to 'paint with paint.' What this means, I think, is that you're supposed to put down large volumes of paint and visually describe your subject with big marks of color and value, as opposed to lines or small meticulously made marks. You're supposed to use the liquid qualities of paint, which are fundamentally different from the 'dry' qualities of pencils and charcoal.

• Brushwork should be loose and expressive, in the style of John Singer Sargent. 

A few weeks ago I had a kind of an epic fail in the painting studio, and in retrospect I think the real reason is that I was trying to get in line with the orthodoxy. But it didn't work for me. After a lot of frustration I decided to forget these rules and just start putting paint on the canvas. This worked much better for me. This is the result:

Despite the fact that I have heard, from various sources, that "Painting should be something you enjoy," I often find it excruciatingly difficult. I crash against my own limitations... physical, emotional, psychological... all the time. But I'm painting because I have images in my head that I want to get out. These images deserve to be materialized. And so I am working on a craft, the craft of painting, in order to make these images real.

(It has occurred to me that I could do this with photography mixed with photoshop... the craft which is known as 'photo illustration.' I enjoy photo illustration, and I do a certain amount of it in service of the images I want to paint, but... at the end of the day all you really have is a print. A print is not an 'art object' in the same way that a painting is. And that is important to me. In addition to making art I also collect art and there is no replacement for the magic of holding in your hands an object that was made by the artist. That is important.)

So at this point I'm sort of in a "The ends justify the means" phase. I want a certain result and I do what it takes to get that result, which in my case means that I do very careful drawings and I rather meticulously match values and colors to my source images. It's slow and quite 'anal.' I don't put down big expressive slabs of paint; in fact I tend to draw with paint. Oh well. 

What follows is a gross oversimplification, but bear with me. 

Let's posit the painting style of photo-realism as one extreme. It is a style in which neither the content of the painting nor the technique of the painting deviates from objective visual reality. The subject is just a real scene, and the brush strokes are tight and unobtrusive, unnoticeable. From this extreme, a painter may deviate in one of two ways, either by distorting the content (towards surrealism or other distortions of reality), OR by distorting the technique of the painting (towards looser and looser brush strokes, or graphical abstraction). 

If we plot "Distortion of Content" along one axis, and "Distortion of Technique" along the other axis, we can get a graph that looks like this:

In theory, every painter who ever painted could be plotted somewhere on this graph. For some of them, it's quite difficult to evaluate them... and this is at best a very imprecise and subjective 'science.'

Here are some artists that come to mind, plotted on the graph (again, these are my estimations and they are approximate)

Now it so happens that I have a preference for paintings which display a medium-level distortion of content and a low-level distortion of technique... such as seen in the blue zone:

(Mind you, there are artists within the blue zone that I don't like, as well as artists outside the blue zone that I do like. This mainly comes down to subject matter. For instance I don't like Botero (too precious and cute) but I do like Bacon and Basquiat (because their paintings are tortured and dark and have so much energy.)

So the logical question that arises from all this is: If I like the tight and controlled paintings of Gottfried Helnwein, Paul Cadmus, and Mati Klarwein, and if I want to produce paintings like these, then should I be bothered at all about 'loose and expressive brushwork'? No, I don't think so. Helnwein and Cadmus and Klarwein certainly never gave a fuck about how Youtube told them to paint. Fuck the orthodoxy.

And anyway, every time I find painting difficult, I just remember the wise words of the very talented Jeff Cochran, "You are not supposed to enjoy painting. It's a battle/war/work."

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Total change of topic. 

I've met a fair number of famous people over the years, and it's occurred to me to write some of those stories down. Some people will find this tacky, or think: "what is he trying to prove with these stories?" I don't think I'm trying to prove anything; mostly I just want to catalogue these stories before I forget them. Some of the stories are good.

Most of these took place while I was living in NYC and LA.

I met Leonard Cohen and shook his hand and told him how much his music always meant to me, at Coachella in 2009. I discussed this meeting previously on this blog.

I also briefly met Perry Farrell at Coachella.

I met the amazing J.G. Thirlwell (Foetus) after a show in Los Angeles, some time around 2004. My brother Trevor is kinda friends with Thirlwell.

I met Michael Gira of the SWANS briefly in San Francisco after a concert in 2015. 

I met Marilyn Manson in LA some time around 2003 or so, at one of those beautiful downtown theaters. I saw him sitting a few seats away from where I was, and worked up the courage to go talk to him. As I approached, his bodyguards tried to block me but he waved them off. I told him about my robot performances and gave him a business card. He was nice and actually sort of enthusiastic about the robots. I'm sure I complimented him about his music, which I liked a lot then, and still mostly do.

On different occasions I met two members of the band Einstürzende Neubauten; Blixa Bargeld in LA, and N.U. Unruh in Amsterdam. I have always liked this band, but both of these guys were genuine assholes, and these meetings had a definite negative impact on my tendency to listen to them.

I met Jon Favreau when working on the effects for Zathura. He noticed a picture of an ultrasound of Kodiak, in utero, that I had at my desk and we talked briefly about having children.

I met Steven Spielberg while working on A.I. Artificial Intelligence, and then had a slightly longer chat with him a few years later working on War of the Worlds.

I also met Jude Law on A.I. Artificial Intelligence and gave him a Robochrist Industries t-shirt. Haha, I bet he treasures that!

I met Robin Williams while working on Bicentennial Man.

I met Alfred Molina and Tobey Maguire while working on Spider-Man 2. I was one of the puppeteers of Dock Ock's tentacles so I was around Alfred a lot, and I got to puppeteer one of the claws grabbing Tobey around the throat during the deli scene.

I also met James Franco on Spider-Man 2. James Franco and I had a friend in common, a talented and handsome young fellow named Ben Neidhardt who had just recently died of a heroin overdose, so Franco and I talked for a few minutes about Ben.

I recognized Cillian Murphy in an airport a few years ago and, as respectfully as I could, complimented him on his work. He was nice. Christina and I were watching Peaky Blinders at the time.

I rode an elevator with Petra Nemcova once and, although I did not really meet her, I smiled at her and she smiled back! I knew exactly who she was, and I was in love!

I met Larry Page (I think it was him, or maybe it was Sergey Brin...) at Burning Man in 1999 or so. Those are the guys who started Google. Larry (or Sergey?) liked my robots.

Gibby Haynes came over to my warehouse in the South-of-Market area of San Francisco in 1996 or so, because he was an old friend of my then-housemate Flynn Mauthe. 

A few years later I briefly met Johnny Depp at Wacko in LA and I mentioned to him that I'd met Gibby, because they are pals.

I am an acquaintance of the great painter John Currin and his talented wife Rachel because Rachel and I were close friends in college.

I worked pretty closely with Mark Pauline for a few years in the 1990's and we are still friends.

I met Stelarc while we were living in Berlin a few years ago. We chatted for a bit; he knew who I was which was cool.

Julia Roberts spends time in Taos, and a mutual friend brought her and her family over to our home for a visit a few years ago. I got along pretty well with her husband; she was reserved with me but very open with Christina.

I'm saving some of the better stories for last...

One day at some point around 2000 or so I was living at the Brewery in LA, working on my robots outside my workshop when this sort of hippie-looking guy came over and started chatting with me about them. He was familiar with SRL and wanted to talk about the 'underground' art scene in San Francisco. After a few minutes he explained that his son was working on a commercial in another building nearby, and asked if he could bring his son over to meet me and see the robots. "Of course," I said. A few minutes later he and his son, Leonardo DiCaprio, came over to my shop and we talked for 10 or 15 minutes. I'm pretty sure I complimented Leonardo on his work; I've always liked him as an actor.

For the second half of my time attending college at Columbia in NYC I lived in a fraternity house called Delta Phi. We were just about as un-fraternity-like as you could get, we were all just into art and drugs. We used to have a lot of parties there, often featuring large tanks of nitrous oxide. Around this time my brother Trevor, who also lived there, was dating a girl (with an amazing birth-name which I won't divulge for reasons of privacy) who was very friendly with Uma Thurman. Through this connection I met Uma and over the course of a certain few weeks I became somewhat friendly with her and even a bit flirtatious. One evening we were having a party at the house, and, as an older 'brother' in the frat I had early access to the nitrous tank, before the party started. A few of us were doing nitrous 'hits' in the basement but finally everyone said "OK we need to save some! Let's go upstairs." They all left the basement but I hung back to do 'just one more!' I took one more nitrous hit, and... woke up a short time later on the floor. My glasses were a few feet away, broken, and I had a profusely bleeding gash over my right eye. I had fallen, from standing position, flat on my face (!) and my glasses had broken from the impact and given me that nasty cut. I gathered myself and decided I should probably go to the hospital to get a few stitches; St. Lukes Hospital was a block away. As I was leaving the house, Uma was arriving for the party. I explained the situation and she said "Well I'll just come with you." So she walked with me to the emergency room and sat there with me... for 2 hours! I was never seen by a doctor because gunshot wounds and other more serious patients kept arriving. Eventually we decided to just go to the Love's pharmacy on Broadway and buy some butterfly bandages, which she applied to my cut. We finally returned to the party, now in full swing, and she wanted to come up to my room. When I opened the door to my room... with Uma Thurman at my side... my girlfriend was there! Well, short introductions were made... and I never really saw Uma again, other than in passing here and there. The scar above my right eye, which she patched up, is faded but still there. 

In this timeframe I also briefly met Ethan Hawke and Gary Oldman; they were hanging around Columbia a lot for a little while.

During that time I also sort of knew Jann Wenner because I had dated his niece. One time Hunter S. Thompson came to speak at Columbia and Jann was up on stage too, because they were friends. During the Q&A I raised my hand to ask a question and there must have been something good or funny about my question because Hunter, sort of inexplicably, suggested that I come join them on-stage! Hunter had a cast on his right arm at the time, and so did I... so there I was sitting on the stage between Hunter Thompson (both of us with casts on our arms) and Jann Wenner. I had to whisper to Jann that we already knew each other; he did not remember me. The whole talk was organized by some of the older Delta Phi brothers and so after the talk, a few of us went back to the green room with Jann and Hunter and got to drink beers and hang out a bit with him. I clearly remember my old pal Chris Metz deep in conversation with Hunter. I wish I had a picture of me up on stage with those guys.

EDIT: After reading this, Chris Metz (mentioned above) put me in touch with photographer Steve Eichner, who did actually snap some photos that night.

Here we see Hunter walking with Chris, and...

I'm not sure who the woman on the left is, but starting with Hunter and going back to the right, we have Hunter himself, Adam Schneider (who was one of the organizers), my brother Trevor, and... barely visible behind him, in glasses... me. Fun to see these old pics.

Both photos courtesy of Steve Eichner

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Although it's been a little hard to find time to paint in the last week, I am still painting. I've decided to go back to the first painting- the one I couldn't finish - the reinterpretation of Ingres' Jupiter and Thetis. I'm finishing it, and improving the figures. But it will not be the masterpiece I'd hoped, in large part because it is now a mish-mash of styles... my timid and uptight style from last year mixed with the slightly looser, more confident, and higher-contrast style of now. 

And when I'm done with that one, I'll start on the next one. 

I'm already working on the photo-illustration. 

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For those of you who knew him, I am sorry to say that Sprocket, my dog of 15 years, has died.

He was a good dog.

I used to think that one of the functions of having pets was to give children a bit of practice at dealing with death. I wasn't exactly wrong, but what I didn't get right was that adults need practice dealing with death too. 

It's not easy.