Summer 2021. I’ve just finished my thesis project and a slick show in Italy. The work looks great. It’s clean, well made, nice color, very professional. I got my drivers license, motorcycle license, and I won a grant. I’m burnt out.
My neighbor dies of a heroin overdose. He was a drug dealer. He’d always been particularly nice to me, a stand out amongst my other neighbors. His father died almost exactly a year prior, his aunt passed sometime in between, and his uncle was dying at time, all from covid. The household went from six to two in a year. I couldn’t look his mother and sister in the eyes as we passed each other in the hallway. I didn’t know how to empathize with their pain. There was a vigil outside the building every night for a week. I brought six packs and got drunk with the dudes who came to remember him. He had a kid, too. A son.
Megan and I got into a fight and it lingered for months. We weren’t talking. I surprised my dad with a visit for his birthday. My parents are separated, and I wanted him to know he’s not alone. He’s unambitious. Mom says “lazy.” I am too. She left for work, she works a lot. Dad teaches at a small school, he’s important there. He likes to teach, to be a part of his students’ lives. He’s important to me.
What’s the point of ambition given the fragility of life, if you have meaningful relationships? Why pursue success, recognition, fame or wealth? Art feels egotistical. You make something to be seen by others, something that will last for centuries. I’m not saying my neighbors aren’t ambitious in their way. I’m saying that walking around on this planet hoping to get recognized by millionaires for your talent, living to get a big show and be invited to Venice feels very fucking weird in comparison to trying to make enough money to make sure your family is alright, to have a enough to eat, and to hang out with friends when you can. I want to be real, I want to understand my Dad, I want to question life and ambition.
CLOUDS
I love the clouds. I’ve tried, with older works like We’re all Leaving Town For Good, Again, to get away with painting something tacky. Letting that pretense go felt right, and I felt like my dad or neighbors would like the work. I used just a few colors, and painted right outside the studio or from my bedroom window. They were all quick, sun sets in forty five minutes or so.
I went to the bar after one of these sessions. It’s late, I’m drunk already. Lou Reed is playing, “It's such a perfect day, it just keeps me hanging on...”. I think about my neighbor, my dad. I’m alone. I realize the song is about suicide. And that the clouds are pretty perfect.
SUICIDE
Another neighbor was particularly affected by our friend’s death. He blamed himself. I’d lost a friend to suicide by gunshot a few years ago. I kept picturing my neighbor’s head, blown open on his couch. I wanted to paint it. My friends in high school used to watch Al Queda beheadings online, and I remembered the website. I found this image, and made this painting instead.
GEICO
I’d hoped to make some amount of money of during the Italian show, but it didn’t pan out. I went broke during the summer, and dragged it out for months. You can’t do shit in New York without cash. I left a suit I needed dry-cleaned hanging over my chair. It watched me that whole time, “you don’t have thirty dollars to waste.” Medusa’s glare. I remembered this old Geico commercial of a stack of bills with googly eyes, and painted it in front of the LiMu emu. I hate those commercials.
Someone from instagram offered to buy the piece almost immediately after I posted it, which was a relief. But, whenever I reached out to artists about my worries, I came away feeling like a fraud for hoping to make money from my work. I understand that suspicion, and hold it against myself. In a clip from the recent Wojnarowicz documentary, Peter Hujar and David discuss the creative dilemma involved with making money. “Art today is a commercial product. So that people are doing art that looks like art. They’re turning out a product. And I think that when an artist perceives what he does as a product he’s in trouble. That’s it, I mean they turn into little mini factories. There’s nothing human about it.”1 I agree. So I held onto the piece and got a pandemic loan to keep going. I wanted to keep experimenting. Maybe Geico could hold more meaning in the context of other paintings in a show.
1 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=18X5dBp06Qs&t=2544s

But Paul’s going to come calling- I have to pay those loans back eventually. And, let’s be honest, I’m a fucking painter, how experimental is it ever going to get? Painting has a high degree of liquidity. It’s old, accepted, flat, easy to hang, transport, and sell, all of which make it very close to currency. This closeness to the market is a limiting factor in its experimentality. And, I love you, David, but you lived in my neighborhood when you could squat a place to live, shoot dope all day, and afford not to sell your work. Your success is part of the reason I can’t afford to do that here, anymore. You are a part of the legend that inspires me to want to be here, and maybe I just can’t live up to it.
BW FLOWERS
I wanted to deal with my neighbor’s death. I figured I’d paint him dead on his floor. First steps are the greatest. I didn’t see it, so I had to imagine the scene. As soon as I finished the sketch with him in a Durant jersey, the whole thing broke down. It looked like a joke about a drunk guy passed out on the floor. I let it sit there for a while. Maybe that would work, maybe I’d use the joke to draw in the viewer, and then pull the rug out with the title, and crush them with the weight of the reality of the situation. No, It was too disconnected. It was never supposed to be a joke.
After Christmas, I painted the words “I feel afraid all the time” over the original image. The piece morphed into a text work based on sharpie drawings I’d developed over the holidays. It broke me out of the first idea, but it still wasn’t working.
I no longer had a definite direction, but kept going. The Sunflowers were stuck in my mind from Schnabel’s stupid movie alongside a memory of the black and white Flowers I did for the Italian
show. This final layer was thickly, rapidly, fluidly painted and the shapes underneath read through the surface. It took two hours. The simplicity of the image and its connection to, but detachment from the goals for, what is underneath hit right where I was aiming with the clouds.
BEZOS
Bezos started out as another text painting based on my sketches from the holidays. It read “I wish my family was closer.” I liked the simplicity of the emotion and of the act of painting it as a phrase. It wasn’t cool or smart, so it followed this unambitious thread. I think it was the most
successful of the text paintings, but then I had a simpler, cheaper idea. Bezo’s head, decapitated like Caravagio’s classic Medusa, blood trailing, levitating in black space. Portrait of Jeff Bezos as a Rocket Ship. I loved this quick joke covering up the softer emotion beneath. It felt like the thing we do when someone asks “How’s it going?” You cover it up with something you heard from someone else. A lot of “fuck Bezos” or “fuck Amazon” talk you hear is as deep as small talk, but it did allow me to begin to feel out the big-white-male-genius-subject, and my own egotistical relationship to it. It’s too fast of a joke to go past a beginning.
ICEBERG
I liked how the emotion hides behind the image in Bezos and in the Flowers. Even though it’s got about as much weight as an artist saying “my work is radical,” I liked that Bezos started to
deal with some real things, and that it gets there through a sort of sleight of hand. I began taking the idea of “cover-ups” seriously, so I recycled a canvas I’d started for my thesis project, and painted “It seems like no one can solve any problems,” over it.
This was early February, troops were building up along the Ukrainian border in my news feeds all the time, but hadn’t invaded yet. I was getting anxious, but I had this weird faith that if I just went into work diligently everyday, everything would work out peacefully, and that there were bigger problems. How do we deal with things that are bigger than us? How do you understand them? How do I deal with capitalism, racism or global warming? How can I, as a painter working in the studio solve anything?
I started trying to think of examples where painting achieved social meaning, or been part of meaningful action. I think Kerry James Marshall is a great example. He identified the problem “There are no black figures in museums,” and he is a part of resolving that. He approaches it through study, work and cooperation with others. He formulated an effective thesis and took action. It’s an effective way to get something done, but it’s not my way. I think that if I form a concrete thesis, it would take colonial bent. It feels like planting a flag in a field, building a durable, conceptual wall around a territory I survey, stake out, and claim. It’s in my nature to subvert my own theses, to contradict myself. It’s part of what’s hard about getting something done: why do a thing that I’m critical of?
For example, Frederic Church is written about as the preeminent painter of his day, of embodying and affirming the cultural values of his time. He was wildly successful marketing the Wild West to the white imagination of the East Coast. He manifested manifest destiny. He
therefore, played a part in the genocides that accompanied that thought process. He is also directly responsible for bringing about the National parks, the first and most significant legal assumption of responsibility for stewardship of the land in that same imagination. The idea that the land should be protected is in my head partly because of him, and his cohort. Manifest Destiny, Genocide, the National Parks- they’re all very real outcomes.
Church became so successful, ie made so much money, doing these Teddy Roosevelt paintings, that he was able to become an early trustee of the Metropolitan Museum of Art alongside Cornelius Vanderbilt. He created the place that so inspired me as a child, I dedicated my life to art. He created the place I still want my work to hang in today. He built the canon in America, and he built it in my head.
After his work was revived from obscurity in the middle of the 20th century, a massive iceberg painting went to auction in 1979 and sold for 2.5 million dollars. It was, at the time, the third most expensive picture ever sold, surpassed only by Titian and Velazquez. In 1981, coincidentally, Richter begins a project of large scale photorealistic iceberg paintings that have since gone under the hammer at upwards of 20 million dollars.
I was sitting there in my studio, thinking about what I can do, when I remembered a small iceberg painting I’d seen in college at the Carnegie Museum in Pittsburgh. It’s beautiful, luminous. I mean the man was fucking great with color.
So, I ripped it off. I did this thing in black and white, with the same liquid paint I’d used for Bezos and the Flowers, and blew the whole thing up over the text painting underneath. A giant,
white, looming, melting, iceberg. It took about two hours to paint. It’s feels like the most ambitious so far, but it’s just a copy, and I really didn’t waste a lot of time on it, and it still doesn’t solve anything. It’s gonna kill us all.
BANANA
It’s a dick painting. Most paintings are dick paintings, trying to show off in some way. Look how
good I am, how smart, talented, or how bad I am.
Withering fruit is a classic vanitas subject. This is an immortalized, frozen, spotless banana. It reminds me of a few things. My own death, the bodega, 19th and 20th century US imperialism,
United Fruit’s destabilization of Honduran, Guatemalan, and Colombian governments in order to control the supply chain tightly enough to bring the fruit to market in the US before it got too spotty, the Banana Massacres, the banana blight currently threatening banana monoculture across the world, Andy Warhol, and my own dick. Teddy Rosevelt said, “speak softly and carry a big stick.” He built a navy and called “the great white fleet,” United Fruit called their own private flotilla the “great white fleet.”
GEARS
I’ve been working with black and white because it’s cheaper than full color, and I wanted use more paint than I had in the past to get the layers into these cover ups. Eliminating color simplified the number of choices that go into making a painting. Sticking to a palette allowed me to unify what I anticipated would be a visually disparate group of paintings. I felt the emotional tone of the color scheme was appropriate for the project. Finally, it struck me as an established painterly strategy to look “smart,” which I’d like to go into more.
Much of Pollock’s drip painting, Avery Singer, Wade Guyton, Chris Wool, and early Richters, all follow a predominantly grey scale tonality. New Yorkers love to wear all black, and it looks “good.” It reminds me of the Pilgrims. Im not sure how far we’ve come. Michael Taussig says in “What Color is the Sacred?” that the irrational, mystical associations Eurocentric culture has with color are at odds with its puritan, rational and commercial values. David Batchelor follows it up with a whole book called “Chromophobia.” I think black and white bodies of work “look smart” because they appeal to deeper cultural associations. I used this tactic in order to appeal to a sympathy viewers might have with this strategy, so that my work will read as smart. However, I don’t want the whole show to hide behind this strategy, to give into its seductive powers. I want to critique it as a strategy, and I need to bring color back in to do that.
So I started another cover-up by tinting some of the grays I had been working with. The subject is from a dream. I’d always wanted to paint a painting I’d seen in a dream, (not paint a dream, that’s an important distinction).
DEAD RAT
I went to have a coffee - same place, everyday, I love it there. There’s this dead rat, right in front of where I sit and smoke, in The Dead Toreador pose. It was too good. I ran home to grab my stuff and make this painting from life, on the street. One hour, nice impasto, good sheen.
BIG BADDIE
Two issues thus far: One, I’ve been criticizing myself, my ambitions, history, and ego across this group of paintings, but it should be more obvious. Two, I felt like I’d fallen back into hiding behind the slick image. I liked that way it worked in Bezos and the Iceberg, but I wanted to peel back the mask, to try to show some of the raw emotion beneath, and to reveal the “recognizable image” as another strategy or trick, to bring forward my own distrust of it.
So I brought back the black and white over a color still life underpainting. It was a loose self portrait on Jefferson Davis’s body, flanked by distorted repetitions of my face. The eyes held too much command over the image, so I crossed them out. I wanted to try to unify the black and white and color sections, so I brought heightened colors from the background over top of the central figure in loose fiery marks. A grid of Xs over the whole painting blends the image sections further. I scraped paint away, then retouched the mark with a green highlight. I wanted to achieve a pictorial depth with atypical elements and ordering. The middle and backgrounds of a picture form a substrate in which the subject is suspended. I tried to re create that here.
All the marks, the crossing of the eyes, the fire on the figure, the Xs and the erasures, felt like marks of magical self loathing, like a statue with a thousand nails driven into it. Magic seems like a viable option when facing issues that are much bigger than you. Things that aren’t possible to understand.
It doesn’t do what I wanted to it to, the self-implication is lost amongst all the other demands against image and depth. It’s too confused. I like looking at it though, it has promise. The Iceberg hides behind the completeness of its image, behind reference, color strategy. It feels the way I feel when I put on a suit. It’s impressive because it uses reference to plays on authority bias. It looks good, and it feels familiar. I like this work because its a mess. The show is more accurately me because of it. Laziness, or a lack of ambition, can’t be expressed in a concise thesis. The show has to fall apart to be truer in form to its subject.
GUN
Another dick painting. I like this one, it’s a West Virginia painting. It’s shine is the kind of surface that the paintings that the prints in my Dad’s hallway would have had. It tacky, and it uses it’s tack to poke fun at its subject and to appeal to the people I think should see this painting.
DICK BANANAS
I wanted to start wrapping the different elements across the works together, and to take the dick thing further. It started with the yellow/pissy background, and a weird skyline. I added these two mirrored cocks over top, merged together as if they were an architectural member. Lace is sexy, and it’s see-through fence kind of quality reminded me of the Xs in the big baddie. I tried to bring it all together with the banana grid, this purple cum. It’s messier than the first banana. Dripping over everything, I wanted to counter the horizontal banana grid with a less orderly vertical element. It’s not finished yet, more to come later.
GREY FACE
This is the most layered of the cover-up paintings, the thickest impasto. The abstraction was too graphic, too flat. I tried adding a central figure, with flanking verticals. I tried the x’s again. I sharpened an edge on a paint scraper, and cut into the paint. I blended the remaining color out with a light grey in both rectangles. Rough horizontal cuts in the skin of paint are plainly visible. A face I borrowed from an old piece worked to offset the mouth of the central figure, popping it off the surface of the painting by its reference to the thing behind it. But it’s physically set beneath it, and the cuts in the surface reinforce the fact of that depth. This one may get some more work as well.
TAKE-OUT/RONALD MACDONALD
This is still in an underpainting stage, I plan to cover it up with an image in a ghostly color palette similar to the mouth, but overall again (like the iceberg), with an image of Ronald MacDonald (I’ve made a composite reference below). I love MacDonalds, I really do. Everyone thinks this image is scary, but I like it. I’ll have more thoughts later.