I love the philosophical endlessness in art making. All of my paintings come from two photographs. Picking up a brush creates meaning.
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I grew up fantasizing about being an artist but only knew art through photo reproductions. I love Max Beckmann and traveled to see his MoMA show in 2003. I was disappointed when the painting’s banal objecthood did not match my photographic fantasy. This was a fundamental experience. I now create textiles and oil paintings that use two specific photos as source images to talk about the relationship between fantasy and meaning.
Where do you find inspiration?Michael Mann movies! especially <The Prestige> where two men are given the same magical power but use it to different ends. Also, the contemporary Slovenian philosopher Alenka Zupančič whose work focuses on psychoanalysis and continental philosophy, especially her books <What is sex?> and <Disavowal> has allowed me to move more easily through art making and thinking. Also, French painters in the 1960s who responded to Jackson Pollock in radically different ways, namely Martin Barré and BMPT.
What would you do with $25,000?I would use the $25,000 to pay the rent on a larger art studio. I have been lucky enough to work in a wonderful 200 square foot art studio in a great factory building in East Williamsburg for about ten years but it is really limiting the scale I can work at. My modest scale is very appropriate for my life as a Scenic Painter for TV/Movies (Local USA 829) but I could do so much with more space and light. One of my jobs as an artist in NYC is to be smart about financing a sustainable existence.
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