“Hollywood Hawaiian” is available on my shop page.

The third and final (for now) print in my become-a-human-color-separation-machine series (that’s not really what it’s called) is complete, just in time for holiday shopping madness. Or whatever kind of madness it is we’re having right now. But supporting artists is never mad: For every $1000 in sales, I will buy a piece of art from another artist, passing on the love and money. It’s called Artist Support Pledge, a way of getting through this together, and the brainchild of UK artist Matthew Burrows. There are a number of initiatives to buy from artists and other small businesses directly this year, and I hope the sentiment continues. It’s a challenge for anyone to make a living at their craft even when there isn’t a pandemic.

But back to my true love, CMYK printing! This new print is the most chromatically complex of the series, making more use of layering and transparency to render, for example, fat (get it?). Additionally, I was trying to create more space in the picture plane, still using the inherently flat process of cut paper stencils. Inspiration came from looking at lots of still lives—from old Dutch masters to Wayne Thiebaud, with stops at Matisse and Morandi—and I finally settled upon simple repeating elements of circles and lines, along with a gingham ground whose linear perspective would add depth and hopefully tie the whole thing together visually.

Ham and pineapple recur throughout my vast collection of mid-century cookbooks, always touted as “Hawaiian” in the same way that topping anything with avocado makes it “Californian.” The title, Hollywood Hawaiian, references the general feeling of fakitude attached to the word “hollywood”, as well as a Warren Zevon lyric.

Earlier this year I was already at a juncture in my painting where I was questioning everything about it that had worked up until now: process, materials, subject matter, scale, context, everything. I was ready for a reset . . . be careful what you wish for, reset-wise. I started this screenprinting project partly to have something physical and technical to work on while I worked all that out. I have since learned that big-ass social and personal upheavals wreak physical havoc as well: they bring about physical neurological changes and we have to kind of re-wire our brains afterward. As it turns out, boiling the visual world down to its most elemental properties—flat shapes cut with a knife, four colors—was the perfect exercise for my pandemic-addled noggin. I still don’t know what it’s going to look like when I resume painting in the coming weeks, but these prints are an integral part of my new wiring.

“Hollywood Hawaiian” is available on my shop page.

I’m living it and the best part is my guests who stay in the room always make comments that they understand a lot about what the place means for me through your work.

Lisa Picard

Update: The Farmhaus was featured in the New York Times Real Estate section; scroll through the slideshow—one of my paintings even made it into a shot!

Late last year, I heard from my fabulous collector Lisa Picard. She was looking to acquire a painting for a modern getaway spot she’d designed and built in northern California, and had her eye on this one . . .

Alas, this particular midcentury goddess had already found herself a home. So Lisa decided to commission work specifically for her new place. She was drawn to the restfulness and solitude of the lady in her spare-yet-sort-of-busy modernist expanse. Lisa built her country retreat to be a relaxing gathering place for herself and her community of outdoorsy friends. She was looking for art that would embody restfulness, and also the dualistic nature of her work and life: developing dynamic, urban work places in big cities, but feeling equally at home pedaling her bike through rugged mountain terrain.

The commissioned work was destined for the guest room, which is in a separate structure from the main house and connected by a patio. It has a garage door that can open the entire room to the outside. The house epitomizes the California ideal of indoor-outdoor living—which is of course right up my alley! We ultimately decided on two facing paintings: One would capture the reviving solitude of this creative urban dweller’s country place; and the other the communal nature of both work and play. (Of course, at the time we had no idea that solitude would soon become a recurring theme for everyone, and communal bonhomie a fond memory.)

I spent the spring and summer of 2020 developing the imagery for the two concepts. The mid-century ladies whom I normally pilfer from magazines to use in my paintings are models posing as housewives. In my work they often stand in for the viewer; in this case the viewer was a CEO of a large company and her contemporary, active, nature-loving pals. The main character in the solitude/interior piece had to draw them in and feel like a kindred spirit, despite her fifties-housewife trappings.

I spent a lot of time on the geometry and perspective of the interior. As in the painting that inspired it, the space was to be largely defined by a tile floor. For this kind of project, I use a chalk line to draw the receding parallel lines of the floor and walls, anchored by pushpins at the vanishing points. I could geek out for hours about the particulars of perspective (and I have), but I’ll spare the reader that part of the journey. This interior took elements of two houses from a book of Julius Schulman’s photographs.

I swiped this gal from a Culligan ad. The magazine that she’s pretending to read features, not surprisingly, another Culligan ad. Like many of my star players, she’d appeared in a previous painting.

Choosing the fabric is critical; it sets the tone of the painting, and is the one thing (besides the shape) that can’t be changed. The choice is part instinctual, part circumstantial (a model had just scored the brown fabric and gifted it to me). In this case I was focused mostly on the main character’s outfit. I had already decided that the left one would be her top and the right one her pants, and planned to leave some matching curtains in the distance. The one on the right is kind of wacky, and I nearly swiped it for a dress for myself, but the sympathetic vibration between the stripes and the different shades of orange in the two together won out.

The second painting was to be set at night, from the outside looking in, and with multiple characters, perhaps at a party (remember those?) or its aftermath (yes, even more fondly).

This house is also a composite. I usually draw it first, then draw potential characters on separate pieces of paper, so I can pin them up and move them around. Scale is a matter of trial and error: I move a figure up and down on the drawing, to find a believable spot for someone that size. Sometimes they never feel quite right in the space and I have to toss them. Many of these people were cut from the scene.

The shape required me to build three irregular panels, one with five sides.

The phone lady is another recurring character from my past work. Her friend in the chair was someone I’d been wanting to use for years: she had me at the knee socks, but her setting is intriguing, too—a sort of flattened theatrical space. Perhaps the corrugated translucent fiberglass will make its way into some future painting.

I chose more oranges and browns for the fabric, to unite the palette of the two facing works. The brown tiki print would be someone’s groovy swimsuit, and also double as some sixties “primitive” art on the wall.

Both final paintings, and their stunning home, can be viewed on my commissions page.

My first food paintings were of eggs. Lots of eggs. Eggs distributed one to a plate, eggs enshrined in stainless steel bowls. I was working out, among other things, my angst-ridden resistance to the cult of motherhood and its reproductive mandate. I had just begun to pilfer 195o’s magazines for imagery, and at the time I was particularly struck by how busy all the ladies pictured in their pages were with countless projects —shining floors, whipping up cakes, contemplating their kitchen cupboards—but really, it all seemed to me to be just a sublimation of the main message: Their true and only purpose in life was to make more tiny Americans. It didn’t seem to me, in the 1990’s, that the message had altered much. It still doesn’t.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

On a visit home to Cleveland around this time, I asked Mary Beth, my very brilliant but troubled oldest sister, whether she would be attending the following day’s family Christmas gathering. She replied cryptically, “Of course I’m coming: I’m making . . .deviled eggs.” She slowly drew out the name of the favorite midwestern delicacy, lingering on the “devil”, imbuing it with a  significance I could only guess at. My cousin, an academic who is never at a loss for meaning, pointed out that perhaps here lay, in the humble deviled egg, my next subject matter. Take the egg—embodiment and symbol of the female’s power to create life—remove its core, fluff it up with mayonnaise and reassemble it into a decorative appetizer, a mere warmup to the main event of manly meatitude. The project of the patriarchy in a nutshell. Or eggshell.

I’m Making Deviled Eggs (1999) was something of a break-out painting. It won first prize in a juried show in 2000, which led to my first commercial gallery representation. It was the first time, after working in near-isolation for ten years, that I felt that my art was of interest to a wider world, the first hint that I could have a professional career at it, and maybe even one day make art full time. I had named the painting in an ironic nod to my sister’s cryptic quote. Mary Beth died in 2010 under rather unhappy circumstances. In retrospect, given what a pivotal moment this piece represents, artistically and professionally, I’m happy I did. It feels less ironic and more like an homage to a very smart woman born at the wrong time, whose potential, like that of the deviled eggs, was never fully realized.

I’ve since expanded the menu considerably, but I’m still drawn to those highly decorative concoctions that seem to be channeling an enormous amount of female creativity into bizarre and ephemeral projects. The theme of gutting something, mixing the innards with other ingredients, primarily mayonnaise, and stuffing them back into their original container to create a similacrum of the original—it recurs again and again. (Twice-baked potato, anyone?) It is, come to think of it, also an apt description of what I myself do with the ephemera of the American Dream.

I have been working from 1950’s and 1960’s magazine ads for almost thirty years. My temporal relationship to the material is strange when you think about it: The first time I started cutting up and mining for material an “old” magazine that I’d found in a thrift store, the images were thirty or forty years old. Now they’re sixty or seventy years old, which seems more like an antique. Antique that they might be (and I’m getting close to that myself by that standard), I’m not precious about them. They are my still-living source material. I tear out things I find interesting or telling or oddly relevant, or maybe I just like the colors. I file the torn-out images in rough categories. I have a drawer overflowing with manila file folders of ragged magazine photos with labels like People, Children, Kitchens, Decor, Patios, Lawns, Pools, Appliances, Food, Cake, Disembodied Hands. That’s basically my system, and when I’m working out a composition and I need, say, a husband for someone, I look through the People file until I find a few candidates for the right guy, in the right pose, with the right clothes.

Some people just come in handy, time and again.

The little boys above were posing with their “My Fair Lady” outfits with a row of little girls in equally silly garb when I came across them in a magazine, McCalls maybe. When I used them in a painting, I placed them out in the wild to better showcase their feral quality. I used a fabric with an overall pattern of olde timey maps of a vaguely colonialist flavor, which seemed like a perfect match for the little suits of little capitalists in training.

I felt a particular bond with the little boy on the left. Steve said he looked like Drake Deknatel’s images of himself as a little boy, which he’d painted right before he died. Indeed, the painting’s eventual owner, with no knowledge of that conversation or of even of Drake himself, told me that that boy was her favorite one, and then spontaneously dubbed him “Frederick”, which, chillingly, happens to have been Drake’s real name.

But I digress. A few years later, I snuck the same boy into a newspaper that a smoking dad is holding in this piece, Cowboy Diplomacy. He’s at the top left.

And here he is again, looking over the fence at an execution in an homage to Manet’s homage to Goya.

I finally gave him a solo show about two years ago, overtly acknowledging the homage to my late mentor. He’s changed a bit since I started painting him, and he seems happiest in his mayhem now. I think Drake would have liked this one.

Sleek shiny cars, gleaming ribbons of freeway, convenient modern handheld devices like TV remotes and light meters—we’re all nostalgic for the future that never happened.

My show of recent paintings on vintage fabrics, remixing images of mid-century car ads and real estate porn into dissections of the American unconscious, is up through this Friday, April 26 at Atelier Drome Architecture + Design, 112 Prefontaine Ave. S in Pioneer Square. Hours are 8AM- 5PM Monday through Friday.

Recommended by The Stranger as one of the top shows to see this spring.