My friend, mentor, and studio-mate, the incomparable artist Drake Deknatel, died on this day in 2005. He had been home recovering from heart surgery, and called me that morning to let me know he’d be in to pick up some art supplies so he could work at home. We started to talk some more, but I was walking under the incredibly loud Alaskan Way Viaduct, so I said, “I can’t hear you, but I’ll see you in a few hours, let’s catch up then!” (Life lesson: You might not.) He stopped first for lunch at his favorite haunt around the corner from our studio, Cafe Paloma, owned by his good friend Sedat Uysal. Moments after giving his order, complications from the surgery caused him to collapse completely. He never regained consciousness.

When something good happens in my art career, I think about Drake the unwavering champion of his artist friends. When something disappointing happens (more often), I think about Drake’s persistence and his example of maintaining a thick skin and sense of humor in this business. When my work changed to abstraction from figuration, I thought about his late-life shift in the opposite direction. When I’m trying out something new and I need a highly specific tool or material to make it happen, he miraculously provides it from the heaps of his stuff that I’ve been storing for seventeen years. Here is what I said at his memorial service.

I first met Drake thirteen years ago when I was modeling for his classes at Pratt. I later modeled for and drew with a life-drawing session that he ran in his studio, where he created an atmosphere that allowed the small group that gathered there to transcend our conflicted historical moment, and to be simply artists and human beings, drinking wine and talking about art, life, politics, music and philosophy; we could have been in a Parisian garret a hundred years earlier.

My favorite image of him in my mind’s eye is of him standing at a table during one of those sessions, surrounded by jars of indeterminate powders and granules, sprinkling them willy-nilly on his drawing, making a mess. In that moment, all that existed was that mess.

He tried to get people to become as adventurous with materials as he was. He would hand out little unlabeled plastic containers of mysterious products for you to try. He’d try to get you to make your own paint. He was generous with his materials and his tools and his time to those who shared his passion.

Our friendship was based on the shared assumption that you could live your life completely in art, that it was making art that made you an artist, not a masters degree, a grant, or a gallery contract, although if you achieved any of those things, he would celebrate your accomplishments as enthusiastically as if they were his own.

Making art can be a lonely and isolating experience. To Drake it was a conversation. In the works we could call his figurative abstractions, I can say firsthand that the figure was anything but an abstraction. Those paintings are a record of conversations, of moments of being present to art and life. All those moments, all those conversations we all had with him may have been themselves ephemeral, but they left their traces on his canvases, just as his words (and he had many) have left traces in the work and lives of all of us who were his friends.

Photo of Drake and Dermot by Sedat Uysal

I’ve started a fundraising page for the Movement Voter Project (MVP). They work to strengthen progressive power at all levels of government by helping donors – big and small – support the best and most promising local community-based organizations in key states, with a focus on youth and communities of color. Right now they are focused on local groups in states with competitive races for congressional seats.

I’ve created a series of 9″x9″ screen prints, each unique (and named for a state with a competitive race). I’m offering them to the first 13 people who donate $100 or more to MVP. Make your donation here, screenshot the receipt, and email it to me along with your choice of print (be sure to include a second choice — I’ll try to keep the page updated as quickly as I can, but I don’t exactly have a tech support staff.)

If you’re in Seattle, you can preview the prints at my open house, & take yours away on the spot. If not, I’ll send it to you.

Eleven years ago the building where I had my studio—me and about a hundred other artists—was condemned for a highway tunnel. This caused a lot of media hysteria rife with stereotypes of starving, flaky artists; however, for me it led to a hasty construction project, a beautiful studio in a new artists’ community called ’57 Biscayne, a lot of thinking about that myth of the artist and a Ted talk about same, and, eventually, to co-ownership of the Good Arts Building, creating stability and permanence for myself and other artists.

Last year we intended to celebrate the tenth anniversary of ’57 Biscayne, but the pesky Delta variant got in the way & we had to cancel. But this year we’re taking it to ELEVEN for our eleventh. Next Thursday, October 6, my neighbors and I will host our first public open studio event in three years. And boy am I ready. It will be a big party, 5-9 PM with live music and an exhibit of work by resident artists and a whole bunch of the guest artists who have been part of the community. Other building tenants will also be open to celebrate our recent partnership with Historic Seattle.

I’m now in the midst of the familiar frantic rush to turn a messy work space into something presentable and guest-worthy. Since I’ve completely changed my medium in the past three years there is a lot more stuff to pack into corners. But I’m trying to enjoy the process, and really take the time to tell the story of the changes in my work over the past two years, and where I want to go next, with what I hang on the walls. I’m really looking forward to seeing a lot of old friends.

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In 2020 the Food Art Collection, a small but mighty gallery on Seattle’s Capitol Hill (which doubles as the apartment of gallerist Jeremy Buben), presented an exhibit of the last representational paintings I made, twenty-some tiny circles depicting close-ups of processed mid-century foodstuffs.

That series was transitional and transformative for me. I had been trying to decide whether I wanted to continue painting on printed fabric; it was feeling increasingly confining, forcing me into a particular way of handling paint that had served me well but which I was possibly done with. I had a lot of tiny plywood “doughnut holes” left over from making the backings of circular panels, so I covered them with clean masonite and started in, loose and painterly.

It was the first step away from the figurative work on printed fabric that I’d been doing for thirty years (which incidentally started with a lot of paintings of deviled eggs). A couple of screenprints and an installation later, I had become a completely different artist, leaving representation and even painting behind.

When Jeremy exhibited the 24 tiny food paintings at the gallery, he also purchased two (pictured above and below), adding them to the collection of food-themed art he’d been amassing. This week the entire collection is being auctioned off as a sort of art project in itself.

Over the past 7 years I have collected art with a singular motif: food. But outside of that unifying theme, the collection is anything but homogeneous. The collection evolved into about 200 artworks and objects, now they will be auctioned, without reserve, to the public a little over a week from now on June 25. The collection includes paintings, prints, photography, sculpture, furnishings, antiques, books, objects, and even lighting.

Jeremy Buben, Food Art Collection

The collection will be displayed for the last time in its entirety at the Museum of Museums (MoM) June 22nd through June 25th, with a public preview reception on Friday, June 24th from 5-10 PM. The auction is online here and bids can be placed through 5PM PDT June 25, 2022. There is also a catalog for sale.

Andy’s Ambition, a site-specific installation at Bonfire Gallery at 603 S. Main Street in Seattle’s Japantown neighborhood, is on view now through June 30, 2022. It’s viewable from the street 24/7, and right next door to the storied Panama Tea Room. There will be a public reception on first Thursday, June 2, from 6-8 PM.

The reason I’m painting this way is that I want to be a machine, and I feel that whatever I do and do machine-like is what I want to do.

Andy Warhol

That quote might conjure up an image of Andy’s outwardly cold, unemotional stare as he churns out endless rows of Marilyns in his Factory.

For me, the associations are more nuanced: The line between machine and human is not so clear-cut. A human and a tool performing a task together make an intimate, intricate dance, the repetitions of their movements creating new rhythms and patterns that neither could have created on their own. Decorative pattern has its origin in one such dance: weaving, one of the earliest and most widespread of human-machine collaborations.

For this installation, I generated a pattern by rotating and repeating a single shape on a grid, in collaboration with screen, squeegee, and hand-cut Tyvek stencils. Out of our repetitive dance and its variations, additional shapes emerged. Those shapes felt both mechanical and handmade, and also somewhat creature-like. In collaboration with a saw, I brought these creatures out into three dimensions to continue the dance.

The basic shape at the root of it all is a square divided into two unequal L-shaped parts. Starting in one of its four possible positions and rotating it clockwise or anti-clockwise gives you eight possible variant rows. How you sequence those rows makes for an infinite variety of patterns, some of which form new unanticipated shapes.

Here’s a block of 4 units by 4 units, starting with the larger shape in yellow:

Magenta in the smaller shape, filling in the interstices.

And then it gets interesting…a variant pattern, generated from the same unit, printed in translucent cyan over top the first one….

And another layer of cyan, offset a bit …

Earlier I had experimented on a smaller scale with other patterns that I generated from the same unit. I kept returning to this sequence because I really liked the vaguely anthropomorphic, robotic, space-invader-era creatures that emerged out of it, seemingly by spontaneous generation. These shapes became the key to my next adventure: bringing pattern out of the wall and into the third dimension.

I cut two flat identical shapes based on the robot guys, cut a slot into each one, and rotated them 90 degrees from each other and attached them. My creatures now had a three-dimensional existence.

I cut the pieces out of plywood with the COOLEST FREAKING THING ON THE PLANET, a Cutawl K-11.

I’ve spent the last seven or eight months printing scores of “screen tests”—covering my studio walls with them. I wanted to see what all they could do: a necessary precursor to knowing what I wanted to do with them.

I chose screenprinting as a way to dig into and understand pattern, because, first, I love screenprinting—but also for the simple, practical reason that it lends itself naturally to repetition.

For each pattern, I drew a single geometric element that fit into a square, then rotated it clockwise and counter-clockwise in sequence to form a row. Four starting points times two directions equals eight possible rows. The sequence of these various rows determines the overall pattern. The shapes line up against themselves in different combinations, forming new and often unexpected shapes.

I cut each row by hand into a sheet of Tyvek to create stencils, and then pushed translucent cyan, magenta, and yellow inks through them in various combinations (a sort of a punk rock version of mechanical color separation). The patterns are all based on a two-inch grid, which allowed me to combine and layer them with each other. There are between six and twelve layers per print.

I printed these guys in hundreds of combinations of pattern, color, and opacity. At the start of my print-a-thon I had no particular goal in mind, however it eventually became clear that I was trying to get them to move. They’re just ink on flat paper, but I wanted them to give the unmistakable feeling that there was something going on beneath the surface—a lot of somethings and a lot of surfaces.

A screenprinting setup is the platonic ideal of machine as an extension of the human mind and body. It’s a simple technique to learn: pull a big squeegee across the screen, pushing ink through the holes of the stencil and onto your paper. It’s very physical, and you can’t stop because the ink might dry—but also because you’re doing an intricate dance with its own rhythm. Do it over and over again, and you and your squeegee dance partner become a single machine.

In these prints I was aiming for precision, but also OK with their imperfect precision. The images reference the mechanical and the digital, the repetitions of our mechanized, DNA-sequenced beings. But they also contain mutations, intentional and otherwise, retaining evidence of the (my!) human hand.

In my last years as a figurative painter, I had started amassing a file images of mid-century people with comically large yet intimidating early computers and other office machinery, with the intention of employing them in a series of paintings about people and technology. The photographs I’d collected are only about 50 years old, but to look at the machines you feel they might as well be of horses and carriages. And yet, we are just as overwhelmed today by the tiny machines that dominate our lives, maybe even more mystified by their inner workings for all their ubiquity.

Last month, when I finally stopped making tests and completed some actual prints, it came time to name them. It was then that I realized that they are at least partly about the means of their creation, and in fact I had made the series I’d intended—just not as figurative paintings. After two years of just maniacally cranking stuff out, I finally have a little something solid to say about what my new abstract work is “about.”

View the whole series.

*Here’s a link to the interview in which my fellow Slovak American Andy expresses this desire.