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.

The themes of house, home, and the American Dream of owning one recur so often in my work, it seems natural that people in the businesses of building selling homes would gravitate to it. For example, one of my earliest collectors and supporters was the late real estate goddess Jan Sewell. Her niece now has possession of the appropriately-titled This is the House You Ordered:

Last year, while I was in the process of scanning old slides and organizing my archives, I posted some older work on Instagram, including this painting:

My friends Kim and Chavi, the dynamos behind Team Diva Real Estate, saw it and wanted it to hang in their own wonderful world. Alas, the painting had been sold in 2009 by a California dealer. I suggested to the gals that they commission something.

Many artists don’t like commissions, but I love them. Maybe it’s because my collectors are such a self-selected group who share my sensibility, and we both understand from the start that it’s my vision they’re after. I’ve never once had someone try to micromanage me as I worked. What would be the fun in that?

What I did do is ask what it was they loved about Wonderful World. They said it was the feeling of abundance and hospitality; the anticipation of sharing one’s home and food with guests who are about to arrive. The fact that it is an abundance of weird, mid-century, overengineered food just makes the people more endearing (you almost forgive them for living in such a pornographically modernist palace.) Which all made sense, given that these gals, in addition to being residential real estate moguls. are enthusiastic and frequent hostesses.

So the food was a given (and I LOVE painting food) but I also intuited that the structure of the piece, which pops the table and the food into the space you’re standing, was also integral to the draw of the piece. I’d made Wonderful World on two attached panels: I covered the top one in a striped fabric and formed the couple’s outfits out if it. The bottom panel I cut by hand to match the curve of a round tablecloth, which as a bonus was trimmed in classic dingleballs. I covered the bottom panel with a piece of the tablecloth, lining up the bottom with the bottom of the panel. The shadow that curves across it is translucent paint, which gives the illusion of  the table jutting into the room. The top half of the table is painted to match the tablecloth. This whole construction was an idea I’d been wanting to revisit anyway, so I decided to try something similar for the commission.

I started, as usual, with the house.

I based it loosely on a photo from a Better Homes and Gardens decorating book from the 1960’s, much edited and simplified. (I really just liked the staircase.) Then I had to go looking for the right characters. The short list of potential co-hostesses is on either side of the drawing below. As you can see, I made reversed versions of each gal in order to try them out on both sides.

I drew a couple of them in the right scale and pinned them to the drawing. The one on the left was a keeper, the one on the right not so much. Her bending down so steeply seemed a little weird, and the hand going missing behind the table makes her look like she’s going to lift it with one hand.

The next one worked much better, but the hair was going to have to go. Too dowdy.

The fabric is usually kind of an agonizing choice, especially when I need to choose two of them. I was fairly certain I wanted to use this odd, scallopy Finnish tablecloth I had for the table, but getting them into the right outfits and somehow tying it all together chromatically would be a challenge. I ended up using a piece of the same striped fabric that I had left over from the painting of ten years ago, turned horizontally this time.

Here is the bottom panel turned on its back on the work table. Ten years ago, I’d cut the curve with a small Japanese handsaw, but this time around I used the whole thing as an excuse to buy a jigsaw. (Who knows what other wacky shapes I might want to paint in when I finally move on from circles?)

Here it is a few stages in, when I was ready to start blocking in the food. The final piece can be seen on my commissions page.

These are some studies for decorative patterns based on carbon dioxide, top, and carbon monoxide, bottom. The idea was inspired by the Festival of Britain, mentioned in a previous post, where designers worked with chemists to create groovy patterns based on molecular structures. Carbon. It’s what’s for dinner.

 

Here is a small test piece, in process, with a different version of ethanol and a lady driving. The molecules and the people with their gorgeous vintage gas-guzzlers are finding their way toward new circular compositions. Stay tuned.

In 2015 Chatwin Books published Fabric of the American Dream, a combination monograph (of my Manet covers) and meditation on some of the recurring themes in my work. Chatwin co-founder Annie Brule, who had been a tenant of my ’57 Biscayne studios from its inception, and I had been wanted to collaborate for a long time, and this seemed like the perfect project. Annie is an illustrator, map-maker, and book designer who specializes in art books. She and Arundel Books owner Phil Bevis founded Chatwin a few years ago; Fabric of the American Dream was the first in their artist series.

On Phil’s advice, we produced the book in two editions: a clothbound limited edition, and an unlimited paperback edition. Both versions have identical content inside. I wanted the books to reflect my psychedelic homespun aesthetic in their form as well as their content. When I hear the word “clothbound”,  I’m not picturing some tasteful, plain, dark, smoky, brown number. I’m thinking more along the lines of something I’d use in a painting. The problem with vintage fabric is the difficulty of finding a sufficient supply to do all fifty covers. (Besides, I need it to use in my paintings.) After some searching, I managed to find some brand new fabric that gave off the right mid-century vibe, so I snagged what was left of the bolt.

I consulted with some crotchetty old guys in the midwest who had been binding books for forty years and knew their stuff. They initially tried to scare me away from the idea of using just any old cotton cloth to bind my books, but after I badgered them a bit to tell me what exactly real bookcloth is, they relented and allowed that I could add a stabilizer to the back of the cloth and it would probably work just fine. They were a bit tight-lipped about what that stabilizer would be, so I badgered some crotchetty old ladies here in town who had been in the crafty-fabricky world for just as long, and they, along with some younger artist bookbinders on the internet, recommended an iron-on product called “heat-n-bond”.

Due to some delays and miscommunications at the bindery, we nearly didn’t have any books for our projected opening. The production binder who bound the softcovers and the innards of both editions was unable to add the cloth covers, let alone print titles on them. Some panic ensued, but we found a smaller house to do the binding, and I decided to tackle the titles myself.

I burned a screen in the same typeface that Annie used on the printed softcover. Screen-printing the front cover was easy enough, if a little nerve-wracking. I had exactly 50 of the cloth books to work with; I was committed to having 5o perfect (non inkstained) books when I was done.

To print the title on the spine, I came up with a little contraption on the fly, cutting a book-width slit in a board and adding some book-height legs to it.

Slide the book in, lower the screen, squeegee the ink across it, and presto!

Earlier in the process, when cutting out the bookcloths, I had been very, very careful to use every square inch as economically as possible so I’d have some cloth left over. I spent the day of the book release at home in my sewing room, being just as frugal with the remainder of the cloth, and I managed to squeeze out a dress. Because if it is at all possible to match your publication, why on earth wouldn’t you?

The hardcover edition is entirely sold out, but the delightful Brule-designed softcover is available through my brand-new store page.

Elements of Pattern class starts 7/13 in my studio.

I took the photo of a Moorish tile pattern, above, at the Alcazar palace in Sevilla during a visit to Spain several years ago. The Moors created a lot of their patterns by connecting the centers of a bunch of circles, basically dividing them into sixths, and forming a complex overlapping pattern of stars and interlocking hexagons. The hexagon theme pops up a lot in patterns both manmade and in nature. A hexagon is one of the few basic shapes that can tessellate, that is, it fits together with a bunch of its hexagon buddies with no spaces in between them.

This turtle (RIP) is sporting a pattern of interlocking hexagons, squeezed a bit to fit into his or her oval shape, complemented nicely by a fetching border pattern:

The starfish (also RIP), if you look closely, has hexagonal pattern in the skeletal structure supporting it, lines radiating from the center of each one and interconnecting the whole thing, similar to the Moorish tile design.

However, if you look from the top, the structure modifies itself a bit to reflect the radial 5-pointed shape of the animal:

This pattern of interlocking hexagons is found in many molecular structures, too. Some British designers in the early 1950’s ran with the idea, producing crazy home-furnishings textiles based rather literally on specific molecular structures. How about a dress of boric acid:

(images: Victoria & Albert Museum)

Or perhaps insulin, in which the hexagonal molecules, rather than interlock, are arranged in a half-drop pattern:

These designs and others like them were inspired by the new technology of x-ray crystallography, and were displayed at the 1951 Festival of Britain, a kind of post-war atomic-age art and science fair. You can see how they eventually gave birth to the more free-form “atomic” style.

Elements of Pattern will dive into these matters in a hands-on way, where we’ll learn these underlying structures and use them and vary them to create original patterns. The possibilities are infinite, but you’ve got to start somewhere! Sign up HERE or contact me for more information.

Patterns—the fabrics I find and incorporate into my paintings—are such a driving force in my work that it’s inevitable that I would eventually gravitate toward inventing my own patterns. I’ve used made-up painted patterns in some of my paintings in the past.  For the most part, I’d concentrated most of my attention on the motifs, the individual repeated elements, usually abstracted from things in the paintings. I’m always attracted to novelty motifs in fabric, vintage and otherwise. But pattern’s underlying structure has been a growing fascination for me. The structure and design principles of pattern are closely related to those used in composing a painting, and also have deep connections to sculpture, architecture, the decorative arts, and design of all kinds. It’s surprising how infrequently it’s taught anymore. Many of the best instructional materials I’ve found on the subject are decades out of print. The Bauhaus folks got it: The simplest motif, a circle, say, put through variations of scale, weight, and structure, can yield an infinite number of patterns that you’d be tickled to wear, cover your walls with, screenprint on a card, glaze on a pot, or compose an abstract painting around.

This summer I’ll be offering a four-week class that delves into the elements and underlying structure of pattern. I’ve developed some Bauhaus-inspired experiments that use the basic building blocks of form—there are nine!—and six scaffolds—don’t you love it when you can quantify things?!—to start hacking away at that infinite number. To boil the subject down to its very essence, the exercises will be in black and white (not even gray), and use just ink and cut paper. The goal is to become fluent in the language of pattern, to see it in unexpected places, interpret its structure, and to be able to use that heightened perceptual vocabulary in your own work.

July 13, 20, 27, August 3; Thursdays 1PM – 5PM

at my studio, 110 Cherry Street in Pioneer Square

$225

Register here, or contact me.

In the interim, I’ll be periodically posting some thoughts and observations about patterns I encounter in my wanderings.