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Bio
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I’m
writing this on the eve of my 38th birthday. Holy shit! From
where I’m sitting the entire history of the universe is
deficient in significance compared to my mortality. As a society
we need to move quickly with this clone breeding if I’m
to have the spare parts I need to live forever.
I was born
to hillbilly teenage parents in Jasper, Alabama in 1964. This
is the hometown of Tallulah Bankhead. My father managed to get
a doctorate in physics and went on to become a Biotech tycoon.
My parents, who are still relatively young, now live in a mansion
across the street from where Tallulah grew up.
Just like
everyone else in America, I started drawing when I was toddler.
I painted my first oil painting, a portrait of John Travolta
from the Grease Album cover, at twelve. Here’s a drawing
I did when I was 17. Because I was such a bad kid I was thrown
out of private school and not allowed to attend the fine arts
high school in downtown Birmingham. I spent my last two years
in an Alabama public high school. Only the math, science and
English classes turned out to be a waste of time. The art classes
were as useful as any I would later find in college. We drew
bones, still lives and figures with charcoal and then moved
on to black and white acrylic because that’s all they could
afford. Ironically this is the same progression taught in the
French academies of the 1800’s. At the same time the fine
arts high school was cutting up trash bags and gluing them to
the ceiling.
Soon after
graduating I went off to the Philadelphia College of Art. In
this more urban setting, representational painting was making
a feeble come back mostly in the guise of illustration. When
Robert Longo made it big with his drawings of thin tied 80’s
dudes dodging to avoid being hit by a ball; the drawings where
actually executed by some illustrator he hired. This was a strange
time in the Artworld. Everything was a sub-category of conceptual
art. Even abstract painting and photography weren't abstract
painting or photography. They were just tools used by conceptual
artists to make "art." The summer program I was in
didn’t get much into theory and my work started to drift
toward surrealism.
After a
year of doing the bohemian thing back in Birmingham I started
at Ringling School of Art and Design in Sarasota, Florida. A
lot of the students there where into surrealism and some of
them where extraordinarily talented. Being naturally rebellious
I moved my art in a different direction. Instead of fantasy
and nonsensical train-of-thought subject matter I went for nudes
and landscapes.
Because most college art programs at the time focused on the
ideals of abstract impressionism we tended to concentrate on
color and design and drink heavily. At the time there was a
real cast of characters at Ringling and I had a number of adventures,
actually too many adventures. But I wasn’t learning anything.
These fine art programs should focus on marketing and stop pretending
to be teaching art. I left after one year and returned to Birmingham
to live penniless on the streets and hop between thankless blue-collar
jobs.
My plan
to live penniless on the streets and hop between thankless blue-collar
jobs worked out perfectly. If you’re lucky you can get
16 minimum wage hours in by waiting for a truck that never arrives.
I continued to produce oil paintings and drawings, mostly nudes
and genre
scenes. During this period I took some painting classes
at UAB and had a big show in the university gallery. I also
made very little money by producing a lot of illustrations and
acting as art director for three different newspapers. I was
in a good position to learn all about desktop publishing. All
these new innovations meant less drudge-work for me.
Needless
to say this was a time of many adventures.
Back at
Ringling I had had an idea for a painting that nobody would
like. It had to be incredibly crude and lowbrow. It had to be
kitsch and X-rated. Having lots of time and no prospects I began
my largest painting to date. For the next six months I worked
on a four by five-foot canvas and painted the Masterpiece. I
have no idea where this painting is now but one overexposed
slide of it was enough to get me a scholarship at the University
of the Arts.
Back in
Philadelphia I had my opportunity to lash out against what I
felt was the shallowness and pointlessness that had dominated
art for the past twenty years. I firmly believe at least 75%
of art produced today is boring and pretentious. But in 1986
it was hovering around the 95% range. With the coming of Jeff
Koons, Metro Pictures Gallery, a lot of great photography etc.
etc. things started getting interesting if you knew where to
look. The Masterpiece was actually a pretty conservative painting
for the time, very mainstream. Really all the old taboos had
been broken in America by the 1960’s. Anything and everything
was allowed in the Artworld, no holes barred, if you pardon
the pun. The only thing that was bad, absolutely no-no, the
only thing that couldn’t be considered art was painting
and sculpture. This is ironic because collectors have always
bought mostly representation art. As long as, according to Tom
Wolf, they’re told "it’s new and not actually
realism." I remember a very popular artist in Philadelphia
at the time who showed very classical figure paintings in some
of the hipist galleries in town. But he was gay and the paintings
even more so, so it was all right. The best thing about the
University of the Arts was the humanities. Besides taking classes
from Steve Berg, founding editor of American Poetry Review,
I was able to study under Camille Paglia who went on to become
a celebrity and pundit.
If I would
have joined in with the Artworld and dedicated my career to
lashing out at corporate America and Republicans I probably
could have done really well in Philadelphia. Unfortunately,
that’s not my style. I chose instead to make
fun of art. My work had gotten quite large by this time
and I started grommoting my canvases so I could roll them up
and transport them. I helped found and was made Editor-in-Chief
of the University newspapers. I caused as much trouble as possible
in this position going so far as to call the Jews "baby
killers." Art students are encouraged to be outrageous,
but the institutions have their sacred cows. For instance when
it comes to their sources of cash there’s no joking around.
I continued to create paintings to be offensive
and caused a mild stir in the area. These were the issues of
the day and volumes have been written about them. Whether it
was to get rid of me or because of my painting I’ll never
be sure, but soon I sent off to represent the University of
the Arts in a New York based independent study program.
Because
all I had to do in New York was paint and go to galleries, I
got to see a lot of the inner mechanics of the Artworld. I had
long since known that the art object itself was for the most
part irrelevant when it came to judging its value. Like nothing
else before it, the Artworld in 1990 was totally superficial.
All that mattered was marketing, getting on TV and in magazines,
celebrity and all the trappings of enormous sums of cash. What
surprised me was how many people knew this too. Except for a
few kooks who really thought they had some special and profound
insight into the cosmos, the best artists were creating work
about getting rich and famous. The aesthetic seemed to center
around found objects. I think I was only accepted because some
of my paintings could be seen as pornography.
Oddly enough,
being in such a jaded environment toned down my act. My paintings
started to take on pop
elements as I felt shock value was being worn out. A lot of
precedents were set in just how far the Artworld is willing
to go to trample on peoples deepest held principles. But, of
course, Piero Manzoni was selling cans of his own shit back
in 1961.
Wanting
to get a break from all those angry people around New York my
future wife and I moved to New Orleans right after I graduated.
I was surprised to see that they had a pretty good art scene.
At the time there were about 100 commercial galleries in New
Orleans as compared to about 1000 in New York. I found a couple
of good wholesome full-time illustration jobs and continued
to follow all the revolutions in desktop publishing. I had started
my art journal, isms, in Philadelphia and continued publishing
it with the objective to spend as little money as possible.
Even though New Orleans had a pretty sophisticated art community
we slanted the editorial to be as sophomoric as possible. I
showed my paintings around town even spending a few months down
at Jackson Square selling little drawings
of the French Quarter. I continued to produce oil
paintings and my technique
improved tremendously. My work of this period took as long as
a year to produce. I accidentally destroyed one but I don’t
want to get into that now, it’s kind of embarrassing. There
were a number of good oil painters around town from which to
learn new techniques and plenty of world class art on display.
I eventually opened a little print shop that specialized in
art and desktop publishing. Though this led to some good things,
including a newspaper with the Bourbon Street merchants and
publishing my comic book, Spacebabes, I still went belly
up fast.
Once again
broke and without prospects I moved with my wife 70 miles outside
of Birmingham in the Appalachian foothills. My grandmother had
just moved out of her little house in Jasper and we needed some
protection from the elements. With the advent of the Internet
I was able to keep up with the goings on in the Artworld without
having to be close enough to get upset. Not being rushed I began
painting a series of subtle landscapes
which I believe are some of my best paintings. I found a graphic
design job in Jasper and started publishing isms again.
Although my art journal was finally beginning to flesh itself
out editorially, Birmingham didn’t have a large enough
art community to justify its continued publication as a newspaper.
Desktop
publishing was exciting as the technology was advancing at such
breakneck speed. Today one freshman with an iMac can accomplish
what took a small team of experts with big machines to do in
1980. Of course when it’s all said and done there’s
not a big difference between desktop publishing and just plain
publishing. For some time now Birmingham has been a center for
publishing, more so today than ever. Because I’d been around
printing for so long I was able to get on board a fledgling
publishing company in a rich white suburb of Birmingham. For
a while everything seemed to click at Vulcan and within a few
years we were one of Americas fastest growing publishing companies
and the largest publisher of outdoor magazines in the world.
It went from being a mom and pop organization to corporate culture
overnight. I became Dilbert with a paintbrush. It seemed like
a good situation. The CEO got to be a millionaire, going on
African safaris and raising polo ponies on his ranch in Alabama.
I got a stress free Illustration job with enormous creative
freedom and an opportunity to hone my skills by painting on
a regular basis. Yep, seemed like paradise till that damned
Internet came along and everybody went crazy.
I’ve
had a few good shows
in Alabama lately, one was at the Birmingham
Art Association and another was at the University
of Alabama. With the BAA show I was finally allowed to display
my most profound work in a way that did it justice. I didn’t
have the Masterpiece anymore but I had a larger painting along
the same lines entitled Macho Fag. At the time a buddy of mine
was the president of the BAA and he new me well enough to expect
sexually explicit artwork. Never wanting to disappoint I had
to push the envelope and show some anti-Christian
and racist themed paintings too. It was important to me that
it was funded by the NEA. Even though the show was called "Paintings,"
and I wrote a several essays about oil painting as postmodern
art, a lot of people didn’t get it and few got really angry.
The University show didn’t include any of these knee-jerk
themed paintings and was very well received.
Today I support
myself and my family through any legal means necessary, such
as publishing a newspaper, the
Birmingham Free Press, producing a lot of illustrations for magazines, building Websites and selling paintings when I can part with them.
Thank you
for reading my story.
These are
some of my more recent paintings:
Fat
Freddy's Cat
Trees
From Below
Walker
County
Lookout
Snow
#2
Solome
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