“Sculptor”
Oil/card-stock
30” x 22”
1993
What I like about this piece is the dialog between the sculptor and his work which is now looking back at him as though it was alive. The tension between the charcoal lines and the places of color as well as the “flying white” of the card-stock is the same tension as the energy between the creator and his creation. This tension opens a lot of imaginative possibilities.
“The Resurrection of our Lord Jesus Christ”
Oil/panel
36” x 28”
1993
“Death’s Head”
Oil/panel
18” x 14”
1993
A painting of a skull has been a subject of paintings in the Western tradition for at least 500 years. It is meant to be a reminder of the brevity of life or a tool for the contemplation of life’s fleeting beauty.
Here is my own version of that scraped out on some left over matte board salvaged from the garbage pile of a frame shop near my studio and some house paint left on the curb.
“Couple”
Oil/Cardboard
28 x 14″
1993
The artist most associated with Surrealism is Salvatore Dali. However, Picasso was also very much a surrealist artist and is considered to be one of the artists most responsible for defining the movement. This piece is an homage to that body of his work. A key difference is that the overall affect of this painting is one of tenderness. He developed and used this visual language to express horror and existential loss and even hostility towards loved ones and outrage about the horrors of war.
Here, there are 2 worm-like creatures intertwined in a kind of embrace. Despite their less than insect like forms, they manage to express some of the depth and complexity of human connection. It is both weird and sweet. It is that contradiction that makes it surreal in a formal definition of the term as it’s used in art speak. But it’s also surreal in the more conventional sense of the word.
But is brushy and expressive. It is not the slick polished presentation of Dali’s work. But the level of finish is not what makes a piece “surreal” or not. Not does a high finish mean it has anything to say.
“Requiem for Aids”
Oil/canvas
10’ x 20’
1993
Even as I write this short essay in the middle of a worldwide pandemic due to a virus, I have not forgotten the impact that AIDS had on my life. It was devastating to gay men, galvanizing for art culture and reshaped a generation of young people coming of age in the 80’s and early 90’s about sex and promiscuity. It was, without a doubt, the first return to a more careful and calculating notion about sex since the invention of “the pill” in the early 60’s.
I was of that generation. I graduated from college in 1983 and had I been gay I would very likely be dead. I was young and cute and very much looking to become an artist of consequence and that meant moving to the edges of society. But perhaps more insulating than my sexual orientation was the fact that for most of the 80’s I was living in remote parts of China. And by the time I returned and wound up living in Manhattan, there was a very developed understanding about what caused HIV/AIDS and how to prevent it. As it turns out, preventing the spread of HIV was theoretically pretty simple; just wear a condom. That proved to be as difficult for some of my peers as wearing a mask does now. Of course there were other ways to contract it such as sharing needles or having a blood transfusion from someone’s tainted blood. But for me, the risk was sex.
And what made HIV significantly different from the current viral outbreak is that contracting HIV was flat out certain death. And worse, a long slow painful death fraught with shame. The slow deterioration of the flesh was grim and the damage to one’s family, professional and social circle was potentially alienating at best and all out destructive at worst.
Well, the gay community got organized and got to work on many fronts. They quickly realized that as terrible as AIDS was, and as unfortunate as it was that anal sex was perhaps one of the most sure ways to spread the disease, gay men realized that the AIDS epidemic could actually help the larger public come to accept homosexuality. They leveraged the threat of shame and secrecy as being forces that would help spread the disease. And they capitalized on whatever compassion for the sick and wounded they could to win converts to accepting the essential humanity of homosexuals.
All of this became increasingly personal to me as more and more of my friends and associates died from AIDS. In May of 1993 one of colleagues at Seattle University died from AIDS. He was the same age as me.
Up until that point the only social issue that inspired me to create art was the famine that had been going on in Sub-Saharan Africa. My art is often motivated by broader philosophical and cultural trends, but not specific issues or singular events.
But for reasons I still don’t understand, I decided to do a large AIDS painting that I hoped could be used to call even more attention to this already inescapable part of everyday life in the early 1990’s.
So, I began drawing. I decided at some point to make the piece similar to Picasso’s famous anti war painting, “Guernica.” That painting was a large painting meant to be displayed in public to draw attention to the atrocities being wrought by Franco’s alliance with Hitler and specifically the firebombing of the Basque town of Guernica where thousands of civilians were deliberately killed. I saw what was going on around me as a kind of war on a disease as well as a war on homosexuality and by extension, a war on culture and art.
I decided to make the piece long and thin like Picasso’s and to organize a lot of various particulars and “ideas” around an almost classical geometric design principle. And, I decided to restrict the palate of colors to just black, white, ochre and cerulean blue to keep the piece from becoming even more chaotic than it is.
In the middle is a kind of Pieta where a gay couple struggles to “let go” as one of the partner’s dies. On the left side there is a sailer who has burst in to mutilate a musician whose instrument is scattered in pieces. He also topples a classical statue in the process. This was inspired by an actual current event that happened in Denver that year. A navy man attacked and killed a fellow navy man accusing him of being a homosexual. They were members of the navy band. To me this also represented an attack on art and music and an upending of the principles of civility and restraint represented by the statue. On a personal note, I made the bust of the statue resemble my friend Gary who had just died from AIDS.
On the right side there is a horse rider who is falling of his horse. This scene was inspired by the Medieval depictions of St. George slaying the dragon. That is a story of easy stereotypes where good is good and evil is evil. Here, though, nothing is certain. The hero has fallen off his stead and his weapon is broken. Here, the weapon is a test tube which was meant to represent science and its failure to save my friends. Eventually it did save some of my friends, but by that time AIDS was 10 years in and there were still no effective treatments and certainly no cure.
There are countless little symbols and historical and art historical references. I have just shared a few to get you started. This website is not the place for a complete analysis or description of this complex piece.
I will say that seeing the piece on a small scale is always disappointing to me. It looks jumbled and formless like a bowl of noodles to me. The overall organizing form of the piece is lost. It’s interesting to me that Picasso’s Guernica does not do this. I saw the original in New York City before it returned to Spain and subsequently I have seen it in reproductions many times. It looks good small. But I must say I was underwhelmed when I saw the original. It’s also interesting to me that Michelangelo’s Last Judgement on the front wall of the Sistine Chapel also does not work on a small scale. It too looks like a pile of rope or a bowl of fettuccini. However, when I visited the Sistine Chapel I was more moved by the wall than the more famous ceiling.
I can’t count the number of times I have unrolled the large Requiem painting with the thought that I would cut it into 3 paintings and possibly discard the middle section. And then, once it was up I could not bring myself to do it. And it is not for lack of fortitude to destroy my own work if I deem it not worthy. I often cannibalize my own work in order to paint over it, to both eliminate a substandard work but also for the convenience of a canvas all primed and ready to paint.
So, for now, it is safely rolled up and stashed in a corner of my studio.
It has been shown on several occasions and to some extent it did its intended job of raising awareness for AIDS. But not really. In the end, I think it was mostly experienced as a painting… moving or beautiful to varying degrees. And now, already, just 30 years later if it is ever exhibited I don’t think it will be experienced as an “AIDS” painting. It will simply be a painting. Maybe it is classism and unabashed allegiances and references to older works of art where the very things that made is less relevant and effective in its day but may keep it worth looking at in the future. Hard to know. Someday I may unroll it on the floor. Get out my scissors, cut in several pieces and make some new paintings.
But for now, it is safely rolled up and stashed in a corner of my studio.
“Study for a Sculpture”
Oil/cardboard
36” x 24”
1993
My intention was to create a gigantic concrete slab in this shape and then paint it with bright colors.
“Exaltation”
Oil/panel
20” x 8”
1993
“Woman and Child on the Beach
Oil/panel
24” x 24”
1993
“Exaltation”
Oil/panel
12” x 8”
1993
“Man”
Oil/cardboard
24”x20”
1993
I had to find my way back to the figure in the craziest ways. Here I am adding the Yantra geometries of my studies in the art and spiritual practices of East India along with the brush strokes and handling of paint from the abstract expressionists, the paint it and paint over it of Picasso and the conceptual landscapes of my studies in China. That’s all well and good and may even have made a good painting, but all I really wanted was to paint a man.
“Buddha”
Oil/Canvas
36″ x 24”
1993
During this time I had already begun painting what would become known as my “figural realism” pieces. But I was still creating a lot of drawings and paintings that I came to refer to as my “mythic figure” paintings. Like this painting they were drawn from my imagination, not from life or photographs. Eventually I would stop making paintings like this but these kinds of figures continue to emerge in my sketches which I am constantly doing almost on a daily basis.
The figures are often distorted in ways that reveal something about our inner truth. In some ways they are more like poetry than natural speech. Yes, it’s true, no one speaks that way. But the distortions and artistic liberties might reveal something more real than any amount of accrued details or natural speech can achieve. Sometimes these pieces just “work.” They come together just right and can be quite powerful or downright cute.
Sometimes they just flop. Fortunately I have noticed my worst flops and painted over them. That process became a body of work in itself which I eventually began calling my “white out” pieces. There are quite a few of them so perhaps they will have their own section on this website one day.
“Rape of Europa”
Ink/Paper
48” x 48”
1993
Around this time I found a big roll of paper in a dumpster. I later realized it was photographer back drop paper. The kind you pull down over a psychloramma to give that pure no edge or corner look that is so popular in modern photography and which was first introduced in the paintings of Edward Manet in the 1850’s.
The paper was a dream to draw on. Large. Soft. And free.
And so I did a series of large drawings exploring the new idiom I had recently evolved using a children’s book type of character but applied to “serious” themes and with an erotic twist.
Because the paper was free and large I experimented with leaving large sections blank. This also created an edge to the work I would not have discovered without all that free space to move around in.
“Grieving Couple”
Various materials including cardboard, panel and linoleum
Various sizes from 12” x 8” to 48” x 48”
1993
The couple are grieving over the loss of their relationship symbolized by the burial of a child or the planting of a seed. The skull obviously represents death but this also suggests that there is more to the death than a child. And they don’t appear to be murderers. The skull is too big and hopefully it’s obviously symbolic. The pear in one of the pieces is also too large to be a real pear.
These are just 3 of many paintings and drawings I did on this set of ideas and compositions that were similar. In some of the compositions the figures are so entwined they form a single unit. In others, they form a kind of linear grid but are nevertheless still integrated into one thing like a web.
These pieces draw on so many influences including Picasso’ late 20’s cubism, Dega’s washer women pastels, early stage computer graphics, Matisse’s large cubist works from the 1910’s and the early pre-abstract work of the abstract expressionists. Somehow I needed to churn through all these influences to get to my own synthesis. You can see the impatience in these works. They are barely finished in any measure of the word. They just barely hang their ideas out to dry.
Like all good work though, whether my own or others’, when I see these I want to paint more. Maybe it’s their hurried barely finished nature that is their strongest aspect. Perhaps that is not what makes them the best aesthetically, but the most useful in that they open the imagination to keep flowing. Ironically the subject is death but the real affect they have on me is one of resurrection and rebirth.
Historical art references for “The Fixer”
“The Fixer”
Oil/Canvas
60 x 36”
1993
This painting was inspired by a poem by my friend Douglas Newton. At some point I will recover the poem and with his permission add it to this website. But it was also inspired by my urge to introduce the figure into my abstract paintings. And so, here I am, painting a figure so nearly abstract except for the lines that define him and the shovel and clod of dirt.
But this painting was also an attempt to reconcile two other concerns that were on my mind at that time and to some degree still are. On the one hand I wanted to feel connected to something grand like the arc of the whole history of art, the merging of East and West and the van garde of artistic development as an expression of democratic freedom. And on the other hand I wanted to be grounded in my authentic place of origin. In other wards I wanted to somehow find a way to think globally but be true to my place.
Two paintings were very much on my mind when I created this. Picasso’s “Boy Leading a Horse” and Grant Wood’s “American Gothic.”
Well, the struggle is noble but I think the painting is evidence that I hadn’t yet figured this out. To make matters worse I sold this piece shortly after I painted it and didn’t get a very good photograph of it. This is an over exposed washed out version of what it looked like. Still, even if the photograph was better, I think it still falls short of my goal.
Later works more successfully integrated these concerns but not long after that I felt free to let the figures become much more singularly present. My concerns for integrating them into an essentially abstract no space dropped away and my figurative work exploded.
“Harvest Abundance”
Oil/canvas
36” x 60”
1993
Thirty years ago, as of this writing, I had the good fortune of having a mentor and benefactor in the person of my Uncle. Earl was the younger brother of my mother. Since my childhood Earl always took an interest in me perhaps because of the strange tremor I developed after a near death experience at the age of 11 or perhaps because I was just a strange child.
Earl was Dr. Zimmerman. He was not only a neurologist specializing in Alzheimer’s disease, he was also a research doctor committed to science and medicine far and above money and conspicuous success.
To me Earl was the epitome of a dying breed of true scientists who understood that science is creative as well as ordered and that scientific discovery comes to a scientist the way ideas for paintings come to artists … as a gift … and therefore should be shared in a community … a scientific community. Not hoarded and sold for profit. Back in the day, after all, Universities were known as centers for the Arts and Sciences. Not job training centers.
In short, Earl was the living embodiment of a grand tradition of the charismatic and wise genius who not only knew a lot, but held in his very bearing, wisdom that was superior to knowledge and understood the value and importance of creativity. There is a painting in the Philadelphia Museum of Art by Thomas Eakins of a doctor performing a surgery in a medical school surgical theater. Although it was painted in 1875, the doctor in the center of the composition could very well have been Dr. Earl Zimmerman.
Throughout my 20’s Earl grew impatient with my fickle inability to commit myself to art. But by some twist of fate we both landed in the Northwest in the late 1980’s. He was the Chairman of the Neurology Department at Portland’s prestigious medical university and I was at last a full blown bohemian devoted to art and living in a warehouse under a bridge. On the surface our lives could not have been more different. Earl was a major University Chairman and I was broke and only then in my late 20’s ready to steel myself for the hardships inevitable in my choice to devote myself to art.
Earl did not take pity on me. He celebrated my resolve and was no doubt relieved that I had finally stepped up to what he had known all along was my destiny.
And yet, he was troubled and distracted by a tumultuous second marriage. Once that ended and perhaps even more so, once he met and married the love of his life, he was able to invite me into his world in a way that was exactly the right way and the right time.
By now it was the early 1990’s. Earl was married to his third wife and was finally really happy. They bought a gentleman’s farm and moved to the country. I had finally let go of any semblance of a career or even a job and was painting night and day.
And so….I started going down to the farm to rest and recover. Earl and Jody would cook fabulous meals for me and we would work together on projects that were physically demanding but they were outside in the fresh air and we would quit when the sun went down. After a few days of that I would return to my studio cave in Seattle and paint for another 3 months straight.
Earl and Jody started buying paintings from me as well. And hosting shows. Earl even snuck into a gay leather bar one time around this time and bought the best painting in the show my dealer had mounted there. Eventually they also commissioned a painting that would somehow capture the essence of those halcyon days.
Around that time I had invented a number of ways to paint. One them was a kind of cartoony collection of figures I would often depict dancing or celebrating. And so I chose a theme of celebrating an abundant harvest to capture the zeitgeist of the farm.
Fortunately they loved the painting.
Thirty years later Earl’s beloved Jody passed away and he had to find a smaller home. Along the way his assistant at his new University post in Albany New York fell in love with the painting and so Earl gifted it to her.
Now, as I write this citation for this painting Earl is dying. His condition is so frail that I needed to send what I presume to be my last letter to him to Nancy, his assistant, so that she can read it to him. Because of what she read to Earl she realized that I was the artist of her favorite painting. So she sent me this photo of the painting which is a true gift since until then I had no visual record of the piece.
Now, as I look at it here on my computer I am swept back to the gardening, the projects, the meals and the hilarity and fun of those years…so restorative and so crucial to my becoming what Earl always knew was my destiny. I simply could not have become the person and the artist I am and have been these last 30 years without the love and generosity of Earl and his dear sweet Jody.
Thomas Eakins’ painting “The Gross Clinic,” exhibited at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, depicts a surgeon performing in a medical school’s theater. Despite dating back to 1875, the central figure strongly resembles Dr. Earl Zimmerman in character and presence.
“Prometheus”
Ink/paper
48 x 40”
1993
In the 1980’s a young artist rose to prominence very quickly with his iconic signature work inspired by the cultural response to AIDES. And then, before he even reached the age of 30, he died of AIDES. He was Keith Herring and his Art still remains popular in pop culture and still reminds us that pop culture can be high culture.
Or can it? I wanted to play along. I even like Herring’s work and definitely admire his brief but ambitious career and work ethic. And I admire and appreciate the important work he did to raise awareness about AIDES and elevate the public’s opinion and acceptance of homosexuality. All very important. But I still wonder if it’s art by my own definition.
No. My intuition keeps telling me, no. That is not art. And while I also would like to say, so what, I do think there is a purpose to making the distinction. Conflating one thing with another usually diminishes one’s ability to effectively create either. And art, by some folks definition, rejuvenates the soul. Increasing awareness, making something terrible feel playful, expanding the acceptance of marginalized groups of people are all worthy endeavors and arguably more important than art. But that makes them closer to social work than art work.
I was in the throughs of figuring that all out for myself around that time. And because of that I played with some of the techniques of pop artists I liked such as Keith Herring. In fact, I even developed my own cast of characters initiated by his iconic solid outline cartoon character. And, since I was also developing my relationship to antiquity and mythology, I merged this pop art approach to my own ideas about ancient mythology.
Here, the figure is described as Prometheus. He is in his moment of ascension as he soars up to the heavens in pursuit of stealing fire for humanity. Already he is taking the form of a crucifix portending his sacrifice on behalf of humanity hinting at my own belief that the Prometheus story and the story of Christ are essentially the same powerful myth that is built deeply into what makes us human: the urge to risk ourselves for the benefit of others.
Is my painting art? Hard to say. But that was certainly my intent. It is definitely not a very good teaching tool for learning about antiquity or Christianity. No social awareness building going on here. And no real attempt to make clear my ideas about the archetypal nature of Prometheus or Christ. Just a drawing with some hints and suggestions and hopefully that certain “je ne sais quoi” that leaves room for it to become art. By the way, “je ne sais quoi” is French for “I don’t know what.” It expresses the same difficulty to pinpoint exactly what it is that makes something a work of art.
The story of Prometheus captivated me for several reasons. The idea of a figure who was half god and half man appealed to my developing ideas about mankind as a combination of animal and god by virtue of consciousness. And that consciousness would therefor almost demand a deep sense of connection to and commitment to the well being of others.
Prometheus is known because he stole fire from the gods, not for himself, but to give to humans. And for his crime he was forced to suffer a punishment for eternity. He was eventually released from his bondage through interesting circumstances but that is another story.
To me, fire represented so many things. Warmth, technology, invention, control over one’s environment, passion, the arts and so much more. What mankind did with it is also interesting. As the gods had foretold, people would misuse and even abuse it creating untold horrors and eventual destruction of the world. Perhaps climate change brought about by excessive use of fossil fuels for endless abuses of fire are the fulfillment of their prophecy.
Here I have placed Prometheus as a kind of messiah uplifted and surrounded by a field of energy. Its clearly a reference to Salvador Dali’s crucified Christ. But hear he is not floating above the earth. He is soaring above or possibly out of a volcano. He is the fire itself.
You can’t see this piece without thinking of Keith Herring, an artist about my age who died of aides in his late 20’s. This piece is a kind of homage to another artist I thought of as a kind of Prometheus. A man who claimed his spiritual power through committing every hour of his short life to bringing as much art and fire into this world as he could. His commitment and passion are still burning inside me. This piece is an homage to his sacrifice.
