“The Coat Check Girl”
Oil/Door
80″ x 25″
1995
I painted this when I wanted to be and was actually living like a bohemian modernist. I was living in my studio which was a crude corrugated steal warehouse with no windows and under a gigantic freeway. I was in my early 30’s and finally felt I was living the life I wanted.
Every Thursday night I went to a straight friendly gay dive bar. Thursday was 80’s disco night and drag night. It was as close as I was going to get to Studio 54 in Seattle. It was probably closer in feel to the early days of Montmartre in Paris. Lots of artists hung work there and hung out too. I met people who would change my life.
Part of being an authentic Bohemian, in my mind, was painting the characters that hung out or worked there. In this case I convinced this guy to let me haul an old door into the bar during off hours and paint her from life. I worked fast and in 2 sittings I got the job done.
A few years later I sold it to a straight couple with a nice house in Seattle. They paid me a little extra to deliver the piece to their home since it was the size of a standard door. After I set the piece in the living room we got to chatting about the art. Of course I told them about the Re-Bar and how the painting came to be. And of course I added that the coat check girl was actually a guy. For a moment the air was tense as they had clearly not figured this out on their own. Then the woman burst out laughing saying how she loved the piece even more now.
My only regret is that I sold it. The Re-Bar lived on another 25 years finally ending during the Covid pandemic. During its run it became a major node of Seattle’s vibrant underground culture of live music, drag and gay comedy. It was also a gathering place for many of Seattle’s most colorful Demi Monde. I was fortunate to be there and even more fortunate to have painted the coat check girl and several other prominent characters during its halcyon days in the mid 90’s.
If anybody knows the location of this painting please let me know. I would purchase it back.
“Tamaki”
Oil/canvas
48” x 40”
1995
Tamaki was one of the great loves of my life. But this piece is more about my break up with Picasso than with Tamaki. Clearly this piece is a compelling assimilation of Picasso’s crossover work in the late 20’s and 30’s where he was revisiting cubism and combining it with his surrealist style. To be sure I am deploying my own imagery: the flared nostril worm portrait that is Tamaki, the crowd gathering to bear witness, the large eye head and the palette of cerulean blue, black and ochre. But it is still essentially constructed the way Picssso would have done in the early 1930’s.
Around this time I took a large monogram on Picasso and tore it to shreds. I tried burning it in a makeshift fire pit outside my studio but many of the shredded pages floated up in the heat and spread throughout the empty lot around my studio. For years these partially burned pages would reappear like seeds or bones of the guilty dead. But the ritual worked. This was the last derivative painting I did.
Almost overnight my work took a decisive turn and became unmistakably Hengst.
“Jodi Blowing Bubbles”
Oil/Panel
20″ x 14″
1994
“Gary the Dealer”
Oil/panel
24” x24”
1994
Gary was my art dealer for a few years. And it has been my practice for many years to paint portraits of the people in my life from memory. Gary did have a noticeable stigmatism in one eye. But more importantly he had ADHD. He was always wondering from subject to subject at 100 miles an hour. And he was definitely an entertainer.
He was also a con man and offered me my first opportunity to see what that looked like and felt like as I eventually became the victim of his cons. Eventually he stole several of my paintings including this one. If anybody knows of the whereabouts of the painting I am including here please let me know. It is large. 8’ x 4’.
“Gary as Clown”
Oil/Panel
30” x 24”
1994
I often end up doing portraits of my friends as clowns or Comedia del Arte performers. This is Gary. He was my art dealer from 1993-95 or so. He was not a professional art dealer, but he was fiercely devoted to me and my work. He actually functioned more like a professional assistant. He had worked as a campaign organizer for local politicians. He was gay, well connected and a lot of fun… when he wasn’t drunk. He saw my art as a tool to advance his social position and my studio as a locus for his various political activities. He was a glorious nut.
For these clown paintings my friends don’t formally sit for them. They simply appear in a painting one day and it is obvious to everyone around the studio who it is. The likeness is often striking as it is here. In most of these paintings they have an invented hat and collar and often look like they could have been performers in a Comedia del Arte performance group. They often have a realistic element to them. In this case, Gary’s flesh is painted in the same way I was painting my more realistic work at the time… with thick stiff white paint and a stiff dirty brush. The flesh is not so much painted as carved.
By the time I painted this painting I had already discovered Lucien Freud’s work, but the speed and the attack were still very much my own. These are paintings of energy and of the moment rather than the meticulous accretion of observations that are the hallmark of Freud’s work. The hat and collar are pure invention. These pieces were done as fun breaks from the rigorous figure painting work I am usually doing.
“Self Portrait as Comedia Del Arte”
Oil/Panel
30” x 24” Approx.
1994
I think this is what I will look like as an old man. When I paint these “clown” paintings I never know who they are going to be. They are not done from life. They are created from imagination. And usually I don’t have a person in mind when I create them.
Around the same time that I painted this, I did a realistic portrait with the aid of a mirror. In the painting I am wearing a red velvet Harlequin hat like the one in this painting. I suspect I did this as a more fanciful interpretation of the “real” one.
“Ramon and Horse”
Oil/Panel
48″ x 24″
1994
In 1994 or 1993 I started working with a man named Lewis. He was a nudist and just wanted to hang around my studio being nude. I eventually made many paintings of him and his lover James as well as him alone and with other friends. Lewis was also a very sweet soul and a good writer.
One day he had a dream and in that dream he was gifted a story. When he woke up he wrote the story in one sitting while modeling for me. I loved his story and immediately did a suite of drawings to illustrate it. The story also caught my attention because I had just seen Picasso’s Boy with a Horse at a traveling exhibition at the Seattle Art Museum.
Eventually I did a painting which captures the moment of exultation in the story when Ramone and the horse bond. To me this was a powerful metaphor of a boy becoming a man through integration and acceptance of his deeper self or animal spirit guide.
I gave the painting to Lewis but years later he decided to move to Isreal to explore his Jewish heritage and was downsizing his possessions. And so he gifted the painting back to me. Unfortunately the only copy of the story I had was taped to the back of the painting and that too has gone missing.
So Lewis… if you ever see this website please contact me and send me a copy of the story so that I may enjoy it and add it to the website.
“Vision”
Oil/Cardboard
36″ x 24″
1994
Around this time I was pulling together ideas from a variety of sources and was still under the sway of recent standards and expectations in the art world.
I had absorbed as big a bite of the entire arc of modernism as I could, including the abstract expressionists which brought me nearly up to date. I just couldn’t find any place for the pop or post modern irony that followed. And so I set myself with the challenge of being a modernist after abstract art.
But how?
Well, I wanted to bring subject matter back into the painting but not cubist and not surrealist and not expressionistic. I started stacking symbols that had meaning to me. The mythryc eye, the yoni, open circle Enzo and more. These stacks of multicultural symbols also suggested figures or portraits. Some of these experiments were much too cerebral and vapid. But occasionally something worked.
This piece is one of those loose ends I didn’t explore enough. Perhaps now, 30 years later, it’s not too late. So much for the linear idea of an artist’s “progress.” I’ve never accepted that concept anyway.
“Pressure Form Portrait”
Oil/Panel
30 x 24”
1994
In the early 1990’s I was synthesizing several threads of interest in a way of painting the figure. Abstract expressionism, cubism, realism, and gestural qualities including flying white I absorbed in China.
At various times this process became too cerebral which to me means the degree of thinking cut me off from the mysterious way imagery bubbles up from nowhere in my mind. That flow is nearly constant and mostly incoherent. Hence the need for some rational thinking to make the endless fire house of images and ideas somewhat translatable into works of art.
Here is a piece where everything came together just right. The realism is balanced with the abstract elements. The patches of paint provide compelling energy in their interplay with the lines. The lines themselves have chi. And there is a refreshing spontaneity conveyed in many ways including the loose white unpainted patched of canvas.
And it’s a striking likeness of the woman who inspired it. I don’t remember her name. I only met her twice. A friend of a friend. What struck me about her was her prominent features probably enhanced with makeup, another form of art. In any case, I’m grateful to have had that brief encounter and this painting.
“Break Up”
Oil on panel and various mediums
Various sizes
1994
Perhaps a better title for this piece would be “The Angry Cock.” Whatever it’s called, this piece makes me laugh every time I see it. That was not my intention when I painted it. I was mad and hurt and deeply conflicted. I had just dumped my girlfriend, Tamaki, one of the great loves of my life. The reasons for doing that were Shakespearean in their depth and complexity. And even though I’m the one who initiated it, I was devastated. She had done nothing wrong. It was my own feelings of inadequacy exacerbated by my poverty intertwined with her status as a foreign student who was unable to work due to her legal status and not wanting me to work because she was an art history student who had a deep respect for the artistic process. And that is only one layer to this.
The result was an outpouring of drawings, paintings and sculptures. This section of the website features a few of this little series.
I had recently acquired some old doors that still hadn’t had a hole drilled for the knob. This was painted on one of those doors and as such it is large. That gave me plenty of room to explore this idea of a cock man that is raging mad but flaccid and without arms…unable to do anything or affect any change in his condition. I also used blocks of color and a shifting approach to making marks to create energy and tension.
I wouldn’t say I painted a bunch of these because I liked them. It was more a matter of painting until the anguish exhausted itself. After countless drawings, 50 or so paintings and one sculpture I was ready to paint something else.
Looking back at myself through these works is painful and yet still funny. I was indeed an angry little prick. And given how much I loved Tamaki, I was also a pathetic flaccid powerless flop. It would take a few more years of intense creative work on my art and myself to become the rest of the man that this boneless raging flabbiness depicts. I can laugh now because I’m a completely different kind of prick. Probably just as bad in some way, but definitely not pathetic like this. If I’m lucky in another 30 years I’ll look at myself at this age and hopefully have another good laugh.
