Q: How did the idea for "The Olympians" come about?
It is a good place to begin: it has been done so much before, it is a pretext to paint nudes, and it allows to me to have shows with such titles as "The Wisdom of the Ancients". Olympians are vigorous, good-looking, and kick-ass, and represent essences of important things. Painting navel-gazing, withered, dirty nihilists doesn't interest me, since I am a navel-gazing, withered, dirty nihilist! Sort of like Toulouse-Lautrec and the whores, so the story goes.
Q: In making your art do you start with the materials or the form?
Everything is planned completely, and I know how it will look because of my expectations of the technique. When the work is complete, 77% of the piece is accidental or incomplete compared to what I had in mind, because I get impatient or run out of energy.
Q: You are also an accomplished musician, could you speak a little bit about how that informs your visual art and vice-versa?
Music is more powerful to me, perhaps because I don't understand it as well, but it exhausts itself in a certain way which is not good.
Q: Also if possible, could you speak a little bit on the idea of how "removing things" informs your process, whether it be from an expanse of sound or from a visual work?
Subtraction seems to be my personal life theme. These paintings are done by starting with a panel with paint on it, then taking away, ala Michaelangelo and marble; with music, volume dynamics and short works with undeveloped motifs predominate; when I am desolate, I throw things away or do something funny to my diet and live monastically and minimally. When I succeed and become preeminent, I abdicate.
Q: As a dealer I have always viewed the nude as the epicenter of art since antiquity and find the movement away from identifiable form to be most disconcerting, I always saw Pollock et al as rapists
There's a trend in evolutionary biology, I suppose, called paedomorphism, which is a trend easily seen in domestic animals. Before I go on I must point out I have absolutely no idea what I'm talking about. Anyway, adult domestic animals resemble the babies of their wild counterparts. Humans are like this. Human adults are ever more child-like, adults reading comics and playing video games, or grown women with pigtails, for example. I see people here in Portland biking around in Dog suits. All I can say is that, whatever is on the cutting edge is there probably because it is playful or fosters a juvenile sensibility. This of course is presupposing we will continue to become more paedomorphic. Currin's work is mischievous. My guess is religious art, if it is to survive, would have to become more playful or juvenile, which perhaps explains the rise of "Christian Doom Metal" music, etc. Decorative hay incorporated into crafts is terrific because it reminds us of Kindergarten.
Q: Do you believe that brutality is a relevant inspiration to art? That the deconstruction of women applied by Picasso and others is about fear of women or about fear of tradition?
I seriously doubt Picasso was afraid of women. Picasso was very inspired by tribal masks, which are heavily apotropaic, like gargoyles presenting an image of evil for the purpose of warding off evil. Like Sigmund Freud, the very fact that so many people want to take Picasso down a notch bespeaks his relevance (and he was relevant because his work was).
Q: What is your opinion of Maximalism in art, of artists returning to the old Florentine ways of painting, including going so far as to grind their own paints?
I'm glad there is renewed interest in how people used to do things.
Q: Do you think that sculpture is important for a young artist prior to moving into painting, because it teaches form?
I have not sculpted a single thing since silly-snakes in elementary.