Art Alliance. I'm very pleased to introduce Alexis Rockman.

His paintings are fantastic visions about the clash between humans and the natural world.

He has taken long journeys into very wild, remote places to do research for his work.

His is in the collection of both the Guggenheim and the Whitney Museum of American Art.

He also had a survey of his work at Smithsonian Museum.

Smithsonian.

Smithsonian Museum in 2011,

2012, which then traveled to the Wexner Center for the .

His current exhibition at

Sperone Westwater Gallery runs until November 2nd, and he also has an exhibition at

The Drawing Center which runs until November 3rd.

Please welcome Alexis Rockman to SUNY New Paltz.

[APPLAUSE]

I'm trying to turn these lights off. Does anyone know how?

I think it's the [inaudible 00:00:59] one.

That was my next guess.

[LAUGHTER]

All right. Thank you, Zara.

Is everything ready for your web upload streaming thing up there on the top? You're all ready?

Okay. Wow, timing is pretty good to come and talk to you guys.

First of all, it's a really beautiful out so it was a great drive up from the city this morning.

My wife is in Israel and I just told her how beautiful the leaves were.

She's dropping our son off at

University of Haifa for his junior year, abroad.

Sorry that this screen has this idiotic small image.

The painting that you're looking at is very big and it's the centerpiece of my show at Sperone Westwater.

If you guys go to the city in the next month, try to check it out.

I hear there's pretty good bus service.

There's a lot of great shows up.

But of course,

I'm going to be talking about what I've been doing.

The show at Sperone Westwater is a gallery show which means that I made the work for the show over the last two years.

What I'm going to talk about today are the two main paintings which are very large.

Then I'm going to talk, first, a little bit about my history with large images, large paintings, which started 21 years ago at the same gallery which commissioned me to make a painting that was 24 feet long by eight feet tall called Evolution.

I also want to just mention that the show at the Drawing Center is drawings that I made for a movie called Life of Pi.

The movie was started in the fall of 2009 with myself, the script, one of the producers,

Jean Castelli, and the director, .

We sat down and tried to figure out what we wanted the movie to look like.

I proceeded to make a number of drawings that developed into images that were used not only by the production, but also by Ang and the art department that ended up being formed as the project proceeded to convince 20th Century Fox to give Ang a hundred some odd million dollars to make the movie.

The drawings at the Drawing Center are the drawings I made for the movie to convince Fox to make the movie.

I designed the island, for those of you that have seen the movie, and also the underwater sequence where Pi and the tiger,

Richard Parker come together and have an experience of intimacy as they travel to the bottom of the ocean and inward.

If you're interested in how that movie developed visually, check it out.

There's also a really good interview

I did with Jean Castelli, the producer I mentioned, who is one of my close friends who's really great.

It was an awesome experience.

But I'm not going to be showing you pictures from that because I'm going to show you pictures from my painting career.

Just to be clear,

I don't really make much distinction.

20th Century Fox owns the work at the Drawing Center even though they're so idiotic, they don't even know that the drawings exist, they just know they own the rights to them.

If you ever want to deal with corporate, global capitalism,

I think movie studios are a bad beginning.

Let me just say, this is a painting, as I mentioned, the centerpiece of my show at Sperone Westwater.

It's called Bronx Zoo, and it's pretty self-explanatory what it is.

It's actually on the Fordham Avenue entrance looking towards Astor Court, the oldest part of the zoo.

I'm going to show you some paintings I made over the years that are quite large as well.

I love large paintings.

There's so many opportunities, they're also very cinematic.

This is actually one of my smaller large paintings, even though it took me almost a year.

Evolution was the beginning of this.

Really looks tiny, it's ridiculous.

This is 24 feet long, and I did this painting in 1992.

All the work that I'm going to show you in the beginning is starting with this and leads to the present.

Big paintings, for me, are encyclopedias.

This is the key to the painting and of course, unless you have binoculars, you have no clue what anything says.

I wouldn't guarantee everything is correct, but everything is an attempt of being correct.

It was constantly revised.

We did a catalog for this show, including all these large images that I'm going to show you.

I had to revise the keys on everything because I learned a lot since I did this key, which generated for this painting when it started to travel.

First, at the Carnegie Museum, it went to the in 1993, and so on.

Large paintings come in handy because there's so many things, they're spectacular, hopefully, they're advanced, and they are really unique, they're uniquely mine.

Not many people would bother to do these types of paintings.

One of the things I want to tell you about is I love what I do.

I consider myself incredibly, not only lucky but just privileged to be able to do it.

You have to find ways to make what you do unique and worth paying attention to.

That has to do with if you're a writer, filmmaker, whatever you do, you have to find your own niche.

This is a painting I made in

1997 called Map of Cryptozoology.

Obviously, it's built around the high school educational image that has everything to do with putting vignettes on Geography to tell the story.

Does anyone know what cryptozoology is here? Anyone?

Study of mythical animals? That's close. The study of animals out of time, place, or scale, so it could include dinosaurs, obviously.

The fun for something like this is obviously musing anecdotes that are based on so-called eyewitness accounts.

They often include photographs.

If you look on the upper right and you see that dark shape that looks like a sea serpent.

For some reason, the image is cropped on the right, I'm sorry about that.

That's based on the 1964 so-called Cook Islands sea serpent, off the coast of Australia.

One of the fun facts, and here's the painting's key.

This is an educational tool that's used to tell the story of obviously ridiculous pieces of information.

Now, the problem with cryptozoology is first of all it's so much fun and it also flirts with actual information.

If you look at number 20, in Central Africa [NOISE] excuse me,

I've had somewhat of a irritating cough, so I apologize.

Number 20 is the okapi, which is in a real animal that was discovered in 1901.

It's a forest giraffe.

It's one of the more beautiful and I think so many animals are fascinating and beautiful.

But okapis are particularly cool because they have enormous tongues that are black and I think they're adorable.

Anyway, that's a real animal.

You see that animals are still being discovered and it fuels the fire for delusions and hallucinations.

The fun of this for me is, for instance, number 26, just to the right of South America, uncharted territory [LAUGHTER] that can mean anything and that's the fun of it.

You just don't know. Whenever I go into exotic places, which I've done.

That I've done quite a bit but I have friends that have done more, but places like ,

Antarctica, camping in the Amazon.

I often catch myself daydreaming that some extinct animal wanders by just out of vision.

I just missed it, it's around the tree, the corner whatever.

That's my confession to wishful thinking.

Here is a painting that I made

[NOISE] about 10 years ago, that was a commission for the and it's called Manifest Destiny. It tries to give an idea looking

East from the bank of the East River towards Brooklyn, what might bring to the tri-state area if the sea levels raised.

I think it's 82 feet or so.

I worked on this for years, exhaustively researched and so on and so forth.

Now, you might look at this and go,

"Oh my God, I've seen all this before."

Now I agree, the post-apocalyptic landscape that is tired at this point.

You know I grew up at a time when movies like, I'm 51, so I didn't actually see Planet of the Apes in the theater because I would have been five or six.

But I saw it in 1973 when I was 11.

I saw Silent Running When I was 11, Soylent Green, all these movies that come from pop culture and the first wave of a type of eco-consciousness.

In terms of the EPA, the clint which is of course on-hold today

[LAUGHTER] and so many other things in terms of America's understanding that ecology was a fragile thing that needed to be protected from capitalism.

Obviously, certain things have improved superficially, but we're really headed off a cliff or were probably over the cliff we just don't know it yet.

I took it upon myself 10 years, well, it was 15 years ago because I worked on and off for five years to approach people in NASA to get information about what New York might look like if the sea levels rose and what was possible.

Subsequently movies like I Am Legend and all other, visually compelling on some level, movies I know very well looked at this painting and other paintings I made right after this.

Not to say that I invented the genre of monuments of American nationalism in ruins, obviously, Planet of the Apes did a great job with that.

But there is a certain flavor to things that I could see my hand in.

Use the key for that.

Now this painting, which is one of the main paintings that my survey show the Smithsonian, another word for retrospective.

The Brooklyn Museum ended up having some financial problems and now the Smithsonian owns this

[NOISE] Other things that I have been interested in.

This is called Battle Royale, it's a painting I made for a big international show called Prospect.2 in a couple of years ago.

I'm interested in obviously ecology and what are the implications of , endemic animals going extinct and so on and so forth.

What I decided to do,

I had a couple of years heads up for Prospect.2.

I actually found out on a subway coming from playing basketball, going back to my studio the day before I was headed to Madagascar,

I ran into the curator and he said, "I just emailed you, do you want to be in Prospect.2" and I said, "absolutely".

Then I went to Madagascar for two weeks with my wife to study lemurs.

When I got back, I started to think about New Orleans, which is obviously a very sexy place for humans.

We all love food from New Orleans, jazz, very glamorous and

Baroque and all sorts of things like that.

I started to think about it as one of the more interesting places, certainly in America, as a type of hub between North and South America.

It has a very rich history of obviously animals and plants that live there, but also invaders from other parts of the world. If you look at this painting

[NOISE] animals on the right, let's say mostly animals on the right, there might be an exception or two, are going to the left they're from

North America and endemic to North America.

Animals on the left, facing to the right tend to be from other parts of the world.

For instance, the European wild pig or wild boar, snake head, xenopus, tilapia,

African giant snail, reticulated python.

You can see the reticulated python

[NOISE] having a battle that it's winning with a jaguar that used to live in New Orleans or .

I think they're pretty much extinct now.

Anyway, so I devised this narrative that was almost like

Paolo Uccello to imagine this battle between endemic animals and invaders.

We all know that story now where we're headed towards a type of global where the local populations of things get muscled out by wild cats or feral cats,

Norway rats, pigeons, starlings.

Then there are other stories like the Canada goose or Canada geese that's right above that American alligator

[NOISE] weren't necessarily from another part of the world, but they're doing extraordinarily well because of humans.

Now I noticed when I was outside lying in the sun just before I came in to give this talk, there is a lot of turkey vultures flying around.

Aren't they cute? [LAUGHTER] Writing the thermals, it's a warm day to day.

They're going to start to migrate south soon.

They've done relatively well since DDT was outlawed.

I always admire turkey vultures.

I think they were harbinger of optimism as far as I'm concerned.

But [NOISE] I think that's superficial and we'll see how long they hang around over the next couple of decades.

Anyway, there is so many rich and fantastic stories.

The nutria, the Eastern red-eared slider, axis deer, Africanized honey bee, so on and so forth.

Brown tree snake. Here is the key for this

[NOISE] and you can see all sorts of fun details which I love.

Wait, what is number 7? I forgot about that smooth softshell turtle.

Anyway, the things on the right tend to be in trouble mostly.

It's a little place holder.

Now I'm going to talk about how I built the Bronx Zoo, and what I'm thinking about when I'm making it and how I made it.

It's a behind the scenes making.

First of all, I was talking to my other son, and I was exhausted.

I just finished that New Orleans painting, and I was like, "Oh my God, what am I going to do now?"

He's like, ''Well, you should do a fucked up zoo."

[LAUGHTER] I thought, "Well, really?

Tell me about that." He's like, ''Well, I don't know.

Some tidal wave or shit hit it," and this was about two and a half years ago.

I said, "All right, let me think about that."

I started to think about the Bronx Zoo, and as a place of very rich memories for me,

I grew up in and that was one of the places I went as a kid to look at animals.

I always had mixed feelings about zoos because they obviously have wonderful animals and habitats and it's an intense sense of wonder, but it's also very sad for me because I realize from a very young age that this is probably going to be the future of all these animals and there was nowhere else for them to be.

Going to the zoo was always a trauma.

I'd start crying if I saw the big cats pacing back and forth, or the primates that look like they were in prison or whatever.

Remember, this is in the '60s and early '70s.

I started to think about, all right, what are the coolest zoos in history?

I thought, well, the zoo in Xanadu, in Citizen Kane is pretty bad ass.

I started to look at production drawings by

Mario Larrinaga of the zoo for Citizen Kane.

Has anyone seen Citizen Kane here?

All right. At the beginning, there's this haunted, very gothic prologue that tries to set the stage for a mystery.

What happened to this person who built this?

There's a series of images that travel around Xanadu, which is this enormous estate that has everything that money can buy, including a private zoo, and it's a ruin. I thought beautiful.

There's another drawing by Mario Larrinaga,

One of my favorite concept artists, did a lot of work for King Kong,

Hunchback of Notre Dame, the 1939 version, he was active at

RKO and Citizen Kane, obviously.

That white dot at the top is the light where Charles Foster Kane is barely still alive and the camera ends up in that part of the estate when he drops the paperweight, then says, "Rose bud" and sets off the mystery of what is rose bud.

Here's another image that I start to think about from my childhood era.

I think patty cake is actually in the Zoo.

But anyway, you can see by the haircuts that this is in the '70s, early '70s.

I spent some time in the Central Park Zoo as well.

The sort of fetishization of this is a silverback gorilla,

I believe, in the Central Park Zoo being treated as a celebrity.

The history of zoos, obviously, ranges from, in this case, it looks like a small time dip shit circus, you can see and the macaws on the rings, this guy's holding a boa, there's a white pelican, kind of interesting.

If you know anything about island biogeography, you'd guess that this is somewhere on the Pacific side, if there's white pelicans, that's where they're from.

Obviously, macaws are from South America.

The lion in the cage is from Africa and so on and so forth.

So where is this?

I don't know, but it has a sense of exoticism and showmanship.

That's something I wanted to think about too.

The idea of enclosures, again,

I think it's the Bronx Zoo.

The way I work is that

I called up the Bronx Zoo and I said,

"Can I come and look at your archives?

I know they have a great library," and since I'd done that the last time, they put things online, so they were very generous and sent me

PDFs of many things, journals, and so on and so forth.

I had this plan initially that I was going to base my painting on a ruin of the Bronx Zoo.

But have it be based on it being constructed also, like I could see how it's being built.

It didn't work out that way, but I couldn't find anything that was interesting enough visually, but that was my idea.

Postcards from the '60s,

I believe, hand-tinted showing the graphics and the displays.

I'm fascinated by how these things operate in pop culture.

This, I think, is the Tibetan,

I actually have a taxidermy version of that pheasant.

That's a Tibetan pheasant.

Peter Matthiessen wrote a great book that includes an account,

"The Snow Leopard" of this bird.

Anyway, look at displays and you can see like the side of the van, airbrush number of the bamboo forest in the back.

This is from a relatively recent display.

Then, of course, I started to look at futuristic ideas about zoos.

In this case, it's not a zoo, it's a race track with gigantic robotic, it looks like dogs, but it might be horses racing around.

This is by a wonderful concept artist, industrial designer named Syd Mead, who is a friend who designed Blade Runner, Tron, and the space station in Elysium, that basically sucked except for the visual arts. Anyway, which is nice, not what I wanted, but I just included it because this led me there, ideas about robotics, the future, blah, blah, blah.

This is Astor Court looking towards the seal pool.

If you go up the stairs in my painting and I'll show it to you, you'll understand it.

This is looking, I believe,

South, but I'd have to look at a map.

I don't know where this is from, but this is one of the pieces of information, there was this central part of how I wanted to describe a zoo run amok.

What I ended up doing in the painting is substituting the female Indian elephant for an okapi. You'll see that again.

Panda reference I used for the panda in the painting, and you'll see it all again so don't worry.

It probably doesn't make much sense right now what I'm showing you.

This is from some flood or something and that's a wildebeest in Central Africa.

Another piece of information I used is a beautiful griffon vulture, I believe.

You can see the difference between these vultures and the vultures you have here.

They have no relationship to each other even though they have the same name. Vultures in Africa and the Old World are related to storks.

Vultures in the new world, here, in South America, are related to birds of prey, raptors.

Here's the reference I used for the hippo in the painting, and here is one of my big inspirations.

I spent so much time on the Internet looking for things like shopping cart in water,

[LAUGHTER] floating can, so on and so forth.

They're the most beautiful still lifes as far as I'm concerned.

Just to give you a little background too, when I started painting in the early '80s, one of the things I was fascinated by was trying to resuscitate genres of painting, like still life paintings.

So much of what I'm interested in is ideas about describing information that's not necessarily photographic.

You'd say, well, why do you look at photographs and not the real thing?

Photographs are a great tool like everything else to just gather information.

So many times I have had to reinvent the light on it, reinvent things to do with it, reflections, but it's just place holders. There's another wonderful photograph of a shopping cart.

That just doesn't get any better, does it?

[LAUGHTER]

Egret looks like a big gulp.

[LAUGHTER] Sad.

I think this is a shot from post-Katrina New Orleans.

You can see the joint compound.

There's so many things that just are so depressing.

If you see a floating joint compound bucket, or a shopping cart or a tire, you know you're in trouble.

This is one of the greatest Still Life images ever.

I've no idea where it's from other than I found it [LAUGHTER] years ago.

You can see on the lower right, it looks like some styrofoam and a plastic bottle.

Now I'm going to show you a bunch of photographs that I took while I was doing,

I ended up going up to the zoo and deciding what I wanted my painting to be after I realized I wasn't going to get anywhere with the historical reference.

This is the primate house, the monkey house, that I ended up moving around somewhat for the purposes of the painting.

This is the right side of my painting.

This is the actual photograph that I used as the foundation for the structure of the painting. Other ideas about shopping carts, and you can see it looks like,

I'm not sure if it's oysters or what, but it's just not a good situation.

Now you can see I took this image and started to screw around with it in Photoshop, and this is how I started to build things,

I move the primate house on the left into the image.

I moved one of the jaguar sculptures to the left of that, and because of my memory of the zoo as a kid,

I had to make sure that there was a cage.

As an architect, this should be a failure, but in terms of a painting, that's what I wanted.

The other thing I started to do is play around with animals, move things around, and I decided that any painting with a zoo cannot have a giraffe.

That's just too much like animal crackers.

I also worked on Darren Aronofsky's upcoming movie,

Noah's Ark, and he was like,

"I don't want any fucking giraffes."

[LAUGHTER] No giraffes on the ark.

I just included this because this is how things can look bad.

I started to move things around.

This is much further into it. I changed a lot of things.

You can see on the left, there's that panda looks like it's asleep.

I decided I wanted to eviscerate it, but you can also see in the center how the okapi and the elephant had been turned into a Photoshop document to just get a sense of where things should go.

Here's my painting in my studio,

I guess about a year and a half ago, probably June of 2011.

You could see that it's very theatrical type of situation where I had to figure out where everything goes so I could get the reflection going, and then I do very theatrical type of space from back to front.

That's actually I think earlier.

Yeah. [NOISE] You can see on my laptop with panel over, the reference that I just showed you as I'm painting,

I can't even remember what house that is.

But anyway, that's what I was looking at, the reference.

Now you could see how the architecture is developed.

I redesigned the cage on the left.

As things develop further,

I started the block things in, and this is the painting. I guess it's finished. [LAUGHTER] It's hard to remember what.

This is up in my show at Sperone Westwater, which is at 270 Bowery.

That's the process of making that couple of details.

You can see all those pieces of reference to the bottles.

But when you're making a painting, you better figure out what you're doing, and I had to change all the light sources.

They're just more or less an inspiration.

I couldn't really use them as reference because they wouldn't work in the light that I was painting.

You have to really control your own light and stuff like that, if you're making a painting like this.

Here's the key for that.

[NOISE] Now I'm going to talk a little bit about this painting, which is the other big painting.

This is called Gowanus, and it's a painting of the Gowanus Canal.

For those of you that don't know what that is, that's a stretch of water in Brooklyn that used to be a tributary, that emptied into the East River.

Now it's more than the most notorious, sludge, toxic nightmare. For me, one of the more exciting places in the world.

I started to develop this idea with the idea that I wanted to have it be this magical place of wonder and also toxicity, and it was inspired by this anecdote of a dolphin that swam in there last January and died.

I start to think, wow, how many things have gone in there and died or just died.

The first thing I decided was that I want to make a character that was a combination of, if you squint at it in the right light, it looks like a cat fish, but if you look at it in detail, you can see that it's made out of many different species of creatures, the spiny dog fish, a bear, a turkey, a fox, striped bass and so on and so forth.

That was really the beginning of how I wanted to construct this image.

I also decided I wanted to go on a field trip.

Here's the key for this.

That cluster of animals at the bottom is really a round up of some of the things that used to live in the area that probably died in there. Here's me on the Gowanus Canal doing research.

You can see that I took parts of this and created almost like a fantasia of toxicity.

There was no place that I saw that was quite good enough for what I was after.

But if you look at this rock on the left and that rock wall, you can see how I took that and stuck a sewer opening into it.

Then I took the pipes on the right and did whatever I wanted with that.

Here's the staircase that

I ended up putting behind the wall.

You can see on the left behind that pink and blue stuff coming out.

I decided I was just going to take my favorite parts of this and create a situation that was almost like a fantasy, the greatest hits of toxicity.

[LAUGHTER] Almost like a giant

Still Life of a Superfund site.

You can see there's a very cute seagull sitting on that piling there.

Here's a watercolor I made of that character as well.

That's unfortunately not my show because there just wasn't really room for it.

Here's that shopping cart I showed you earlier with an invasive species chimera.

In this case, you can see the tail is a reticulated python. There are three heads.

The one on the left is a turkey vulture, the one in the middle is an opossum, and the one on the right is an American alligator.

Here is a piping plover waiting around.

It looks like it's gotten a little messed up.

[LAUGHTER] Anyway, this for me, as much as I love going to the Amazon,

I have as much fun going to the Gowanus Canal and Newtown Creek.

They really offer their own sense of wonder and magic.

Here's what I imagine is going on below the piling.

You can see there's all sorts of debris, and again, these are watercolors, so they're not paintings.

That's it's own little discrete body of work, and that's in the second room of the show.

That's the end of my talk.

[APPLAUSE]

[NOISE]

Well, that's institutional.

Anyone have any questions?

Don't be shy. Oh, there you go.

Do you have to get permission to use all those reference tools that [inaudible 00:36:59]? No.

Have you ever had anyone angry at you for [inaudible 00:37:05]?

No.

Are you worried about it?

No. [LAUGHTER] In all seriousness, legally, if you'd make a painting, you're transforming it.

It's certainly what I do, I mean,

I've the same lawyer as many of the people that have been sued, and for better or worse,

I'm so OCD, I changed things around so much that, it's a piece of a piece of something. Yeah?

You write, correct?

Do I write?

Yes.

No, I write badly.

[LAUGHTER] Why?

I thought you had a collection of essays or something.

I have done many interviews,

I live with a real writer.

She'd be laughing right now if she were here.

I'm forced to write occasionally and I can't stand that.

I do a lot of interviews and I love doing that, but that's not writing.

I'm going to start here and then I'll get to you.

How did your career start? Well, careers are all different.

Mine started when I was an undergraduate in 1984 or so, and I was just very determined to get my work out there and fumble along.

I've made a decision very early on that.

I didn't want to wait until I was 50 years old before I showed,

I wanted to have a life being an artist and I had to make a living doing it.

I just was like just get out there and make mistakes in public and grow up in public, that's what I decided. Yeah.

Do you ever find, as a considerably type of a skilled painter, people are looking and saying that's great, what else can you do?

Because I feel that's something I personally hear a lot of.

What would be the expectation?

No, what do people say to you?

It's can you loosen up to the paintings and I think that [inaudible 00:39:29]

Can you loosen up?

Yeah it appears a lot with me as having a certain skill for rendering

I mean, if I can design movies, is that enough?

[LAUGHTER].

Yeah.

I was just wondering if its something that you could breakthrough. You've always been so.

I've always felt like my work was so unique in its own niche that I've never heard that.

I've asked myself to not make paintings for a couple of years and I made things that were shallow dioramas embedded in resin that were pictorial.

My dealer was like,"What are you doing?

You're an idiot.

You're making very expensive objects to make, and you're confounding people that you want to buy what you do."

I was somewhat more self, not destructive, but I wanted to challenge what was possible for myself.

But I think that painting has, now it's so different but when I first started painting, you were not allowed to make a still life painting, and I was like, I love that.

I wanted to take disgraced languages and make paintings that were undeniable using that language.

Just one more question under lighting, you said that you had to remake up a lot of lighting?

Yeah. Well, do you sit there and relight things in your studio like get a shopping cart and flip it over?

I don't have any objects like that, no, it's mental.

No, why waste time.

Photoshop is just a placeholder.

You have to know what you're doing and just figure it out.

Photoshop is its own black hole of a nightmare.

You get involved with Photoshop, then you'll just be like a lame ass collagist with nothing happening.

Or why make paintings?

I mean, you have to just stop and just decide, that's just a place holder.

[inaudible 00:41:24] [NOISE] and Sci-fi movies and stuff [NOISE]

I didn't look at art until I was forced to in art school.

My mom knew artists like Mark Di Suvero and I was like, I hate that.

I was looking at comic books to a certain extent, but like paleo, illustration like Charles R Knight and people like that and Keagger and what have you.

You couldn't make art about that stuff when I was a kid, it was only after the Germans came in like Polka,

Richter and Kiefer, and those guys, and some of the younger American painters.

You could do anything after they paved the way just by using eccentric pop culture.

Yeah.

[inaudible 00:42:29] was describing your work as I don't remember if it was tension of relationship between humans and , but where do you draw that distinction because a lot of times I have a hard time drawing the distinction.

Why draw the distinction?

Why draw the distinction?

Yeah.

I think [inaudible 00:42:52].

You can't draw a distinction, especially now.

But would you separate humans and nature?

But who separated them? I didn't write that.

[LAUGHTER] I would never say that.

There's just the stuff out there, who knows where it comes from?

[inaudible 00:43:16]

Obviously, you go to places now, wherever you are and there's human footprints, whether it's literal or it's a dandelion or pieces of plastic everywhere, or too much CO2.

I've been in , I've been in .

You just see it, it's everywhere.

Come on, more questions. Yeah.

When I was researching you [LAUGHTER] a few days ago, they called you an ungothic artist.

Who's they?

The site? A specific name or.

Ungothic, what is gothic?

It's the idea of using atmosphere.

Gothic is the idea that verticality will lead you to God, right, in terms of Gothic architecture, but if you're talking about goth, that's embracing a sense of the macabre, darker, yeah, I could see that, but

I think that was written in 1998,

I don't know how new I was.

Right.

Yeah.

As far as your work as your working process [inaudible 00:44:37] over a long period of time, do you do smaller pieces in between or you just focus entirely.

It depends on what my responsibilities are professionally. [BACKGROUND]

That's amazing.

Well, you have to really keep focused and be disciplined about it.

If you have a deadline and something in mind, it's helpful. Yeah.

Are you using acrylic paint or oil paint?

Oil paint.

How much work do you make for yourself versus how much is commission?

It's all for myself.

I know as an artist, technically, you're going to make work for yourself because it's what you love.

I've never done anything other than what I wanted to do.

But I mean how much of the work is commissioned?

You have to understand something.

When I say commission, it's against sales, so inevitably it has to be paid back by the sale of it.

It's not like a commission of someone's dog and then it ends up in their house.

It's that the gallery funds a project as a partner.

It's really what I want to do and what I think is important.

It's not what I think someone else will like.

That's a fool's errand.

Yeah.

You said later the initial ideas in

Photoshop is trying to broaden the ideas, how do you then transcribe all that onto the canvas. [OVERLAPPING]

I used a piece of string and a push pin to figure out the perspective.

Literally, I drew a line.

I have a 30 foot wall,

I put the painting in the middle.

I knew where the horizon was,

I put a pencil mark and I had vanishing points and

I literally used a piece of string.

It sucked. [LAUGHTER]. It was hot and my family was out in Long Island and I was stuck in the city.

It sucked and I ate a lot of cheap ass Mexican food.

[LAUGHTER]

I'm sorry. [LAUGHTER]

Price you pay. It could be worse.

There's so many ways for it to be worse.

But anyway, the point is that you just do whatever it takes.

You have to be almost desperate.

Not only a fool would make my work.

Really. It's just too difficult and it's too much of a gamble.

I do it because I have to do it and I don't mean that in a romantic sense.

Every time I sell work, I figure out I have six months to do this shit and it better matter to me.

I guess I scared someone off.

When you were at school, did you worry about [inaudible 00:47:35]?

No. You can't afford to do it if you're in school. What are you going to do with it?

Unless it's on paper or something and you roll it up and then it's going to get trampled.

No. These things have to have a destination or something in mind.

It has to be a gamble that feels like an intelligent gamble.

Is this like a [inaudible 00:47:59] that you've always had in mind or did that just come after you graduated and had.

It was actually suggested by the gallery where my show is today, 22 years ago.

One of the dealers, [inaudible 00:48:15] , came to my studio and I had a [inaudible 00:48:18] painting and he's like,

"You must make this bigger." I'm like, "What?"

He's like, "I will pay to get this to be 30 feet."

I'm like, "Are you fucking kidding me?"

[LAUGHTER] I decided 24 feet was the way to go in the logistics of getting it out of the studio but I wouldn't have dared. I was too timid at the time to do something like that.

But once it was planted,

I was like, "Oh, this is really."

It was so bizarre to make paintings like that because who makes paintings?

This is pre-digital but it's still with printing and advertising and all that stuff.

It's as big as going to the movies.

Certainly bigger than that.

[BACKGROUND] I'll get to you in a second.

That was just panels.

They're panels, yeah, and they're bolted together.

This painting is literally as big on one panel as I can get it out of the studio in one piece.

That is I believe,

72 inches tall by 90, so it's not that big, but it goes up through the elevator shaft by an eighth of an inch. Yeah.

[inaudible 00:49:39]

Sort of.

You have to remember that for me,

I started with a bunch of drawings like thumbnails and then I start to piece it together.

It has to develop because if it's on a computer screen, it doesn't mean anything. It's like what makes sense when you're looking at it, you're working on it for weeks, if not months.

It starts to make itself and sometimes you change your mind.

You have to be alert and really pay attention to how you're reacting to things.

So you will make changes?

Oh, completely. I've thrown out ideas, moved parts of things around.

Once I start something,

I only believe in the furthest layer and everything else is up for grabs.

Now one of the things, the way I've been painting the last couple of years is,

I love making the reflections be one event.

They're always done in a day or two.

It's like a big watercolor.

I just do it on the floor and it's one day.

But I better know what the reflection is because that's the other stuff that's in the painting and it has to make sense pictorially.

It might take a month to get to the point where I could do the reflection in one day.

I have to plan that part out and stick to it.

Once I have the reflection, unless I want to repaint it, which is not something I want to do, I have to commit. So you [inaudible 00:51:11] reflection water.

The reflection will lie if I tell it to, but it better be for a reason.

[inaudible 00:51:17]

Yeah.

[inaudible 00:51:18] with it?

No. It's too long a journey.

I can't afford to be in that position.

That's the point of preparation is to be engaged with it.

How do you keep yourself interested in it?

Desire for money and survival?

[LAUGHTER]

Also, that's kind of a joke but it's true to a certain extent.

I need to make things every day or I go crazy.

I have a lot of energy and I need to be engaged.

That's why I make complicated paintings.

When did you know you wanted to be an artist?

I went to art school to study animation.

I always had a sneaking suspicion that the film industry, especially then, was really not a healthy place to be because you're always depending on other people's money to make something.

I had a teacher who said,

"Maybe you'd be better suited to being a painter instead of filmmaker."

Because I never really knew what the story I wanted to tell was.

I just had images I was interested in.

That's how and lucky for me, it was the '80s where you could make paintings that look pictorial.

All right. That looks like you've exhausted every question possible. [LAUGHTER]

Thank you.

Thank you.

[APPLAUSE]