I hope that the last points you made are true about my paintings. I want them to come out of well known traditions–both artistic and otherwise–but in a modified form. Not radically modified, and maybe even modified without it being apparent to the viewer, so that the expectations associated with those traditions aren’t quite fulfilled. I love the Russian Formalist concept of “estrangement.” The idea that the role of art is to estrange reality so that perception doesn’t become automatized. For me, that constitutes the art experience at its most profound. I always try to create that experience for the viewer by making paintings that occupy an indefinite place somewhere between the real and the artificial, the familiar and the unfamiliar, the obvious and the oblique.

Having said that, I don’t think of my art as political in the typical meaning of that phrase: I don’t intentionally make work that is meant to address a specific and present political condition and advocate for immediate change. Not in the sense that John Heartfield or The Guerrilla Girls or Dread Scott are political. But in another way, I think that all good art is political, in that if it’s good–and experienced authentically–then it alters consciousness. And that’s ultimately political. I think the question of the political (broadly defined) value of art is particularly relevant now: Trump’s election has made it absolutely clear that Adorno was right in his analysis of art and the culture industry: that by and large cultural experience in advanced societies is one of mass distraction, and that has destructive consequences. I take an old point of view: that there’s such a thing as high art, and experiencing it offers an alternative to the manipulations of the culture industry. I don’t think that anybody who consistently challenges themselves with complex art experiences could ever fall for the mass manipulation that led to the election of Trump. I think a sustained engagement with art forces people out of habitual patterns of thinking. That helps create a social consciousness that has critical thinking at its core. In that way, Wallace Stevens is as valuable politically as any overtly political artist. I would hope that my work operates politically in that way. Whether it does or not is a different question.

 

The imaginary clothes removal makes me think of Goya’s clothed then Nude Maja. Tell me about your influences (literary, musical, visual)…

The artist I love more than any other is Ingres. From very early on, he was my favorite artist, and that remains true to this day. I adore his color, his form sense, his reinvention of the body, his unintentional but gloriously perverse way of seeing the world; I love the way his paintings push resolution beyond the point of the real, into a destabilizing artificiality; I love that he thought of himself as upholding the glorious classical tradition of the Ancients and Raphael, but was in fact producing a kind of proto-modern uncanny. There’s nobody I’d rather look at. I also love Holbein and David. I find them both strange in some ways similar to Ingres, though there are many differences; I also love many individual paintings by artists whose entire bodies of work I don’t necessarily love: for example, at the National Gallery in London, there are paintings by Vincenzo Catena, Thomas DeKeyser and Hendrick ter Brugghen that I am obsessed with. Among Modern Artists, some I’m most moved by are Lyubov Popova and Russian Constructivism in general, Florine Stettheimer, Alice Neel, Meredith Frampton, Picabia, Warhol, Ed Ruscha, Richard Artschwagger, many others….

I’m not sure I can clearly articulate his influence on me, but I’m obsessed with Bach’s music. I listen to him almost to the exclusion of anything else. I don’t think there’s any art of any kind more moving and inexhaustible than his.

Somebody once said to me that there are as many ways to get gallery representation as there are Artists. And I think there’s some truth to that. I was very lucky. When I was at UCLA, Randy Sommer from ACME., a terrific gallery in LA, came to UCLA to do a lecture on the Artists he represented, and to do studio visits. He visited my studio, and showed some interest. He took my card. A year later, after developing a body of work, I called and asked if he would do a studio visit. He came by, and we started working together. ACME. was my first gallery, and they still represent me in LA. One of my first Diva paintings was reproduced in Flash Art, and Jeffrey Deitch saw it and got in touch with me. I started working with him after that.