Portrait

Thoughts on Violence

"Wrestlers," oil on paper, 4" x 6", 2012

i painted these wrestlers after

the sandy hook shooting because

i liked their faces and the way

they held each other up. i painted

from a picture i took with my phone

during a movie. in the movie they

were brothers but they had to fight

each other for some stupid reason.

they pounded each other's faces into

the ground and cried. 

roland barthes says that wrestling

is not a sadistic spectacle, it is 

an intelligible spectacle. we don't just want

to see pain, we want to see why pain

happens, the whole equation laid out.

i see one brother holding the other brother's 

arm behind his back in a terrible

bone-twisting way and my body thinks

about what i could do to my own

brother, and under what circumstances.

could i twist his arm like that? could i let go?

what would it feel like to be hit there,

and with that hand?

his suffering is open and i can enter it.

we can collaborate.

like falling in love with you so deeply that

i fall in love with your love for another. 

someone at work after sandy hook

said, "i'm not surprised," 

and i thought, no, we are always

surprised by pain. the next wave

feels the same as the last 

but is brand new. 

i have a lot of dreams

about people i love dying

and they always make me cry

but i feel them so deeply that they must

be more good than bad when all things

are finished.

last week i painted a sad old woman in a 

rocking chair. she didn't want to be happy.

i gave her the love of my labor.

when i painted the wrestlers i almost fixed

their bloody faces with my brush. 

but all of us knew 

it was not my place.

"Wrestlers," detail

A Woman Four Times

oil, acrylic and ink on paper, 9" x 12" and smaller, 2009-2012

- matisse

- martin mcmurray

Exhibition: About Face at ACME.

Scott Grodesky, Ilona, 2012. Mixed media on linen on panel, 22" x 16"

This is the first time I felt like being at an opening was a better experience than going some other day. The exhibition at ACME called About Face—curated by Daniel Weinberg—was a group of fifty paintings that explored the theme of portraiture. The paintings were hung either in groups, in salon style, or alone. Because the exhibition design mirrored my body's relationship to other bodies (at times alone, at other times in groups, at times shorter, and at other times taller), I imagined these painted faces conversing with one another.

Faces created by renowned artists like Jim Nut, Eddie Martinez, and Brian Calvin met faces created by emerging artists like as Neal Tait, Scott Grodesky, and Helen Rae while also meeting with some artists' actual faces like Allison Schulnik's and Kristin Calabrese's. While I stood there, in that crowd of faces, I imagined what all those faces, human and painted, were talking about--painting, faces, surfaces, portraitures, etc.

I felt I was looking just as much as I was being looked at. Even the paintings that seem to be less figurative transform themselves into eyes that stared back at me. We, the human and the painted, the human and the human, the painted and the painted, acknowledged each other. The faces of humans and the painted faces became completely blended on my mind.

ACME, About Face Exhibition, Installation View. (December 2012) 

Painting Narratives: Untitled 1 (Portrait Series)

Bruna Massadas, Untitled 1 (Portrait Series), 2012. Acrylics on panel, 18 X 24.

He told her to meet him at 5 PM that rainy afternoon. She arrived at the coffee shop at 5:10 hoping she wouldn’t have to wait. She looked around and he wasn’t there. “Maybe it’s the traffic,” she thought. She walked to the cashier, ordered a caramel macchiato, and dropped the change on the tip jar. She carried her coffee to a table as if she was wearing heels (although she was not). As she sat down, she positioned her body diagonally from the door and tried not to look at the door so often. She kept her eyes at her watch, allowing herself to look directly at the door every 30 seconds for 2 seconds. As she saw him opening the door from the corner of her eyes, she dipped her index finger in the coffee and slowly licked the whipped cream off. She was ready to tell him that she didn’t see him coming. But it wasn’t him. 

Objects of Our Desire

Elizabeth Peyton.

Elizabeth Peyton paints David Bowie.

"Sleeping, reclining, sitting, daydreaming, fantasizing, brooding -- Ms. Peyton hardly ever depicts these young artists and musicians standing, and she never visually associates them with an activity like making art or music -- Ms. Peyton's friends and lovers Piotr and Tony and Liam encounter her celebrity obsessions John Lennon and Prince Harry and Kurt Cobain like chess pieces on opposite sides of existence. The tribe of the obscure look strikingly similar to one another: blank-faced, thin, closed-up yet strangely open, looking so intensely outward that it feels they must actually be looking inward.

They are also strikingly similar to the tribe of the celebrities, who bear the same physical features. You feel that the desire of Ms. Peyton's friends to be famous is so powerful that they have acquired the appearance of the celebrities they yearn for -- the way dogs begin to resemble their masters."

Stella Vine.

Stella Vine paints Kate Moss.

"Most jarring of all, nearly all of Ms. Peyton's subjects, both famous and obscure, don't just resemble each other. They also look a lot like her: delicately featured, wispish, androgynous. Ms. Peyton has spoken of how moved she has been by Proust's meditations on the nature of time, and how Proust's work has influenced her attempts to capture her subjects in the web of fleeting mortality. But it seems that what she has really taken from Proust is his exploration of the way we project ourselves onto the objects of our desire. We recreate the people we love -- and the people we hate -- in our own image."

Alice Neel.

Alice Neel paints Andy Warhol.

"Ms. Peyton's likenesses may not capture her subjects as intimately as we would like, but she has used the embattled genre of portraiture to lay bare a very contemporary perceptual and emotional predicament. At a moment when technology has made it possible to "know" people without ever meeting them in the flesh, there is the peril of imagining them as mere reflections of our own wishes and obsessions. Then, too, we have just lived through a time when we were tempted into projecting our desires -- some would say our greed -- onto reality beyond the point where they could ever be satisfied. Ms. Peyton's dreamy, insubstantial figures, waiting to be fulfilled by fantasies that will never be realized, may be more intimately connected to us than we think."

- Lee Siegel, "Painting Faces", The Wall Street Journal, 2009.

Brown Spots

Jean-Michel Basquiat, Brown Spots (Portrait of Andy Warhol as a Banana), 1984.

Why is Warhol a banana?

Because he made a famous album cover. Because he collaborated. Because of friendship. Because of rivalry. Because he was subject to homage, tribute, and patricide. Because he was another painter's mentor. Because he was taking advantage of rising stardom. Because it's a joke. Because he's gay. Because he seriously wore those wigs. Because of spontaneity. Because Basquiat ran out of ideas. Because he lived his own art. Because you can be anything in a painting.

Photograph of Andy Warhol and Jean-Michel Basquiat pretending to box.

Because of love.

Hot Bodies

Dana Schutz, Frank on a Rock, oil on canvas, 2002. Schutz says, "I have been working on a group of paintings loosely hinged on the act of painting a fictional man from observation...the paintings are premised on the imaginary situation that the man and I are the last people on earth. The man is the last subject and the last audience and, because the man isn't making any paintings, I am the last painter."

Brooke Shields at age 10, photographed by Garry Gross in 1975 and rephotographed by Richard Prince in his 1993 work, "Spiritual America." The version seen here was found on the internet and has been further altered; someone has cropped the photo, changed the color, and added a black and green border. Shields has unsuccessfully fought to gain control over the photographs in this series for years. Courts have said both that Shields' career was built on her sexuality (and thus she has no reason to complain) and that the photographs are not sexual in nature: "They are pictures of a prepubescent girl posing innocently in the bath." Prince's version of the photograph was sold at Christie's in 1999 for $151,000.