The Thrill of it All

   I love that I get to be an  an artist, I don't make much money at it but my bills are always paid. I'm invited to all kinds of cool events and am meeting all kinds of people from all walks of life and my job is constantly challenging me to try new ways of doing things.


   I made the painting above "New Gold Dream" this past November, it's part of a series I started in April of 2012. I had never before made anything remotely like this. I'm going to try and describe how it came about.

  

   The drawing above, from 2007 is probably the closest thing I had made to these current "wooden room" paintings. The way the current paintings came about is that My friend Mark Krayenhoff was describing these drawings as being very kooky and having all kinds of crazy patterns clashing against each other so I went and looked at them and this is what I found, I couldnt find anything like what Mark was describing so I decided to try making some.

   Here's what I came up with, a drawing "Other Voices" that I gave to Mark for his birthday last March.

   I wanted to see what this would look like as a painting so I tried and came up with this....

   ...pretty good, but not great. It was very exciting to make though as I'd never really made anything like it before.

   I tried again and came up with this......

 

   I felt the thrill of having made something unlike anything I had ever made before. I took risks and challenged myself and I ran with it, I spent the next 9 months exploring all the dark cobweb filled alleyways I could find.
  
    We know when we are going through the motions and we know when we are really going out on a limb and challenging ourselves. I look at it as one of the great perks of our job, that we get to challenge ourselves, when its just getting repetitive and we know what the end product is going to look like we do it a different way, try something new and that thrill when we've created the thing we never even envisioned and that no one has ever seen before, thats what makes life worth living, and that's what makes me supremely grateful that I get to be an artist.

Obama

I love this, and I'd like to tell you why. Before this there was a kind of institutionalized homophobia, if it was ok to discriminate against gays in the military and not allow them to marry it was also ok to blackmail and to threaten them. So it was pretty typical to meet gay guys online who tiptoed around and were terrified of sending you a face picture. It was also common to meet guys who wouldn't tell their family.

Now I have to say the whole tiptoing around thing seems very  Boris and Natasha. very outdated. I met someone online yesterday who wouldnt send me his face pic because he was "very very discrete" and "too much was at stake". I told him I wasn't going to invite a complete stranger over to my apartment if he's unwilling to share his face with me. That just feels wrong but somehow he thought that was acceptable, like because I'm gay I can't expect people to be above board with me, Im supposed to live a risky, seedy life because I love men?

Thank you president Obama for calling homosexuality what it is, Love....and that's nothing to be ashamed of and its not ok to treat me like a low life or a 2nd class citizen anymore.

Now if I could just meet another man who feels the same way......

The Number One Song In Siberia

Valentine's day 2013

I gotta say Ive never really had a problem with valentine's day.....does that sound like faint praise? I suppose it is, its just that so many of my friends loathe VD but Ive never had a problem with it. Ive had boyfriends who've hated it and wouldnt celabrate it, no biggie !!!..and Ive had guys go out of their way to make me a memorable meal, some have which have truly been memorable and then there's always the single me who goes out of my way to get me something I'll really like.

   This year it was a Margiela T shirt with some crazy numbers on it that I wore to my friend Bubi's opening last night.

   I guess in some sense VD is about expectations about unicorns and perfection etc but its also about treating someone special very nicely and hey, there's nothing wrong with that...

Valentine's day Paris 2006

   I was invited by the French government to live and work at Cite des Artes in Paris, in the Marais for 3 or 6 months, my choice. My boyfriend at the time was none too happy about this, I never really knew why. I chose 3 months instead of 6, to make him happy, it didn't really work, he was of Mexican heritage and born under the sign of Scorpio and he liked drama. In the months leading up to my departure, anytime my Parisian residency was mentioned Evaristo's response was stony silence.

I don't know why I was expecting anything different, this is the guy who would say things like..."I don't want to go to work today, I want to be an ARTIST". So...my departure date arrived, Jan 2 2006 and soon enough I was in my new studio in Paris, outfitted with an awesome easel, I took that as I sign that I should be painting there, in Paris, so I did. I went to the louvre during the day and all the other amazing museums there in Paris and looked at paintings, then I came back to my studio and painted, it was amazing.

I also had my laptop with me and would go to the usual sites, bearwww, bear411 etc and flirt with guys. One guy in Astoria queens with whom I had had a mild flirtation over the years took a renewed interest in me. He would describe in detail various sexual scenarios that really got me going and ask if I would have sex with him when I got back....what could I say? He seemed to know exactly what I liked in the bedroom even though I had never told him...it was weird but kind of hot. Evaristo and I had such a messy relationship...he was always breaking up with me, like every 6 weeks or so then he would call me up after a couple of weeks and want to get back together....who knew what happened during those breakups, so when Astoria asked if I would have sex with him I said "sure", I didn't hear much from him after that.

Evaristo and some friends had planned to visit me about halfway through my residency. The halfway mark was exactly February 14. So a few days  before Evaristo arrived, and he was grumpy. Everything was bugging him, he was always kind of picking a fight. On the 13th  Evaristo and I and a friend took a stroll to the Centre Georges Pompidou, after a couple of hours Evaristo said he wanted to go back to my place and how could he get there, I did my best to explain (walk to the Seine and take a left) and was a little surprised that he didn't think it was his own responsibility to find his way around. After a couple more hours I headed back to my place at Cite des Artes, Evaristo was nowhere to be seen so around 11 I went to bed, a little while later Evaristo showed up and informed me that he was leaving for NY first thing in the morning...he had changed his ticket. He felt that I had sabotaged his trip by not giving him more detailed directions from the Pompidou back home.....he had no interest in talking about this, it was overt and he got on his plane the following day, so there I was in Paris and my boyfriend of 4 years had broken up with me on Valentine's day. I played Serge Gainsbourg's "Comment te dire Adieu" and layed low for a few days. Before long I was seeing a French guy in an open relationship, a smart, funny guy who was great in bed,  we had an awesome time together and he was taking me out for dinner to his favorite Parisian restaurants.

Oh and when I returned a few months later Evaristo was living with the guy in Astoria who knew all of my bedroom secrets...

Arpad Miklos

He was my neighbor and I knew him about as well as I knew my highschool classmate, PRINCE, ie: not at all... We said hi and chatted online a few times but he was always super nice to me, on top of being hot as hell in person, he seemed like a good guy, sorry to see him go

Ai Wei Wei in China

 

I really enjoyed his bicycle pieces, this one was in a stairwell in a building on the Bund in Shanghai