On letting go of the idea of the tortured artist

My parents got doing art in my head. They weren’t artists, but they were really committed to taking us to see art and going to theater and music. The first big concert I saw was Paul McCartney at the Silverdome in Detroit. I think we saw Bob Dylan that same year. Two artists that I have absolutely no interest in as an adult, but you know—it’s the experience that counts. The first music I remember hearing was when our parents got a babysitter and went to see Tom Waits on his Frank’s Wild Years Tour. They bought a tape. The tape was in our car, so we heard it all the time growing up.

I grew up in Kalamazoo, and I went to a hippie alternative school. It wasn’t Waldorf, but it had a ton of cultural programming. A lot of emphasis on history, specifically American civil rights history, and art and music from other cultures. Not things you would necessarily, like, trip and fall over in southwest Michigan. I left having a kind of feeling towards hippies that you would have towards nuns, if you went to Catholic school. I didn’t realize how culturally different it was until I went to public high school in extremely white, rural Michigan. That was the most depressed I’ve been in my life, which is really saying something. Even though I love to learn, it could also be true that I just never liked school. I’ve never really gotten over the novelty of never having to go again.

But the flavor of my work comes from internal experience, so that would have happened no matter what. The depression I have is called dysthymia, which is when just you’re always a few degrees lower than everything. It’s like having a gas leak. And the labor-intensive quality of my work comes from being fastidious in general. I’m a very orderly sort of person, so I really get interested in the specifics of how things are and the options inside of actions. You know, like you can do one thing or another thing, and so you start going down a road. Then, everything refracts and becomes something, so before long you’ve spent a lot of time thinking about minutiae.

I used to ride my bike year-round in Chicago, no matter the weather. In addition to making me even more of a hyper-vigilant person, it acted as a brain-cleaner. It was relaxing in that it felt separate from working. Maybe relaxing isn’t the right word, but occupying in a way that felt good for someone who prefers strong flavors. I don’t think in moments when my brain has something to do, and then I am exhausted and relaxed.

I studied film in college, and that was my main practice for a long time. I made a lot of music videos and a lot of shorts, and then two feature-length things (The Pink Hotel and The Poisoner). The features took three years each, and they didn’t have any outward momentum at all. I was entirely consumed by making them, but I was also just into being a punk and being with my friends as being sort of core principles of production. I don’t know, at the end of three years of doing something, I should not have been the one in charge of representing it. I became close with Guy [Maddin] during those years. He was always extremely supportive of all of my films, but then—we just kind of made them, you know? We just had our friends, and we made sure there was beer around. I would pay for stuff by having parties and art auctions. I still don’t want to live my life in service to big companies and committee-thinking ways of making artwork, but you can’t connect with festivals or distributors unless you have a thing for them to see. I gave it my best, but I had no idea what the hell it was all about.

The paintings I’m making right now are the biggest things I’ve worked on as a single idea. They’re 700 percent bigger than my usual. A lot of stuff changed. I acquiesced to going on medication for depression, which I resisted with all of my being for my entire adult life, for reasons that were very real. I’ve had friends die by suicide, and their reasons have muddied between their actual outlook on things and the mental illness that can deepen those feelings. Also, just like—misalignments of medication, you know? But I started to see the quality of my inner life was turning to garbage, and, now that I live with my partner [Stephanie Brown], I’m contractually obligated to be alive. So I had some intense conversations with my doctor, and it was like night and day. I wish I could have done that so much sooner. I don’t know how to express how deeply bizarre that feeling has been. It’s like having a layer of shit scraped off your brain. David Lynch talked about this a lot—you don’t need your mental illnesses to be making the artwork that you’re making. They’re not responsible for your voice as an artist. I wasn’t holding onto clinical depression as an identity or an engine, but I was looking around at things and realizing I’d never really had any perspective on it either.

About half of these new paintings are based on stills from Twilight Zone. They are literally frames, cinematic images—specific moments in the stories I felt were important to think about as a kind of illustrated text, like how people think about Bible stories. The things Rod Serling was talking about are just so, so deeply relevant right now. Everything—suburban xenophobia and violence, capitalistic violence, the desire for and impossibility of escape. The one that was the most upsetting to make was from an episode called “I’m the Night, Color Me Black,” which is about a small town police force that’s going to—I don’t know how they have the legal jurisdiction to do this, but they’re going to execute this guy for murder. He killed a Klansman, but the morning they’re going to execute him, the sun doesn’t come up. The crux of the story is the cops don’t execute him, because of course they’re friends with the Klan, and then the sun comes up everywhere but there. There’s a news broadcast talking about how these anomalous dark spots are appearing all over, like in Birmingham and northern Vietnam. The thesis is essentially that hatred itself is the poisonous element. It also kind of posits that the guy who killed the Klansman is as guilty as his victim, which… I’m not a pacifist, so that’s not necessarily the conclusion I would come to, but the image is what we’re describing. The painting in the show is the last point at which you can see inside the police station before darkness overtakes everything.

I built all the panels. They’re on plywood, and they’re made for that room. Out of everything I’ve ever worked on, there’s just a handful of things that are in color color. Usually, everything is achromatic or monochromatic. It’s just always been the case. But I was messing around with underpainting, after seeing some paintings I really liked that were blue-gray on top, with these wild, fluorescent underpinnings. I tried red first, absolute flat red, but then I wanted a glowing feeling, like the images were sitting on top of a pile of embers. I did some small paintings, and Stephanie—she’s like, a color super-taster. She was like, “Well, what kind of red are you going to use?” Then she showed me one I was crazy about. It was complete. But because the panels would be covered in this one color, with the paintings on top it would have cost about eight hundred dollars to get that much of this particular pigment. I can’t do that. So I color-matched it at the hardware store—I didn’t want to go to Home Depot, but I ended up having to go there because their paint was the closest match, for whatever reason. I got three chips and did three tests, one of which was from The Bad Seed. (Patty McCormack is my favorite. I have a signed photo next to my drawing desk.) The color I ended up going with was called Flirt Alert, which felt correct.

Humor is like salt, you know? It doesn’t have to be the main ingredient but things are just better with it. My exact flavor is “this is such an uncomfortable situation it has to be funny.” That’s a part of who I am; it doesn’t have to be the main thing. A dramatic rendering of a crashed UFO in a restaurant is funny. Stephanie and I used to live in this old church on a hill (we moved there in the fall of 2020—talk about a humorless time!)—and there was a lawn full of Kentucky bluegrass. I could go on and on about Kentucky bluegrass; it’s so stupid. It’s a colonialist trick. Anyway, the lawn was too big to deal with, so one day I cordoned off a part and made a sign that said “Ghost Sanctuary,” and I said I wasn’t going to mow it—because it was a ghost sanctuary. No one could argue with me, and they wouldn’t, because then I’d just have to mow. So I started thinking about who the ghosts would be, at this particular point in history, and why there would need to be a special corral for them. I made this pamphlet being like, “We’ve decided it’s everybody’s duty to have a space for the overpopulated ghosts.” I mowed around it but not in it. There was a little bar at the bottom of the hill, and those guys were like, “What in the fuck is this weird little guy doing?” All this goes back to the decision-making, to walking yourself up the ladder and being all, well: if I want to do that, I should think about why.

Eventually I got a scythe. There’s this guy in Eau Claire [Botan Anderson] who is like, the scythe guy. He imports these wonderful Austrian scythes. It made sense that I was going to mow the edges of this thing with a scythe. So I did, and then I needed a uniform. A black work uniform and a black sun hat. At one point, this guy from the bar comes over. I got the sense that he was like, the person they sent out to do this. He’s like, “What’s the meaning of that circle?” I said it was a monument to the dead. He said, “Well, that’s kind of odd.” I will pause and say: nothing is less odd than that. If a monument wasn’t to the dead, that would be odd. But I just said, “Well, man—life’s weird.” And I kept going. Every once in a while, the pamphlets I made would be ripped up and thrown around the street, but to bring it back around—the humor is in the delivery system.

It’s funny like the whole thing is funny. It’s funny I had to do that. Imagining me mowing the lawn is funny. Imagining them dealing with this weird thing is funny. The fact that it was artwork did not come up. I felt like discovering that it was somebody’s fucking land art thing would’ve been such a dream killer. One of my favorite things about making things is when something is like—this, but not quite this. You can’t really describe what the joke is.

What’s apparent about every one of my stories is that I resisted something for ages and ages, and then I gave in. Like, my brother is a tattooer. My partner is a tattooer, and my friends are tattooers, I’ve been getting tattooed since I was a teenager and I have enough of a contrarian aspect that I was just like, I’m not going to do that. I will not. The social aspect of it really freaked me out, but turns out I actually really like that part. I’m essentially a printer, which sounds self-degrading, but I don’t mean it like that. I really like that they want something. I don’t have to care. I have a critical faculty about everything, and being in a place where I’m just like, I’m so stoked for you! You’re gonna have such a great day. I’m gonna make you the best version of this—?! It’s insane. Like, if I felt myself judging something culturally, I’d be like, I’m not your guy, but overall, it’s extremely refreshing.

The weird thing is how comfortable the permanence gets, but there’s no other way to learn. You’re just going to walk outside and continue dying as soon as this is done, you know? It’s complicated but in a way I love that there’s a billion people doing it now, because seeing things mutate this quickly is so cool. It’s slow, but it’s definitely more stable than selling drawings. It’s also weird and refreshing to be new at something at 41. Especially something I’ve been involved with my whole adult life in one way or another.

My other job is touring with ADULT. I’m definitely working all the time, like a service robot, but it’s a completely different equation. Everyone’s there because they’re really stoked on the band, and I love their stuff myself, I was a fan first, so it’s an easy point of connection. I’m fastidious, and I can hang. Heather [Gabel] hooked it up. I had just come back from Berlin, right after my friend Marcus [Fjellström] died by suicide, and I was trying to figure out what the next thing was going to be. At first ADULT. needed me for two one-week stints around the Midwest with Plack Blague, and I did that, and we got along really well, and then they invited me out for a full US tour. By the end of that, I would just see things that needed to happen and be like, “I’m going to drive now.”

There are people I see in Berlin, or on tour in the States or wherever, who I don’t really know. I only know them in their night form. They’re like bad Muppets who crawled out from under something and came to the show. The sweetest people in the world. Out in the street, they’re research scientists or teachers—they could bite me and I wouldn’t recognize them—but every time I see them at the merch booth, I’m so happy. They’re always smart. Genius-level shit. But we’re all just at the club because we like techno.

[Author photo by Patrick Mooney]