On the distance it takes to make work from your own life

Walk me through what a working day in the studio looks like right now, start to finish.

An ideal day, I put my stuff down and go to the bookshelf where I keep my singing bowls, my Guanyin [the bodhisattva of compassion], all my Buddhist accoutrement. I make an offering of tea or water, use the bowl to get into the right mindset, do Metta [loving-kindness meditation] and at least five minutes of sitting. Then I open my studio journal. I write the date, and every entry starts with the phrase “Here today,” because I’m here. I mark the time and either what’s on my mind or what I plan to do, as a way to slowly build motivation. That’s the ideal.

Usually I come in unmotivated, sit, look around, get into the muddy waters of the cell phone and Instagram, and try to will motivation into being. Before I paint, I’ll do exercises, mark-making on a page or a preliminary sketch, so I’m not diving in headlong without a plan and getting lost in the sauce. I can usually work three to four hours before I need to eat or leave. I keep multiple tables going with different projects so I can rotate between them. I work a lot wet into wet, so I want the paint to pool rather than drip.

As the day goes on, I return to the journal: the time, what I’ve done, the names of people I talked to and what we discussed. At the end I mark the time I leave. Part of it is to prove, from a business and tax perspective, that I’m working. Part of it is to prove to myself that I did something that day. My studio journals go back to about January 2014. As someone interested in data, I like having the data set, looking back at goals I had and where I’ve gone since. It’s like seeing where the fog of war used to be and where it still is.

You mentioned building motivation. A lot of artists struggle with that even when they have the space. What does it look like for you day to day?

I see it as bifurcated between external and internal motivation, the external locus of control and the internal one. It depends on who I am when I walk in: whether I worked a full day first, whether I exercised, how much I’ve eaten. It’s about how much strength I have to rouse the energy. My meditation practice undulates, from sparse to consistent, and that affects my head space as much as anything external.

Deadlines are very motivating. Without one, when I just have some half-formed concept and I’m in this vast sandbox of what am I going to do now, I wade in the water. So I use the list method, and when I make the list, I include things I’ve already done or that are easy. If there are 10 things and three are already checked off, I feel better about getting four or five more done. I write it in my studio documentation with the date each thing was finished, so I can track my progress.

What’s a habit or rule in your studio that you didn’t have five years ago and now wouldn’t give up?

Five years ago was 2021, which is when I moved into this space. I had it organized very differently, no real structure. Even though it looks messy in here, I’m more systematized now about what I have and where it goes. The longer I’m in the same space, the more I refine it.

When I first moved in, I set it up according to the bagua [the Feng Shui energy map], certain things in certain areas because they contribute to wealth, or knowledge, or helpful people. The entryway is where I keep my shrine, the business cards of people who’ve helped me, and images of artists I find inspiration in. Over the past couple of years I’ve adapted it for flow, so that when I open the door there’s a direct view from one end of the space to the other.

So the rule I can’t give up is organization. If everything gets too messy, I go crazy and lose motivation. When I get stuck now, I start cleaning, even when there’s no studio visit coming, so that my brain is clean.

You’ve said certain feelings only surface after time and sobriety let them. How do you know when a memory is ready to be in a painting, versus when you’d be forcing it?

It’s weird to have my own words sent back at me. I might have to blame this on astrology. Being a Taurus moon means having trouble with change, with moving on from things that no longer serve you. More often than not I’ve held onto things from the past, turning them over, trying to understand them. It’s almost like trying to photograph an electron. The more you try to touch it and define it, the more it eludes you, so closure is hard.

That time-and-sobriety thing comes from the series I made about my relationship to alcohol. I stopped drinking in 2015. I’d first gotten drunk at 14, so that’s 1999 to 2015, sixteen years. I didn’t start making paintings in that series until 2020, five years before I could look at it, reference it, and make a narrative out of it.

It’s like standing at the front door of a skyscraper. You see the door, some of the sides, the edge of the top, but not the scale. To see the scale you have to walk away and keep walking, so the angle from your eye to the top gets wider. I needed a certain amount of temporal distance from that mass of life experience to see an arc, to understand it as a story. I had to wait for the karma of those actions to bear fruit before I could see the value. The most valuable memories are the ones worth making art about.

A lot of creative people fear that if they wait too long, the urgency dies. How do you tell the difference between something cooling off and something that just isn’t ripe yet?

Something’s ripe if I can produce something coherent about it on the first try, if there’s luck in just putting it into form. It’s not ripe if I have to keep making paintings or sketches about it. That happens a lot with commissions, because I’m taking someone else’s expectations and trying to understand them. It’s rare that someone tells me exactly what they’re thinking and I immediately say, “Oh, it’s this,” and explain it back visually, and they say, “Yes, it is that.”

The urgency feels different when the inspiration comes from inside me rather than from someone else. That’s the best feeling, to urgently paint something and have it come out wonderful. That piece right there was an urgent creation. I didn’t do any preliminary sketching. I knew what I wanted to paint and I went for it.

The work often changes for people who’ve made art through both active addiction and recovery. What changed for you, and what stayed the same?

I made art when I drank, but I don’t think I ever used alcohol to make art. Alcohol was about putting down social anxiety. Cannabis is different. It’s always lit a creative energy in me. I use it with the same intention as coffee. Caffeine is a good ADD medication for me, good for focus, and cannabis is the same. It gets me to sit and focus, and I don’t have that interior voice of “Don’t do this, why are you doing this.” It’s not that I’m hopped up every time I paint. It depends on the task. If it’s straight labor, stretching and prepping canvases, then stone-cold sober is best, because it just needs to be done.

What sobriety does to creativity is keep me in the rut of past experience: this worked last time, so I keep doing it, and there’s zero experimentation. Meditation is how I find experimentation when I’m sober. It taps into the same relaxation of the mind that lets the experiments and the childlike mind come into play. That’s what I’ve been working on, coming at things with childlike wonder, without expectations.

I really think it’s not substance use that ruins my productivity. It’s my reaction to things, my self-imposed anxiety. It’s not substances making me lazy. It’s being so tired and burned out from anxiety that I want to leave, but if I leave and rest, then I’m not being productive, not making enough to post on Instagram and prove that I’m working.

You studied creative writing before you came to painting. What did the writing brain give you that painting training alone wouldn’t have?

It gave me the difference between being literal and being poetic, and it developed my interest in narrative. I’ve always loved storytelling. My mom’s father was a prolific storyteller. He could take any mundane thing from his life and make it sound like he was reading from a storybook.

When I approach a painting, and this goes back to the alcohol series and to commissions, the preliminary sketches are very literal. Very journalistic. The who, what, when, why, and where, almost a visual list of what exists in the space. Then over the course of many sketches, reworking the arrangement of the visual information, I move from that literal list to a poetic sensation of what the experience felt like or what it means metaphorically.

A lot of these paintings are based on songs I wrote. There’s the music, the lyrics, the direct reading of the lyrics, and then the literary-analysis reading of them. My best paintings are when I’m speaking about the abstract concepts in the writing rather than the literal illustration. I used to teach literary analysis and write curriculum for a private academy, so I can’t help but approach my own past work that way, to develop new creation from it. I’m taking songs I wrote in 2010 and 2011 and making paintings about them. They’re little creative engines. I build them, and then they start making more things out of themselves.

One song was the impetus for my show Paper Thin Friends, which I did at a popup space during COVID. Another, called “SLS,” has a phrase about bucolic prisons without decisions, and that painting is about finding comfort in being completely alone in a beautiful place. There’s a Walmart series I’d love to turn into a film like Jacques Tati’s Playtime [the 1967 comedy]. [Gaston] Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space is something I read while I wrote most of those songs. It’s hard to come up with something new right now, and I think that’s because I’ve already come up with all these other things I can still generate from. Why think of new ideas when I still have so many? Maybe the new ones come once I’ve brought all of these to life.

What’s something you used to believe about being a serious artist that turned out to be wrong?

That a gallery will save you. That representation is the finish line, you’ve made it, you can go to bed. That if someone says they love your work and want to live with it, they mean it. That a painting is good if someone buys it at the price you asked. And that when someone calls another person their friend, it means friend, and not friend in the LA sense, that they can help you with something, not that you actually hang out and can count on each other.

In the past year I’ve started to notice when people are paying lip service versus being sincere. Sincerity is hard to come by. I like to think I’m a sincere person, but I’m suspicious of people whose job it is to sell art, about where their sincerity lies. A lot of the time they’re lying by omission when they describe the market’s reaction. So now I want to close out consignments within a month of a show ending. If I ask whether there was any interest and they say no, what’s the point of leaving it consigned? The time is done. I’ll sell it myself. You tried.

I came to art because it was mysterious to me how people made it, where they got their ideas. As often as I want to give it up and throw everything away, a serious artist doesn’t let that happen. A serious artist is shrewd about who they deal with, because they only have so much energy. For someone still working on his reaction to rejection and to being ignored, I think serious artists let the water fall off their back. I’m learning how to be a duck.

Before we stop, any other thoughts you want to get down?

I’ve been listening to Mike Birbiglia’s Working It Out podcast. It’s about comedians, but it feels like I’m listening to studio visits. They bring jokes to the table they’re working on and try to find the punchline, and I apply it to my studio practice. There was a Jack Antonoff episode about songwriting, about how less instrumentation can take up more space and sound more full.

One thing I’ve been trying to do is pare down the subject matter in my compositions. For a while I was interested in multiple points of view, multiple vanishing points, and I was told in studio visits to stop because it was getting messy. That usually happens on paintings I dive into without a plan. Even in poetry workshops, my professor, Christopher Buckley, would write KISS at the top of my papers: keep it simple, stupid. I come to the table with a lot, and I don’t always self-edit.

A serious artist self-edits more than I realized starting out. Growing up I only knew art that was in museums, so I assumed those works were instantaneous, that each brushstroke was right the first time, that the artist didn’t have to make a hundred other paintings to make this one. Sixteen years in, I’m still working on editing and refining. I’d like to make a painting with as few brushstrokes as possible that still delivers all the information I want to present. Refinement and simplicity, that’s what I’m working toward.

Refinement is the name of the game. I was always told the perfect piece of writing is one you can’t add to and can’t cut from.

Right, being able to tell that adding anything more won’t be a beneficial contribution, and subtracting won’t either. “What’s the benefit?” is the root question of so much of what I do. Sometimes the answer is just that it looks pretty, that it would look cool in someone’s house. A lot of art is just that. It’s cool, or it feels good.