I have been thinking ,about the paintings of Basquiate, recently. He was such a master of taking graffiti art to another level. He was around in New York city exhibiting ,when I was at RISD, he died in 1988 at the age of 27, of a heroin overdose.
The amazing thing about his work is the freshness, influenced by graffiti I am sure, but he knew when to stop. Many have tried this path to a kind of boldness and a use of mark making that looks deceptively simple. He was such a master of his craft.
So thinking about my work , I will draw something that at first sight seems very satisfactory , over time those initial marks just don’t hold up. I feel the need to add complication and layers. I had an epiphany about why I need to cover up the image, yet I so admire Basquiate for being so bold— he lets an image stand. I do however acknowledge that I am seeing his finished work not the process he took to arrive at that image.
For me ,the desire to add layers often comes out of pain and the desire to cover over some trauma, to present another path .I show here ,a recently finished triptych where I deliberately made a large drawing on tissue paper, of all the traumas in my recent life— including moving up here to Oregon. I used this as a basis for several pieces — cutting them apart and reassembling with the addition of the virus imagery. This piece is called “The Floating World”
