Some of My Favorite Painters

So, these are some of my favorite artists. They're all really well known and there aren't any big secrets here. Christopher Wool. Lives In New York, just pushing it to the limit -- abstract paintings and I love his silk screening techniques and the way that looks. There's Charlene Von Heyl. German artists also in New York and they're married. Also pushing it. I love the playfulness and vocabulary. There's Arshile Gorky. Who committed suicide after he discovered his wife was having an affair with Mata, his hero. Really tragic. Hung himself. There's Sigmar Polk. Huge influence on everybody and me included. Took a ton of acid and lived in communes when he was younger. Acerbic humor in his paintings. It is just the max. There's Albert Oehlin which you could probably say is Polke's protege. Also a tremendous sense of humor in his work and very, very creative. There's Joanne Greenbaum, an abstract painter in New York. I don't know a lot about her but I just love her work. It's so simple. And Very, very direct… playful vocabulary and bright primary colors. Laura Owens, California artist. Also deconstructing abstraction.Chris Martin. A Williamsburg painter and love the simplicity of his work, and the playfulness there. So that's about it, really…. Oh, and I forgot Michael Majorus. A bit of a tragedy there. Died in a plane crash really young. I don't even think he was 35. A figure from the 90s taking a very popular kind of commercial imagery and using that as vocabulary in his work, really interesting painter.

Pokey Paintings and the Kid with Moxie

Back in Barcelona, I continued on a long journey in abstraction. I love abstraction. And down the rabbit hole I went. I was caught up in gestural marks. At first working in oil paint, and when I no longer could, I started using Flashe paint thinking it could be an oil paint substitute. Wrong! It culminated in a series of small, intimate works.  A few of the pieces I showed at an alternative art fair to Frieze, in London, called Pilot II in 2005. It was organized by Rory Macbeth, a good friend and a brilliant painter and artist in his own right. 

I thought the work from this series in general was pretty anal, and I started back into figuration and gave up on the pokey abstract work. The real abstract painter who had the moxie was my 3-year-old son. Not me. Check out the video below. 

Unfortunately, he stopped drawing on the walls after about 6 months and never returned to painting or drawing again.