I
When I was a child my mother would tell me the story of the time she took me to Coney Island as a baby because my father was yelling at her to keep me quiet. She says she stood at the boardwalk staring at the ocean with me screaming in her arms as I had been doing for hours. I don’t know what her face revealed, what intentions were there to be read, but a black man, she says, who was sitting at a nearby bench, said to her softly, “don’t do it, lady”.
Brooklyn
In the last year my studio space has changed somewhat drastically. Since I moved into my partner’s Brooklyn apartment, my studio space is smaller, sparer, and stranger. In Queens, where I lived alone, my whole apartment was my studio so my portrait work had the run of the place. I had my sittings perch on my wine-colored futon, or lay on the deep brown covers of my bed, or sit on the red, yellow, and orange geometric-patterned rug on the floor. There, in my Queens apartment, I arranged things that were in the room around my sittings. For Michelle, I placed several pottery pieces at her feet with a dagger sticking out of one of the pots. For John, I laid a katana across his reclining body. I surrounded Jasmine with books and then ripped pages out of one book we selected together, scattering the torn pages around her. I arranged pink and white carnations around Caleb that I had plucked out of a vase on the windowsill.
Now, here in Brooklyn, a small back room serves as my studio. My portraits in this room are stark compared to the ones done in Queens. My sittings have only room enough to sit on a small, skeletal chair in front of a white, yellowing wall or recline on the unpolished wood floor. I try to dress the portraits up with a plant at a sitter’s feet, or a blue shawl across a shoulder. The portraits are not the same here in Brooklyn. The color is gone. The people who come to sit are wearing white. Like spirits.
Before I moved in, my partner Chris used this small back room for storage. In this room, he stored the clothes of the three dead matriarchs who raised him. He stored his now grown son’s toys and a small bed frame, a bookshelf full of crumbling paperbacks, a dresser full of old bills, a newspaper with a headline reporting the assassination of JFK. It is a room for ghosts and dusty memories. So it is no wonder that my practice has turned to memory and specters.
The process with which I am working with memory is complex and haunting.
Years ago, my mother put together an album for me consisting of family photographs mainly capturing my childhood. The pictures are 33 millimeter photographs stuck behind cellophane pages in a Disney-themed photo album. In my process, I leaf through the cellophane covered pages and select images. The criteria, at first, seemed to be interesting and balanced composition. But I soon realized that was not the criteria with which I was selecting images. My true criteria, I realized, was that there had to be room in the composition for an insertion. Not just physical space in the composition, but room for me to exorcise childhood impressions and illustrate childhood stories by inserting symbols, alterations—ghosts. The chosen photograph had to summon in me a story not being told. Having selected a photograph, I would then paint a replica of the family-photo image on a swath of canvas and include a somewhat non-analogous, apparently unrelated entity within the composition. The additions, in fact, are not random or unrelated to the actual photograph, however: they are (to me) symbols of truths that hover just above the happy and warm family photographs.
Life Under Water
The path to this project is somewhat unclear. It wasn’t something that was suggested and it wasn’t something that I had ever previously conceived of. In fact, I regarded the use of photographs as a reference for painting as something of a cheat at worst and a somewhat meaningless activity at best (why, I thought, recapture a moment in paint that has already been captured in a photograph?). This is why I have always fashioned my portrait work after Lucien Freud and Alice Neel—portrait artists who both worked solely from live sittings.
Still, I have also been drawn to the work of Francis Bacon. Bacon’s work always seemed to me to offer another avenue in which to work with the figure. His work took on both abstract and surreal aspects and Bacon worked largely from photographs, sometimes referencing them directly, sometimes folding them and using the distortions of the folding as visual reference.
While Neel and Freud chose to ignore the death knell of figuration with the advent of photography, Bacon seemed to understand that photography (the tool with which one could now easily capture composition, landscape, portraiture, and moments) turned painting into an “aesthetic game” (Deleuze 10).
II
My sister was marched out the door. She was 16 or 17 and pregnant again. I remember the look on her face as she followed behind my mother; she was angry, resentful. My mother, I’m sure, believed she was saving my sister from a mistake—that she was freeing up her life for better things.
My sister never went to college. She never learned a skill or became famous. She barely ever held a job; she instead stole someone else’s husband who then physically abused her for ten years and she would later almost die from a staph infection because she couldn’t afford health care.
Sensation
In his book on Bacon and Bacon’s works titled, The Logic of Sensation, Deleuze points out that Bacon (like all figurative artists post-photography) now had to deal with “sensation” over figuration (31). As a portrait artist, myself, there are times when I am thrilled with the work I have done but there are just as many times where I wonder at the point. That is not to say there is no sensation in my portrait work. There is—for me. But I wonder if the sensation goes beyond the portrait artist and the sitter for anyone in 2020. I, myself, experience sensation in the work. But does anyone else? Or is the work a bit masturbatory?
Take my latest portrait of Andres, a local NYC actor and writer; I look at the portrait and I still experience the sensation of what it took to paint the portrait of Andres: the preliminary request and scheduling, the negotiation of positioning, the thrill of becoming familiar with the actor/writer over the course of the four to five hour sitting, the struggle with color and changing light, the rush of time and all you’ve managed is half a face, the after-sitting dinner and drinks, the days of reworking, the sharing of the final product and the emotional reaction of the sitter when he sees it. In the microcosm of myself, Andre, and our close friends and family, there is sensation in the work.
But does that sensation exist outside of the experience of the artist and the sitter?
That is the question that I have tacked onto my portrait work: the type of work to which I seem to have always been attracted and anchored.
But in last summer’s Berlin residency for Transart, I was determined to explore something—anything—outside of portraiture. I was determined to explore sensation outside of portrait work to see if I could expand sensation beyond artist and sitter.
Andres
Becoming Animal
In Michael Bowdidge’s course in Berlin (titled “Becoming Animal”), I presented an anthropomorphic painting and a performance that explored personal trauma. I had never before wanted to delve into memory or trauma because it always seemed to me both gratuitous and unnerving. Both of my Berlin presentations (the painting and the performance) revolved around childhood sexual abuse: An abuse that was sanctioned by the blind eyes and the deaf ears of adults whose minds could not cope with the suggestions they were receiving, could not read my outbursts for what they were reporting, would not decipher the language of a young boy whose older step brother’s actions made him break windows with his hands.
I hadn’t known it at the time but these presentations in Berlin must have opened a door and opened my senses. The experience of presenting a trauma did not influence me into making work detailing this trauma necessarily. I did not know what I wanted to do after Berlin actually. But like a calling, I was pulled to the old photo album that recorded images of me as a child at the age of or around the age of that trauma. I examined the 33 millimeter photos arranged by my mother (an album that seems to have conveniently left out any photographs of my step brother) and something would come: a symbol to be inserted that would, in some way, reveal the language of a young boy who had no voice; a symbol that would reshape the images in a way that felt more honest: work akin to Martin Luther’s 95 Theses nailed to a church door—changing things—casting light.
And this, perhaps, was the beginning of touching sensation for me.
Francis Bacon’s figurative work released sensations in a number of ways: the colors, the melty-fluidity of the figures, the geometric encasings. But the characteristic of Bacon’s work that most closely touches my work with these photographs is his insertions.
Take Bacon’s 1973 Self Portrait; sensation comes from all of the elements listed above but my contention is that one of the strongest conduits of sensation stems from the insertion of non-analogous elements into the composition: it is the sink and the overhead light fixture that jars the viewer into a feeling. They do not belong there. We do not sit in bathrooms dressed this way, in this posture. In literature, this phenomenon is called absurd realism. In absurd realism, authors combine absurd elements with realistic elements in an effort to create an overstated sense of reality. In Self Portrait, it is absurd for the figure to be leaning on a bathroom sink floating in space. Is the sink a symbol? For the viewer, it most certainly is: it speaks of bathroom, cleaning, water, mornings, tile, plumbing, family or solitude. For Bacon, in this piece—who knows what it represents? And our certainty combined with the mystery of his meaning is the cause of sensation. Absurd realism in paintings jars the viewer into a heightened sense of things because the mind wants to decode what it is viewing.
I found, as I began working through these photographs that the symbols or insertions did not solely speak of sexual trauma; it was deciphering the larger world around the younger me. The symbols I was inserting into the composition of the photographs (often animal) read as decoders of a mythology I had both lived as a child and repeated to myself over and over as an adult (like an epic poem) resulting in something closer to sensation than anything I had ever done before because much of the symbolism I was using derived solely from “involuntary memory”.
Deleuze cites Proust when unfolding how involuntary memory operates. According to Proust, involuntary memory “couples together two sensations that existed at different levels of the body and that seized each other like two wrestlers, the present sensation and the past sensation, in order to make something appear that was irreducible to either of them, irreducible to the past as well as to the present” (57). This in fact seemed to me to be exactly what the process of painting these family photo pieces were: a collision of childhood memory and the way adults build a personal mythology around those memories. This collision gave life to this body of work that belonged wholly to neither the past nor the present.
First Encounter The Snake Was Allowed to Stay
Living Room Recital
Mythology
There are two ways through which I am working with the photographs from my childhood album. There is memory and there is mythology. I do not use the term mythology referring to Greek or Roman myth or the idea of make believe. Mythology is a term I am using to describe the psychological way in which we, as children, make sense of the world around us through the stories we are told and the stories created by our experiences and how, as we age, those stories calcify into the story of our lives. In my work, I have chosen to represent the mythology I have created through symbols. In The Power of Myth, Joseph Campbell states that “myths are clues to the spiritual potentialities of human life. Myth is the experience of life and they teach you that you can turn inward” and there you begin to “get the message of the symbols”(5).
This idea about myths may best be explained using another subject. My partner, Chris, is a good example of someone who has built up a personal mythology based on the stories of his past and the stories told to him by the three matriarchs who raised him. Chris tells (himself and anyone who will listen) the same stories over and over again. And if you are around him long enough, you see how these stories, these mythologies, shape the way he navigates the world today.
When Chris was twelve, while playing in the backyard, his beloved dog mauled his little brother with no provocation. His little brother was rushed to the hospital. The blame was lay squarely on Chris and he was threatened to be banished from his home. His dog was put down.
I realize that anyone who hears this story simply files it away under “trauma”. But I argue that Chris (both as a man and as a child) has built a personal mythology around this story and that this incident acted as a chapter in a myth wherein Chris learned the shape of the world he lived in: the terror of the unexpected, the sadness of losing a loved one, the heavy weight of blame. Today, as a man, Chris reacts strongly against blame. His mythology of the world is that the world seeks to scapegoat him for things he cannot help.
It is not blame that shapes my mythology but rage and shame; I experienced rage for the first time in my life through my step brother. But it is important to understand (in order to understand how I am using mythology here) that the sensation of rage cannot be separated from the story (the mythology) of my step brother and our relationship: of the nights in our room, of the days we walked together, of the shame in my stomach for what he was doing, the love in my heart for him, and the complex mystery of his motives. My step brother does not physically appear in the work. He cannot. My mother edited the album tightly. But he appears as symbols. He is the snake in the bed and the demon greeting the baby. He is lust that a child is not prepared for but is not adverse to. In the way that Zues takes the shape of a swan, a golden shower, an eagle, and a bull, my stepbrother takes many forms in my work. The symbols are absurd juxtapositions that should, I hope, jar the viewer (or the reader) into discomfort and short-circuit their ability to code so that their minds are forced into simply receiving the sensation that the image projects.
But as noted earlier, the work took on more themes than just step brother and sexual abuse. Aside from my own experiences, my own mythology, I was witness—in close proximity—to the lives and the stories of my mother and my sister. I knew the smell of their menstruation and the sound of their tears.
As a result, with this project, I am attempting to imagine my own childhood mythologies and the stories, the traumas, the lived lives (the extended mythologies) of those around me and how all of their individual ways of navigating the world impacted and shaped the way I lived (live) in the world. How could it not? The stories we are told as children and the stories we live through must become nothing else if not mythology: how does a child’s mind deal with their own navigation and the surrounding needs, desires, and sadness of the people around him, pressing on him, unless he makes them into stories or a form of anecdote that is cut off from who he becomes as a man? In this way, I can liken my work to children’s drawings that seek to simplify form and flatten out reality (perhaps as a way of getting to truth). In my photo album paintings, both the child and the man are at work (two wrestlers colliding) but instead of flattening out the truths (mommy, daddy, house) I am choosing to reconstitute the images through symbols not easily read. For, according to Campbell, “the symbols [should not] render the experience [but] suggest it”(72).
Images of children’s drawing depicting domestic violence
III
I woke up to the sound of my mother wailing in the other room: the living room that she used as her bedroom. I snuck out of my bed and walked along the shadows of the walls following her moans and her cries. She was on the floor on her knees and the Black man who was before her was stoically staring down at her. I could smell the liquor from where I stood—a small boy in the shadows.
My mother brought many Black men home. Sometimes she would wake my sister and I so my sister could play piano or sometimes she would wake us because the man she brought home had brought us food.
I knew this man who my mother was kneeling in front of: Willy. He was very kind but in this moment, he was not being kind to my mother. He was tired of her. He wanted to leave. He was trying to leave her.
I went back to bed recognizing that I could not help her. The pain he was causing her was not physical. Many years later, I found out that Willy was a married man. My mother was an affair. She told me that he was the love of her life.
Memory
The Descendants
In Mark Wolynn’s book titled, It Didn’t Start With You, Wolynn examines something akin to cellular memory as relates to family trauma. I became interested in connecting Wolynn’s idea to my work with family photos once I realized that it was not only my own trauma that I was excavating and exploring but the trauma, memories, and mythologies of my sister, my mother and quite possibly, my grandmother.
As I pulled one photograph after another off of the sticky pages of the album, inspecting each one and determining if there was something there for me, I was haunted by one particular photograph of four children sitting in a row on the living room floor. They were myself, my sister, and my two cousins (children of my mother’s sister). At once, it became inescapable to me that these four children were the descendants of a Nazi soldier. I had known the stories of my grandfather as a Nazi soldier at a very young age; older black and white photographs showcased him in that unmistakable uniform with the unmistakable armband. It was at the moment that I took up the photo of the four children that I realized what I was pulling from the pictures was more than my own childhood mythology, traumas, and sense of the world. I was digging at the truths of my mother and of her mother and I was touching a trauma within myself (a part of me and apart from me) which belonged to those two women and their connection to the event that shook the faith of the world: the Holocaust.
“Emerging trends in psychotherapy”, Wolynn writes, “are beginning to point beyond the traumas of the individual to include traumatic events in the family and the social history as a part of the whole picture” (17). Wolynn’s work attempts to prove, scientifically, that “traumas can and do pass from one generation to the next” (19). In his book, Wolynn seems to allude that the Holocaust was the mother of all traumas (though I would argue that Africa American slavery and many other genocidal events compare). Many of his theories revolve around the trauma of the Holocaust survivor (how descendants of Holocaust survivors are born with “low cortisol levels” similar to their Holocaust surviving parents) but in my work, I am interested in the trauma passed down from the descendants of Holocaust participants.
My grandfather (right)
My mother talks of her Nazi father as a reluctant soldier: A man who was loving, charming, and warm; a man who drank and laughed; who played the piano and sang; a man who was only following orders. She paints her own picture of the memory of her father as kill-or-be-killed and imagines her father’s participation in genocide as a way of protecting his family. My mother’s trauma (and quite possibly the trauma of her own mother) (and quite possibly a trauma passed down to me) is one of avoidance and reconstitution.
It must have been painful being raised on the wrong side of history. It must have been tricky to love and defend a father who was a participant in one of humanity’s darkest moments.
Wolyyn asserts that I do not have to directly experience this trauma in order to “carry the physical and emotional symptoms” of it (20). My paintings from the photo album are violent and sexual and at times they are both. In the images I alter, children are faced with danger and with situations to be avoided and reconstituted.
In one of my pieces, my mother holds a baby (me) whom she is unable to love because of his deformity. The child is born with the eyes of a goat. He is the physical scapegoat for the sins of her father. He is World War II nuclear deformity. He is the death of God as reported in TIME magazine or he is the Adversary. A tear rolls down her cheek but she keeps a straight face. Avoid and reconstitute.
When my mother and step father sat me down and demanded to know why I was acting out, I did not have the language to tell them what my step brother was doing, alternately, to me and my sister. Later I would reconstitute my brother’s actions as the actions of a confused teen feeling unloved by his father, my mother’s actions as a way for a mother to manage what she knew but could not manage.
Because my mother’s trauma exists on a cellular level within me, the presence of her past leaks into my work: She sits naked at a children’s birthday party while a hawk picks apart a freshly killed dove and children absently eat a white cake.
Birthday Party
Engineered Spectacle
My mother has a small bookcase in her Florida home stacked with photo albums. The photographs inside have followed her from Germany (recording her childhood and her family) to Virginia (recording her first marriage to a poor American soldier) to New York (recording her second marriage to my father) to Florida (where she lives now). Photographs are important to my mother. Even now if she sees a picture my sister or I post on Facebook that she likes she will send a message: “can you send me a hard copy of that”?
My mother is an archivist. So the lion’s share of the photographs in her albums are either taken by her or (one can feel) directed by her. My mother has a vision of herself and an idea of family life that is staged throughout these albums. It is characteristic of the family-album-as-archive: selective memory.
No one cries in my mother’s albums. No one dies. No one slaps women across dining room tables in her pictures. There is no incest. There is no genocide.
In Lauri Firstenberg’s article, “Automomy and the Archive in America”, the author posits that the archive is an “instrument of engineered spectacle” (314). She discusses how contemporary artists have “unearthed” the “cultural and political narratives residing in institutional archives” and how contemporary artists have “mined” these sources for “visual material” and “conceptual strategies” (313).
Photos from my mother’s photo albums
Some of the conceptual strategies Firstenberg discusses are “self-framing, reobjectification, self-staging, and reversal” (314). By taking photographs out of the album that my mother curated specifically for me, it is my intention with this project to reconstitute the images in a way that sort of backfires on the intention of the family-album-as-archive (look at how happy we are; look at how many great moments we have had) and instead serve to disrupt the illusion of my mother’s narrative with mythological symbols representing (the truth? My truth?).
Second Encounter Wedding Day
In order to accomplish this, I needed to engage with the family photos in both a subjective and objective way.
I have explained the manner through which I worked with the photographs subjectively in terms of memory and mythology. The objective process came by looking at these photographs and working with them very closely to the way Gerhard Richter worked with photographs in the 1960’s.
In Virlag Hirmer’s book on Richter’s work painting from photographs titled, Images of an Era, Richter reveals that he “wanted to do paintings that had nothing to do with art” and this is the reason, he stated, that he started working with photographs (13). Richter treated photographs as readymades and found-objects that he hunted for in the magazines of the day. Although my source for material came packaged in one album, it was still (like Richter’s process) a hunt. I went at hunting for source material in this one album with no set narrative in mind; though I was reconstituting my mother’s arrangement of the past with a sense of my own mythologies and the mythologies of my surrounding family members, I did not look for photos that spoke only to my experience or to the experience of myself and my sister. Nor did I choose photographs solely of my mother.
As stated earlier, what mattered in these found objects was that there was room for an insertion of truth, of a symbol that carried with it a story.
Moreover, in working this way (reworking photographic material), I managed to free myself from the burden of making art or making a painting because I was engaged more in the reconstitution, the self-staging, than I was in making art. Hirmer reflects on Richter’s work with photographs and states that Richter’s reframing and refocusing of magazine photographs availed Richter of the “truthful” (now so aptly captured by photography) (14). In opposition to this, my work with family photos allows me to find and express something more truthful than the “truth” of a photograph. With the insertions (a naked black man, an eel, an aborted fetus) I hope to force the viewer into a kind of hyper-seeing wherein they have to navigate and negotiate the presence of disconnected imagery interacting in a happy-family-vignette without any clues that help decipher the intrusions. They are left with only sensation.
Works by Gerhard Richter reconstituting found photographs from magazines
Though it was suggested to me that I could accomplish the same work with digital manipulations of the source photos, I knew from the start that I wanted the work to be paintings. I am a painter. And so I thought it was really important that my final Masters project be in the medium that I work in.
Unlike Gerhard Richter who used paint to scale up magazine photos, I chose to scale the paintings down. I worked organically, never choosing a specific size to stick to for each piece (they are all round about 6”X8” or so). Once a few pictures were selected, I would stretch a canvas large enough to fit 4 compositions (in any way they could fit as long as there was border enough to cut them apart from each other).
To create more of a vintage feel, I desaturated the colors I was using by preparing a 6”X8” surface area with grey paint first and then rendering and reconstituting the image of the chosen photograph while the grey was still wet so that it would absorb and mute the color.
When I showed the first few pieces to my advisor, David Cruz, he immediately recognized two things that needed adjustment; the first thing was that for each of the pieces, I was not varying my brushes. I cannot say this was an artistic choice nor was it for lack of brushes. What I recognized was that I was so immersed in producing the work that the manner in which I was working escaped me. It was almost as if, possessed by what came to me to insert as a symbol, I was in a rush to give the image life on canvas; I found I was not creating as much as I was exorcising. This was also made apparent in David’s second criticism that I was moving straight to paint without first sketching the composition.
Though varying my brushes proved to move the work by resulting in a more delicate image that made the pieces all the more haunting, sketching the compositions beforehand was not feasible. Using still-wet grey paint as a base did not allow for sketching before painting. Nonetheless, I am happy with the results.
The last obstacle was presentation. Like the execution of the work, I was so caught up in the psychological aspects that I did not think about how the pieces would be finished or presented; I simply separated the canvas from the stretchers and then (with four images sitting on one canvas) I would cut out each finished piece leaving ragged, uneven two to three inch thick borders.
David was horrified.
He insisted that I find a different, more finished way to present the work and he showed me a series of small paintings done by a former student of his who was also using photographs as source material. His student presented her work as Polaroid pictures and so her finished pieces were the exact size and squared off area of Polaroid pictures including the white borders we associate with them. As of this writing, I am currently refinishing the work with straight edged white borders so that an audience can associate the paintings with the source material which is photographs.
At its conclusion, this project has me thinking of expanding the concept into my mother’s personal archives and experimenting with the black and white photographs she has collected of her life before I existed. I have had two separate sittings with my mother going through these albums as she narrated her life, her loves, and her traumas with me. I also have her life documented in writing; years ago my mother believed that she was going to die. There was an aneurysm in her brain. My mother is terrified at the thought of death. To try and get her mind off of her situation and off of the thought of death, I asked her to write her life story for me. I will use her writings as inspiration to reconstitute her archives in attempts to get at a deeper truth than what is being presented in the albums she has compiled of her life. I am looking forward to, myself, indulging in the sensations released from the work.
IV
I remember sirens, every night, sirens. My mother was in the volunteer Red Cross during the war. We slept in our clothes so that we were ready to go into the bunkers, mostly at night during the attacks. I remember stepping over dead people on the way to the cellar (bunker) I remember screams. I remember one time my father too was in the bunker (most times he was not there, maybe at "work"). I remember he slapped a man in the face, later I heard he did this because the man, also living in the same building was in shock with fear.
-excerpted from my mother’s memoirs
V
We were out on an assignment. He was a senior in high school and one of his teachers assigned the students to collect anything that had a Greek name to it. I surmise now that the concept was to show how prolific Greek culture was inside American culture. But back then, I had no idea why my stepbrother had to do this. I only knew that he asked me—me—to go with him. I loved him.
Bibliography
Wolynn, Mark. It Didn’t Start With You. Penguin, New York, 2016.
Deleuze, Gilles. Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation. University of Minnesota Press, 1981.
Campbell, Joseph. The Power of Myth. Anchor Books, New York, 1988.
Firstenberg, Lauri. "Autonomy and the Archive in America: Re-examining the Intersection of Photography and the Stereotype." Against the Archive: Toward Interdeterminacy and the Internationalization of Contemporary Art. (2006): 53-91. Print.
Schneede, Uwe M. Gerhard Richter: Image