About Me

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Michael seeks to create works that reflect his struggles with the world he finds himself living in, and the commonalities that we all share in this. Desire, Defeat, Acceptance, Judgment, Love, Fear, Time, and Space. Michael's studio is downtown Los Angeles in the Spring Arts Tower. "Happiness is that funny little place halfway between fantasy and reality." -me

Friday, December 24, 2010

...and Patti Smith sang of Horses

The first time I saw Patti, it seriously disturbed me. Late at night I am up watching SNL and The Patti Smith Group performed. Something from her cracked something inside me. I didn't know what she was, I didn't know why she was the way she was. I feared drugs. I feared the devil. I feared the worst. The next day at church me and my friends discussed what in the world could possibly be wrong with her...her drummer destroyed his drum set at the end of the song My Generation. It is 1976 and I am 9. A few years later my cousin Shelley had the album Easter. I was mesmerized looking at this album cover...Patti had hairy armpits.
It was August 1988, and I had just moved to New York City. I was invited to go to The Whitney to see the Robert Mapplethorpe retrospective. It was a thursday night, and the museum was open for free after 5pm. Looking at his photographs blew my mind. Something from him cracked something inside me. Why would you put your genitals inside barbed wire and a trap? Again I feared drugs, excess...the devil.
I lived on 24th street, between 7th and 8th. I would go up to the roof of our building and stare at The Chelsea Hotel. All the years I lived in NY, I never went inside the Chelsea. I was afraid I wouldn't come out...I would stand on our roof and smoke and watch the sun set, and the lights inside the hotel come up and I thought about all that transpired there, not knowing exactly what or with whom, but feeling it. Sensing it. Rumors and stories would float in the air to me and slowly over time I would understand.
I wanted to be free, to be brave, to allow. In my own ways I was as free and naked as Patti and Robert, although I didn't think so at the time.
In Manhattan Patti lives across the street from my dear friend, Byron. He tells me that Patti owns the building next to his; a ground floor empty space that she uses as a studio. Bright open windows is all that separates her studio from MacDougal Street. One day as I leave Byron's apartment I pass the studio and look inside  and Patti is inches away from my face. Paper is pinned to the wall and she stands there, drawing as intently as I have ever seen another artist work. I freeze, and I imagine in that moment all the things that Patti and I will never do together, beginning with her sharing some of the wall space so I can paint with her. Tonight after I watch her interview on Tavis Smiley I dream of Patti and that studio. In my dream it is 2001 and when I pass her studio, I stop and knock on her window and she invites me in...
It would be a few more years before I would even own a copy of Land, and I would be living in Los Angeles. It may have arrived in my studio via iTunes...but as the hoofbeats of Land pounded their way through me it was as if time ceased to be a format and Robert, Patti, and I were brought together..."Horses" would chant in my head for years to follow, and I would begin work on a series that remains today un-concluded. It is about freedom and adolescence...two things that Robert and Patti cracked in me.
Just Kids is the book Patti writes about her story with Robert, New York, artistry, and love. It is about the struggle I have with myself and my work, and it reads like an unfolding dream. It is beautiful and it explains to me what I feared back in 1976; Myself. Today I don't have that fear anymore, but perhaps a few of the daemons remain...coaxing me to unfold myself further. I have a love for Robert and Patti that will remain unrequited, but feels as real as any love affair I have ever had because emotions and artistry defy logic, as that is what they have taught me.



White Horse
60"x76"
Oil, Oil Stick on Canvas
2010/2012

Sunday, November 28, 2010

Backstage and on Broadway from the wings....

I wondered tonight how many shows I have worked through, and ultimately listened to. If I have worked in the theatre, basically nonstop since 1993, then I have heard well over 5000 performances. The breakdown would go something like this: Cats = #1 (having worked there for 2 1/2 years) then The Scarlet Pimpernel (all 3 versions), Saturday Night Fever...and so on, and then it becomes more of an even mix of numbers...per show/play. Most shows I worked on for at least a year. If you don't miss a day of work, which many times I didn't, that is 416 shows a year. Some were short runs, some closed too soon. I have always considered this a real privilege. I love my work, it isn't my "A" plan, but it is an "A-" plan for sure. I work with brilliant artists, and it affords me my studio...
Backstage.
Listening to Laurie Beechman singing Memory from Cats. How many times did I listen to her, perhaps a hundred times? More, maybe? Her amazing voice I can still pick out in my head in brief moments...such a fierce peformer and singer. Douglas Sills singing Into the Fire, maybe 600 times? Sandra Bernhard singing about the rivers on Mars, Genius. I will hear a song from a show I've worked on, and in my mind I see exactly what I am doing, at that moment and with whom, backstage. I don't usually see the performance of what is happening, just who I am interacting with, and what task is at hand. In many of the shows if I didn't have a cue I would pick out a special moment and watch from the wings. Watching Carol Channing every night walk the passerelle in Hello Dolly, or eating the potato puffs with Horace. Claudia Shelle would quietly run through the White Cat adagio all by herself in the dark. Every show. Sometimes quickly, but with the same concentration, and application. As beautiful as watching her perform it moments later for the audience of the Winter Garden Theatre. Tonight I watched Alice Ripley's reaction at the end of singing Didn't I See This Movie when her husband Dan walks in. Shocking...unbelievable...beautiful and haunting. I watched it twice today, being a two show day. I was curious what happened at the end of this rocking song, so I watched from the wings. Even busy with changes backstage, I listen carefully to I Miss the Mountains, the previously mentioned song, and a specific line she says about grief. The way she says it every night tells its own story, all by itself.  What I get from these performances each night, from each show I work on, I have never quite been able to calculate. I know the energy of working with a performing artist enables me to constantly think about my own work as a painter, which one might think of as constant/not live...but I think of what Fosse said; "pretty picture" and I think of each picture, of each second, of each moment that a stage performer works to convey; amidst all the scenery, lighting, music, and staging. Each moment conveying an ever reaching arc of emotion that lives on in the audiences memory, reflecting the human experience...and I strive for that 'live' feeling in my work. Listening to a performer while backstage, usually in the dark, it feels to me like you are being let in on a secret. Not seeing them, just listening, gives it a nuanced air that might get missed in viewing it onstage. There are so many distractions designed to coerce the story along to its conclusion. And rightly so. For me, I try to let the viewer in on a secret too, in my paintings. Silently looking at the story and noise, color and shape, texture and harmony of its picture.


Dancer in Attitude 
Wire sculpture
9"

Wednesday, November 24, 2010

...and then there was Orion.

...Midnight, November 20. Just got home from a long day of pre-production on Next to Normal, the national tour. The sky had been full of clouds and rain all day, but as I got home the clouds parted, the Moon bloomed the night sky full, and there he was. Orion, big as your hand when held flexed straight armed and up to where he stands. I had been looking for him every night for the past two months. Who was feeling crazier, me or Diana, the character that Alice Ripley examines in Next to Normal? She sings of missing the mountains, sings of something lost and forgotten, sings of who she used to be...or maybe wasn't...or maybe of something that was just misplaced. And I finally found Orion after looking for him. What does Diana find? Reality in its' infinite wisdom reveals to us what we design, and it's timing is not coincidental. I pondered if Diana didn't create her family out of her delirium entirely...that perhaps Gabe isn't the only one missing. If you are free enough to not continually create the same reality day after day, then the possibilities are endless. If you don't carry the past around with you like a heavy emotional weight, then you are free to fly, and those memories are but part of the multidimensionality you access to recreate experience. Why I wasn't seeing Orion I don't know, but he was there. It was me that wasn't.

Schrodinger's Cat 
Box, marker, (cat)
1'x1'x1'
2009

Friday, October 29, 2010

Abeyance

The condition of being temporarily set aside; suspension:
Sometimes it is best to let things hang in limbo. Sometimes it happens all on its' own. Sometimes you're not ready to finish it, or at a place where you have the understanding of what is coming next, or where it is going, or what it is to be. It suspends. I painted this painting in N.Y. It was the last painting I did while I lived there. Well, basically the last one. There was a point at which I couldn't make such huge paintings anymore...and had to prepare my place so I could leave it. N.Y. for me in my mind is that place I left behind in abeyance. Even though I know much has changed about N.Y. since I moved to Los Angeles, in my heart I still think of N.Y. as the place I moved to in 1988. Big, mysterious, full of energy and life and fear and possibility. Some of the people in this painting I knew, was, met, hoped to be, encountered, and left. Other's are ghosts. I am a ghost of N.Y. now. Friends tell me they walk by my old apartment, and still think of me as being there. Sometimes at night as I fall asleep I imagine myself back there, in my apartment just as it was when I lived there...I see the red light on the M of the Milford Plaza, casting its' shadow on my wall. I light up a cigarette and listen to the wolves of the night as the drive up 8th Avenue in their yellow taxi, or leave a bar on 46th Street. My window open if even just a crack in the middle of winter, to hear, smell, taste, and feel the air of the City. Surprising how quiet my apartment could be even in the middle of all of this. That apartment was a channel and a window for many souls, spirits, beings...coming through. I wonder if the person living there knows this? Knows all the magic that happened there. All the prayers that were said, the dreams that filtered through the night, the starlight of my friends who shared time with me...laying on the floor at 3 am listening to Gorecki and smoking. The past hangs in abeyance, and you carry it with you. Your whole life through.



Abeyance: Oil on Canvas 10'x5'

Saturday, October 23, 2010

"On a balcony in N.Y. It's just started to snow."

When I lived in N.Y., that lyric felt sentimental, even as I lived it. The ability to place a moment so encapsulating...as if my experience had been read from far away, lifted, and transposed into word and music. Made me feel less alone even as the alone-ness was thriving for me. And then she sings, "...hey there Michael, do you really love me." Yes Kate, I do.
By peculiar chance, The Red Shoes had been musicalized into a Broadway show, the same winter the Red Shoes cd was released. My friend Wade was an assistant costumer on the show, and I saw quite a few incarnations of it during previews as a result. The ballet was so spectacular, for me it would have been enough to cover the price of admission. "These moments given are a gift from time." Because you will never have the opportunity to see that piece again, with those costumes, sets, or performers. She runs to the top of the building on the set and leaped with all that was within herself and blackout. Perfect theatrical combination of elements. You didn't need to see her jump conclude with a fall. You knew she did, and fell to her death. I remember 4 very specific things about that show; how fast she danced the adagio when asked to do it double time in "rehearsal", the beautiful blond hair Jonathan Sharp had, the ballet of the title, and the red robe that George de la Pena wore in Act 1. Funny, huh? But these are the things I took away, and Moments of Happiness are derived of these things. Fleeting pleasure sentimentalized and captured in our hearts' eye. Looped over when lost in thought, reminding us how time passes. Marching on. Paul Thek was right, the face of God is a clock. And time rolls on...


The Face of God, after Paul Thek


UPDATE: 10-24-2012 From a link posted by Scott Fowler, an original cast member. Footage from The Red Shoes:

Friday, October 22, 2010

The Night Sky, and The Others.

Growing up in the Great Plains of the Dakotas, I always had the Big Night Sky overhead. I had a father who could name every star, and constellation, and night object I would point to. My favorite was always Orion. He seemed to be the clearest, and most tangible of the constellations to me. The Big and Small Dipper, also very clear and easily read in the northern night sky, came in close second. I think John Guare summed it up best in House of Blue Leaves...he captured that feeling of "...you got to come see Orion. He's the hunter and he's pulling his arrow back so tight in the sky like a Connect-the-Dots picture made up of all these burning planets. If he ever lets that arrow go he'll shoot all the other stars out of the sky."
Lately I can't find Orion. This time of year I always go out and look for Orion, because I follow his belt to find the Pleiades. Pleiades. Who two years ago looked so close to me one night, that I was actually shocked in amazement. They seemed to reach forth with their light, bringing close to me who and what they are. The Brotherhood of Light welcoming me. Initiation. Catching my attention in such a way that I stood in amazement for quite some time staring up. Or is it out? Maybe down...or more than likely inside out. Now however, Orion is nowhere to be seen. It is baffling to me, because I actually have posts on Twitter from the previous year, at this same time, mentioning looking up at Orion, and the Pleiades...and how beautiful the Giant Wonder is of the Night Sky. The shivering excitement of the dark and the stars above. Feeling the secret thrill of being alone under the heavens. The night is quiet...even the buzz of Los Angeles can't overreach the hum of the Universe at night. The stars may appear dimmer here than my childhood home, but I know where most things are, and where they should be. Where is Orion?
I think of the Universe as a giant undulating being. Like waves, or maybe the wind...heaving and sighing. Exhaling out light of stars, inhaling the deep dark of the sunless night. Moving. Alive. And in this I guess it makes sense that Orion is off on his own somewhere else. Taking aim of his arrow in another Universe, where another being follows his sweeping bow across the sky. Wouldn't it be something if a constellation disappeared? Proof that the Night thrives, and moves...rolls and undulates. Bringing a story of light forth, and taking another with it in its' wake. Giant flapping wings of a bird that flies across the expanse of our consciousness. We are but fragments of All That Is. And our consciousness grows with every breath. That night two years ago the Seven Sisters made their presence known to me in a manner I will never forget. Showing me that sometimes "objects in mirror may appear closer than they are." Whether that object is a car from behind, or the Beings of Light in the sky.

Installation: Tire Swing in the Night Sky

Thursday, October 21, 2010

"Said by you though, George"

Has it all been said, written, composed, shaped, drawn, painted, designed...? Well, I have stuff to "say", and even though maybe it's been said by another in their voice, ultimately it hasn't been said by me, and I am not an appropriationist. But to think that what has come before hasn't influenced me in any way, would be to deny the historical line created by those artists before me. And so, in that vein, it has to be said by me.


                                                  Childhood #3 (detail)