––After Robert Altman, Emma Amos, David Hockney, Beach House, Kerry James Marshall, Roman Polanski
for myselfBloom(n), by Merriam-Webster definition: plural blooms 1a: BLOSSOM sense 1a, FLOWER b: the flowering state c: a period of flowering the spring bloom
For reasons I can't seem to locate, sculptures of black panthers in a range of materials and sizes have guarded living rooms for decades. Since the 1930s, the black panther has been enshrined within domestic settings––locked in curio cabinets, crouched stately on mantels and amongst other precious figurines. I think immediately of the glitter winged angel in Kerry James Marshall’s Souvenir I, 1998. The sentry figure acts as a kind of panther, silhouetted against the funerary room bedecked with mementos. These extraordinary relics of bankrupt mail-order department stores (Sears Roebuck) once proliferated in American consumer culture and defined interior design aesthetics. The living room for me has been an abiding thematic fascination, a preoccupation with the public and private site(s) of queer interior fantasies.
I first visited Los Angeles in January 2018. I had only fantastic ideas about California through cinema, music and certainly the paintings of David Hockney. My obsession with David Hockney began the instant I saw his 1963 painting American Collectors in the collection of the Art Institute of Chicago. I am still overwhelmed by its truth and scale. I’ve only had this visceral response to a handful of works; it happened again with Emma Amos’s 1973 painting Sandy and Her Husband in the exhibition We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965–85 at the California African American Museum that January. The show first opened at the Brooklyn Museum, and so images of Amos’s work had widely circulated social media feeds, a serious phenomenon of modern times, but this particular painting still managed to affect me in some way. There is a relationship between the work of Amos and Hockney: both were students of the British sculptor William Turnbull in London. I presume Hockney’s couple portraits were an undeniable example for Amos in the way that Turnbull’s sculptures are rendered in homage in Hockney’s California scenes. Emma Amos gives us an intimate glimpse into her interior world through mise-en-scene, redepicting her 1966 self portrait, Flower Sniffer, as a voyeur to the slow dance of Sandy and her Husband. A moment of great tragedy, I think, can knock away that impulse, the impulse to tell one's truth. Couple portraits represent the greatest myth: Love.
Yellow was a popular color in 1970s interior design. Age of Youth, Groovy Gold, Peace & Love, Summer Haze, Urban Prosperity: these names of wall paints reflected a shifting social economic climate. American interior design had changed to accommodate a new regard for nature and environmental concerns; a newfound preoccupation with self-discovery, self-awareness and the self as protagonist was blooming. The years swelled with “A hippie or psychedelic movement that had begun flowering about 1965,” coined as the “Me Decade” by American journalist Tom Wolfe in his book Mauve Gloves & Madmen, Clutter & Vine. This secular notion of––If I’ve only one life to live, let me live it as a (fill in the blank) was a sort of alchemical dream formula. Anyway, this is about how clear it is to see the beginning of things and harder to see the ends.
I’ve had a lucid fixation with yellow interiors since seeing Robert Altman’s 1977 film 3 Women. Altman said the plot came to him in a dream and therein lies its brilliance. The film stars Shelley Duvall as Millie Lammoreaux, a young California woman who fashions her interior world and dresses exclusively in sunshine yellow hues. The filmmaker Roman Polanski also employs yellow psychology in his 1968 horror Rosemary’s Baby. A maternal yellow bedroom and a vase filled with bright red carnations are vivid in my recollection of Mia Farrow’s rightful paranoia.
When painting there is a magic moment right before the sun goes down––“the golden hour.” The light consumes the studio, the palette perfectly bleeds so the brush scoffs, effortlessly rendering the wet surface. The studio feels radiant yellow, the color I associate with this exact temporary bliss. In fact the idealism of such conditions is the starting point of my work.