AA Self-Storage/ Shmevils

6/8/18

      This week, I have been working on replacing the below with the belower.  Please excuse the disturbing Photoshop on that first one.   I painted  this while living in AA Self-Storage, my first New York City "apartment".  Living there marked a strange and heady time, but mostly, just strange.  Someday, I will spend the time to recount the events from this time, but in the meantime, they are very much sealed in my memory.  That deranged man who called himself my "landlord".  The shoe polish in the hair, all those cats, the pots and pans in the shower.  The hipsters that would show up living there every once and a while.  The stuffed animals.  The way my room was where he always kept his latest "girlfriend".  The darkness and the filth.  The painting studio I had in that gigantic room, where I would paint at night when I should have been working on lesson plans and sleeping. The way he attacked my character because he wasn't getting what he wanted from me.  The juxtaposition of this strange home life with my early morning teaching stint that turned out to be an abject failure...

      I have no idea what became of the original, but after reviewing Saul Steinberg's work, I felt compelled to revisit this composition as an examination of broad flat junctions. Quasi-parallelograms located approxamtely in the same plane, but shifted just a bit...  Swimming in reds and oranges is exhilarating.  

     I started using devils, which I call Shmevils, as human subject matter as a way of avoiding gender, historical placement, and was attracted to the imagery for whichever reason it has attracted artists through the millennia. These are not usually a contemplation of evil.  In the case of AA Self Storage, it is just two beings staring at each other from either end of a hallway--trapped in their loathsome vulnerable humanity, for a window of time oddly subject to one another's scrutiny. 

AA Self Storage --Lost Original

AA Self Storage --Redux (In Progress)

   Its mind boggling to think of how much work I have sent into the world ,and how much of it disappeared without my knowing it. This is far from the first time I felt compelled to recreate a piece that was sold or stolen. 

Bonus track:  

The Class