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I want my work to be rooted in lived psychological life, so I try to recognize and work with a full and often contradictory range of desires around vulnerability, admiration, humiliation, beauty, self-aggrandizement; and increasingly, around power, moralizing and mortality.
I have a long history of using myself as a model and at times, I’m acutely aware that I have these desires myself, and I work to embody them. Other times I tell myself I’m trying things on, thinking – for better or worse – this stuff is broadly human. Either way, I really don’t see myself as doing any of this looking down on it from a position above.
Looking back, I can see that I’ve often been drawn to the thin line between grandeur and grandiosity, and while I’ve tried to make paintings that are felt, I am also instinctually drawn to parody. I think laughter operates a lot of different ways in the world. For me, it doesn’t prevent real feeling – it just helps as a way to get through.
Years ago, at one of my openings, a writer who had followed my work for years pointed at one of my paintings and said, ‘That is so painful, I can’t look at it.’ A couple of minutes later, an artist friend, pulling me in front of the same painting, said, ‘That’s one of the funniest paintings you’ve ever made.’ I loved both of those responses.