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Maximalism and psychedelics
The Ojai Studio Artists studio tour is this weekend (I’ll be open Oct 12 & 13 - closed Saturday). Please come! It’s a super fun weekend and a great opportunity to see art in the places its made - 60+ artists are participating this year, painters and sculptors and printmakers and ceramicists and all manner of visionary and lovely-human artmakers.
I’m hustling to finish up a 16 foot-long landscape that will go off to a private collection in Ventura in a week or two - it’s the biggest picture I’ve ever made, close to a mural in size but filled with tiny details and patterns. Excited to show it off semi-publicly before it goes off to its new happy home.
I can’t help it - I’m a maximalist. As you’ll see this weekend, my studio is crammed to the ceiling with pictures and journals and art books and a collection of stuffed chickens. My pictures are packed with brushmarks and scratches and drips and starburst orchards and big bulbous clouds and curvy roads and boxy little houses. And of course, lots and lots of color.
A few times I’ve tried to get serious and limit my palette to tasteful creams and beiges and big empty fields of nice muted tones but it’s no use - once I get going, the colors take over and all the spaces scream out to be filled up.
When people walk in, nine times out of ten they stop, take it in and say some variation of: “Wow: so much.”
At this point they either scrunch up their face and make a quick exit (their expression reading oh-so-clearly: NOT FOR ME), or start wandering around letting all this stuff do what it does to me. I love the feeling of super-saturation and world-building, the dreamy calm I felt as a kid drawing imaginary maps or the engrossed concentration I felt clicking together whole cities with multicolored Legos with my kids when they were little.
Every once in a while, someone comes in and looks around and says with a conspiratorial wink, “Hey man - mushrooms? Or ayahuasca?”
I get it - there’s definitely a psychedelic, head-shop energy in my work. I’m not all that interested in physical reality. I play with perspective and point of view, filling a single image with multiple vantage points and sources of light. There’s a reason a series of mine is called the Big Weirdies.
The truth is I’m not into psychedelics. No shade to those who are. I’ve read the Michael Pollan books and have nothing but respect for those exploring deep reaches of consciousness with whatever tools make that possible.
But the truth is none of my pictures were created with chemical assistance. Anything more than a few milligrams of cannabis makes me anxious - every sentence ends with some variation of: “Do you like me?”
After looking over the Big Weirdies at a recent show, a friend said with a wink-wink laugh, “I’ll have what he’s having.”
He’s welcome to it! What I’m having is fun.
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