FAQ 1: What artists and ideas influence your work?
I adore Matta. If you get the chance to check out his work, do it. He is a Chilean artist and his paintings are hard to come by, at least in the US, but every time I encounter one, I am enraptured. I love the Light and Space artists especially Robert Irwin. I was in San Francisco in the nineties, so I was influenced a lot by the work I saw going on there as well. I studied spray painting, so graffiti art is an important element in my work as well. I mean it’s all just art really, only this form is sprayed and is often found outdoors. Who knew you could study it in college? Text really is the ultimate form of abstract art, just ask the Chinese, their writing, as well as our own is all based on picture-grams. I get compared to Escher sometimes and I love that because Escher was the first artist to really blow me away. My dad bought me an Escher monograph when I was eleven and I used to marvel at it for hours. Some years later I went to go see the Robert Longo retrospective at the LA County Art Museum and it was then I knew I wanted to make my life about art.
I love to find the beauty in things that are banal, common-place, dated (like five year old pop) and things that are worn down. I also love things that have no idea how outrageously tacky they are. I love Japanese design and the ideal of Wabi-Sabi, objects that are so worn and common-place that you might just miss them as being the masterpieces that they are.
I take tons of pictures with my phone and I love them. They are usually of walls, the streets of New York ,peeling paint, store windows, things on TV. They are almost never of people, just things I see that strike me as beautiful at the moment. Then every couple months or so, I dump them all into my computer to see what the computer thinks, then I edit each one using “enhance” and sometimes the computer says “ it’s fine just the way it is” and other times it goes all psychedelic on my ass. This process influences me a lot. I basically put things on top of other things, obliterate what doesn’t work and start over again.
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FAQ 2: What happened in San Francisco right before you left?
Some crazy things happened in San Francisco right before I left and I wanted to mention them here because this turned out to be a pivotal time for me and secondly, I could not believe what I was seeing. When I moved to San Francisco, it was to go to school, and I found an apartment downtown which wasn’t too expensive because no one wanted to live down there at the time, but it was close to school and my job so it worked for me. I didn’t go out ever to the clubs and bars there because I was too busy with school, working and my art.
When I got out of school I started going out and got mixed up with a crazy ring of people that I could not seem to get out of my life. I started to get involved with drugs and the “party” scene there. If you know what I am talking about, then you know , if you don’t and you want to know, send me an email and I will tell you. It’s really no “party” at all. Somehow these people put some kind of crazy mold in my apartment that grew all over everything and I ended up having to throw out just about everything I had ever owned because of it. Rents downtown had started to skyrocket because it was the Dot Com era there and everyone wanted to be there. People were getting unfairly evicted from their apartments right and left, in the “Big Heart City”. As it turns out, these people I was having problems with turned out to be involved with my landlord. I ended up getting evicted from my apartment which was also my studio. They had been putting the mold in there so that I would get too sick to do anything or leave. At the time I was paying $550.00 a month in rent, I heard before I left they were getting $1800.00 a month for that apartment. You might think this mold story is crazy, but I think anyone that would pay that much money for that apartment is crazy.
In the end it turns out to be a mixed blessing. The whole thing did get me out of a life where I felt bound to my rent-controlled apartment that was too small, in a town that I was over anyway. I went back to LA where I reconnected with friends, and while I had to live on the streets for a while, and go from place to place until I settled in New York, I got clean and I got connected to my art in a way that , I am pleased to say, brings me to where I am today. It was, to quote Joseph Campbell, The Hero’s Adventure.
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FAQ 3: What is that line on your head?
I am very proud of my line. It is a scar I got from a hair transplant surgery I had maybe ten years ago. You can see how much pretty hair I have now. It seemed like a good idea at the time, but it was actually very painful. It is a surgery that is really intended for men who have $50,000 to spend on hair care. I figured this out after the fact. You have to do it over and over, at $10,000 each time. I did it the one time and that was enough for me. I can say however it really does work, but the thing is your hair still keeps falling out while the transplanted hair keeps growing, so you get this unnatural hair pattern on your head unless you do it more. I just keep my hair very short now and I love my scar. It was made for some great stories so when people ask me what it is, I tell them that I was a Siamese twin joined at the head, and that luckily I got most of the brain. Other stories have to do with bar-room brawls with bikers where I win or accidents with weed wackers.
I am always a little surprised when someone I don’t know just blurts out “hey what’s that line on your head?”, like I owe them my personal information. It would be like me asking someone “ how big are those boobs anyways?” or “ do you chose to act effeminate or is it something you can’t control?” One nice thing about the scar is it does give people something to think about and no one bothers me on the subway.
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FAQ 4: Are you German and Chinese?
I don’t know why people ask me this, but, no I am not. I am Polish (second generation), Irish and Portuguese. In fact my name at birth was Eugene O’neill, and yes, according to my mother, I am related. He was my grandfather’s brother, which makes him my second uncle. I don’t really talk to people much about this part of my history but people who know this about me sometimes ask what it is like to have “ the O’neill blood” running through my veins. The truth is I’m not sure I know. I have never met any of them, but it would seem to me it’s a double edged thing. On the one hand I may have inherited my desire to never stop pursuing my art until I have made my mark on the world, on the other hand, I also inherited and rock and roll drug and alcohol addiction. I am grateful to say that the later hasn’t been a problem for some years now.
Thanks for checking out my site and feel free to email me.
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