Eric Fischl

Published Aug 5, 2013, 4:00 AM

Eric Fischl became known in the 1980s art scene for work that explores issues of sexuality and power and what it means to become a man. Alec talks to Fischl about his memoir, Bad Boy: My Life On and Off the Canvas, where the painter writes candidly about his youth, the art world, his own struggles with depression and substance abuse, and his thoughts about the creative process. Fischl started as an abstract painter, but as he explains to Alec, once he began to work with figures, he realized he was “doing the work that [he] was supposed to do, that [he] was built for.”

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This is Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Here's the Thing my guest today. Painter Eric Fischel became known in the nineteen eighties art scene for work that explores issues of sexuality and power in what it means to become a man. In Bad Boy, which Fishel describes as his most famous and notorious painting, there is a naked woman lying on a bed. A young boy is standing in front of her, his hands behind his back, seeming to be taking something from her purse. The complexity of his early pieces can be attributed Fishel has acknowledged to his childhood. He grew up in the privileged country club culture of Long Island, to be specific the Port Washington Yacht Club, but his mother suffered from depression and alcoholism and committed suicide when Fishel was twenty two. After decades of living in New York City, he and his wife, painter April Gornick, now live full time in eastern Long Island. In his recent autobiography, Bad Boy, My Life On and Off the Canvas Official details his youth the art world, his own struggles with depression and substance abuse, and his thoughts about the creative process. For Eric Fishel, the book challenged him in unexpected ways. The difficult part of writing it wasn't the early stuff where it was about family traumas and you know, the sort of dealing with that. That was actually the easiest part to write, because I put that into my paintings and stuff, so I had already kind of gone through the emotional ramifications. What was difficult was actually trying to find some perspective in the present moment as to what my feelings were, what was going on in the world around me at that time. I went through a lot more confused feelings about the present in the past. I dealt with it so much in the work that I I knew exactly what I felt. It was just a matter of putting in the words. Eric Fishel first picked up a paintbrush in college, and experience he describes as an awakening. Official was in the first undergraduate class at cal Arts, a place that would become known as much for orgies as conceptual art. It would be some time before his skill, talent, and voice found a home in realism. I started out being trained as an abstract painter. You know, if you you were going to be a painter, you should be an abstract painter. So I tried. What it turned out was that every abstract painting I made felt like it was absolutely the last painting I could make. Then at some point I started to work with figures and with narrative and language and stuff like that, and it flowed. That's when I realized I was now doing the work that I was supposed to do, that that I was built for. And then it was a matter of getting better at it and you know, perfecting it, honing it, etcetera. And what was among the first things that that led you to that, Like, what was the story? What was the narrative? You thought, I want to put that on canvis somehow? It was a process actually, and the process was that I um. I found this transparent paper called glass seeing paper. It's this kind of paper they used to put chocolates in and stuff. It accepts oil paint beautifully. That is that the brush feels gray gliding across the slick surface. If you make a mistake, you wipe it off. Very little shows of that, you know, and it's got this transparency. So I would start with an image a chair, and I would paint a chair on this paper and I'd stick it on the wall, and then I would sit and look at and I'd say, Okay, where is this chair? Is it in a you know, the living room, is it in the dining room? Is there anyone sitting in the chair? And as I as I was thinking that, I go get another transparent piece of paper, relay it on top, and say, Okay, it's a person and they're sitting this way in the chair. Now that didn't work, Take that off, get another one, put that on. Okay, they're actually standing next to the chair. So I would paint that. I would just talk to myself and as I did, I would sort of create these images, and eventually a scene would emerge that seemed to resonate for me, that had some kind of memory to it, some kind of feeling in it, that was expressing something about relationships between people, families, inter family relationships, people and objects that they surround themselves with. And then you know, eventually I decided I wanted to actually bring that into the painting world and with color and canvas and stuff like that, and more detail, more specific detail. So it evolved into the work that I do. Now there's a description in the book about how with a as times you were comfortable being alone when you have those tools in the material in front of you. Which I found fascinating was the river. I thought of you doing something else creatively. Music was out of the question because I haven't toned deaf years and there no way I could do that. I was in a a play in eighth grade in which it was called It's Cold and Them Thar Hills, and I played this hillbilly named Zeke, who didn't speak through the entire play, but was on stage the entire time until the very end, when I had this like big speech where I proclaimed my love for this person who didn't know I was even present. You get the girl and I get the girl. But it was like spending a lot of time. Kind of being present and absent at the same time. Was actually a profound experience for me, but it it didn't lead to me wanting to do with the next play or to do that. And I've actually become much more of a public person over the years. I was much more reticent, much more behind my eyes, which is really where the painter comes from. And it was a lot easier for me to in private have my thoughts and feelings and you know, sort of express them before anyone ever saw them. And so I could actually control the form of expression before it entered the world gave art and yes, exactly exactly. But my sensibility is very much I think, consistent with you know, an an actor's sensibility and a director's sensibility, and in that, in that sense of you know, understanding what a dramatic moment actually is, where where meaning is present, and how it comes through not just a language, but it comes through a body language, it comes through a light source, it comes through a a clearly defined space, and how one sort of negotiates that space. And those are the things that I'm most compelled with and and in fact, my my greatest pleasure is when people in the dramatic arts connect to my work because I feel like, you know, they get it in a way that that you know, people other painters don't. Necessarily, you do expect the images at some point to start moving, to move yeah, or speaking yeah. And you know, I I my work is based on or that as a source material photographs. What photography showed me, because it slices life so thinly, it showed me that everybody is in constant motion, and that everybody is is off balance, and that that animates the scene. You know that. It's one of the reasons I don't actually bring models into the studio and have them posed for me, because they become a static pose when what I'm looking for is something that triggers a feeling or a memory or a provocation of some kind. And I find that where you look at a photograph that you took of somebody that is, you know, just slightly turning, some shifting weight in their body, doing something like that, that that really sets those questions. What I love when I look at photographs, when I look at paintings, when I look at your paintings, when I look at films, I like and the visual because I went to an acting school where they said, watch the movie with the sound off, and if you can't convey something, if the picture isn't telling the story sixties seventy five percent of the time, then that the movies that wrong. Yeah, I mean, you know, the difference between film and theater and painting is that in both film and theater, you build an emotional sort of construct, You build a narrative construct over a set period of time with various scenes that lead to it. With painting, you're you know, you're trying to shrink it down into this one moment that when you stop that action is when it actually begins to spin the mood, spin the moment, spin the thoughts and projections and stuff. So it's about trying to find, Okay, where do I stop the action? Right for me, you stop it at something just before something happens, or just right after something happens. That if you if you stop it in the middle of something happened, what you end up with is is a kind of confusion that doesn't take you anywhere. But if you stop before the audience rushes in to complete it, they know where it's going now and that person is doing this and that's going to happen because they just blah blah blah. Or if right after dealing with the emotional aftermath of that, then it's then the the audience again rushes in with the memory of those feelings that they associate with what just happened. Uh. That I find to be the real challenge and the fun part of it as well. You know a painter, and this is my view, this is not I'm not saying this is a commonly health view, but this is my view, and that is the work I do. A It requires an audience and also somebody giving you a role, right and someone and exactly someone unless you're self producing. But for you, my view of it is I'd sit there with and look at painters and I think, God, that much I envy them that you sit in a room and you're totally self generating, and you do exactly what you want to do, and then you send it out into the world and say if you like it, great, If you don't, I really don't give a shit. You know, it's completely un self conscious in that way, unless you're doing a commission. Do you feel that is a protective is a response? I think it's like, God, I hope they liked that. Oh sure, yeah, but you know you've already done it. You accept that it may fall short of your hope and expectations. But I don't. I don't believe any painters sitting there pretending that they only do the work for themselves and stuff. They're they're they're seeking some kind of resonance, some some response. Yeah, have you have you ever done a painting and you were mistaken meaning, you did a painting. And I'm being very melodramatic here, but you did a painting and you were done. Even the said, good God, official, you've done it. There, it is there, you have it. And then and the painting did not succeed in one term, and then other times you sat there and said the opposite, this is a piece of crap, and it was one of your most successful has that happened, not in the extreme, but I've certainly done paintings that I thought were better than they were received. And I've certainly had the experience where I've seen paintings that I didn't think were so good when I did them and see them ten years later and go, you know, that, actually isn't that bad. So I don't know, but this is a little off the subject, but more back to sort of acting and painting. I did a project once where actually used actors. I was given a house, Miss Vandorot House and craigfelt Germany to do some kind of interaction with the house. I never worked with actors before, and so I went to friends who were in the business, you know, writers, playwrights, screenwriters, whatever, directors to give me some ideas that like how do you talk to an actor? What gets them going? Etcetera? Because I had no clue and the simple list advice came back from Mike Nichols, who said, I'll give them problems. They love problems. And I said, what the hell is a problem? They said, oh, you know, she wants to borrow five d bucks from him, but you won't tell him why. We just give him that, you'll see, right. I was like, okay, So I went into this thing with these two actors who happened to be German. They understood English, but they performed, and you know, they did whatever they did. And for him to choose, I know, and that's strange. And I was taking still photographs too. I was just clicking snapshots. I wasn't recording it. I didn't think I cared about, you know, the dialogue. I didn't care about the you know sound it said, whatever, you know. The all I wanted were these sort of still moments. What blew my mind was that I would give him a problem. And I was surprised at how fast I could tell that the problem I gave him wasn't any good. They couldn't get animated and they were just like it wasn't achieving the desire to feel they were They were just dead. It was like nothing. Their body couldn't even move hardly. So and and at the same time, when I gave him something they could really bite their teeth into. For example, well I did a sleep with you, but just to break up with their boyfriend first. The thing is the female actress had like zero interest in him, but she was very professional. And so we're going to do the bedroom stuff. And I set up some stuff in there, and it really wasn't working. It was saying, you know, there was something. They were dressed in evening clothes. It was late to come home. You know, he's drunk. She's hoping that, you know, they could have some sex. Maybe he's you know what, it can't kind of get it together. It was lame. So he gets up and he goes off to the bathroom or something like that. And so I say to her, look, take off your clothes and get into bed. You're a wild animal. Whatever you do, don't let him in the bed. Now. This bed that I had chosen was like a modernist bed that had this igloe of a mosquito netting over it, so it made like a cocoon or something like that a tent. So I said, whatever you do, don't let him in the bed, right, your wild animal. All of a sudden, she like curls up into this incredible kind of creature and then like pushes herself against the end of the wall and and and it's like just sitting there waiting, right, And he comes back into the room and now he sees her in the bed. She's naked. It's like, we're getting somewhere. We're getting somewhere, right, And he takes his bathrobe off and walks over to the net and he starts to lift it up, and she comes flying across the bed one leap and smashes him in the face, right, And he's like whoa. And then you got goes, whoa, this could be fun. I like to win be challenge. And I'm like going, oh no, and you've got good images. You got great images also that yeah. Yeah, And they did a whole dancer on getting in and out of the bed, and when he finally got in, she slipped out, and you know it reverse the roles and stuff, and that was that. But now it with people that you photograph, manipulate, paint, whatever, verb you want to use for the work you do and the stages of the work you do. How much would you say you're a view of people because because I think, like most men, we have this in common, which is this kind of relationship of your mother. And if you have a good relationship with your mother, let's say you want to replicate that a terrible relationship with mother. Do you want to find someone who's the opposite of your mother, or you want to restage the drama with your mother? As my as a therapist, one said to me, we want to restage that in our lives. And you get all the good lines now which which eluded you in your in your youth. So I think all art expression is in some way trying to correct a lot of stuff, and you put some clarity to it, some order to it make it makes sense. You know, how would you think that you're you? You're very candid about your mother, who was obviously very ill. You know, she's a very sick woman and that plays out on her behavior. Um, she wasn't a mean spirited woman, she was she was just completely overwhelmed. How would you say that? Colored? Because count to three when you read the book and your bell bottoms and hate Ashbury and you're into a very kind of summer of love sixty six. I thin because when you head out to the West Coast and you're in the thick of it, how do you think, what did you carry out there with few in terms of your idea about women, what you wanted or because when I get from the bookcase, you're someone who was kind of raised not to ask for anything. Well, I had, you know, sort of two kinds of relationships with women. One one was I was attracted to women that were absolutely bad for me. They opened up that void, you know, just emptiness that in a way that was yeah, and you know, it was full of passion and it was full of you know this, you know, profound need and stuff like that was very emotional and very short lived. And then the other kind of woman was one where you know, they were really stable, reliable and reliable and available. Yeah, and I married them. You're married to April. I married I was married before and stable, stable enough, Yeah, but then yeah, I married April and you know for the last thirty some id years. Yeah. Did your work change in sync with your attitude towards love and relationships? It did with time you know, the early relationship with April, for example, we were both young artists, really trying to find our voices, trying to understand who we were. I was dealing with the wounds of the past as opposed to the you know, the present with her. So it wasn't apparent then other than the stability of our relationship gave me the courage to look into these other Well, you know, she's incredibly bright and incredibly disciplined, and um, she she's somebody that can multitask in a in an emotional way. Do you have children now? Do you think that that was partly because of what your childhood? I think we're both April and I had a lot very traumatic things that passed that made that that seemed dangerous. Do you regret having not done that? There was you have a very warm, humanistic your personality. Yeah, there there was a point at which I felt like I could handle having kids, but April wasn't there yet. And the one thing I wasn't gonna do was insist that we do it my way, because I knew what that she was only going to indulge you so far. Yeah, and and or or it was going to break her down in a way that I couldn't bear. So you know it passed. Now. In the book your father, he went that route that a lot of dads go, which is he just wants to give you the safe advice. Yeah, his parental duty was to say to you, you know, let's be reasonable now, and he told you to go to get a business. Did your father live to see you become a great success? He did? Yeah, my my mother didn't. My father did he. He actually didn't understand what success was in art anyway, that he'd kind of given up by then, right, so understanding me, yeah, exactly. She was a very very kind of icy relationship with her. It was, it was volatile and complicated. But you know, he he really didn't know anything about art, so he didn't really know anything about what success in art was. And and back then, you know, success and fortune were not connected to each other in the art world. You you could be highly successful, you know, shown in museums around the world, and and still be doing a teaching job or driving a taxi or something to do it. So he was perplexed that I would even be in a field in which there wasn't a monetary reward necessarily, right, but at some point he uh started to see my name in print, and that was something that he understood as success. You know, all of a sudden local newspaper or you know, an art magazine or something. There there's his son, right, And then he really flipped from from sort of disengagement to the proud parent who you know we did. We'd go into a grocery store and at the checkout, cutry guard, you know who this is my son. This is the artist that he take the clipping out of his wallety exactly. This is from the New York Times. That's E I S F I S h L. Well, you know he uh he became an artist at the end of his life as well. He discovered collage and it took him a while after he retired to find He tried other things, and then all of a sudden he found himself like sitting in his office at home cutting pictures out and gluing them together. And and you know, he's he was not a schooled artist, but he had an eye and he had a kind of liveliness to these collages that he made that were very expressive. And by the time he died, I had realized that he and I could never talk to each other, but we just kept missing, you know, but we understood each other visually, and so he would send me his collages and I knew exactly what he was thinking about, where he was at, how he was feeling. You know, he was really communicating through these visual images, and he showed me that he was had been using my paintings to understand what had happened in our lives with with my mother and the whole family dynamic. And so we actually were both visual people who understood what that meant to communicate visually to each other. So it was it was deeply rewarding to me ultimately to but it took me a while to understand that they were talked to about your paintings and his view of your paintings. Well, at first, I mean he didn't. He talked to me about success. You know, you could see and be enthusiastic for this show and that show, etcetera, etcetera. But there was this uh thing that happened. There was I think, um, you know, really blew my mind, which was that I had done a painting UM called a Woman Possessed, and it was a painting of a woman outside the suburban home, drunk, passed out in the driveway, surrounded by these dogs that were like, you know, beasts from hell it or you know, some were sniffing her somewhere, growling at at the sun. Who had could just come home from school. The school books are on the ground as bicycle slipped over. He topped off his bike. So this boy is trying to pull her away from these dogs and her demon dogs. I I showed the painting in Toronto and the and the critic described it in the most beautiful terms. He understood it as as a painting that revealed the profound pain of love, of loving someone right, and it was. It was a painting, was the only painting in this show. It was a one painting show. And he wrote extensively about it. And so, you know, proud son sends it to my father and unbeknownst to me, my father sends the review of off to my siblings. Right, and my younger sister Lori writes back a her to him. She's furious, why is he trying to make her remember this painful time? You know? And he shared these letters to me. I didn't know they were having until the whole communication came to me, but he shared to me her response and then his response to her, in which he revealed that he had been actually using my paintings the whole time to understand emotionally what had been happening in our lives and stuff, and that he was just trying to heal something, you know, trying to bring her into it as well, into two, into a kind of healing process, and to acknowledge his awareness, yeah, which which took me completely by surprise, and that that he had been seeing the work as deeply as he had, you know, revealed as you intended it to be safe, which is what I intended, which would hope he might have been. Last exactly did he find his ape and marry someone that was reliable for him emotionally? No, I mean he he married somebody that was absolutely reliable, loved him, you know, stable. It's yes in that sense. But she was such an polar opposite of my mother. I was surprised because I I thought my father would just find some uh some a little bit more you know, manageable version of my mother, that the things that he loved in my mother, her creativity, her Yeah, But instead he he wasn't attached to that part of her coming up. In part two of our conversation, Eric Fischel talks about the challenges of becoming a first time our teacher. I was only a couple of years older than them to begin with. You're a young teacher and I had I had never been taught techniques and the benefits. That's where he met his current wife, April. This is Alec Baldwin. This is Alec Baldwin, and you were listening to. Here's the thing. My guest today is Eric Fishel. For years, he and his wife worked out of their downtown Manhattan studio, but he says the city doesn't feed him like it once did. Now he feels a greater connection to nature. Back in the early eighties, however, it was the perfect place to develop his craft. Soho was was percolating. I mean it was. It was a real village of artists, you know, the all of the It wasn't Lower Madison Avenue like it is now. No, it was. It was not a mall. It was it was. It was a village and and you know the kind of thing where you would see people you knew on the streets every day, you'd sit and talk. You know, you'd break bread, hang out at art art bars and stuff like that. It was it was great. And there was you know a kind of exciting tension between the older artists and and us young kids who had come there to to make a difference. And and you know, there was a rivalry and a kind of healthy competitive thing going on. We wanted to kill them and they wanted to ignore us. By them, who do you mean particularly well, there was ah, you know generation of artists, um, you know, half a generation of five ten years older for example, that were doing sort of minimalist work. For example of people like Don Judd or Carl Andre or Sol Wite. There were conceptual artists like Larry Weener or Joseph Kasooth or um to name a couple that doing a whole different kind of thing painting. Painting had become a disregarded, uh medium. So part of my generation was trying to see if we could reassert some kind of authority and authenticity to painting. And the kind of painting that the minimalists had done had brought painting to its ultimate conclusion, which was too essentially have a kind of nothing there. A lot of artists felt it was a dead medium, And then there were other artists like myself who was absolutely no their paintings real and you know, you just have to find the truth, find the you know, the things that matter and convey them convincingly. There there wasn't yet the limos, there wasn't yet the kind of rock star status. All those things were to come when probably by eighty five it started to happen. How did you and how would you describe that it was? When it came? It came? How people weren't collecting? You you talk about painting was an overlooked medium art form. We read about the art world where you know, dead masters continue to sell paintings for tens, if not hundreds of millions of dollars. And at that time, in the late seventies and eighties, is that what the art collecting world was confined to were the masters of art? And everything contemporary was just no what it was? Was there? There was a warhole. Wasn't warhole then? Was he? He wasn't In terms of financially it wasn't. His paintings were still selling pretty cheaply, but a collector base entered that had made money very quickly in the dot com world and then moved into uh, sort of buying art and speculating on it. Um. There was a sense that the object was to find the next genius, right, So what you did was you started to speculate on young artists, buying a lot of a cheap hoping that one of them was going to turn out to be Picasso or something like that. And there were all these stories so that you know, a collector buying a Jasper John's painting for two fifty dollars and you know, selling it for eleven million dollars giving it to you to pay his rent, or one of those exactly that kind of thing. So there was like this whole so kind of vogue among collectors to just go in and put money into young arts. Yeah, and uh, you know, it was a way for them to deal with their money anyway, because they had to change the art world. Now it's hedge funders. And I have a guy who's a friend of mine who's an artist, and then one guy will say to me, hey, in and he says, you know, without ann ounce of cynicism, go online and look at Kevin Johnson. I'll make up a name. Go see Kevin Johnson and Kevin Johnson has just a white canvas. It's just white. He's like, no, no, you don't get it. Man. He's like this, this guy is white. This is what's happening right now. Everyone's just digging on Kevin Johnson's. This isn't white, it's Kevin Johnson's white. It's Kevin Johnson's. When everyone's just Jones in for this white You're gonna buy this now for a hundred and fifty thousand dollars, and about five years now you're gonna sell it for half a million dollars maybe a million. I mean, everyone's going nuts for Kevin Jones. And I look at paintings and I thought to myself, it's just a game I didn't want to play, but people are playing that game constantly. Yeah. I don't understand why people don't have a space in their life where they don't do what they normally do. You know, Like, if you're a hedge funders, some financial guy, why why do you have to turn everything into transact monitor? Why do you have to monetize? Why why isn't there this one place where you do something just for yourself. How do you feel knowing that you're going to do a painting, and that painting is done, and you sit there and say, now, this painting may wind up like in an apartment at fifteen Central Park West, some guys just gonna punt it to another guy and another guy. And do you just don't even have any feeling about that? You just accept that, what did it piss you off? Yeah? Well, it completely pisses me off. It's the kind of thing that if I actually let it get into my studio, it'll destroy what why I make hardlock. And obviously it gets increasingly harder and harder to do that. I mean, I do these works on paper that oil on paper, their sketches, they're a great pleasure for me to do. Some of them lead to painting, some of them don't. But it's it's an activity that I do, and they're There was a time when they would be sold, you know, for like five thousand dollars and then you know, ten thousand dollars, and I uh, at some point on the secondary market they were selling for a hundred thousand dollars. You know, I would sell sell it to you know, in a show for five thousand dollars. Is six months later there and an auction in place for a hundred thousand dollars, right, So you go back into the studio and you're, you know, I'm making my sketches and stuff like that, and I'm looking at and thinking, well, why not do a couple more? You know? Why not? You know, it's like all of a sudden, they're starting to turn into currency, you know, and which is a totally different sort of way of thinking about and how much and how hard is it for you to resist? Because I was joking with a friend of min and I said, what it must be like in your world where you're completely self determined, where you're completely self generating. I get kind of amazed to sit there and say, got Eric official is the kind of guy where if he and April are like laying there in bed on Sunday, I mean, I have a very kind of a silly improv comedy view of April Gornick and Eric Ficil are lying in bed on a Sunday reading the New York Times, and she turns in and goes, Eric, I'd so love to go hell is skiing reading the papers November. I still love to go hell of skiing in British Columbia in January and you're like, sure, baby, let's go hell and you go out and you paint a painting hell of skiing trip. I mean like like you can, you can just go do a painting. You're Eric official and running out the door, whether you like, like how hard? Have this fantasy that when my muse left me, I would still be able to make product, right, that I that that I wouldn't be making art anymore, but I'd be making things that look like art, and that that was okay, right, And so there were times in my process where I got stuck. I I the inspiration was gone, and I was sure that it Now you know, my mused, my inspiration had left, right, a total blockage kind of thing. And what I found, to my horror was that it didn't just leave my head, it left my hand, and that I actually couldn't paint anymore. I couldn't draw, I couldn't make something look like something. It literally left every part. And that was terrifying. Right, That's that's like your worst nightmare. And uh so I have that memory which keeps it keeps me somewhat, you know, focused on on staying to true to my ultimate goal. So you're there and you're in that space and the and the muse isn't there for you, and you've decided not to engage, preferably if you don't. So what's the longest period you went you didn't paint. It's it's not so much that I didn't paint. I kept trying, like a bulldog one and I just keep trying to go through it. It's just it's dead, dead, dead. So I try to keep in mind that there's like U two audiences and there's only one audience that's actually worth playing too, And it's an audience of voices that are in your head there that are made up of um heroes, you know, artists I admire. Well, you know, there's historical figures. They're like, you know, the the greatest you know arms sculptor, you know, Michael Angelo, say, the greatest sort of anger painter, Max Beckman. You know, they're they're they're like they have very particular things for me that I admire that I either emulate or can't do and wish I could, and you know, etcetera, etcetera. But they're clarifying. And there, you know, there's the mother voice, the father voice, the gym teacher voice, the you know whatever, and yeah, yeah, and they're all in there sort of saying what I can and can't do, what I should and shouldn't do, etcetera. And so I'm like each painting is sort of proving did these voices that this was the right move? You know, that I was going to do something that they would admire, something that would finally shut them up, finally, you know whatever. Anyway, I said, this is a an audience of um that is stands outside of time. It's it's constant, and it has a quality standard to it that I understand. You know, I can tell when I'm my paintings are falling short of that performance that you know it didn't reach where I needed it to go, because I knew that I was falling short of this person. I admire this person, and I hate in so far as your own paintings through your success are monetized or just collected by by pure collectors and or hanging institutions. Have you yourself collected others paintings? Have you used your success? Whose art hangs in your home? Have you collected art I have? I don't consider myself a collector at all. What I what I did was at a certain point. I wanted to acknowledge my peers, so I want I wanted to collect something of each of the people that I admire, who you know, have inspired me, supported me, you know what, helped me form my thoughts. So you know, I have examples of their work. That's why I'm not a collector. It's because I don't have the connoisseurship in terms of going after the best David Sally painting, the best Cindy Sherman, the best Anselm Key for you know, things like that. What I have is examples of their work that that somebody looking over my shoulder would say, oh, this was your time and these were your people and stuff, and what about your own work? Have you finished a painting you said? That's for me? Yeah. Yeah. And the older I get, the more I do that. Yeah. Early on I couldn't afford it, and uh, you know, let some of my my best work go out the window. Yeah exactly. Now I'm a little bit more precious about about that. And and part of it is the you know, the the love doesn't come back in the way you need it to come back. The extreme change is not you know there, it doesn't really work. And the way you wanted to, which is to say, I make a painting out of love, right, and and a profound love which includes respect, admiration, desire, need, you know, all of the things that go into you know, being a human wanting to communicate to another human and and connect to another human. I call that love and and so I make a painting out of love, and I'm seeking love in return. I want that. I want that to come back in that way. Right. So somebody gives you money, right, which, on one hand you think, well, that's an expression of love. They want to possess your work, so so they're they're expressing love. But money doesn't feel like love because it's a neutral currency. Now I have to change that money into something that tells me how much love I just got back? Right? How do you do that? Exactly? That's where the issue. How do you do that? You know you've done it well, so you you know, you buy a car, or you buy a house, you you buy onto your house, Yeah, exactly, you do you do things that you want slash need. You do that, and then there's a point in which you don't need those things anymore. You've got all your toys and stuff, your mortgage is paid exactly, but now you have access right, So is that excess love or is that just? But my question for you is when the muse goes away, when you lapse into a period of product versus art. When when the artist, and that's a very real condition, uh struggles. I found people where it affects them in many ways. It affects their appetite, their sexual appetite, their physical health, their emotional health, their sleep. I mean, it really really really damages them and it hurts them. Have you gone through periods of that where you were, like, really really I thought you were losing it? Would you do to get out of it? I painted your way out of it? Ultimately painted the way out of it. But you know, rely relied a lot on April too. You know, keep me sort of above, so you bring me to So you bring me to where are the One of our last two questions is, let's go to Halifax and you meet April and where are you at your life when you meet April? And what happened? I'm I'm twenty seven years old or something like that. I'm teaching at this art school. It actually is a very sort of advanced thinking place that lie cal Arts, where I went to school. Nova Scotia College of Art and Design was also sort of based on the most radical art of the moment um, anti painting. So they hired me as a young, untested painter teacher simply because they'd fired somebody mid semester, needed someone right away they could care less about painting, so they took a risk on this guy based on what my former teacher had recommended. I get this job. I'm in Halifax, Nova Scotia. I go up there with my wife at the time. Uh, spend three months teaching there. She lapsing into a deep depression because she she's rootless and being ignored. And I'm following you basically and following me, and I'm not sensitive enough to it. You know what that sacrifice was. And uh, you know, we moved back to Chicago in the summer and I get rehired and she announces she doesn't want to go back and our marriage is over. And that following year I meet April. I didn't plan on falling in love. I just planned on having sex. And shame on you, Eric, shame on you call me shallow. Anyway, one thing led to another, and and what it was was. I was actually going through a very sort of complicated set of emotions for uh, you know, I had never mourned the death of my mother. I had just broken up with, you know, split with my wife kind of thing. I was now falling in love not wanting to with April. My work was going through a transition where I was giving up the artists I thought I was going to be for the artist I ultimately became. And that period of doubt threw me into a kind of series of anxiety attacks, panic modes where I really began to have some serious psychological issues. I was dissociating and you know, and ended up on you know, any psychotic medicine and stuff like that to stabilize me. Meanwhile, I'm teaching Meanwhile, you're up showing these young impressionable minds the world through your eyes exactly, let me show you the world through my clumb up and soaked eyes. And the thing is that I was only a couple of years older than them to begin with. Your a young teacher, and I had I had never been taught technique. So I'm teaching you thing like your teacher were doing at cow Arts. And that day, Okay, great, to hear that, you know, to some extent, I was definitely going through several women in the in the student body, but not all at the same moment. But it was a sacrifice. Yeah, I mean, it's a you know, it's a small isolated community that winters are harsh up there. Yeah, and when the skipper runs into Ginger and Maryanne, we can only talk about the weather for so many times because then the title charts, So go ahead, So the skipper runs into Ginger and Marian. Yeah, and ultimately ran ran into April. And she stuck with me through this time, which was really difficult and in a kind of way that you know, I just couldn't imagine there being anybody else, so we did. Now, she was a student who started out doing very conceptual art. I actually the way I tried to impress on her, to make her look at me was I found her working on a on a project. She was doing some something that had she was gluing pieces of wood to a piece of paper and then writing some obscure philosophical text around and it was you know, I just went up to her and said, you know, the idea of gluing wood onto paper just seemed the redundancy. That was so stupid. I can't imagine why anyone would do it, thinking that she'd want to have dinner with me having said that, and she just told me to go fuck myself, and and that was that. And and then for the next six months I tried to make nice to to recover, to recover from your offense. And yeah, so I don't I don't know what made me think an insult would be the way to open the door. Did she ever return the favorite work? Did she ever return the favorite she ever walke into your studio and say, what were you thinking? Yeah? This is just yeah, No, she she's actually my greatest, most clear scene critics, your most prevalent subject. If you painted her more than any other person, yes, yeah, I've painted her a lot. I've painted her in in dispised ways, and I've painted her in ways where you can see it's her. Um. So, now you are a very well known man and your work is very popular. You and your wife are a very admired couple in a community that you live in. And I want to ask you, you know, a why do you live out here? Particularly? You could escape, like a lot of great artists find they won't have real anonymity and peace. You can go live in Italy or anywhere you want to go. Why here? And also, let's be honest, we live out here, and there are certain social rhythms out here, and there are certain patterns that repeat themselves almost metronomically out here all the time. And do you find in a strange way you've washed up on the shores of your own Port Washington yacht club in a way, I mean, there's are kind of a rigor to the way you're living now that you didn't bargain for. Yeah, I think there was a moment a while back where I kind of looked around and went, oh, my god, you know this is this is where I grew up. I'm in a different relationship to it. But it's definitely, you know, more of a suburban than an urban environment and a suburban kind of rhythm to it. But everybody needs a sense of community, needs a sense of place where where they belong. Right, Um, I grew up on Long Island. You grew up on Long Island. I used to come out here in the summertime. It's familiar territory, etcetera. It seems natural in a way to to want to be here. And also it's there's a scale to it that makes you think that you can make a difference. It seems like pretty much everywhere you go we're in a state of you know, transformation or decay or something where it's you know, it's what it was going to take ten years before this place gets ruined and you go to someplace el is going to take another five years before that one does it. So you think, okay, I'll stay and fight it a little bit and do that, plus plus on some you know, sort of basic level, you actually feel like you belong here, you know, so you you want it to mind to do it. It's other people's and its mind. So is it safe to say, just to conclude this, if you will, that the eponymous bad boy of the title still has his doubts, still has his anxiety, still has his fears and issues and so on. He just just learned to handle them differently. I think that's true. Yeah, absolutely, they don't go away. I thought that the older you got, the easier at God, it turns out the opposite. We just learned how to manage patty, dismanage it. Yeah, that's true. M H. Eric Official says he didn't set out to write a memoir. His friend Michael Stone was writing about cal arts, which then morphed into their book Bad Boy, My Life On and Off the Canvas. This is Alec Baldwin and you're listening to here's the thing.

Here's The Thing with Alec Baldwin

Award-winning actor Alec Baldwin takes listeners into the lives of artists, policy makers and perfor 
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