Loaded Deck

Forty artists had their way with skateboards for Alternate Space Art Gallery’s third exhibition, Loaded Deck. “We ordered 40 skateboards and the artists came by and picked them up,” Alex Yanes, the gallery’s owner, explains. “They’re each painting their own style on a blank skateboard and painting a 16-by-20-inch piece, as well. So there’s two works of art for every artist.” Participating artists include Ross Ford, Aholsniffsglue, Johnny Robles and Lebo.
When the exhibit wraps up July 11, the skateboards will be sold and a quarter of the proceeds will be donated to St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital. Alex Yanes, who opened Alternate Space four months ago with graffiti artist Fiftythree, says he and a friend, local artist Marc Torres, had discussed doing a benefit before Torres died from a rare form of cancer in March.
“He was so sick with the chemotherapy, and he told me once, ‘If I feel this bad, I can’t imagine how a child would feel going through the same thing,’” Yanes recalls. “We wanted to do something like this while he was still alive, but he got too sick. Once he was on Hospice care, I gave him my word that I would make good on this. I figured what better way to raise some money than to try to get all these local artists who sometimes go unnoticed? All the artists in this show are 30 and under. It’s our generation of artists — the next generation.”
While Yanes knew most of the artists he asked to get involved, he found some of the others on MySpace and other sites. “Some artists are making sculptures out of the skateboards,” he says. “Some are cutting the boards into pieces. Everybody’s getting really creative with it. They’re using everything from acrylic to spray paint. All these artists use different media so it’s going to be really neat to see what everybody comes up with. I know some of these artists. Everybody’s going to try to top each other. It should be really cool.”

Loaded Deck will open 8 p.m.-midnight Friday and run through July 11 at Alternate Space Art Gallery at CocoWalk, 3015 Grand Ave., Suite 235, in Miami. Call 305/447-2262 or visit Myspace.com/altspacemiami.

Q&A with Alex Yanes

CD: How long has Alternative Space Art Gallery been open?
Alex: We’ve been open for four months now. This is actually our third exhibition that we’re having, the Loaded Deck show. We actually opened two weeks before the Coconut Grove Art Festival back in February.

CD: And you opened this with two other artists?
Alex: One other artist actually -- Fiftythree. He’s actually a graffiti artist from Boston.

CD: Did he move to Miami?
Alex: Actually, he’s lived in a couple different places. He lived in England for a little while, but now he and his family relocated to Aventura.

CD: And he does graffiti art.
Alex: Yeah, he’s actually a graphic designer. He doesn’t paint on walls illegally or anything like that. But that’s his style of artwork.

CD: What was your first show?
Alex: The Coconut Grove Art Festival. We actually had our grand opening the Friday night before the festival kicked off, and we had a huge turnout. We tried to have a show like every month after that. Now we’re featuring more artists than ever. We’ve got six artists in the gallery now.

CD: What was the theme of the last show?
Alex: The last show was a hip-hop theme and we had a DJ and we had local break dancers. It was Urban Art and Dance Expo ....

CD: Can you tell me a little more about the loaded Deck Show?
Alex: Yeah, actually back in March, one of my best friends, he’s an artist and he passed away after a long battle with cancer for a year.

CD: A local artist?
Alex: Yeah, a local artist, Marc Torres. He was diagnosed with a rare form of cancer and they had given him less than a year to live, and he and I used to paint together and everything, and this was something that he wanted to do before he passed away. He was so sick with the chemotherapy, and he told me once, ‘If I feel this bad I can’t imagine how a child would feel going through the same thing. We wanted to do something like this while he was still alive but he got too sick. He wasn’t able to leave his house, so once he was on Hospice Care, I gave him my word that I would make good on this …

CD: I’m sure he’d be happy that you’re having this benefit. How old was Marc?
Alex: Marc was 30, same age. We grew up in the same neighborhood and we’ve known each other for years. It’s sad. Once it got to the point when there was nothing else they could do for him, he still kept fighting it. He was the bravest person I’ve ever known. He wasn’t scared. I don’t think I would have been that strong. I figured what better way to raise some money than to try to get all these local artists who sometimes go unnoticed. There’s a lot of talent in Miami and there’s a great underground art scene that isn’t that what people consider high-end fine art. You know, there’s controversy about that, as far as what’s fine art and what isn’t. All the artists are 30 and under. It’s our generation of artists, the next generation. That’s who’s in this show.

CD: How many artists are in this show?
Alex: We’ve got 40 different artists. We ordered 40 blank skateboards and then all the artists came by and picked one up, and they’re each painting their own style on a blank skateboard and they’re painting a 16-by-20-inch piece as well. So it’s two works of art for every artist. What I did was I went on MySpace and through the Internet and contacts with other friends who are artists who are in the show that I have done other exhibits with, through word of mouth.

CD: That’s how you found them all?
Alex: Yeah, I didn’t think I was gong to be able to get 40 artists, and I still have people asking me to be in the show. Yeah, it’s a great turnout and I think we’re on to something here.

CD: How many are local?
Alex: All the artists except for four.

CD: Which artists are from outside Florida?
Alex: Daryll Pierce who I met during Art Basel. He’s in Denver now. Peat Wollaeger, who I met at Art Basel as well and I did a show with him in San Francisco back in March, which was really cool. These guys are really well-known artists. Another artist is Scott Johnson who is also DJing the event.. He lives in New York now. He's actually from Miami now but he’s been living in New York for like the last 8 years.

CD: So the out-of-town ones, aside from Scott, are they shipping their work?
Alex: They're shipping their work. They wish they could be here though. They kinda come down here once a year but its during Art Basel, so they’ll save money to come down for Art Basel.

CD: So at the end of the show, the boards will be sold and a quarter of the proceeded donated to St. Jude Children's Research Hospital?
Alex: Yeah, the show closes on July 11.

CD: What are some of the unique things the artists are doing with these boards? Alex: Some are cutting the boards into pieces. Everybody's getting really creative with it. They're using everything from acrylic to spray paint. All these artists use different mediums so it's gonna be really neat to see what everybody comes up with. Everybody's working on these privately at home so nobody knows what anyone else is doing. I know some of these artists ... everybody's gonna try to top each other. It should be really cool.

Sneaks at Buck 15

You don’t have to be an artist to participate in Buck15’s Arts and Crafts Summer Series. Last month, aspiring designers dropped by the art lounge to pick up plain, white sneakers to turn into works of art. The newly designed sneakers that are now on display in the upstairs art lounge, and customers can vote on them through 10 p.m. Tuesday when judges including South Florida artist Lebo and designer Nazly Villamizar will announce the winner. There will also be music by DJ Keen One.
The designer of the most popular sneaker will win a “BUCKnight” with a private table, noodles in a pail (from Miss Yip Chinese Cafe downstairs) and a bottle of vodka ranging in price from $130 to $145.
Meanwhile Buck15, designed like a living room with retro couches, local art, graffiti and collectible toys, is gearing up for its T-shirt show. Participants can pick up their white T-shirts and submit finished tees by June 30 for July’s show. Upcoming shows will feature skateboards and toys.
Buck15 is located at 707 Lincoln Lane, Suite 200, in Miami Beach. Call 305-538-3815 or visit Buck15.com.

Fetish Meets Paint

Don’t be fooled by the title of Undergrounds Coffeehaus’ latest art show, Fetish Meets Paint. The exhibit, much of which focuses on self-inflicted bondage of the mind, features only one painting. The remainder of Ginger Dougherty’s 10 works are digital art, pencil drawings and a charcoal drawing of a gothic-looking woman in a corset sitting on a table. Dougherty, a self-described former military brat, draws inspiration from worrying and people-watching. “Tormented Hands,” for instance, emerged from Dougherty’s anxiety about her debt.

“One night, I was laying awake thinking about my student loans,” she explains. “I started doing Google searches to see how they could be resolved and saw all the people who were suffering through the same thing. Then, I was watching the news and seeing everything that was going on and I felt really panicked, really overwhelmed. Instead of just sitting there going crazy, I decided just to put it into some art, harvest the emotions.”

She then took some photos of mannequin hands and started manipulating them on her computer. “The hands represent how we’re drawn in,” she says. “People are just kind of chained to it and they can’t get away from it.”

Art is how Dougherty deals with such heavy emotions. “I’m not the type of person who likes to whine to people too much,” she says. “So instead of being a big, whiny baby, I take whatever feelings I have, whether they are about love, lust or things that bother me, and I put them into my artwork. I like when people look at it, to feel what I’m feeling.

“I feel better after I create a piece,” she continues. “It kind of helps me deal with whatever is going on around me because right now, things are very crazy. It’s very scary, especially with the gas prices and the economy.”

“Bondage of Self,” her drawing of a glass head, is based on people’s reactions to these concerns and the importance of being able to let go of some of the things that are beyond our control. “I see that a lot of people just kind of walk around oblivious to everything,” she says. “They’re very stressed-out. We enslave ourselves to credit cards, loans, character defects. In order to cope, once in a while we need to shield ourselves, which is what the sunglasses represent, and free our minds, which is what the empty glass head represents. It was drawn as an affirmation and a reminder that I am powerless over some things and need to free my mind.”

Fetish Meets Paint will be on exhibit through July 14 at Undergrounds Coffeehaus, 2743 E. Oakland Park Blvd., in Fort Lauderdale. Call 954/630-1900 or visit Myspace.com/undergroundscoffeehaus.

Q&A with Ginger Dougherty

CD: Have you exhibited before?
GINGER: No, this is my first one ever. A lot of my friends have been pushing me for years and they get so frustrated with me. They’re like, 'Why don’t you do something with that? So finally I was at [Undergrounds] and I noticed that she had artwork up and I really liked the shop and the way it felt there, and I thought this is a good place to start. I think I’m gonna start here. So I talked to her and I decided to go ahead and do a showing there. So this is my first one ever.

CD: Tell me how student loans inspired you to create "Tormented Hands."
GINGER: Yeah one night I was laying awake thinking about my student loans and started doing Google searches to see how that could be resolved, and I saw all the people who were suffering through the same thing, and I was watching the news and seeing everything that was going on and I felt really panicked , really overwhelmed. And so, instead of just sitting there going crazy, I decided to put it into some art, harvest the emotions. So that’s what I did.

CD: That's one of the interesting things about art, how you can just sort of take that panic and emotion and use it to create. Is that typically how you handle things in your life, like if you freak, go straight to the art?
GINGER: Yeah, that’s what I do. I’m not the type of person who likes to whine to people too much, so instead of being a big whiny baby, I take whatever feelings I have whether they be about love, lust, or things that bother me and I put it into my artwork. I like when people look at it, to feel what I’m feeling. I like to create emotion. Even when I do portraits I pay attention to the eyes and the body language, so that the people can really connect with what I’m doing.

CD: Art is very therapeutic.
GINGER: I think so.

CD: One of your works in the show incorporate acrylic, leather and chains?

GINGER: Yeah, what it is, I created a canvas out of wood and newspaper and it looks pretty warped, and I have on there the background image – it's very abstract. But then I have a woman, she’s got a white leather silhouette, and a man that is cut out of black leather, and that’s a silhouette, and there’s like a big huge chain link that I put onto the canvas and it looks like they’re in a power struggle, and when you hang it up, it's suppose to be hung up crooked. You’re supposed to hang it near an air conditioner so it moves and it looks like they're in a power struggle, a constant power struggle.

CD: I know the show is titled Fetish Meets Paint, but how many pieces are in the show, and how many of those are actually paintings?
GINGER: I have 10 works, and I think the reason [the owner of Undergrounds] puts Fetish Meets Paint, is because she asked about some of my pieces and I told her well, it’s kind of like fetish meets paint, it’s a little bit industrial, so that’s what she put on there but most of it is not really fetish. It’s kind of like bondage of self.. One will be a painting. Three or four will be digital art, and the rest are going to be pencil drawings, and one of them is charcoal. It’s a picture of a woman, you can see the back of her and and she looks sort of gothic and she’s wearing a corset and she’s sitting on a table. It looks sort of, I don’t know how to explain it, but it almost looks like a photograph.

CD: Interesting.
GINGER: Then I also have the glass head, and that’s basically when I was sitting and observing people which I like to do, and I see that a lot of people just kind of walk around oblivious to everything … They’re very stressed out. It’s just about freeing your mind. Sometimes you just have to empty your mind in order to relieve yourself. It's called Bondage of Self. ... It's
inspired by how we bound ourselves to the chaos and material things of the world. We enslave ourselves to credit cards, loans, character defects, etc. In order to cope once in a while we need to shield ourselves (which is what the sun glasses represent) and then free our minds (which is what the empty glass head represents). It was drawn as an affirmation and a reminder that I am powerless over some things and need to free my mind. The collar around the neck represents bondage. The table it sets on is how our ego needs a rest. The fact that is a head with no body means that we can lose our heads in the insanity of it all. I know that may be confusing and rather eccentric, but it has a very deep meaning about how we need to see what we are bound to and let some things go. For instance, do we really need to buy that extra pair of shoes when we have 45 pair and we are up to our necks in debt? How worthy are so me of the material things we own? Are they worth us losing our minds over if they sit collecting dust?

Tell me about "The Tangled Roots." It started with a photograph of a tree, right?
GINGER: Yeah, I went to John Dickinson State Park. It’s up in Jupiter .,. and they had these really neat tree roots that look like they're hanging on the side of a bank so you can see the actual tree but you can see the roots too, hanging off the side, so I took a picture of that and I also have a couple of mannequins, and I have also some mannequin hands. So I took the hands off the mannequins and just took pictures of them, and then I superimposed them together in photo shop, and so that's how I created that piece.

CD: You have mannequins because you use them for drawing?
GINGER: I use them for drawing but I like the way they look in my house. They’re Saks Fifth Avenue mannequins, pretty interesting looking.

CD: How did you acquire hose?
GINGER: I got them on eBay.

CD: Do you have a different job, or do you do art full-time?
GINGER: Well, right now I'm a student in advertising.

CD: Where do you go to school?
GINGER: I was going to the Art institute of Fort Lauderdale but now I am doing the Art Institute of Pittsburgh online, and so I am going to be going into advertising.

CD: Do you know what you want to do in advertising?
GINGER: Yes, I’m very interested in copywriting or creative directing. Pretty much anything that has to do with advertising, creating commercial, print layout, all those things. My goal is creative director. That would be the idea job for me.

CD: Where do you typically create your art?
GINGER: I usually sit on my porch. I like to sit outside or go to the beach. I like to go to the café. The only bad thing about a café is that usually while I'm sitting there drawing, people always come up behind me and I feel a little self-conscious. But I like to people-watch, so ... and I like to get out of my comfort zone when I create art.

CD: Does people watching inspire a lot of your art?
GINGER: Yeah, because I think people are fascinating. It's kind of interesting to see how they go about their daily lives and how they react to thing and how they interact with each other.

Juan Carlos Bravo

There’s something about the huge-nosed little bald guy sleeping beside a trash can and an empty wine bottles that makes people want to pick him up and tell him everything’s going to be OK. Juan Carlos Bravo calls the characters he paints “cabezones” which he says mean “large head” in Spanish. “But really a ‘cabezone’ in Latin American culture symbolizes a stubborn, foolish person,” he says. “ I found it fascinating human behavior that we insult each other like that, especially where I come from in Peru. They don’t call you by your first name. They use derogatories like ‘cabezone’ and ‘narizone’ (big-nosed), to be mean or to make fun of [someone]. So I started to play with those ideas by creating these characters which represent folly and vices and things like that. A good example is The Morning After (pictured), which is a little guy who’s drunk and helpless in a ditch because of his vice and he has a wine cork in his ear, as he doesn’t listen to advice.” Such stubborn cuties are part of Pearls and Marbles, Bravo’s first solo exhibit which will feature 14 paintings about childhood and beauty. There are also paintings of women carrying big-headed babies, and waterside scenes full of characters and symbolism such as pearls and marbles. “I came here when I was 8 years old from Peru,” Bravo says. “I used to collect little marbles and we’d play on the sidewalk and in the grass and compete. If you win, you get another marble and you keep collecting them. They’re a personal symbolism for childhood and innocence so I incorporated them in all of the new paintings. They’re all over the place, the little marbles. You’ll see them on the floor or a kid will be holding them. The pearls are kind of the opposite, like mature. They represent love, beauty, vanity, different things like that. It’s the same circular form, but different in a way.” Bravo, who has been drawing all of his life, was 25 when he began painting. He’d planned to pursue a psychology degree and do social work, but while attending Miami Institute of Psychology, he realized he didn’t want to make a career of this. Since he’d been drawing most his life, he transferred to Florida International University and began taking art electives. “I had never painted before but I was fascinated by the sensuality of oil painting,” he says. “ I just wanted to learn everything I could about it.” Seven years later, he collects artist biographies and travels to museums such as The Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Louvre in Paris. Since moving from Miami Beach to Biscayne Park, he also has a whole room in which to paint. “I haven’t worked in this kind of haven, because before it was always difficult, but now it’s such a pleasure.”
Pearls and Marbles will open 8-10 p.m. Friday and runs through May 28 at Arcoart, 145 Menores Ave., Coral Gables. Call 305/447-2262 or visit Arcoart.com

Q&A with Juan Carlos Bravo

CD: Does your upcoming show have a title or a theme?

JCB: Yes, the title of one of the series I’m working on is called Pearls and Marbles. The story behind that is growing up, I used to collect marbles … I came here when I was 8 years old from Peru. I used to collect little marbles and we’d play on the sidewalk and in the grass and compete. If you win, you get another marble and you keep collecting them. They’re personal symbolism for childhood and innocence …. So I incorporated them in all of the new paintings. They’re all over the place, the little marbles. You’ll see them on the floor or a kid will be holding them. The pearls are kind of the opposite, like mature. They represent love, beauty, vanity, different things like that. It’s the same circular form, but different in a way. The paintings, I have about 14 paintings that I am gonna be showing and they go with the theme of childhood and beauty.

CD: How long have you been painting?

JCB: I’ve been painting exactly 8 years.

CD: So how old were you when you started?

JCB: 25.

CD: Did you go to art school?

JCB: Actually, I graduated from Miami-Dade and I was pursuing my psychology degree. I was interested in doing social work or helping people through social work, things like that. So I went to the Miami Institute of Psychology. There, I got like really close to seeing how my career would carry into fruition, and I didn’t really enjoy it. That’s when I started soul searching and the one thing I always had with me, as part of me, was drawing. So at age 24, I started taking some elective courses. I switched schools to go to FIU and there, that’s when I took some electives in art and it was just natural, it came naturally. And I was so fascinated. I had never painted before but I was fascinated by the sensuality of oil painting. I just wanted to learn everything I could about it.

CD: I understand you’re an avid reader. Do you read a lot of books that inspire your art?

JCB: Yeah. I collect books, biographies of artists. I love collecting, especially from the Renaissance. In literature, my favorite era is the existential period, like Franz Kafka, Herman Hess, Camus … I love all those writers and I read them a lot. I’m more into the autobiographical aspect of writing, writers that portray the human condition through their own experiences. Lately, I found books by Henry Miller, Jack Kerouac. A friend of mine recommended them. They’re not as sentimental. They’re a little bit edgier, so I’m adapting to them. I’m being open-minded and learning from them, you know.

CD: So you have a big collection of books?

JCB: Yeah, I have my own personal little library. That’s my hobby besides painting. I love collecting paintings books, for example a specific period, Baroque and things like that. My passion for that has led me to travel a lot. I’ve been to, I think, the three top museums in the world … and just last year we went too the Washington National Galllery. I love to travel.

CD: Sounds like art agrees with you in a way psychology did not.

JCB: You know what it was? … I wanted to learn about me and about people, how we think,. How we behave. I’ve always been fascinated by that and wanted to learn more but … but as a profession, I didn’t feel I could help as much because a lot of the time, they just prescribe drugs. They don’t go for the humanistic side of it. So I found art and I still use the things I learned in psychology in my art. I use a lot of psychoanalysis, a lot of things I learned. I still have my psychology books and I use them as references a lot. That’s why I have a lot of interesting symbolism at work, because of my background in psychology.

CD: The paintings of characters such as the one in The Morning After will also be part of the show?

JCB: Yeah, those are part of the series. Those characters, the ones for example in The Morning After are characters that I created in a way. I call them cabezones, which in Spanish a symbol for “large head,” but really a cabezone in Latin American culture symbolizes a stubborn person, foolish person. I found it fascinating human behavior that we insult each other like that, especially where I come from in Peru. They don’t call you by your first name. They use derogatories like cabezone and narizone (big-nosed), to be mean or make fun of someone. So I started to play with those ideas by creating these characters which represent folly and vice and things like that. A good example is The Morning After which is a little guy and he’s drunk and helpless in a ditch, you know because of his vice and he has a wine cork in his ear, as he doesn’t listen to advice …

CD: I noticed that. People seem to love those little characters.

JCB: Yeah, I’m so happy about those. I feel like that’s my trademark, my original, while the larger pieces are more inspired by Renaissance art and classic art. of course, with contemporary iconography, you know.

CD: Do you have another job or do you paint full time?

JCB: No I paint full-time.

CD: And you’re a surfer as well.

JCB: Yeah, I’ve been surfing since I was 15. I’ve been surfing so long now that now I’m not too amped to go surfing anymore, because I’ve been through a lot surfing, a lot of injuries.

CD: What was the worst?

JCB: The worst injury I had was a year ago. There was a perfect cold front, when the waves come and it’s really cold. So no one’s really out there when it’s cold wind windy and miserable. No one goes to the beach. So what happened is that I was there by myself, and I have a pretty good expertise with a surfboard, you know, but what happened is six months before, I had sprained my ankle playing basketball, so I was trying to surf with kind of a bad ankle. I started surfing and I was doing pretty good, so I was going a little bit more aggressive and then my leg gave out, and the board hit me right in the face.

CD: And you were out there by yourself?

JCB: Yeah, it hit me right in the face so hard that I was unconscious for two or three seconds. I get up and I don’t feel anything. I’m a little numb and I get my board and I start paddling back because I’m thinking ‘Oh, I just got hit, right.’ Then I noticed that blood is coming out of my nose, like a spraying of blood like a faucet was open. I almost passed out. I had to swim back with one arm, because I was trying to hold on with the other one so the blood wouldn’t go, and then I just laid on the beach. There were no lifeguards. No one was out there, and that was very traumatizing. And that has something to do with the art. … A week or two after that, I had to go to the hospital and I had to go through plastic surgery so they could fix the nose because it was really out of place. This whole experience, coming from the doctor to the plastic surgeon, me and my wife stopped to get something to eat and I had like vision of the Brittany painting, the one that’s in the front of the invitation … that’s the way it came to me. Because I felt exactly what she must have been feeling at the moment when she shaved her head and she was going through this crisis. Like you want to break the mirrors in a way because your appearance has so much value over who you think you are because once something is damaged or something happens to it, you go into a kind of a crisis in a way, so I understood her perfectly and what she wanted to do. She wanted to kind of end that. So from that experience I created that painting, so something good came out of it, but another thing was my, I guess you would say, my passion for the surf, kind of diminished from then on. I felt disappointed because it was really a traumatizing experience.

CD: So you don’t go anymore?

JCB: I go once in a awhile but now it’s like I have a little fear because I’m very cautious, especially when there are really tough conditions and it’s really windy … I’ve been hurt before but never to that extreme. I’m really cautious and I have a lot to lose. Before you’re young and you don’t really care, but now I have a family I have my daughter … I feel like in my heart I’ve achieved a vision I want to pursue. So it doesn’t interest me anymore.

CD: Is this your first solo show?

JCB: This is my first solo exhibition.

CD: How exciting.

JCB: Very exciting. I’ve had little group shows here and there, but nothing major. This is the first major thing for me. I pretty much graduated in 2003 and until now I’ve been developing a vision, because when I graduated I wasn’t doing what I was dong now. It took me two or three years to achieve something that I really felt was honest and unique in a way … my personal vision.

CD: Where do you paint? Do you have a place in your home?

JCB: Yes, recently we moved away from the beach … I was on the beach for 20-something years but we decided to move and we now live in Biscayne Park which is in the Miami shores area and we got a duplex so it’s really spacious and I got one of the rooms and made it into my studio and I haven’t worked like this in this kind of haven for me, because before it was always difficult, but now it’s such a pleasure …

CD: Because you can leave everything right where it is, right? And you can just walk right back into the middle of it.

JCB: Exactly, that’s what I love. It’s fantastic.

CD: Do you listen to music while you paint?

JCB: Yes, music is essential when I create my compositions because I do work intuitively and depending on the music and the feel of it, it creates dynamic and energy where I’m beginning because I begin my pieces abstractly, like you look at it and it looks like a Jackson Pollock painting but eventually I start seeing a narrative and developing it, and then incorporating symbolism and all kinds of things, like dream imagery. I’ll turn on the news and see something just really impactful and I’ll just incorporate it in there, and eventually this abstract composition it will develop into a narrative and the music I mainly listen to. I listen to a lot of classical music, like I have mixed tapes of different ambience kind of thing and but hen I also listen to things I’ve been listening to for a lot of time since I was young, like a lot of rock ‘n’ roll, not your typical rock ‘n’ roll … more like experimental rock you would say. I don’t know if you’re familiar with Chris Cornell.

CD: Yes,

JCB: He was in Soundgarden. Well, he has a few cool albums that are very soulful. They’re still a little rocky, there’s some blues in it – and they’re really, really wonderful. He’s my favorite artists and actually in my new series, I’m gonna start doing work on idols like people I admire and incorporate it into stories, like a lot of musicians. I’m gonna do one on Chris Cornell. I already have them drawn out and sketched. I have one on Kurt Cobain, another idol when I was growing up and one of my favorite bands … have you heard of the band Iron Maiden?

CD: Yeah.

JCB: Growing up, I listened to them a lot.

CD: Someone from Iron Maiden actually lives here, right?

JCB: Nicko McBrain. I saw them twice and the cool thing was that I met the bass player. I met him and got his autograph and actually got a drum stick from Nicko. So it paid off to be like a really diehard fan.

CD: The idols sound like a good show. You seem to have a lot of ideas.

JCB: Yeah, exactly that’s why I’m thinking I don’t have time for everything ‘cause I want to put out these ideas. Especially I’m really excited about the musician series I’m working on. I already have all the ideas drawn and everything. I even have one on KISS. I’m not really a big fan of KISS, the band but I really like the social commentary because they live a very decadent, pleasurable lifestyle and I find that interesting. In this society there’s a lot about pleasure, beauty, celebrity. There’s a little obsession with it.

CD: A little?

JCB: (Laughs). Yeah, I’m not exempt from it so I find that interesting and I want to pursue that. So for example, even if I don’t like KISS per se as a favorite band or anything like that, I still see their story interesting. But that’s the next series.

CD: Do you have any favorite local artists?

JCB: Favorite local artists? That’s a tough one …

CD: It’s OK if you don’t?

JCB: Britto. Lebo. I I love their work … but just aesthetics, I look for more psychology and the human condition in my work. That’s why I mainly focus, like my influences are either from books or from movies.

CD: What kind of movies?

JCB: One that has influenced me a lot is David Lynch. My favorite movie, I would say in my Top 5 of all time is The Elephant Man. That movie is just so amazing and really so powerful. I love that movie. I love Blue Velvet, the way he could do social commentary like that … really powerful. I really enjoy all his movies. His latest movies are getting a little too wacky for me., because I like when he has a plot but when he really goes off just depicting dream imagery, it’s a little hard to understand. Another director I really love is David Cronenberg ... the old classics of course like The Fly. He has this theme going with technology and the human flesh, which is really interesting, like how technology keeps advancing and us humans can’t in a way cope and adapt to what’s happening. I think he keeps that idea in most of his movies until recently. The recent ones are kinda going more into the violence. He’s kind of researching something else. But I kind of like his work. … Speielberg, I have some great memories of his movies – ET, Schindler’s List. I like drama. Oh wait. Before I forget, one of my top influences – have you heard the director called Alejandro Jodorowsky. He did a movie called santa Sangre. He’s a Chilean surrealist director. He was working in the ‘60s, ‘70s and he’s very metaphysical and surreal. His movies are really, really experimental for the time they were done and really revolutionary. Right now, he doesn’t make the same movies. He works on books on metaphysics and things like that …

CD: Anything else you wanted to say about your upcoming show or your art?

JCB: Where I want to go with my art … I started using in a way autobiographical experience, the personal. That’s what I was taught in art school, to really focus on the personal but now as I’ve been working I’m really developing and want to increase the social commentary. My goal is to create a painting that serves not only for a person to know me and see what I’m thinking but also serves as a testament of the time. That’s my goal with each painting that I create.

Augusten Burroughs

Augusten Burroughs, author of Running With Scissors, reached back into his early childhood to write his sixth book, A Wolf at the Table: A Memoir of My Father. In this heartbreaking account, Burroughs reflects on his desperate and unsuccessful attempts to earn the attention of his alcoholic father while struggling to confirm his suspicions that there was something very wrong with him. Burroughs has said this is the story he has been most afraid — yet most compelled — to tell. Recently, City Link interviewed Burroughs, who will read Monday in Miami Beach, about the book, his horrific holidays and future projects.


Q&A with Augusten Burroughs

CD: Are you in the scary country house I read about in The New York Times?

AUGUSTEN: I’m in the scary country house, exactly. The New York place is under construction which will take the rest of my life probably. Even though it’s tiny, things just take forever there. So yup, we’re here.

CD: I understand you started dictating into a tape recorder at 9 and that by 12 you were writing everything down, and now you have written six books?

AUGUSTEN: This is the sixth.

CD: What sets A Wolf at the Table apart from your other memoirs?

AUGUSTEN: It’s so unlike any of my other books. It’s almost 180 degrees. It’s not funny, it’s not light and it doesn’t have that sort of caustic spin. I guess my humor that people know me for is really a sort of a well-honed defense mechanism that really got sharpened when I was 12, 13, 14, 15, living with my mother’s psychiatrist and just finding myself in a state of complete chaos, where my surroundings were so profoundly not only unfamiliar but unusual and my mother was so wildly unstable, suddenly, very suddenly. It was either slit my wrist or look at the turkey carcass on the floor. What are you gonna do? So I focused on the absurd, and I think I always had a sense of humor but it was sort of just psychological triage. My sense of humor just became really, really developed and Wolf was written before that period of time. So I’m much more earnest, and that was more difficult to write. I mean, I didn’t expect the book to be as challenging to write as it was, even though going into it I knew this wasn’t going to be funny, and are my readers just gonna be totally turned off by this? But then I quickly stopped thinking like that because you can’t think about, or at least I can’t think about the reader, because as soon as I do, I can never connect with them. So I just have to write purely for myself and hope that people can relate or connect, but I didn’t expect it to be as kind of harrowing as it was, and the things is, I guess I shouldn’t have been too surprised.

CD: How do you remember so far back?

AUGUSTEN: I have a very good memory for way back. I can remember, being even younger. Wolf starts around [the time I was] 1 ½. but I can remember being 8 months old. I have a lot of memories from that time. It’s not like I just have one that clings to me. I can look at a baby photograph and internalize that image. I have a lot of memories from then. None of them are verbal. It’s not like any of them are really thoughts.

CD: But early memories of your father were missing?

AUGUSTEN: Well, I have none from him, yeah. Just as a sort of shadow on the stairs and one or two places. Really, nothing, until I was much, much, much older. But this memory is a double-edge sword. I mean, it’s great because it’s there and I can access my early childhood and it’s very vivid. I mean, I can stand right here, right now, and I can literally smell the turpentine my mother used when she was doing her oil paintings. … When I’m writing, I’m really watching a movie. I’m not sitting there thinking, “Now, what did I say?” It’s very fast and it’s just right there, like a movie. And unfortunately, it was the same with this book, which made it in places really terrifying and really disturbing and ugly to [write]. I hate talking about this because it’s almost like some asshole actor talking about how hard it was to shoot his movie … because they had to jump off the cablecar and he was worried he was going to spring his ankle.

CD: Well, I was curious about the process. I mean, how did the process of writing this book, compare emotionally to what you want through with others?

AUGUSTEN: Possible Side Effects and Magical Thinking were collections. I don’t remember how many stories were in each one, but probably close to 20 and they were like little mini memoirs. Of courses, I didn’t write them in the book in the order that you read it. And, I mean, it was just a lot more fun, and Running With Scissors actually was a lot more fun because I was focusing what I thought of as sort of the fun points. Now this stuff that floated to the very surface, the highlights of that experience because it was such a huge experience that it was almost insurmountable, it was like trying to create a map for the United States in 1547. I mean, how on earth do you go about doing this? It was overwhelming. So I focused on what I felt were the sort of fun moments mostly, and its kinda actually like that with every book. But this was completely different. I was very depressed, and I’ve never had an extended period of depression. I mean, I’ve been depressed certainly for maybe weeks or even months, but never anything that went on for the duration of a couple of years of writing. I was very isolated. I spent all my time alone working on it. And I worked on it all the time, from the second I woke up until the middle of the night.

CD: What did you learn about your father after he died in 2005?

AUGUSTEN: I had inherited four of my father’s diaries when he died … page-a-day diaries pre-printed with the dates. And he would never of course write beyond that one page. My uncle sent me up a couple of boxes full of documents of photographs from my father’s childhood that I had never seen, photographs from my own childhood that I had never seen, and then all these papers, because my father’s mother was a hoarder … so a lot of his elementary school reports, on Columbian coffee for example, his dissertations, all these documents were there, so I was getting inside his mind in a way that I never had before and it was eerie to me. It was really eerie and it emphasized somehow the quality that my father most possessed which was this construction. He had constructed this very, very effective personality. He was a Southern gentleman and was gracious and charming and he was absolutely false. I mean, there was just not one true thing about him. Not one true thing about him. And as a child I felt crazy because you think about having an abusive parent, as least if I had … I mean my father was a drunk, but at least if he had been the kind of drunk who hit me, I would have had a bruise in the morning. I could have said, “Yeah, it’s true. There’s proof.” But with this, what did I have? What was I so crazy about ... why was I so upset. I’d wake up in the middle of him sharpening all the knives in the house when my mother’s gone. I mean that could just be a very practical man. He could be a man who likes to keep everything in nice working order and he wanted to save electricity so he turns the lights off. If I interpreted his smile as being peculiar, well, I was a child. But I knew, the thing is I knew. I knew, I knew I knew with every fiber of my being that he was putting on sort of a show, and that’s how my life was. Only a couple of times did I see the mask of my father unzipped, and once was during the process of writing this book when I read his journals which were just filled … I mean during the most chaotic point of his entire life, he’s talking about the price of corn, and then there’s the one line where he talks about me being upset and how it must be something to do with “my games.” That was just chilling because that’s exactly what they were – they were his games. And then of course, when I had my brilliant idea to drink too much and call him and suggest he push my mother off the bridge, thinking it would be reverse psychology, thinking this is gonna actually set me free, because he’s gonna say Son … I’m not even gonna talk to you, son. You’re just drinking, carrying on …

CD: But instead he told you how many windows had a view of that bridge.

AUGUSTEN: Right … as horrifying as it was, it was the most freeing moment I had ever had with my father because it confirmed absolutely everything that had come before.

CD: Right, I’m curious, because you have written so many memoirs … I mean I have five siblings, all of whom grew up in the same house, same two parents and if we had to write memoirs about our childhood, they’d all be very different, and those differences could become a point of contention. Can you talk about how your memoirs affected your family relationships.

AUGUSTEN: Well, you know, my father’s dead and my mother and I have not had a relationship for many years but it strengthened my relationship with my brother. And it is true. When he read Wolf, I mean it’s not his experience. We’ve talked about this a little bit, but my brother and I were raised essentially by two completely different people. We were both only children, raised with two different sets of parents really, because by the time I came along, the marriage was in a state of ruin and my mother was extremely suicidal, and my father was absolutely mad and profoundly alcoholic, and absolutely just complete mad. My brother had undiagnosed Asberger’s syndrome so he was in his own technical world. He was lost completely to a world of transistors, transceivers and oscillioscopes … all the ‘70s technology. And then when he was a few years older he was out of the house, just gone. But it’s the nature of memoir, I think, because it’s a person’s memories and their reflections on the events of their life. Certainly some facts will sync up with other members of the family if they were to write a memoir but the interpretation probably wouldn’t because it’s different than anybody else's. It’s almost like if you are driving down the highway really fast and you see this horrible car accident, and the car is all mangled and you look at the person and you say, “Oh my God, that’s horrible. Those people must be dead. No one could survive that. What a terrible accident.” And you arrive at your dinner party and you describe this horrible, horrible accident you saw and then inside the accident, lets say it happens to be a Volvo and the people in the car are a little shaken up but they’re looking around and nothing has intruded into the passenger’s compartment and the dashboard is perfect and the radio still works and they’re looking at each other and neither has a bruise and they’re like, “Oh so I guess it wasn’t that bad. Which then is true? Which then is true? That is Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity, that both are true, that both are true and both are valid. My mother, for Running With Scissors, I have never discussed it with her but I guarantee you that she would think I got it all wrong. Running With Scissors should never have been the story of a little boy given away by his mother to her even crazier psychiatrist … It should be the story of a brilliant Southern woman who was repressed all of her life and finally tapped into her creative unconscious. I would have the emphasis completely wrong, is what she would have felt. But with my brother it stengthened us and it liberated him, and I think it made him much happier. It certainly connected him to the community at large in a much more profound way that he had been. Of course he is writing now himself.

CD: Yes, I saw that he had written a book actually. I listed to his first chapter online.

AUGUSTEN: Yeah, I mean it’s um, I think it’s been inspiring for him and I think its been good for him. Even though, you know, like I said, we lived in two different households. But many things remain the same. He certainly remembers the stuff that happened with us. He knew how horrible our father was, you know.

CD: It seems, in listening to his first chapter, he expressed the same feeling you did your book, about trying to convince yourself that you are not your father etc.

AUGUSTEN: Yeah, I think my brother went through that as well. My brother definitely went through that as well.

CD: I understand the movie rights to A Wolf at the Table were sold in 2005.

AUGUSTEN: Yeah, they were actually sold before I wrote it.

CD: Does that mean you’re more comfortable with your books being made into movies now? I know with Running With Scissors you were initially pretty protective and didn’t really plan on going there at all.

AUGUSTEN: I am, and it’s just a matter of the people that option it. I just always go by my instincts. Sometimes I make the right choice and sometimes I don’t make the right choice but at least I have no one to blame but myself and I’m fine with that. And I just really like the people who optioned it, and were interested in it. I loved this woman. She’s just really, really smart – Lucy Fisher over at Red Wagon [Productions]. She’s really, really smart and she’s a really good mother. I have like this weird magnet inside of me. I can spot a good mother at 50 paces. That matters. It matters that the person, if they have children, are very good with children. And I just really liked her. I just really liked her. And they were enthusiastic about it, and I just explained what I was going to do, the book I was going to write and knowing it was going to end up being different when it’s written. But they were great, so I did.

CD: Are you still working on your holiday story collection, You Better Not Cry?

AUGUSTEN: Yes, that will be my next book. That’s fun because it’s a good book to be working on because its so 180 degrees from A Wolf at the Table. It’s more similar to my other stuff but it’s also different, and its fun because I love writing about the holiday season. I have always loved the holidays, the Christmas time of the year. I have always loved it since I was tiny. And every single holiday has been appalling, one after another after another after another. Including the last two attempts I had as an adult, which were the worst of all. … The house flooded and the dog almost died.

CD: How is the dog ... it’s Bentley right?

AUGUSTEN: Bentley, that’s right! He’s doing great. He had to have two surgeries. I had to move to the basement of the house where I wrote Running With Scissors. I had to hold him up when he took a step and I had to squeeze the pee out of his bladder. Did you ever see the movie with Susan Sarandon, Lorenzo’s Oil, where the boy had some horrid nerve disease that no one could cure. It was very, very, very, very high maintenance. It was around the clock … and of course, I just love him to death, I love him as if he were a child so I did everything for him and I put all work on hold. But he’s doing great.

CD: Will that book be out by Christmas?

AUGUSTEN: Not this Christmas, no. I think it will be next.

CD: In the beginning of the Running With Scissors movie, we hear, “I guess it doesn’t matter where I begin – no one is going to believe me anyway.” Is this something you struggle with when you write?

AUGUSTEN: No that’s something the director added in. I don’t think about that. As a matter of fact, with Running with Scissors that never even crossed my mind. My concern was that people would find it boring, because no matter how extraordinary your own circumstances may be … let’s take for example the daughter of Madonna. Madonna’s daughter certainly knows that she lives a privileged life, and she certainly knows that her mother is very popular and very famous. But that’s all academic. She knows those things but I’m sure she’s wholly unimpressed, and I’m sure her mother, Madonna, is just Mom. That’s kinda what it was like for me with Running With Scissors. A part of me knew that this was an unusual story and then another part was just worried that it was just gonna be tedious for people because, “Who cares?’ because it’s just so profoundly familiar. So I don’t think about the reader, I don’t think about the reader when I’m writing.

CD: Why do you write?

AUGUSTEN: I tend to write very much for the same reasons , motivations that I did as a kid, which is to process the world, and myself. It’s almost as if I need to write. Well, it’s not almost as if I need to write. I do need to write. And it doesn’t work any other way. It only works if I write everything that I am feeling and thinking and going through and don’t do a any type of editing or think about a reader.

CD: I believe there are some very important things that writers only learn about themselves though the process of writing an the way that writing forces you to analyze your life.

AUGUSTEN: You’re absolutely right about that.

CD: What is the most surprising thing, or the most insightful thing, that you have learned about yourself?

AUGUSTEN: Probably, one of the things … and it was the thing that really got me to really start writing, for real, was when I realized that all my drinking and my carrying on, and going out at night really late to bars, and writing on napkins and advertising itself … cycling through friends like tissues, having new friends every year kind of living … I was like a projectile and I was traveling further and further away form myself at tremendous velocity. My alcoholism was almost beside the point in a way. The drinking was just another form of jet fuel, and I realized that I need to do exactly the same thing I’m doing, but I need to do it in the opposite direction. I need to write, and it doesn’t matter what I write. I just need to do the thinking on paper so there’s a paper trail. So I think that was something I learned. And I learned a lot writing Dry. Dry was written originally as my journal when I got out of rehab when I was 30. I mean it was written over years but that’s when I started it. And what I learned through that was the incredibly comforting, soothing properties of writing. I mean it really has a medicinal value. You don’t have to be a good writer to reap the benefits of writing. Writing is extremely soothing because you can go step by step through your anxiety or concerns or your circumstances and if not understand them, at least establish them. That alone provides tremendous relief. I’m trying to think of a sort of specific watershed moment, and I guess it would be realizing I needed to write in the first place and really take it seriously. But I’m always surprised I think by what I find. I’m a lot stronger, I think, than what I give myself credit for. I do think of myself as a strong person, but I think I’m even stronger than I sometimes realize. … I realized too that I’m smarter. I grew up thinking I was just dumb as a box of hair because of my brother constantly telling me how stupid I was, and having a brother who’s a genius, and having parents who are both academic and yet are not interested at all. I obviously did nothing to attract their attention so I can’t be very smart, and it was through writing, it was actually through some journal writing and before I was a writer writer with a capital W … that I went back and read and I actually realized, you know, I’ve got a brain. And I didn’t have that validation in school because I didn’t go to school, so I mean I’ve really learned a lot about myself through writing.

CD: Will you will always be drawn to this sort of writing, where you are pulling from your own life and analyzing.

AUGUSTEN: I will absolutely, but I don’t know that I will always publish it. I will always write but I don’t know that I will always publish it. I really want to write novels. You know, as much as I enjoy this writing, I know the end of every story before I sit down to write the first word essentially. With fiction it’s completely different. I don’t outline my fiction, so I don’t know what’s gonna happen from page to page. I’ve written three novels, though I have only published one and the other two are completely different. I mean they seem as though they were written by different authors. They’re not great novels but it was a great experience to write them. I love fiction, so that’s what I will turn to.

CD: Any other projects in the works?

AUGUSTEN: There are a couple, but I don’t think I can talk about them yet. How’s that for an unsatisfying answer.

CD: Well, Sellevision is being made into a movie, isn’t it?

AUGUSTEN: Yeah, Sellevision is on the process. That looks like it’s going forward and these are the crucial weeks here of casting, and once the cast is finalized and announced they’re hoping to begin shooting in July. And if they get the people that apparently they have, it will be great.

CD: What sort of feedback do you get on our memoirs?

AUGUSTEN: I get tremendous feedback – everything from “I have the opposite life and you make me so grateful for my own station” to “I’ve had exactly the same thing.” It’s just such an enormous range. If you come to one of my readings, one of my events, it’s very young people and also very old people from absolutely every imaginable walk of life. It’s really, really, really, really remarkable to me. I look at my readers and I’m always amazed that they’re my readers because they always seem so cool or smart or empathetic, or, you know? And I’m always amazed. It’s been great in that sense. It’s made me feel more connected I think to humanity, to realize …I mean for a long time growing up and in my 20s, what I went through when I wrote about Running With Scissors, I really did feel that I was the only one who had such a life. And I know now that it’s absolutely not true, that a lot of people went through something very, very, very similar, with many details very similar. So I think that’s been liberating and I think I’ve learned too that everybody has stuff in their past that they’re not proud of or that they’re ashamed of or confused by or that haunts them, you know? And just reading about someone else’s experience makes you feel less alone, less haunted, less isolated … that’s the power of memoirs and that’s why memoirs. I think, are so popular. They’re healing to both read and write. I mean a good memoir, well told, a good beautifully true memoir, it resonates in your soul, it really does.

Augusten Burroughs will read and sign copies of A Wolf at the Table 7:30 p.m. Monday at Lincoln Theatre, 541 Lincoln Road, in Miami Beach. Tickets are free but only a limited number will be available. Call 305/442-4408 or visit Booksandbooks.com.

Showtel

Showtel, the exhibition Kara Walker-Tome curated at Hotel Biba in West Palm Beach on Saturday, was bizarre, interesting, disturbing and fun. At left is a creature from Large Corporations by Halie Ezratty, a Dreyfoos School of the Arts senior who works in sculpture, installation and computer animation. I'll quote straight from the program here, as it sums this exhibit up well"

"Large corporations are legally entitled to function as an individual. They are insatiable and perverse creatures who put their own financial benefits about the health of the community and the environment: 'Profit over health.' They collect establishments, buildings that leech onto their backs and spew out carbon dioxide emissions that deteriorate and warm the environment. They secrete a putrid toxic substance from their mammary glands and flood the surroundings. And then they swell up and bloat and warmly offer us their biological poisons. They want to nurture us by deceiving us. They are synthetic corruptors and are excellent at what they do."

While I was in this room, a woman was in there asking the creature if they OK, and whether he/she needed a drink. Some guy thought that was pretty funny. She said she had made a friend, and was trying to encourage him to enter into conversation with this creature. I think she suggested that he ask the creature about the meaning of life. I'm guessing he would have answered that it was about making LOTS of money, no matter what that took.




Imagine if all the jotted-down reminder notes came alive to haunt you in your sleep? Did you remember to look at them all, or do you wake up in the middle of the night wondering if you spelled someone's name right in a story? Wondering if there was some important interview that you missed, or some looming deadline you may have forgotten about? And isn't it funny how so many of those little notes wind up floating around, and later when we find them on a nightstand or in a pocket or a desk drawer, they don't even make sense? It's as if they were written in a shorthand that after a certain expiration date becomes impossible to decipher. Names we don't remember, projects we've long since forgotten about. Each note in Christian DeFazio's Alright Already had handwriting on it, as did the notes floating around above.



Room 114 was apparently reserved for Mister Rogers neighborhood. A video showed the familiar man, known for changing his shoes and cardigan sweaters, while a little trolley made it's way around the track. One wall was lined with one colorful portrait after another of Rogers, and the bed was reserved for ... I guess it's Lady Elaine and King Friday .... I can't recall seeing Henrietta "Meow Meow" Pussycat, but she was probably there somewhere. This work is by Lauren Jacobson and Cristina Sierra, both of whom graduated from FAU with a BFA in sculpture. The room is described as "a close look at the character of "Mr. Rogers, a man who asked the question: "Won't you be my neighbor?"


Other standouts in the show, which were more difficult to capture with photos, were Bradley Lezo and Denise Moody-Tackley's Life Aquatic (at left), which featured an entire bedroom sunken into the hotel pool to make a statement about global warming and adjustments we may have to make, as a result. Also memorable was Sue Stevens' Enumerate, which featured LOADS of alarm clocks, all going off at once in a dark room with a bed. It was downright nightmarish. ... It reminded me of what the the morning after trying to sleep with all those reminder notes floating around everywhere. There's a photo below but the flash kind of ruins the effect of it. Imagine seeing it in the dark, with all those different flashing times and the sound of every one of those alarms going off.

To see some pics of Showtel that were taken by City Link's Alyson Gold, click here.

The faces of Ross Ford

Q&A with Ross Ford
Ross Ford's solo show kicks off Wednesday at Buck 15 in Miami Beach. Recently, Ross Ford discussed his faces, the tiny apartment in which he started painting them, and how a trip to Pearl helped him to stop listening to Joy Division.

CD: You started drawing the faces in eighth grade, then moved on to video in high school, then returned to the faces?

ROSS: Actually yes, I do have paintings that are about 15 or 16 years old at this point that are very similar to what I’m doing now. The style isn’t quite the same. In fact, some of the first ones that look a lot like the modern ones are a lot more angular as opposed to rounded. But I really have been sorta sticking to the same thing for that long. I had this idea to engage in this particular activity for painting for a long time.

CD: How did you arrive at that?

ROSS: Well, the faces sort of evolved out of what I was doing, sort of a nervous behavior. I used to draw a lot of like, comic book style illustration type things, and the thing about comic book characters is that they all look the same. They’re all big muscley guys and crazy beautiful girls and the only thing that’s different about any of them is their face. Once I had sort of figured out how to draw like the basics of comic book stuff -- and I used to always doodle on my notebooks at school, like different little faces -- it just kept evolving. When I got to college, I used to hang out with a couple of my friends who are also artists and we would listen to music and draw and doodle and stuff for hours. I don’t know how it evolved exactly. I just started doing the faces over and over again, and I have literally sketch books filled with thousands and thousand of them, and there’s nothing else drawn in the books. It’s just row after row after row after row of faces, and each on their own is interesting but they’re way more interesting when you look at the entire group, and you see the progression of the face over the course of an evening or over the course of a month, and how each one is different and also the same … how there are similar elements that come out of each one, and it really is like an unconscious process. I don’t know. It’s something I sort of had to do and then examine afterwards to understand it. I really only understand it now, after having thought about it and looked at what I actually created.

CD: I noticed on one of the sketchbook pages there are little arrows pointing to different ones. I guess those were ones that you felt specifically drawn to paint. So when you look at a page and you’re deciding which ones to take to that next level, what are you seeking? What attracts you to certain faces?

ROSS: Well, the way I rationalize it to myself is that it’s about emotion. I mean human faces are the simplest means of expressing a complex emotion and it sort of translates across cultures and languages. Even somebody who doesn’t speak your language will probably understand what you’re feeling or how you’re feeling based on the expression on your face. And I don’t know, as I started doing that I realized it’s partially random, and it’s partially unconscious. There are two parts to it. There’s the creating and then there’s the viewing. There are two experiences. There’s the experience when I create the face, and there’s the experience that I have when I look at it. I’ve been trying to quantify it for the last couple of years, and I can’t really say anything other than they are just the ones that speak to me. They seem particularly relevant to how I’m feeling then. I try to paint from a drawing that I did more recently because I always want to keep the paintings current with how I’m feeling now. I’ll sketch for days and I’ll look through it and if I’m feeling crappy, I won’t like any of them, or I’ll like one. And then there are days that for whatever reasons, the stars align and I will like lots of stuff. And I will pick out a couple and I’ll have to really narrow it down to which is the one I really wanna do. What I’m looking for is expressivenesses. There are two things – one is expressiveness and the other is construction. Those are really the two major variables that I have been able to identify in the whole set of all those faces. And by construction, I mean which lines comprise the face and which parts of the stroke equal the different features of the face. Expression its sort of that subjective emotional reaction you get from looking at it, and they’re related in that certain construction tend to devote specific emotions or tend to create emotions within a certain area, while other construction tend to create faces that are looking a different way. And there are similarities but I’m still studying it.

CD: When was your first show at Butter Gallery?

ROSS: It was August of last year.

CD: How many works did you have on display there?

ROSS: A bunch. I’m gonna hazard a guess and say 20.

CD: Were they all lined up at the show or spread out?

ROSS: They were all in one area at the show. I had my wall at Butter and all my stuff was grouped together. … I had like a big chunk of the wall on the left in the main room, and they were all together. There were a couple that were in a few other places, but they were mostly all together.

CD: At the show, what kind of things did you overhear people saying about your work, or how did you see them respond to it?

ROSS: Well, I mean people generally react one or two ways to my work. I was a street painter for like a long time and I’ve had the gamut of response, and the response is either one of two. There are people who just fall in love with it and they immediately get it, they get how they’re sorta all the same but also all different. And they realize that it’s not about finding yourself necessarily in a painting but sort of recognizing the person that is in a painting. And in one way, the people in the paintings are me and in another way they’re emotions that have impacted me, sort of removed from a person. They’re really sort of a feeling captured in the simplest that I can put it. Those people of course, love the variety … and the other group is people who are like “Oh, I coulda done that,” or “It looks like scribble.” It’s not that they’re wrong, they just don’t see the full part of it, and in a way I guess you could have [done it]. But what separates artists from non-artists is that artists do it.

CD: Exactly.

ROSS: So it’s not just like I could have done it. I could have done it for a long time, but I did it eventually. I used to hang out with my friend Sean Calloway up in New Hampshire. We used to hang out in his backyard. … We worked landscaping at a golf course, and we would get home in the afternoon at 4:30 or 5 and we would just sit out in his backyard and hang out until it got dark, at like 8, and just draw and listen to music. We used to have all these conversations about different things. He had all these different projects he was working on, and I sorts of had these little things I was doing. I was still doing a lot of video at that time but drawing was still part of my family life. I still had to draw everyday and it felt good to draw everyday, and I had told him then, “Man I’d love to take these little expressive drawings that I do and make them big,” because no one can see how cool they look in the sketchbook. They need to be big to really encompass the full emotion that’s packed into each one, and being an inch tall on the back page of my sketchbook. … I mean, it’s hard to experience a sketchbook especially when it’s so small and only one person can experience it at a time. I had been talking to him about that and I said, “Yeah, one day I’m gonna do these big. I’m gonna do these paintings. I’m gonna copy these out of a sketchbook and do them big. And you know, I’m talking about like 10 years ago. This was like 1997, and life got in the way and bullshit got in the way and I drifted in an out of art doing different things and in 2005, I was working this horrible job in Fort Lauderdale and my life was just sucking.

CD: What kind of job was it?

ROSS: I was actually recruiting people for clinical trials of experimental medication.

CD: Oh yeah, I could see where that could suck.

ROSS: Yeah, and I felt bad about what I was doing, and I felt bad about how I was being asked to do it, and I just was unhappy with lots of my life. I started listening to Joy Division again which I hadn’t listened to since high school and I’m like something is wrong. If I’m listening to kill-yourself music something is wrong. So I was like, I have to have something bigger to live for and something bigger, more important and more meaningful to me going on in my life, or this is a dead end. So one day like on the way home from work, I was working up in Fort Lauderdale and I was driving down … I pulled off the exit at Oakland Park and there a huge Pearl there and I’m like screw it. I’m just gonna do this. I have to do this for me. I have to do something that makes sense for me. I have to create something that I’m proud of.

CD: Pearl solves everything.

ROSS: Yeah, I stopped there and I bought like raw canvas and like gesso and a couple of brushes and one tube of black paint and I came back to my house and my girlfriend was like, “What the hell? What are you doing? The apartment’s not big enough for this shit.” I like moved everything over to the side of the room. We were living in like this tiny apartment on the beach, and really there was not enough room. There was really not enough room for us both to be in the apartment at the same time unless we were asleep. And like, I moved everything over to the side. I laid out a tarp on the floor. I stretched the canvas and I primed it and I primed it and sanded it and primed it … and at that point, I had a thing and I’m like, “I’m gonna do it. I’m gonna finally do it,” and I started looking through my sketchbooks, and I’d been sketching again because I had such a long drive and I had a lunch break and I would go out to my car and I would sketch on my lunch break for like an hour everyday and there were literally just pages and pages of faces. I didn’t have anything else to draw. I would sort of go a little crazy. So I found this one drawing and I painstakingly penciled it out. I tried to copy as best as I could onto the canvas, and then I started painting on it, with one round brush, black on the white, and it took me like two months to finish that first painting. I kept moving the line. I kept painting white over it and moving the black line like an inch and painting white over it again and moving it back. And I mean it was like September or something and I finished it, I guess like the end of December, like early January 2006. But after I finished that first one I invited my friend over from work … and she had a friend in town, another artist this guy Dan Fitzgerald from New Orleans, and I was like, “What do you think?” This is taking me two months to do and it’s a big white canvas with one little skinny black line on it. They were both like, “Wow, that’s cool.” Dan was like, “This took you two months?” I’m like it’s very important where the line is. He’s like, “Well, I can tell. This is not like a random line. This is on purpose. I can tell that you very purposely put these lines in this particular place,” … ‘cause I painted it over six times. But they were impressed, well, they weren’t impressed … they encouraged me. They were like, “This is cool, you need to do more.” So after I finished that first one … I went back to Pearl and I got more stuff and the next month, I painted probably 10 paintings.

CD: That’s a big change from one over two months.

ROSS: Well, part of it was that I got more comfortable with the materials, like it had really been awhile since I had picked up a paintbrush. I had done some ink drawings, like some pen-and-ink and brush and ink drawings but it had been a long time since I had worked with acrylic paint and it really is different than ink in like a lot of ways. It’s opaque color vs. transparent color which is an entirely different process. I’d sort of gotten comfortable with it but it was also the confidence of knowing that my friends liked it, and my girlfriend was still sort of like, “What are you doing here?” Like she remembered, we knew each other in college. She knew about the heads before and she’d seen the books of them and you know they always used to tease me that I would just draw little heads, and it is a little bit pathological when you look at the book and it’s just like nothing but heads. They really can go back years. Basically, I didn’t know what to do with them. I started to build up paintings. I didn’t know what to do with them.

CD: So they were all over the apartment?

ROSS: I had them hanging in my apartment. I ran out of space and I was like stacking them. I called around and I wanted to be able to do something. This is the thing. It’s only art if other people look at it. If you do it in your apartment, it’s a hobby. If no one sees it’s a hobby or it’s a neurosis. The part that makes it art is being viewed. It’s not art until it sort of belongs to the public and they can see it and they’re reaction to it, that’s what makes it art. Interaction between the object and the viewer is more important really than the interaction between the artist and the medium, because that is where the impact occurs. Art is something that impacts populations, not so much individuals. Individuals do have a reaction to it but that aggregate interaction is what makes it meaningful. So I was like, “I have to do something about this.” So I called around and I got hooked up with this lady. Her name was Claire and she had started a Farmers’ Market down at Bayside. She was trying to get it started and there weren’t a lot of people in it. So I called her and said, “Look, I’m a painter, can I come and show some of my stuff?” She said, “Sure, bring your friends. I’m not gonna charge you,” or whatever. The Farmers’ Market I think was only open for four weeks, but I went that first day and this kid came up to me and was like, That’s frickin’ cool,” and he bought my first painting for me on the spot. I didn’t even know what to charge for it. …

CD: How much did you charge for your first painting?

ROSS: I think I sold it for like 40 bucks. And I mean, so actually he’d get a pretty good return on his money at this point if he tried to sell it. But I’m actually still friends with him. He’s bought a number of pieces from me over the couple of years, like 12 or something I think. But that just sort of gave me hope and gave me confidence and after that I realized that it’s not about the people who don’t; get it, the people who are like I could do that. It’s about the people who do get it, and making connections with the people who do understand … we’re on the same wavelength. That’s what it’s about. It’s about connecting with people, and people who do connect with my art, they either look at it and say, “I’ve felt that way,” or “That feeling has impact in my life. I recognize that as something that is important or something that is meaningful to me one way or another.” That’s what it’s all about. It’s about emotion.

CD: Yeah, it’s interesting, when seeing the pieces on a bigger scale and all together to consider what makes someone like one more than the others. Like, is it the expression? Do we see something on certain faces that reflect emotions within us?

ROSS: There’s more to it than a lot of people see when they first experience it. I don’t know. I mean, it’s grown for me. Like, I honestly came to this sort of not really understanding it. I just knew that I had to do it. I had this like compulsive desire inside me that was like, “I have to do this,” and only in doing it and sort of measuring it, I guess am I able to now sort of be able to talk about it, because when I did the first one I was like, “I don’t know what I’m doing. This is just what I draw.”

CD: But that’s just part of the whole fun process, isn’t it? I mean, you feel driven to do something, you do it and then you figure out why along the way.

ROSS: No it really is interesting because I have learned about it and about my thought process, and I don’t know … Studying it has changed the way I think about creating new pieces and the work, I think, shows that and has matured sort of in the selectivity of the pieces that I choose because I’m still drawing la lot. I’m still doing pages and pages. There are still probably like 20 pages to one painting.

CD: I guess you have a bigger apartment now.

ROSS: I do have a bigger apartment now but it’s not that much bigger.

CD: Is it filled?

ROSS: It is pretty much filled with art. Having the gallery representation has been helpful too, and he has storage that I don’t have so I have a lot of pieces at the gallery right now, in addition to the ones I have in my apartment right now … I’m just counting 1, 2, 3 …. 15 … plus three in the bedroom is 18 plus two on the easel and three that are in the planning stage, but I haven’t put paint on them yet. So there’s definitely some artwork in here and for this show coming up I am doing a run of screen prints. I’m not even gonna talk about like the mess that that has created. My girlfriend wants to kill me. We’re getting married in May, so the stress of all the planning and stuff for that in addition to the fact that our apartment is pretty much like a construction zone/slash war zone right now. Paint everywhere.

CD: I can imagine. You should give us a picture of what your place looks like with your art everywhere.

ROSS: Honestly, she would kill me if I took a picture of the apartment right now. She really would. But I can show you pictures of the sketchbook, and I can show you a piece in progress if you want. … But I have taken the ideation process to like another level. I mean, the philosophy that I have sort of created around the art, this is what’s come out of the process. And I’m in the process right now of writing this down into my philosophy so I will have something to show to people when they ask me about it. It’s ideative ideation. It’s the idea of repeating a process or a pattern over and over again, and what’s significant about the process is not any one piece, but the difference between each of the ideations.

CD: What do you call it again?

ROSS: I’m a brand name developer. I consult people on naming products and stuff and in my business what we do is called ideation. We create lots and lots and lots and lots of possibilities and then after you have a bunch, you choose which are the ones that are appropriate for what you’re trying to do.

CD: You’re a brand developer?

ROSS: You could say that. You could also just say I’m a creative in marketing, because that is sorta what I do although specifically what I do is I name shit. Like everything.

CD: Do you name your paintings?

ROSS: No, I don’t actually. It’s kind of ironic that I name things for a living. The reason I don’t name them is because I don’t feel like, “Well, here’s the thing. I studied emotion in college and the thing about emotion is that emotion is this pure element that exists outside of, really above, language. And when you start putting a language tag on it, like a name for it or whatever, you bring into the emotion associations with outside concepts. And these change the interpretation of that emotion because outside elements are going to have cultural connotations that are different from person to person, country to country, language to language, and I’m trying to avoid that. I’m trying to have the expression speak for itself.

CD: Do the paintings have numbers?

ROSS: When people ask me about the titles, I say they don’t have titles so much as they have times that they represent which is why I try to date and time them as much as I can. … I write down exactly the time it was completed on the back and it’s not so much that the minute that I put the final brushstroke on was important. It’s just that when I finished it says something about the time period that I was working on it. There are really times of my life where feeling presided over them. So I don’t want to say, “T o me this is anger, or anger a specific thing, because the person looking at it is going to see their own anger in it or they’re going to see another anger that is important to them. That’s why I don’t put a title on it. I don’t want language to interfere with the interpretation of it. I want the emotion to sort of exist in its own space.

CD: You mentioned that you studied emotion?

ROSS: Well, I have a master’s degree in mass communications, hence the marketing career, but my thesis was on emotional response to advertising. I studied at the University of Florida under Dr. Jon Morris who is like an emotion matrix guru. His whole thing was measuring emotion, and specifically relating it to verbal measures but also to number measures and he uses a scale called SAM [Self-Assessment Manikin], which is … he’s gonna kill me if I mess this up right now, but it’s like symbolic, like emotional measurement. It measures emotion on three different variables, pleasure, arousal and dominance for control. And it comes form a theory by this guy named Albert Mehrabian from California who came up with the PAD (pleasure/arousal/dominance) model and his original scale had like 49 measures but SAM is like a visual measure of those same scales and there are only three and it comes down to pleasure vs. displeasure, and arousal vs. sleep … Dominance is the measure of how in control you are, form full control to no control. So at first it’s like a roller coaster – it’s very arousing, and for some people, very pleasurable and for other people it’s possibly terrifying. But the arousal is high no matter what and the difference is that in one way, you’re in control. You can get on the roller coaster or not get on the roller coaster. But once you’re on you have no control over where the car goes, so in that situation you’re completely out of control vs. you know, driving in a race car, which is for some people pleasurable and very arousing in that your heart is racing when you are driving it. On the opposite end of the spectrum, you are in complete control, or at least you’re more in control because you get to turn the steering wheel …that doesn’t mean you’re in control of the car. But you do have more control than you would in a roller coaster.

CD: Or at least a sense of that anyway?

ROSS: Yes, I don’t want to bore you with all the …

CD: No, it’s kinda fascinating.

ROSS: So I don’t know … that background has led me to think about emotion and I guess to think about quantifying processes, and all my artwork to a certain extent is about channeling unconscious energy and feelings and I’m trying to distill those feelings through a very methodical process. It really does go through a specific process where I draw for hours before paintings and then there’s a sifting process where I sift through all those different things and I find those feelings that are the significant feelings, the ones that speak to me as I’m looking at it, and then when I pick the painting I put it on the canvas and then color is an entirely different thing. Color is sort of like this feeling that comes out of it. I have to see how big it’s gonna be. I can't pick colors before I see how big it is because when you take one color and paint like a huge part of canvas all that one color, it had a different effect than if you had painted that same color small.

CD: How big might they be? How big do you work?

ROSS: Lately I’ve been doing a lot of pieces 30 x 40 inches which is just under three feet by four feet.

CD: Is that about as big as they get?

ROSS: I have a couple pieces that are bigger. The one that’s on the flier for the show is like three feet by four feet. That’s the largest size that will fit in my compact car. I have to move the seats forward to get it in, but that’s another story. And I do have two pieces that are actually larger than that, that are like 60 inches. I think they’re 36 x 60 inches so three by five feet. I still have one of them at the gallery. And I think I sold one at the end of the year. But I like working large because it’s like amplification of a feeling. It’s not that all feelings are big feelings but the impact of a small feeling is, I don’t know, easier to convey on a larger piece. It amplifies it. It makes a smaller feeling more significant when you see it that big. I like seeing them about 30 by 40 but a lot of people like the smaller pieces too. Most of the paintings I have done over the last couple of years have been smaller, 16 x 20 or 18 x 24 inches.

CD: Where do you sketch?

ROSS: I sketch in a lot of places. Most of the sketching that I have done in the last years and a half has been at my apartment. I like to wake up really early in the morning, and I sketch in that haze of the early morning.

CD: Do you mean like 8 a.m. or 4 a.m.?

ROSS: On the weekends, I’m usually up by 7 or 7:30.

CD: Do you listen to music while you draw?

ROSS: Most the time, although sometimes I don’t but most the time I listen to music. I listen to what I’ve been listening to that week. But I also sketch during the week, sometimes at night, sometimes at work. I have like these little sketchbooks that I bring into work. And I’ll sketch while I’m doing something or my mind is wandering … So I sketch all over but most the sketching and most the serious sketching and what gets put on canvas is usually done early in the morning on the weekends, because I’ll be sifting through those thoughts all morning and I’ll sketch for like two or three hours, and then I’ll take a break, make some more coffee, and look through the sketches and see if anything stands out. If I find anything that stands out, I’ll just start painting. But if I haven’t found it yet, I’ll sketch for a little longer, or maybe ill do something else. I’ll do a little work on one of the paintings that’s half done and then maybe I’ll sketch a little longer. But if I find one that’s speaks to me, I’ll start painting right away.

CD: When you have that many, are you tempted to ask people you know which is their favorite … Aren’t you curious?

ROSS: I do ask people that and when we have the shows, or whenever I go to the gallery I always like to hang out there as much as possible, because people will come in all the time and I love them not knowing it’s me … and just seeing which ones that they like, and it is interesting. People see different things in them, and something that may say one emotion to me may speak to somebody else in a whole different way. … It brings me back to the ideation and the meaningful part of it is the differences between each of them. Each one is in itself a meaningful ideation but the difference between them is sort of like this language that is created by the accumulation of more and more. More and more meaningful objects or language objects, I don’t even know what they’re called. But it is very interesting .and I do love listening to people. There are easier to decode paintings and there are harder to decode paintings. There are ones that are simpler, where there’s only one or two ways to read it and there are a few where, depending on how you look at, it’s different faces.

CD: It probably depends on how you feel when you look at it too.

ROSS: Exactly and there are different angles within the same drawing, depending on how your brain constructs the face it will be looking in different directions, or it will be two faces staring at each other. I mean those are things that I think about when I’m choosing the drawings to paint, but at the same time they’re also sort of this unconscious thing that I don’t really see until I’m done.

CD: Are there one or two that seem to have more universal appeal?

ROSS: There are a couple people really like. Every time I take the first painting out people really like it. People have offered to buy it a couple of times, and I won’t sell it because it’s the first one. Literally, this one is that moment when I was broke and this painting represents like a shift in my life from like being miserable and unhappy and stuck in this thing to still being miserable and unhappy but now like with this wonderful thing in front of me. I had a show at The Van Dyke during Art Basel last year and I had that painting and three other old ones on display, and people really loved it and people kept coming up to me and being like that one’s great. I love all these others but that’s great. I don’t know what it is. … People just respond to it. So that first one is definitely one people like … I’m trying to think of another one people like. The problem is that I had so many paintings and I sold so many of them. A lot of the really, really good ones were sold almost immediately. Because of that they didn’t get the exposure that some of the other paintings did. There are paintings that were on the street that were sold the day I painted them. In fact there are a couple that I’m still kicking myself … I’m looking back now and going, “I cant believe I sold that painting … And there’s one that I used as my profile icon on MySpace and I have no idea where it is. I sold it to some guy. He was with two of his friends. He just walked up to me nonchalantly and says, “How much?’ and I told him, and he looked around and looked at his friend and he just counted out bills and handed them to me. I have no idea what happened to it. I have no idea like if the guy was from Miami or just in town for the weekend … It’s gone, and I still wish I knew where that painting was.

CD: Maybe someday you’ll find out.

ROSS: Maybe I will. I’m gonna put the call out on my Web site … like if you have seen this painting or you know where it is, please e-mail me. I’m really, really curious

CD: I love how you know the stories behind so many of your paintings.

ROSS: That’s part of why I did the web site. I needed to keep track of them and I wanted to be able to remember the stories and some I wasn’t able to remember more than after the day I wrote it. Some of them, there isn’t so much of a story. I got into this space where, I don’t know, all I did was record when it was and maybe if there was something that happened and there’s a couple that heave really messed-up stories. One, actually, my friend Gabe has it … He bought it for a present for his girlfriend. It was number 75. I was on Lincoln Road and I was hanging out at Zeke’s Beer Garden during the day painting. The owner used to let me come there and paint during the day as long as I didn’t get anything on the table. Then I guess she got hassled by code or one of the neighboring businesses got upset about me being there. I don’t know why -- I probably drank more than like anyone else there. But I was sitting outside and this kid came up to me and he was just all beat up and messed up and he told me this crazy story about how he had been beaten up in Overtown and how he had walked here from like Atlanta or something .. I was like, “What were you doing in Overtown?” He’s like, “No, it’s cool man. I know people there.” I’m like, “OK dude. It’s obviously not that cool because like your cheekbone has been broken,” and he’d gone to the emergency room and he was all pissed off because the doctor there had given him Ultracet. They had like pushed the bone back into place and taped it up and given him these pain-killing pills, but he was all pissed off because they had given his this Ultracet which according to him was like the weakest of the opioid painkillers and I’m like, “Dude, you have no money. They’re not gonna give you like … and then he tells me this story and he’s like, “Can I have some of your water?” … and I’m like, “Yeah go ahead,” and I’m like making a mental not to drink from that water bottle again. So I hand him the water bottle and he takes like one big slug off it and he’s like, “Hold on one second,” and he gets up and starts puking into the trash can and “I’m like alright, um, you gotta go dude. It’s not you, and it’s not me, but people are gonna notice that you’re doing that and the police are gonna come and for you and for me, you gotta get outta here.” He’s like, “OK, which way is the beach?” And I pointed … I’m like, “You’ll be cool there, man.” He’s like, “Yeah, I’ll be cool” and then he just took off. He was trying to write something. He took out this notebook and he was scribbling. I tried to read some of it and I couldn’t make sense of it. It was all smeared …

CD: Must have been the Ultracet.

ROSS: Yeah, mighta been or it mighta been any of those other things. All I know is that that kid was messed up and I never saw him again. I’m hoping he’s OK. I have no idea. That was just one of the weird stories from being on the street and I definitely enjoyed my time painting on the street, and all the colorful characters but I’m a little glad not to have quite that much craziness in my life right now. There’s plenty of like craziness but it isn’t quite that bad.

Ross Ford’s solo show will open 7-11 p.m. Wednesday and run through May 23 at Buck 15, 707 Lincoln Lane, in Miami Beach. Call 305/534-5488 or visit Rossfordart.com.