Speed of Light and Self Portrait with Backyard

Two paintings, Self Portrait with Death and Self Portrait with Backyard. Backyard’s a little more cheery than Death, I guess. I’ve painted the skull so many times. It’s a skull that my dad had. To clarify it’s not his skull. It’s a skull that he owned while he was still alive. The donor, I think, might have lived in India.

And he bought it from a German company to study dental occlusion, which was his profession. He made prosthetic dentistry. That’s why we had a skull in our house, this skull. All those years, growing up, my father’s dental laboratory was in the house when we were crazy kids crashing through the house. I always remember the skull and his laboratory in the basement, so I painted it.

This particular painting, I started about 19, 20 years ago, and it was in my parents house all that time. I think it had been on exhibit, but it looked completely different. I thought it was confident, it was well painted, but it wasn’t very interesting. And so, what I wanted was to make the composition more interesting, so I darkened the top of it, darkened the picture dramatically, and put in this raking light that’s kind of like with leafy tree shadows.

It’s all made up. And it looked fast. So, couldn’t help it. The Speed of Light, now I think I’ll revise that title. I like The Speed of Light instead of Self Portrait with Death. I’m going to change this title. Why Are Things Floating in the Air? Partly it’s a subject I used to do many years ago and I abandoned it when it became an obvious trademark in my work.

But I got it out again. For this painting to have all kinds of levitation, why do I like levitation? Partly because it gives you a lot more flexibility about where objects can be placed within the composition, you’re not limited. Now I know that’s such an uninteresting answer to the question why all the floating things.

It’s the real reason. But a much more interesting reason would be that, I don’t know, the world’s unhinged. Things are floating, and their spinning saucers can defy gravity with their sort of gyroscopic precession. Flowers, they’re light enough to float, so I usually only float things that are, would have some reason to float.

The self portrait with backyard and the self portrait with death, well, those were initially painted around the same time. I was quite a bit younger than I am now, and had more muscle mass, and I’ve lost that. Can’t seem to get it back. I painted this really with the intention of doing a larger piece based on it. It’s done with three or four mirrors in the studio. Actually, when I painted it, I was painting facing the windows, but I had a mirror behind me that made it appear as though the windows were behind me. And the reason I did that was to have light on the subject. Otherwise, it would just be a dark silhouette and you wouldn’t be able to see anything.

And then another mirror that shows me to, you know, kind of a back view to the side. I liked the piece. It didn’t go all the way to finish work with the head, or with any of it really, because I really thought I’d do a larger piece, and I never did. I’ve had mixed feelings about how colorful this is, uses a little more color than I use these days, but the piece, in spite of the way I’ve changed my thinking as well as my parents, I think it holds up.

The two were painted around the same time, but when I reworked this painting 19 or 20 years later, the painting, Self Portrait with Death, I didn’t particularly want to age myself, but for the light to work on that, It really had to be extensively repainted. And so I stood in front of the mirror and painted the way I look now, instead of the way I looked 20 years ago.

I kind of don’t mind a little bit of that. I don’t mind aging myself. You know, it’s kind of the opposite of what Oscar Wilde wanted to do, but in the portrait of Dorian Gray.