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How has your involvement with the gallery changed your own work?

I see so much art… good, bad, or otherwise. I’m constantly aware of what’s trendy, so it makes me want to constantly avoid the trends. If really ornate type is in, then it’s the last thing I want to do. If hand-drawing little chickens is in, then that’s the last thing I want to do. I think it makes me very hyper-aware of what’s going on and makes me not want to be involved in that.

At the same time I hit a little wall where I’m like, “You know what? I need to take a break from painting right now and just redefine what it means for me in the twenty-first century.” The manual arts have been around so long that I think anybody who’s involved in that world has to question what they bring to the table. Nobody wants to be compared to somebody constantly, and I sure as hell got a lot of Gerhard Richter parallels. He’s a master, but I don’t want to be somebody who’s just a version of somebody else. So how do you bring something new to the table?

Can you say a few words about your style and how it formed?

I don’t know if anybody knows how their style forms. If we’re looking for names, then Andy Warhol is a big inspiration for me. When I was a kid there weren’t really computers and stuff like that. So many of my inspirations as a kid tended to be fine artists and pop artists, which, now that I’m saying it, makes a lot of sense in terms of the computer. And Gerhard Richter was a big inspiration of mine in terms of painting during college. I liked that he could paint from photographs, which I always enjoyed doing. He was the first one to bring that whole blurry quality to photorealistic painting. But in terms of my style, I try to not have one. I try to be eclectic and mix it up.

Do you still do any painting then?

Lately, I haven’t been doing as much oil painting. But I’ve been drawing and I’ve also gotten into doing more sculptural work. I’ve been building some odd little dioramas in my studio. I’m just finding something more interesting in building spaces than painting on flat surfaces. And who knows? Everything’s a cycle; I’ll burn out on one thing and go back to something else. I burn out on 3-D and I won’t touch it forever. Then I go back to 3-D modeling and start doing something different. That’s the beauty of being creative and having an interest in a lot of different things. It keeps me flexible.

Do you have a separate space for all these different interests?

I work out of my house and I have an office and a studio inside. They’re separate rooms and I’ve recently contemplated merging the two to have more access to my computer while I’m in the studio. But it’s sort of nice to keep a division. They’re two different worlds; my computer world is kind of regulated and my studio is a mess. They reflect themes in my life: chaos and control.

Does curating a show have any parallels with composing a painting?

That’s interesting. I think there are. In some of the best shows that I’ve curated, the name of the person or how big the person might be is irrelevant at a certain point. Is the experience cohesive? Or is there a kink in the chain somewhere, where maybe I included some A-list artist who really couldn’t have given a shit about being in the show and just dished me off some half-finished piece of work? The cohesiveness, the message, and the experience are similar in creating a piece of artwork.

Now, you’re using other people to create that piece of work and I wouldn’t necessarily think of myself in any kind of lofty terms, like I’m an orchestra conductor or I’m necessary to make all these pieces come together.

I’m actually trying to curate a show for the Museum of Modern Art here, and the world of curation has a fine line for me. In the world of fine art, especially curating museums, it’s a different level. It’s more concerned with scholastics and politics than aesthetics, which has recently really rubbed me the wrong way. As an artist, when you start to see the seedy underbelly of how museums and galleries work, you get sick, you know? I’m thinking, “What’s the point of me toiling in my studio when I should be hobnobbing at this gallery opening?” If you’re just going to be some little hermit toiling in your studio this day and age, you’re not going to get any exposure.

Are the politics and the “seedy underbelly” some of the reasons you started your own gallery?

Yeah. I worked at a gallery in San Francisco when I was in college. It was one of the top galleries and it was very catty and very political and very “who had their master’s degree from where.” At that time there was a big conceptual bent and that’s not really my background. That made me question a lot of things, I guess. This was especially true in San Diego, because the stuff in LA and New York wasn’t here. We’re a city, we have millions of people, and the people have tonnes of cash here. But somebody needed to put forth the effort. And we’re still trying. San Diego’s still a little backwards.

In my Google-stalking I found an interview with you talking about the San Diego scene being overshadowed by LA and San Francisco.

For sure. What tends to happen, almost exclusively, is that anybody who is worth their salt moves to LA and just says, “You can only fight the system for so long.” You just get tired of banging your head against the wall, thinking, “Okay, I’m going to do something different here… somebody take notice… okay nobody’s taking notice. I’m getting out of here.” I’m not willing to give up and there’s a select group of my peers here who are doing the same, but it’s not easy.

I’ve always enjoyed being a bigger fish in a smaller pond. I think that’s the bottom line. Do I want to move to New York and just disappear in the mass? Not really.

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