This painting is called Film School. It was started in Manasquan toward the end of that amazing summer of 1983. I was still very much in an exploratory mode and had begun this as an abstract and technical exploration of color, which of course is code for I was simply playing with paint.

Film School

I’d been reading about Matisse that week and it lead me toward experimenting with the orange neighborhood on the color wheel. One Saturday night, some young guy, maybe a year out of high school, shows up. That place was an unending house party every weekend and there was always a new cast of characters cruising through. Most were very un-shy about expressing their opinion on whatever recent paintings were visible. It was always entertaining. So this kid started asking about my work, but it was quickly clear that he was not interested anything I had to say. He was not interested in my opinion on my work, he was only interested in his opinion of my work. Truth be told, I met a lot of “kids” from the suburbs like that, though I think it was more due to our “know it all” age (20’s) that it was to the suburban geography. Soon enough he made it clear that he does not like contemporary art, or much of any art for that matter. He admitted that he liked film, and that he was directing his whole life to getting in to NYU film school. For him it was all about the story and, the emotional ride a film would take you on. He insisted that film was the only medium of the future that mattered in terms of complex artistic presentation. Needless to say I disagreed and we ended up exhaustively arguing about the medium, the message, and his version of what should be considered a classic. He tried so diligently to bring Marshal McLuhan into it. He was desperately trying to come across as an intellectual, while at the same time burdened with the affliction of clearly enjoyed hearing himself talk. He was definitely a noisy boy. But then he would just stop and give me this long sarcastic look with straight and had eye to eye contact. Then he would go back to disparaging all art, including my paintings. Was he trying to pick a fight? At one point I thought about hitting him just to shut him up, but of course I didn’t. I just let it go on for a while. That’s when I realize what was really happening… He was hitting on me! Well this was new! I was not a sheltered person but this completely caught me unaware, especially when I found myself thinking (briefly) that this guy, annoying as he was becoming, was pretty easy to look at. Somewhere between afraid and flattered, I told him the posse he had arrived with (five girls, go figure), was heading out to the bars and that it was time for him to go. He went silent and his shoulders dropped. I felt as though I had hit him. He make eye contact one last time and say, very slowly, “nice meeting you”.

The orange was anger, but something noisy boy said in his unending dissertation on film made me think and relate all that color to the chemical process of film. I liked my own knowledge of film and all those very analog processes, and so the painting became about that chemical and technical process. Yes, the technical side, the place where most film school grads ended up working, if they ever found their way in to the business at all. The randomness of the silver bromide that morphs into the linearity of an image. A film can in a dark room. A negative chain. For me, the word “Film” means all of these, not just movies or framed prints. And film school should mean learning about and deeply respecting the analog process, because that is what film was. Of course this is all especially poignant now that it has gone away, gone digital.

How ironic that the word “film” will eventually be all that remains of all that the word “film” used to mean… But such is progress.