The New Black

Way before Orange is the New Black, my punk rock cousin Susan had already "been there and done that" while wearing the standard prison-issue jumpsuit. She was a model in the city during the CBGB music scene of the 70s, and DeeDee Ramone's girlfriend. She was beautiful, glamorous, and a drug addict. After her fling with the “sex, drugs, and rock n' roll” lifestyle, she rallied back from the hard bite it took out of her to work as an office girl in the city, while dating the "nice" safe Italian boy from her neighborhood. 

Unfortunately for Susie, the damage was done. No amount of shiny polyester shirts, tight pants, and Travolta-style pompadours could help her stay out of Studio 54, with all that free coke. What could compete with her troubled working class roots, with its' generic Queens row house, and her excruciatingly boring 9-5 job? Not much, and the allure of the forbidden was too much for her to resist. 

When I lived in Brooklyn, she used to call me loaded to chew my ear off, chain-smoking and enjoying the high. I asked her to write down some of her experiences from those days, but like everything else with my family, I'd have to do all the work, and there was no way I could take her on with all of her diseases. But, she told me enough of it for me to recreate a timeline in my head that's reliable.

After her Queens boyfriend broke up with her because she couldn't buckle down into their engagement and a normal, family-based routine, she went back to using hard again. When she was a model, another girl on the circuit taught her how to shoot up without leaving behind any visible track marks, because this was way before Photoshop could airbrush out any sins you may have committed. When I asked her how she did it, she spread her toes apart to show me how she injected heroin in between her big toe and second toe.

And that was the beginning of the end of the road for her. She was caught in a raid on a crack house that had become the center of a huge drug trafficking ring, and like most addicts, she sold to get high. From what I heard back then, it was a typical dirty-bare-mattresses-on-a-floor-with-scary-graffiti-covered-walls kind of joint. Old school New Yorkers will get it. It's the kind of place brokers try to sell as condos in Bushwick nowadays to stupid rich white kids who are priced out of Williamsburg, by selling it as an "up-and-coming" neighborhood, but I always knew better.

From there, she was shipped off to Rikers to do a stretch of hard time. It was unbelievable. Me and my brothers were working "The American Dream" hardcore in the country 'burbs of early 80s Rockland by studying and working part-time jobs. After she was raped in Rikers, they sent her to a prison in Pennsylvania to do the rest of her time. She told me about her affairs with other female inmates, the crescendo of her time rounded out by an affair with a male prison guard.

When she got pregnant by him in the joint, my father flew out there to give her away in a shotgun wedding after her release. I saw the pictures of her with a flower garland askew on her head during the ceremony, bleary-eyed and out of it. And that's how years before you all cashed in on a gang of girls gone mad, my cousin Suzy gave birth to a low-weight baby boy she named after Bob Dylan, her one and only child, not long after her Corrections Officer died of a heart attack.


(From Wikipedia) The writing and structure are both somewhat more sophisticated than the songs on their previous record. Guitarist Johnny Ramone relates: "We recorded them in the order they were written; we wanted to show a slight progression in song structure."^[3] Most of the songs were written in the band member's homes, rather than at a studio; "Suzy Is a Headbanger" was written in drummer Tommy Ramone's loft apartment.^[4]

"I wrote most of the stuff I contributed at my apartment in Forest Hills, before I left and moved back to a place in the city. I had no amp at home, just an electric guitar. I recorded it onto a cassette and played that back at rehearsal. We had better production, we were playing a little faster, and we had a lot of songs accumulated. We were in really good shape for that album."

Figures

Reality, no airbrushing required.

My daily bathroom reading almost always includes excerpts from a bi-annual magazine called RISD XYZ (http://issuu.com/risd/docs/risdxyz_fall-winter_2014-15?e=0/10291099), produced, written, illustrated, and designed by my alma mater. It was no surprise to me when I saw a brief bit in the Spring/Summer issue about our commonly held attitudes toward the human body, which are analogous to those of a medical doctor. In fact, many RISD scholars also work in major scientific fields, or take coursework as students at Brown that strengthens their understanding of their core major, or serving as an important counterpoint to it. 

What's key to every artist's/scientist's path is the formation of bridges between the disciplines. It's what every person, place, and thing on the planet depends on us to do: rigorous scholarship that expands to fit the spaces and gaps between the average person's understanding. "Seeing connections", as well call it in our verbal form that is Design Intelligence. It means that we are so far ahead of the curve, we often don't reflect the current dynamic in society, and why would we? 

Studying the human form in every direction, light, and body type.

The crew of the USS Enterprise boldly goes where no man (or woman) has gone before, and that's a bumpy, rocky road indeed. We go it alone, usually without support, or kinship, even within our degree departments, because we are not there to seek approval. We are there to learn and observe and do, in an environment so strict, I called it "Art Boot Camp", sometimes bordering on the abusive, like the music students' instructor depicted in the recent movie "Whiplash". It's really intense, and for some minds it is not survivable, because of the intensity and maturity required to create great art.

Bodies as they are: not by Hollywood, or television, or magazine ads.

And so it is with our relationship to the human body. Our professors do not care what our "feelings" are regarding anatomy, but merely our ability to render it in whatever form we need to, so that we may accurately solve a problem. We drew bodies in space and motion that make the typical art school student have permanent night sweats: this large man has a hernia that has expanded his body in a unique way, requiring him to wear white compression tights while modeling (use your imagination); this woman had dreads, tattoos, and almost no body fat; this beautiful woman of 90 dozed as she sat half-naked in the slanting light of a tall studio window, while we struggled to capture just a bit of what made her "Pearl" in oils, an infamous painter's model who will live forever in our works. 

Serving up reality in each and every century.

Not bodies that would be considered by the warped weirdos of Hollywood as "perfect", or magazine-quality airbrushed photos, or body parts mangled and mutilated by multiple plastic surgeries, nor faked in any way, shape, or form. Here was a man "out of shape" due to an incurable and ongoing genetic condition, there a still-beautiful woman with limbs pulled down by the enduring weight of gravity: in short, I saw real bodies without interference or prejudice, for purely academic purposes, in a studio space that has nothing to do with sexuality or titillation, and everything to do with study. The human body is extremely complex and hard to draw, even more so when it is aged or infirm, which is exactly how our professors designed it to be.

Nudity in every medium and shade.

One RISD-oid focuses on eyes to become an Oculist for wounded vets, another dissects flowers regularly at the nature lab to produce textbooks on Botany. This one designs swimwear for women who have recently undergone mastectomies, as this shoe designer works in service to people with orthopedic foot problems. In short, how you think you look is irrelevant to us, which flies directly in the face of most popular media today.

It is a public space rife with anorexia, eating disorders, and seriously untreated madness. Every day and/or night of the week, I can turn on the t.v. to see women so fundamentally sick, they have formed an unnatural human shape made for media called "The Bobblehead" (a.k.a The Lollipop, or The Q-tip): a woman with a very round, large head who has dieted to excess and illness, to create grotesquely thin stick arms and legs. It's disgusting and abnormal, but so is "Reality T.V."; a format specifically designed to exploit the drunk and deluded, and the mentally ill or alcoholic alike. Why would I ever count on such a population group to guide and/or inform me about the human form?!

Capturing kinetic energy in each brushstroke  for "Gesture Drawing".

I never would, because I'm half afraid that my old college mentor would ring my doorbell or knock on my front door someday in the future, to take away my hand-drawn calligraphic diploma from the most difficult school on Earth. I would never disrespect their faith in me, nor the hours we spent as a community honing our skills to lead each and every major conversation that exists in society, in whatever language we want to, or whatever format we choose, a thousand times all around the world (thanks to Lao Shir Cindy Ming for that opening phrase in her form of Tai Chi). 

That's what a true master is about, and that's what you will always see from me; the work and the truth that I began in earnest as a teenager, with a foundation that existed way before my time. You can see the truth about who we are as a species here, because that's part of my eternal promise to you. Live on, humans.

Dark and light and "happy accidents" are part of the art-making process.

Bodies of flesh, blood, and bone not owned by some t.v. exec.

Who are you, really?

Men and women scrutinized under the gaze of our study for hours.

Bodies in motion, active and alive, moving through 3-dimensional space.

As individuals, and in groups.

Bodies that were both near and far, up close and also impersonal.

Please note: All images shown here are from my portfolio and are original works of art. You do not have permission to reproduce any or all of them, in any portion. Thank you, Marie.