Transgression as Stabilizer

At the time of this blog post, I’ve been painting portraits in oil almost every day for about eighteen months. That particular eighteen months featured a surprising degree of instability, including temporarily losing access to forms of creativity I have devoted my adult life to. In order to ground myself during this period, I turned back to oil painting, a former hobby-now-lifestyle which I first experimented with twenty-four years ago.

The theme of transgression emerged as the unifying principle of my painting, just as it had in my acting and filmmaking. Drag is obviously transgressive to broad swaths of the population now; horror will always seem bizarre and perverse to many; and classic cinema is rejected by people today for being dated and at times offensive, which it can be.

When something is devalued by the culture, I instinctively re-evaluate it. I may present the subjects listed above as conventionally beautiful or as confrontationally hideous, but I hope to always use my work to challenge presumptions of worth. My art is for the people who see magic in what others would discard.