Famous Feelings With Painter Sam McKinniss

Death. Illness. Having your heart broken. Disappointment. Collapsed identities or expectations. Failed aspirations. The descent into madness. Those things seem tragic.

It depends. I feel overworked. I went out a lot this weekend. I was out really late every night. This morning I woke up at six, because I had really wanted to go to bed early. I'm smarter in the morning. My brain works faster. Sometimes I try and take advantage of that. As the day gets longer, I get stupider and lazier and I give up faster. Or I'm inclined to finally give up for the day. It's annoying that you have to live an entire day every day sometimes.

No. I socialize a lot. I'm going out earlier. I'm not going out in the way that I used to. I used to go out to raves, dance parties, warehouse parties, things of that nature. I wanted to dance more and I wanted to do more drugs. I'm doing that less now, just because it's less exciting. It's more predictable and I've done it a lot. I don't feel like it. I have to work.

I'm still very social with a tight knit group of people. Acquaintances are exhausting. I don't find small talk exhausting. I like small talk and I hate it when people say they don't like small talk, because I think it's great and socially valuable. I like repartee. I like discussing minuscule events. I like politeness. Light inoffensive gossip, observational humor. People who can't engage with that are annoying and tiresome.

Immediately. People have tells. Whether they know it or not people are exposing and presenting a set of values or a sense of humor or a sense of style and a set of prejudices. I think I'm a good judge of character and I'm also good at reading body language. I've been taken advantage of by people that I like, but I've also had really meaningful, extensive, long friendships and relationships. It's nice to be surprised by somebody that you initially think that you don't care for.

My parents are rather conservative. My dad is a pastor at a church in Connecticut and my mom is his wife and my mom.

I understand certain evangelical tactics, conversion tactics, religious instruction as indoctrination. Recovering addict mentality. I think I understand people coming from a conservative background or outlook. I kind of wish I didn't, but I think my background lends a certain complexity to the way that I understand messaging. It also exhausts me. I feel exhausted by eternity and symbolism.

There was an art museum down the street from where I grew up in New Britain, Connecticut called The New Britain Museum of American Art. I remember going there when I was really young, almost pre-memory. I do remember being there and knowing that there were paintings on the wall but not being tall enough to see them. I remember a print in my childhood room. It's a Northern Renaissance masterpiece, but there was a print of it in my room, and it was a very explicit depiction, a kind of goth depiction, of heaven and hell. And the hell section rocked. It was extremely gory and violent, a lot of nudity in it, bodies in eternal agony. It was frightening, and the heaven part was really kind of straight-laced and boring. It wasn't as interesting.

Professionally speaking, none that I'm aware of. There are a fair amount of dabblers. My grandmother and my mother, all the women on my mom's side of the family are good with their hands. My mom makes quilts. My grandmother made quilts. I'm sure her mother made quilts or handiwork. I have a bunch of my mom's quilts. My dad is an amateur woodworker. He makes decoy ducks as a hobby. That's what I know of.

I worked as a florist for awhile. I was a bookseller. I worked a lot of retail jobs at the mall selling shitty clothes. I was a waiter for a little bit. That didn't last very long. I always wished that I'd become a bartender because I like bartenders a lot. It's probably for the best that I didn't go that way due to my own proclivity for drink. I probably would've just made a full-time life out of that. A lot of retail. I was always trying to sell paintings here and there, whenever I could. Usually I could, but it was never enough to live on.

When I discovered Henri Fantin-Latour's paintings they seemed inherently strange, even though sedate, and superficially opposed to the more pressing artistic formal achievements of his day. There's something hidden inside of his work that takes advantage of the way paint handling changed during his era, the way that the observation of light and color developed during his lifetime and career. He absolutely took advantage of there being bourgeois society that made a market for there to be an art market commercially. He certainly took advantage of that, which is why I think there's so many of his paintings. Yet the longer I look at his paintings, the stranger they look. They care not for specific dogma or a prescribed point of view or approach. I think they're extremely intelligent paintings, endowed with an innate intelligence and sensitivity that has nothing to prove. That level of intelligence or sensitivity does not feel the need to prove itself. I really like that. I want to paint like that. I want to be that kind of artist, and I want to be that kind of human being.

No. I hold these truths to be self-evident. [Laughs]

In terms of choosing to be an artist as a vocation, in past regimes, in past centuries, that would have meant going to work for an established master in their studio, learning their technique, learning their work, learning how to make their work, so that you could work under them and produce more pictures. To fulfill whatever the commission or assignment or whatever the demand is. That no longer really exists, although obviously people work with assistants. I think this is different from there being a master and apprentice. The apprentice system doesn't exist anymore, but it's probably a good way to learn how to paint. I've latched onto this figure, Fantin-Latour, based on an initial attraction and copied a few, out of a desire to self-educate and learn technique, look at his composition really closely, how things are built inside the rectangle. It turned into my work, but it also turned into a master-apprentice kind of relationship. But also, it felt analogous to what I was already doing when I would copy any other jpeg off the internet. I'm copying it to get to know it better. I'm a good copyist. I like mimesis as a post-modern attitude toward imagery and image-making.

I just got annoyed with it. I got annoyed with myself. What's true is that I've always liked copy-work, or mimesis, or something about appropriation, but I wanted also to make romantic looking work. When I was in art school initially what I gravitated towards, and felt was really powerful art in the world that really left an impact on me, were people photographing members of their circle. People like Nan Goldin or Jack Pierson or Mark Morrisroe. People who were making art out of people close to them in their life and it turning into some kind of melodramatic or operatic romance. That kind of impulse felt immediate and cool and sweet and accessible. If you're young and you have a camera, it's really easy to make work like that.

Emotionalism. Emotional appeal. Manipulation. A lot of that is also based on color and light and the formal aspects. There are cliches and tropes that may be relied upon. Big themes: death, love, individuality, character, fortitude.

Yeah, privately. Out of respect of my own privacy and his privacy, I would refrain from asking anyone else to look at or care about it [Laughs]. I usually feel like oversharing needs to be something that people are wary of, and now people are not. I'm not interested in memoir anymore. Maybe I once was. I'm not anymore.

I'd like to. I used to think I was interested in creative writing as a form that helped me explore some details of my life. I'm less driven or motivated to do that now, but I think that's because I've gotten more involved with [writing for] Artforum. I don't like collaborating that much, but when I write for the magazine it feels collaborative in a way that I understand. Every time I write something, I feel like I have to read four or five books. There are a number of voices that I'm contending with and working to understand that have already made arguments and observations on whatever the given subject is. There's an editor who is working with me to make a better piece of writing, a better researched argument, a better stated point of view. That feels collaborative. Then, there's the object itself I'm seeking to understand. Whoever the subject of the piece is. These are all things that make me feel that my brain is healthy.

I talk to myself in here when I'm alone a lot. Just exclamations. I yell a lot just to try and stay amped. Also because I get frustrated. Just to keep the intensity up. I listen to pop music a lot, a habit I can't break. I drink a lot of coffee all day. I stand up and sit down.

Oh my god. Whatever painting I'm working on, because it's so demanding. Beyond that, the three flights of stairs I have to go up to get here.

Yeah, I go to yoga, which is like exercise-lite. I can't bring myself to hang out at gyms.

Rather plain, but I think I look cool [Laughs].

Vaguely. I'm aware of fashion as a force in the world and I'm aware of its presence within contemporary cosmopolitan life. If I have to show up and present as a member of the art world then I guess I try to dress like somebody who grew up in Connecticut with a chip on their shoulder about everything.