Cy Gavin

0:00There's what you're trying to do and then what you actually did do, and if you're even fussily trying to put paint down in an exact way, it's still communicating that you're a person who's probably out of control.

0:14From the TED Audio Collective, this is Design Matters with Debbie Millman.

0:21On Design Matters, Debbie talks with some of the most creative people in the world about what they do, how they got to be who they are, what they're thinking about and working on. On this episode, a conversation with artist Cy Gavin about his career and about why he stopped drawing when he makes his paintings. Why not just eliminate that step entirely and just be yourself?

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3:23Cy Gavin is a painter whose work resists easy categorization. It moves between figuration and abstraction, between landscape and memory, between what is seen and what is carried. He creates artwork that unfolds as atmospheres, as questions, and as a kind of inquiry into perception itself. His services hold both material experimentation, pigments, textures, light, and a deeper investigation into how we locate ourselves in the world, physically and psychologically.

3:55His work has been exhibited at institutions including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and is held in major public collections. But what distinguishes his practice is not scale or recognition. It's the way his paintings operate as sites of searching. They ask not only what are we looking at, but how we look and what we bring with us when we do. Debbie spoke with Cy Gavin in front of a live audience at the Met, where they were in conversation both about his life and work, but also about how it relates to ecologies of painting and

4:28installation on view in the European paintings galleries. Hello, everyone. Thank you for joining us on this beautiful afternoon in New York City. Cy, I understand that you, as you were growing up, were an avid birder. That's true. Tell us more about that. I understand that you learned more than 200 bird songs? I did. Calls as well. Birds have like flight, migratory mating calls, and songs, some of them.

4:58So I was a person who started this group in my high school with Envirothon, which is a kind of state-run academic team. And yeah, like I was a specialist in bird calls and stuff. I understand that your team, this Envirothon, you competed with your classmates, no, against your classmates to test your knowledge about soil, forestry, wildlife, aquatic ecology in a national decathlon. Yeah, we went to states.

5:30We didn't win states. You didn't win? No. But we were incredibly good.

5:35And I believe that you learned much of this information during long family car rides in the countryside. Where were you and your family traveling to? My family were Jehovah's Witnesses. So they would go knocking door to door. In the rural setting means driving around for hours. And that's what we did. But it was really great because actually it meant that I could bring books with me and read in the car.

6:05And put me in spaces where I would have opportunities to observe birds. And that made it actually engaging for me. Do you still remember the bird calls? Many, yeah. I do. I moved to California where there was a whole other set of things to learn. So I sort of lost a little bit there. While you were in the car, you and your sister were also sketching and reading. And your parents also often dropped you off at the Genora Public Library where you spent

6:38long days exploring the stacks and rows of books. Is that where you first became aware of the artwork of the old masters? 100%. And kind of in an ill-advised way, my very overprotective parents only allowed myself and my sister to go unattended to the library. And so it gave access to all the things we had curiosity about and also luckily gave us access to people who were volunteers there who were sort of surrogate parents for me at

7:12least and who took an interest in what I was doing and suggested books and ordered them from the interlibrary loan system. And yeah. What first inspired you to begin copying the old masters? I mean, I think it was really just, I wasn't allowed to do anything. So I just went to the like DIY section and would take out books about making all kinds of things. So I dabbled with all kinds of things that were there because it was a way of getting an

7:43education for free. Um, and I, where I grew up, it's very much like the education is about football and not an education. So to have the library really like more than supplemented in education, I actually provided it. And it was also a place where I could have sort of unobserved space and time to read books that would not have been allowed in my house. So you said you initially liked drawing when you were a kid, because it was a skill where

8:16you could readily notice your improvement. For sure. Did anyone in your family at that time recognize that you had artistic talent? Um, I think there's a difference between talent and skill. I think that's, I mean, I don't talk about what that way. There's a difference between talent and skill. For sure. Tell us about that. I mean, I think I'm distrustful a bit that talent exists. I mean, I hear it all the time, but I don't know what that means for myself. At least I think that I had, um, a life that was conducive to a certain kind of attention

8:51being paid to things because, as I said, I wasn't allowed to do very much. So it concentrated my attention on what I could and it fostered like an imagination that was maybe a sort of like a escape hatch. Um, but when I say there's a difference between skill and talent in my case is that it was very easy to, um, for people in my family, maybe, and other people too, to say you're talented because you have drawn this thing that looks like that thing, um, from observation or by

9:25copying it. Um, but that one, um, sort of remove them from that equation. It wasn't, it meant that you were special. You could do this and we can't. And I remember very distinctly being a young person and all of my friends drew and they all drew all the time and they drew well. And then at some point people told them that they were good at writing or that they were good at wrestling or whatever. And then they became people who looked at me and said that you're talented. So for me, it felt like an inadequate explanation for something.

9:58But I also think like whenever I would draw, I really remember and what was gratifying about it and it was that it was, as I said, like a thing that, um, the muscles of your hands are used for writing as well. So it was something that I could say, say like this week I could do something that I couldn't do literally two weeks ago. So it's evidence. Yeah. Compared to say like trying to learn an instrument, which I tried to do as well. So by comparison, it was much more like immediate gratification to be able to, to create something

10:31that would be a gift for someone. And also that would distinguish me in a way that would give me attention and make people feel that I had value in a society that otherwise probably didn't see that value. You've described your artwork at that time, some of which we can see here as a kind of coded communication. For sure. What were you trying to communicate that couldn't be said out loud? Not in these things so much. I mean, these are paintings that I made when I was in high school. And, um, the first oil painting I made is this weird self portrait with a burl on the

11:02shoulder. Um, I had sort of two sets of sketchbooks. My, I had no bedroom door, like this is not too, but like there was no sense of privacy in my youth. And it became very apparent that I had, you know, my father would rifle through every sketchbook I had, copying them and taking them to the church. It was, uh, dangerous to them somehow. Um, but when I realized that there was this kind of like power in that, which was more than I had otherwise, it was something that I obviously like played with.

11:34So I could have basically two sketchbooks and one would be like the one I knew that they were going to find. And then one was not. So you hid that one. Absolutely. Yeah, for sure. Yeah. And, but none of that work is here. The hidden work is. It was a slide I took out. Um, but those were drawings and these are paintings. So, but all the, under these, I included this because I think, um, probably our conversation will go to a place where it talks about the act of painting. And I think these are really like illuminated drawings more than paintings. And that was what, when you look at a book that you get from the library that says how

12:08to paint, that is what they tell you to do. So I, and also when you look at, uh, you know, Titian or something like up close, you see that there is actually like a chalk drawing under it or a drawing. And so I thought that that is how a painting has to be made. And, um, so the idea of painting felt inextricable to drawing and, um, and I don't feel that way now, but I, back then did. You loved going to the Carnegie museum of art in Pittsburgh, but couldn't afford the $13

12:38entrance fee. And I understand you found a way to sneak in. Yeah. I was hesitant to talk about that because I didn't want them to like close it up, but there's multiple ways, but now. You don't have to tell us where it is exactly. If it's still there. Now I'm on the board of that museum and it's like, it's still an issue actually. Um, uh, but it's the library in the basement and through the stacks. What, what did that experience teach you about access to art?

13:09And is that something you're bringing to the museum now that you're on the board? That's the number one question. I mean, I wanted to be in the museum, so I made it a point to get in there. I'm sure that other people would want to be in the museum, but I'm also sure that many people wouldn't. And I think that like that curiosity to go into a museum has to, um, sort of people have to encounter that. And what was unique and I think really lucky about my experience having that be the museum

13:42I would go to was that it was also the natural history museum and Carnegie funded a lot of excavations for dinosaur bones. So I did, I thought all museums were this kind of mix of like an active academic space and also collecting art from wherever and also relics from other cultures. Once you figured out how to get into the museum, you were there all the time. And I believe that you also had a teacher in high school who believed you had talent or

14:14skill and she would meet you in the mornings before class at school and you'd bring your paintings in, in garbage bags and she'd give you feedback. Um, what kinds of things was she telling you about your work? Yeah. I mean, I brought, I was copying paintings that I saw in the world and in books mostly, and they were all 16 by 20 because Michael's would have like two per sales and that's what I could afford. It was like $5 for two. And they always had the good coupons. Then they do have the coupons.

14:45Um, and so I would get them when they would be on sale and then, um, was very afraid of just making something that I wasn't proud of because it was costly, relatively speaking. Um, and those paintings were originally on like using just hobby, hobbyist paint, um, like 50 cent tubes from Joan Fabrice, which I really like actually. And I still use that paint now because it has a lot of chalk and it's very absorbent, absorptive rather. And so it, um, has a matte finish and is also affordable.

15:17So you can work with it without feeling, um, sensitive about losing stuff. But I bring paintings into her and she would just sort of give her opinion about them or challenge me to, I remember one moment where she would challenge me to be like, well, you make all these paintings are showing me to have, um, a certain kind of point of view. So what happens when you work larger, like where would that point of view, will it expand the painting as if you, um, grab the corners of it and drop through it out? Or would you clutter it up with the same scale of activity inside that larger painting?

15:48And since I couldn't access, you know, larger canvases, she had canvases, people had left from years past and I would have to, you know, sand them down and paint over them. And they also left paint, oil paint and, um, oil paint was way beyond, um, like accessibility. So yeah, that's, was incredibly important for me to have a person who would just like carving out five minutes to do that. One of the masterpieces in the ecology of paint, ecologies of painting exhibition here at the

16:20Met that we've been hearing about from, um, the curators is Peter Bruegel's 1565 painting Harvesters. And you've said that first seeing Bruegel's work at that time of your life was life changing. Yeah. I mean, in what way, what did it inspire you in you? How did you feel when you saw it? Not Bruegel's alone, but I mean, I think Vanderbeiden, I think Van Eyck's, Bosch, I mean, because oil paint was, you know, made in these places, it was, it's like a new moment and in

16:56painting. And it was very fascinating to see the kind of intricacy of the way that they were made in composition, but also in loading them with data. And to contrast that with say like a courtly image, it wasn't seemingly meant to serve any one person. It felt like it was more for an audience, not one person or one religious entity. And it were fun to look at. So like, yeah, I would go to art school, like many, I guess, have like a homeroom sort

17:28of thing. And you could go to the library in the morning. So I would go and like, it's called Flemish paintings. We'd take these books out that were probably from the sixties. And a lot of them were in black and white, which was annoying, but, um, you could still see that there was so much intention and, you know, I didn't understand kind of the underpinnings of, of these societies at all. I would read it what I could, but I was more interested in sort of how they were made and they were often on wood. And that was interesting to me too. I looked at everything. It wasn't just, it wasn't just, I wasn't specifically Flemish painting.

18:00I looked at everything. How did that early exposure influence how you thought about art? I thought that it had to do something. And I think that is not how I feel now. I think that like what I thought was that these functional objects, which back then, especially like cost so much money and also time and labor to make the materials. They had to do something and often had to be funded by someone to do that thing. And it wasn't, and this is not my objective either to be expressive, but it wasn't, it

18:33was often with an end role that feels functional in a society. And I think it, well, that was like, it took a very long time to sort of unburden myself from that. And also why, when I was maybe like 30 or something, I never saw this work as being art necessarily so much as like a sort of skill, something, something that had a function and like, you know, like paint someone's dog that died and it'd be like, oh my God, this person had a real response to this because it's meaningful to them.

19:05And that was hugely gratifying and also like not art in my mind. Why? I don't know. That's a good question. I just didn't, I didn't feel, it didn't feel, um. Conceptual enough or? Zero. I mean, I think it's like, um, I think, no, I think it was just like making a perfect cocktail or making like a perfect meal or something. It had to do these things and it's like, okay, it did the things. I think in the process of making something like that in that mind so that you can totally

19:36daydream and do anything. Yeah. It's more of an artisanal activity. Did growing up in a post-industrial town where nature was literally reclaiming what industry had left behind shape your sense of what nature was at that time? Hugely. Yeah. I mean, also society and like what capitalism was and like what globalization was, which I didn't know and encountered that when I went to school. But yeah, I mean, I saw, I lived in the kind of like ravaged aftermath of industry going into

20:12a place and then leaving and that meant strip mines, uh, but also old mines that had been sealed up that would open up and just consume someone's house. And no one, my town was from 1901. It's very similar to many towns along these rivers that were all mill towns. So there was an entitlement that people felt, I think, having had grandparents who had worked in situations that were very deadly to them, but which gave them a pension. I didn't grow up in that denouement. I grew up in a denouement that was 40 years after that.

20:43So, but I would go into buildings that were like, as if you'd stop time in the thirties, like just in fixtures, everything was like that. And there was a deep grudge that was talked about and felt by people there for not having the kind of lives that they felt entitled to by merit of their parents or grandparents living when they did. Many of them all died of like lung cancers and stuff. You have some paintings here of your grandmother and they feel very conceptual in a lot of ways.

21:16Can you talk about the two pieces? Well, this is my painting of my mother, actually. Um, but this is a painting of my grandmother. She did fall and she did have a walker. Why she's in this space, I don't know. I just, I think I was very, uh, at that moment looking at like a lot of surrealist paintings and I love my grandmother and he wouldn't necessarily know from that painting, but, um, I painted her a lot and I, and she's actually, I took care of her garden, which was a little strip of like maybe a foot that surrounded her house because she was bedridden.

21:48And that got me very interested in planting things. Um, but she was very old when I was born even. She's from Puerto Rico and yeah, she just was a character. Um, you've talked about feeling safest as you were growing up in the woods, places that weren't surveilled. Um, do you think your relationship to landscape began as a form of freedom? Um, I mean, I hadn't thought of that, but, um, maybe, I mean, I think, I think more than I was maybe seeking the lands, those spaces I was escaping the people I was with, um, and

22:23the kind of scrutiny that was like unavoidable in those kinds of really hermetic situations. Um, at that stage of your life, you were planning on going into science. Yeah. What were you planning to do professionally at that point? I don't really know. It just felt, I think like something that to my young mind, I believed one and two that it felt exciting because it, whatever I was, it would have been something in natural sciences, but it would have been in my ignorance.

22:55I thought that that would be a space where there was like no ego. It's like, Oh, like I could spend my whole life working at finding this thing, cracking this code. And then I, as I'm on my deathbed, some young person comes and does that and I'd be happy about it. Like, I thought it was just sort of like this, um, kind of utopic alternative to man-made religions or something. Your high school teacher arranged for you to attend an event with admissions officers from several college art programs. And this resulted in your being awarded a scholarship to go to Carnegie Mellon's prestigious

23:30undergraduate art program. And you said that when you got there, everyone else in the program had a baseline knowledge of art history, which you didn't have. How did you catch up? I didn't. Or did you? No, I didn't. And I, um, was totally confused by that. I mean, I went, you don't really, I didn't meet these people immediately. I just saw them because it's very communal. I saw people pulling out their portfolios and all were presenting drawings of cones and cylinders and nudes and stuff.

24:02And I was like, like, what does this have to do with you? I just totally didn't get it. And then every single person had the same thing. And it was like, I brought whatever I had there, which were these lots of drawings of all kinds of people that singers and that I care about and whatever, birds and whatever. And any of these paintings that we see behind us in that portfolio? Probably this painting of Maria Callas, probably that bird, but lots of drawings, which I did all the time. Um, and so, um, and which were very minute and like intense, but so many people rejected

24:32or like, really like, what is this? And it was really crazy circumstance, happenstance because I arrived there, everyone was already queued up because you didn't have enough time really to go to every place you wanted. So you had to have also like a knowledge of where you'd want to go and get in the line that would take an hour. So since I didn't have that, I was standing there looking at this map of the broom and I was like, where do I can go? And this, these people came up and they were running late and they were throwing together like a little folding table and they were panicked because they were there 15 minutes

25:04late. And I thought, well, I'll be the first person in line for these people. I don't know who they are. They didn't put the thing out. And it was Carnegie Mellon, which was weird because it was also from where I was. And this portfolio review day happened in Baltimore at MICA. And the person who she'd looked, looked at my sketchbook and started crying. And she's like, she started to cry. She started crying. And she's like, where are you from? And she's like, no, don't know. And she's like, what are you doing? And then she's like, if I gave you a scholarship, would you attend? And then I was like, yeah, then.

25:35So she changed her life. Like in a second. That's incredible. Yeah. It was bananas. And then I had like an hour to kill. So I was like, I'll go to these other places, I guess. And, and really I went in line with these places and they were like, what is this? So it was, it was very. Do you have a sense of what made her cry? I do because I got to know her later and she was the drawing chair. I mean, I, I should talk to her about it. And well, one that she recognized where that was in terms of socioeconomic meaning.

26:10And you wouldn't unless you were from that region. And she also just, I think, knew that what I was making was not meant to cater to an acceptance committee. And it was like a thing I was making in the vacuum of my own child mind. This episode is brought to you by Choiceology, an original podcast from Charles Schwab, hosted by Katie Milkman, an award-winning behavioral scientist and author of bestselling book, How

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28:40It's incredible when adults reach out to people that they believe in, even when they might sense or know that the person themselves doesn't believe in what they're capable of. I ordinarily don't talk too much about myself in interviews with others, but there is somebody in the audience I want to acknowledge who I found out was coming today. Her name is Roz Goldfarb, and she changed my life back when I was in my early 30s and

29:10completely lost with nowhere to go, and she believed in me. And when we find people like that in our lives, I think it's important to acknowledge what that means. I love that. Right? Yeah. And it's also, I've been the beneficiary of so many people like that in my life. Thank you, Roz. In any case, I believe your family was disappointed that you weren't following their biblical beliefs. I didn't ask them.

29:40I don't... I can surmise. My father married a woman who was a Jehovah's Witness also, so I sense a little bit of what you, or I'm aware of what the sort of door-to-door situation was. My brothers had to do a lot of that with her. Yeah. How did you manage that? It was not fun in the summer. I mean, because also you were wearing like a cheap suit in like 100 degree weather. These were not confidants of mine. No? Zero. No, absolutely not. And so... And they had no... No, they had no interest in me as a person. I was a product of their...

30:11I'm them. I think, you know, my mother is alive and it's really evolved since then, but my father did not evolve away from that. And yeah, and I think in so many of those kinds of environments, it's about power and control. And if you have a personality, that's a threat in that I had a personality.

30:30You've said that the amazing gift of your upbringing... is that you have absolutely no problem telling someone to F off. Yeah, I thank them for that. And so, this is the tutorial moment of the interview. For all of us that might also have had challenging upbringings, can you share how you acquired this skill to do that? It's a good question.

31:04I don't know exactly where that came from, probably from my grandmother, to be absolutely real. Not too readily to tell someone to F off. But I mean, I think if it's obvious that they don't really have your interests at heart, as was so the case when I was a kid, they're asking for it. And also just like, there's nothing at stake. They're not losing anything, actually. But that really requires a belief in what you're capable of to sort of tell someone no. Yeah, but I mean, you have to answer yourself at the end of the day.

31:35And I think, like, I would be, I don't, they didn't, you know, it's wonderful to have been born. But like, you do the rest of the work, it's like not, it's not someone else's job.

31:48After graduating from Carnegie Mellon, you worked in video post-production. You also worked in as an assistant to the feminist photographer and filmmaker Ellen Cantor, and as an archivist for the artist Vito Acconci. You then applied to MFA programs and attended Columbia University, which really surprised me. I mentioned that to you the other day. Why Columbia? I would have expected you to go to like a very famous art school for your MFA. I mean, not that Columbia is not famous. I just wouldn't have necessarily thought of it first and foremost for art.

32:19I mean, to go back to this portfolio review day, like way back when I was a kid. And also, yeah, that was, there was seven years of doing all kinds of things. And part of what was so wildly off-putting about my undergraduate experience was that there was this idea that you are there to fit into an art historical continuum, and that is basically the same as starting any business or something and having to be relevant or whatever. And that motivating drive for so many of the people I went to school with, if not all of

32:52them, made them, you know, spend huge amounts of money for student projects that looked like museum kind of incredible things they were making. And then they immediately stopped making work as soon as they graduated. What I struggled with in that situation in undergraduate studies was that it was this kind of feedback loop where people were really like only interested in having a career. And so what was wonderful about being at Carnegie Mellon was that it was a university where I could take classes in other departments.

33:23And they actually forced a sort of interdisciplinary relationship you have to choose if you're going to go to humanities and partner with them or science, as I actually went with humanities. When I was thinking about going to a graduate program, it was important to me to be like, I want to have access to other kind of coursework that will actually like not just be talking about what shows are happening wherever and, or what some theorists wrote about whatever, like actually to have access to like, as I, when I was at school, I studied with Kelly

33:55Jones, who was like an enormously influential person to me and also studied in anthropology department and that enriched that experience immensely. And yeah, like it made me have a kind of multidimensional time there that I think many people you wouldn't have. Actually, you would not have that if you just had the coursework of your department. How were those courses informing the subject matter of your painting? Hugely. I mean, enormously. So all you had to do was like really write a professor. And that was as simple as getting a course catalog and seeing what looked interesting,

34:30their email be there. And then because you're a grad student and they're not going to kick you out, you just write them and say, is it possible that I can be in a class for this sort of pass fail thing and they could say, no, they usually said yes because they wanted different points of view. And if they didn't say yes, then you could at least audit it. And it felt like a huge waste of an incredible resource to not, I mean, Neil deGrasse Tyson is there. Like you have this access to a crazy telescope, like whatever you were doing in your studio

35:00could have been enhanced, whatever it is, by someone on that campus. To not exploit that felt unwise. These paintings feature, they all feature nature, but they also include a figurative entity. Talk about the relationship that you had at this point in your work with a figure sort of embedded or participating or witnessing nature. A lot of these paintings were, it's like the beginning of me moving away from drawing.

35:36Yet many of these actually do have drawing as a sort of starting point. I allowed myself to deviate from that, but I remember that always being this kind of gear shift and being like, okay, throwing that away now. And like, now it's becoming something else. What you learn when you do that is that you immediately forget what you were so precious about and then you're pressed about something else. As far as people go in some of these paintings, like it was a bit, it was absolutely out of this moment, which is the kind of rise of Black Lives Matter movement. And I had to kind of justify to myself what I was doing in the studio.

36:08If I'm going to be spending 10 hours a day painting or doing something else that's more immediate, like protesting or whatever. I was very also interested in creating images that I hadn't seen exist in the world. And I think the more that I thought about the language that was being bandied around at that time was really rattling around in my head, like matter, like what it does mean to matter and matter itself and what constitutes that. So like, and also I was thinking about making paintings that were more than just an image such

36:42that they would be singular and one to the next be very different. So like these have different materials in them as a sort of way of seeing also how on a few occasions where some of these were exhibited, how people address that or how, if they were like forensically looking for, oh, there's diamonds there or like whatever this, they're not diamond diamonds, but like milling diamonds used for machining, but how people assigned value to this, that kind of carbon and not the charcoal that it's underneath or the, whatever is in

37:13it. Susanna Coffey, a painter and your mentor from Columbia once told you that when people see something they perceive as beautiful, it becomes difficult for them to unsee it. She did say that. Do you think that beauty can function as a veil, as something to sort of obscure the, the act of being beautiful obscures you from maybe what the topic matter is? Yeah. Maybe like a cloak. Yeah. Cloak. Don't worry. And a dagger.

37:43I think that, yeah, I think she was saying it as like a sort of inducement to deal with like topics that otherwise would be, you know, people can tune out or compartmentalize away. I think she really believed in the power of painting as much as anything else and wasn't just an image that it had a kind of, can have a certain kind of power. I think that that exists in paint in a way that I don't really talk about, but I think it is a real thing that I make my paintings myself.

38:16And so like, you know, a lot of people do have all kinds of people doing stuff. Yeah. It's amazing. I've been to many studios where there's a whole staff of people. Most. And so, which is fine. That's making an image. I think when you're making a painting, though, it is, does have a kind of inherent, like, I feel that way. You look at Rembrandt. They're made by teams of people or Rubens or whatever. What I like most is looking at paintings that are made by a person and that where you can retrace the actual physicality of it, what they were bored at and what they cared about,

38:49what they, how they adjusted something or how they maybe chose to crop an image after it was painted. To me, that is, at a human level, very interesting. And I think it felt dishonest to make work that didn't foreground that. And I think that is why it felt increasingly dishonest to make paintings that were having a drawing as an underpinning and being kind of dutifully executing it. So now you place the paint directly on the canvas or the medium that you're working on? Yeah. Without a pre-drawing and without even a sense of necessarily what might occur?

39:24Exactly. For better or worse. It feels extremely dangerous. But it's like, who said that? I forget who said it. Maybe Augustine or someone was like, it's not dangerous. Like running and saving people out of buildings is dangerous. It's not dangerous for you. Yeah, it's uncomfortable. It might be for you. It's certainly, it's deeply uncomfortable and it feels out of control. And for me, I'm the person, why I wanted to show those things at first is like, that is my tendency as a human being is to have control, especially over an image. And I think particularly given where I kind of grew up, everything would have been so heavily

39:56scrutinized that it was a natural inclination to hide myself away from that and puppeteer an activity in a studio rather than showing up in a kind of a real way. How do you navigate the tension between beauty and difficult histories in your work? I don't ever think about beauty. I don't, I've, I'm actually shocked when people say that things are beautiful. But many I know are like, I think, I don't think about beauty. I think about, not about much, actually, if I'm painting now.

40:27I think that what I do think about happens before I paint. And then when I'm working, something comes out of that. And then I have to identify it. I have to like reckon with it. I have to either, yeah, I follow it. When I was younger, I've been like, oh God, I would like yank this back to make it what I want it to be. And then what is, what is that that was coming out? You know, like that always happens. And I think that is also what was sort of at the, the crux of that is like to paint without a drawing. It's, it's not actually dangerous in the way that you say, because even if you did paint

41:02on top of this drawing that you already laid out very meticulously with every kind of voice in your head from everyone who cares about you telling you like, well, you made that like, if you did that, you'd still have a second image. Like there's what you're trying to do and then what you actually did do. And if you're even fussily trying to put paint down in an exact way, it's still communicating that you're a person who's probably out of control, like, and you're trying to communicate that you are. So like, why not just eliminate that step entirely and just be yourself?

41:33You know, the exhibition, the ecologies of painting invites us to look very closely at landscape, not as a backdrop, but as something alive and entangled with human history and labor and imagination. And the paintings remind us that nature has never been neutral and it has been observed and shaped and idealized and controlled and sometimes resisted. When you look at the images in the exhibition, what do you see beneath the idealization?

42:07That's the thing about that kind of work is that I think to read it in the way that it was resonant in its time requires information, a lot of information, actually. I enjoy that. I enjoy, like, getting books and reading about what I'm looking at from bygone times. Because, yeah, I think that those same, I mean, painted by human beings, I think what has really shifted hugely in terms of, like, what is painted or what people think of as worthy of being painted or whatever is the accessibility of materials.

42:40And, yeah, and I think, I was just even thinking about this conversation of, like, painting, like, what is painting? Like, what is painting? And, like, you know, 17,000 years ago, you know, that's when the Scope Caves were. And it's like, we don't understand exactly what, how those images were resonant in that time. They're clearly meaningful for whoever made them. I don't think they lose value for not being able to decode them. I don't feel so arrogant as to think I understand, like, what situation produced the painting that I didn't make. Even myself, I'm like, what made this?

43:11But the paintings, I think, in the exhibition, they ask us, I mean, they span centuries. So they ask us to consider not only how artists have depicted the natural world, but how those depictions shape our understanding of our place within it. How do you approach painting landscapes that have been mythologized as paradise?

43:34As a human being, not as a person painting. As a human being, if I'm puzzling something or if it matters to me in some kind of way, it's going to be a thing I talk about. It's a thing that will probably come out in the studio. And it is not so contrived as to be like, I'm going to do this thing that will change the way that this site is seen. It just doesn't work like that. That would have when I was younger, where I think that, I think actually to be, to use this, like, ugly word, I think that's where, like, art can become propaganda. And I really struggled as a young person to be like, so, like, who painted these religious,

44:12like, I want to look at these paintings at face value as just great artworks, but then there's also this underpinning of, like, who's funding them, the kind of actions of the church that maybe they're working for, and how the person making it wasn't even kind of seen in a good light by those churches. Does that influence how you feel about a piece? I think it can be a component. I think, like, not always, but I think I look at something, period, no matter who made it, just, like, for what I can see it to be. And you can sort of infer intention without knowing it.

44:44And I think that's why outsider art, or whatever the language is, we're calling that now, is so meaningful to people because it's made with intention and has value to the maker. And that is very immediately recognizable to me. What is harder is whenever the value is in the person funding the making. And then I usually just kind of appreciate it as a construction. And also, I think, but it adds complexity to appreciate the societal situation that produced that thing.

45:15I think a person who jumps to mind is, like, Goya or Velazquez, who were court painters, but also creating images of society of people that were not able to buy their work, but they were also making very political, very intense personal statements, for lack of a better word, in what they were making while still painting the Duke of Wellington or whoever. Drawing from personal geography, you traveled to Bermuda to understand your family's legacy,

45:47your father's legacy, to the Hudson Valley where you now live. Your work explores how place holds beauty and violence, presence and erasure. And your paintings are not simply representations of landscape, but meditations on memory, material, and the layered histories embedded in land itself. Do you think it's possible to depict landscape truthfully? Or is every landscape in some way an invention?

46:19I don't know if there's, I don't think there's a truth to any place. And I don't think of landscape as being distinguished from even the built environment, to be totally real. I think I was really thinking a lot about this, for the show and for this conversation, what nature means to me. And it's really not like a thing outside of myself. It's not that I'd move upstate to like find Arcadia. I'd move there because it was like the only, actually it was very close and it was very, it allowed me to work without certain constraints that I felt impeded me, specifically like being

46:52observed and also, or having to come up with enough money to afford places that I, would be working in. And for that need to sell stuff to afford the place that I'm working in. But having gone there, I recognized as you do anywhere, that there are politics of a place that shape it, that shape conversations, that shape your treatment in the place that exists everywhere. And the moment when I moved upstate, it was a question of like how, as readily and quickly understand the texture of these places and what is, what are the stakes?

47:25Why do these people care about this issue? And what, and that is for my own self-preservation, but also to be like, how am I implicated in this? What is my impact as a person who's coming into this place? If I go and tell people I'm in this town, is that going to just completely like destroy the, the, a lot of, a lot of positive things about the town? Um, and it surely would have, I think, yeah, I think I moved through the world curious about that and, um, I think of it as always evolving in ways that are positive, negative, and neutral.

47:58You've talked about having to find ways into museums when you were younger. Um, we're having this conversation today, now, in a museum that since 2023 holds one of your paintings in its permanent collection, an institution that, like the landscapes you paint, is itself a site of history and access and transformation. What do you imagine your painting being in dialogue with the other paintings here being?

48:29I mean, it's sort of proof of having existed, which is interesting and profound. Um, I didn't make this work right before it was required by the museum. It was in my life for like a year before I even showed it. And it's of a, of a site at my studio of literally paths that I cut into a meadow that I didn't really know what I was painting when I was working on it. But then the more I looked at it, which is why I was in my studio for a year, I felt that it was probably because the time when it was made about agency and making choices and also

49:02the kind of magic that historically happens at crossroads. And I don't feel like that is not so necessary information for people to like have their experience with that work. But I think what is really amazing about the Met, what's incredibly amazing about the Met and apropos of this conversation particularly is like, this is a free museum and so few are in the world. And this houses some of the most incredible things to just feed your imagination and curiosity and to be able to do that so readily, why would you not be here all the time?

49:33And so when I was here all the time and what happens and what's interesting about painting to me is that whatever you put in does go into this kind of under realm of the subconscious and comes out in all kinds of ways. I believe that like when I was working on this painting, that some part of my brain remembered that Bruegel painting and actually that cut into the wheat field, which struck me as like a very strange, cool choice. It sort of punctures the way that you see the painting.

50:05And I was not thinking about that in this painting here, but I think that all those things just end up informing decisions you make. And only later you're like, oh, like, did I just repaint someone else's painting? So it's like hard to put into words what it is to be at this museum, but it feels like by home, like a sort of cultural home in lots of ways. And you don't have to sneak in anymore. I don't have to sneak in anymore. Yeah, this is my favorite place in New York, so it's cool. I have two last questions for you. Do you have a painting here in one of the most, if not the most famous museum in the world?

50:40You're represented by the Gagosian Gallery. Your work is in important collections in museums. You've even designed the carpet and some of the ephemera for last year's Met Gala. Does success impact the way you approach your practice? No. No? No. Do you feel pressure to live up to anything specific? No. No. How do you keep that aside? I front-loaded my life that way. I was just like, I'm not doing this again. I had very hard conversations with gallerists that I worked with years and years ago about that.

51:18And it meant that no one goes in my studio. It's my space. And that is probably unique a bit. Like, I don't, people don't go in my studio. So, not only can that now pick up something that's half done and say, I want to sell that, or like, stop, it's done. Don't put another, it's like, you don't know what you're looking at. So, I don't either. I don't either, but you certainly don't. Um, so, for me, like, that has meant, um, like, huge freedom. And I think, certainly, probably meant that certain opportunities were not afforded to

51:49me because I was not having people, uh, in my studio in the same way. And I was not allowing them to ever say, like, do that again. The moment someone ever said anything along those lines, I would just be like, I didn't have a conversation about it. If they did it twice, it was a problem. So, you know, I think many people I know are, have been intimidated into behavior because of that kind of pressure. And I think it is very important to not deal to it. My last question is actually, I think, more of a gift, um, for, for us all.

52:25Um, tell us about what you're working on now. And I know you have a slide to show us, despite you not letting people into your studio, you're letting us in. And it's true. So, look at this magnificence on the wall here for everyone to see. Um, talk about what you're making now. I don't know if I can. I took this picture literally last night. I'm, yeah, I'm looking at this and working on it in real time. I think it probably came out of, the painting that was previous to this is of the Delaware

52:55River Frozen and where I was going there and drawing or painting the river, but then it melted. So, maybe this is probably the algae that's underneath that I've been looking at. Probably. Yeah. It takes a long time to sort of ascertain what even something is. Well, thank you for sharing this with us. I feel very- Thank you for looking. To get this sort of very, very exclusive peek under the hood. Thank you for being an audience. Bye, Gavin. Thank you so much. Thank you, everybody, for joining us here today.

53:25I hope you enjoyed our conversation as much as I did. And thank you to everybody at the Met for making this happen. Design Matters is produced for the TED Audio Collective by Curtis Fox Productions. The interviews are usually recorded at the Masters in Branding Program at the School of Visual Arts in New York City, the first and longest running branding program in the world. The editor-in-chief of Design Matters Media is Emily Weiland. You have the vision for your business.

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