Exclusive interview with Erik Wayne Patterson. Brought to you by Antipoda  
Latest Artwork by © Erik Wayne Patterson 2005. Watch › one · two · three · four

Erik Wayne Patterson, who lives in New York with his wife, Renee, and a baby in progress, is getting down to basics. As he completes his MFA at Parson’s School of Design and looks forward to his next show with Brooklyn’s 31 Grand, he’s busy with rearranging his life, moving his studio, and preparing for the joy, sleeplessness and responsibility out there on the horizon. He seems to be managing it pretty well.
His paintings evince the twisted humor and philosophical bent of the best underground comics, sometimes aggressive, sometimes disarming, always alive with ideas. As he explains in an email, there is a distance between the two media, comics and painting, but likewise there “really is a tradition in fine art painting of the comic / grotesque / narrative; think of Bosch, Breugel... Grosz... most surrealists.”
Patterson is also a perceptive critic and an able writer. View and read his work online at Antipoda under USA or www.erikwaynepatterson.net
Interviewed by Andrei Thompson May 2, 2005
Q · In an email you used words like “crappy” and “dated” to describe your style. Would you use the same words now?

A · I guess I would use words like dorky, actually. It’s partially decisions you can't put your finger on, like the way this looks, it makes the point better than this other way.
I want to create a sense of predictability or normalcy, something comfortable in the way the image is composed, or the paint is applied, so you’re looking at a picture as opposed to a painting, like Norman Rockwell or something. So in some ways I’m intentionally conservative in certain ways, the composition, the application of the paint, it's not big showy brushstrokes, not terribly gimmicky or “clever.”
Then in other ways there are stylistic elements which serve to disrupt that. First step: there’s something very familiar. Second step: after looking at it for awhile it twists into something alien or strange, a certain wrongness or a warped quality.
Lately it's getting a little more like contemporary art or painting as opposed to like a picture – but there’s not many of those sorts of pieces on my website.
Q · You’re completing your MFA from Parson’s in New York. Where do you see yourself headed after that?
A · The most important thing is to make my artwork, as I am associated with a gallery and will have another show in a year, year-and-a-half. I have to do whatever I can to concentrate on that. But a person has to pay their rent, so I’ve been trying to find a teaching position in a college somewhere within an hour’s drive. I do plan on staying in New York, I think it’s very important unless you’re an artist who’s very established, and I’m certainly no such thing. But it’s really competitive and I’m a little bit pessimistic.
  But the big thing is that my wife and I are going to become parents in September. In general it’s like, how can you plan for that, or imagine anything along the lines of how your life is going to be rearranged… so it’s a little bit scary but also really exciting. At some times I figure I should not think about it, but of course it sort of creeps back into the front of your head. It’s a good thing it takes nine months so you can mentally prepare.
Q · A lot of your paintings also seem to be preoccupied with basically sex, it’s in a lot of the paintings, except it surfaces in all these different sorts of ways. Some of it is very upfront, and some is much more under the table. Why don’t you talk about the first “Evil Gorilla.” That seems fun because it opens up the same sort of dynamics, the weirdness of hanging out in those bars, and what a much smaller person maybe thinks about when speaking to a much bigger person….
A · [Laughs] I actually hadn’t thought about it in quite those terms. The big idea in that making me laugh is, things just run through people’s heads, sometimes really bizarre things, like a kind of unvoiced Tourette’s syndrome. Given this kind of boring [unintelligible] your brain will come up with these perfectly bizarre, inappropriate scenarios, like how did that just get into my head, and I think the way it happens is, in Tourette’s, your brain on some level is figuring out what would be the most embarrassing or ridiculous thing possible, and then, there it is. And if you have Tourette’s you actually say it out loud.
   Here, you see it vividly in your head. So here’s this little guy, kind of cartoonish, sitting in a bar and this thing pops into his head of this giant gorilla yanking his penis, it’s like oh, that’s insane. And then if you’re making a painting you can do what you want, they do come out of silly ideas like that, and I thought it would be interesting with a generalized cartoonish guy on a painting having this thought, and I could then go ahead and have it happen. Which is even more ridiculous.
Q · Well, there’s another one, how about “Shooting the Shit on a Tuesday Afternoon?” Where the guy on the left has a yellow polo shirt and says something about a couch, and his table companion has a tie on and basically a penis with a helmet and boots and antennae sticking out where his neck is.
A · I think I have less explanation for that one. Sometimes just a strange, beautifully stupid idea comes into my head, that makes me laugh to the point that I just have to paint this. There’s certainly something to [things that make] you laugh, as a phenomenon. Usually it’s a kind of unexpected thing, bordering on distasteful, and something about it makes you make this noise, you laugh at it. So this one, I can say that it’s dealing with this normalcy and the fact of a situation and people sort of zoning out…
  There literally could be things that bizarre going on right next to you or in front of you, and you carry on the most banal conversation and not know about it. Certainly there’s significance of some kind to the particular bizarre phenomenon I chose…
Q · Well I think it characterizes the conversation as between two characters, and gets you thinking about what’s in their background. You have an attractive guy talking about furniture, and a more office-bound guy with this distinctly erotic enthusiasm, and basically two different converstations going on the same time.
A · I think that connects to the idea I was just talking about. Also one thing, there have been a few different interpretations of that piece, the simplest of which was from an uncle who was like, “that one’s so funny, sometimes there’s a guy who you’re talking to and he’s just such a dickhead.” And I didn’t think of that, but you know, that’s great. I really just wanted the actual wording [about the couch] to be as boring as possible, but I recognize sometimes the words end up taking on connotations.
Q · What about your work do you consider political?
A · I certainly have my political views, particularly in the past couple of years. But I’m uncomfortable with making art that’s directly political. Maybe it’s a little irresponsible? The best way to deal with a political issue is to really deal with it, to do your homework and know what you’re talking about. But to use a medium like painting, whose strengths are in its vagueness – I don’t think the two are exactly suited. I suppose anything could be indirectly political, and a lot of my work deals with faulty thought processes that can lead to people not really understanding what’s going on politically; those processes are encouraged and enforced even through White House press statements and the media in general, it’s a very big tricky thing.
  But I do see artists as connected very often, and not just by coincidence, to politics and the communication wing of politics – PR or propaganda, even – because in a way it’s the same type of language. Not so much painting but a visual artist in general is an expert on the presentation and manipulation of images and words and ideas, and that’s really what propaganda is as well: taking factual information and fiddling with it until it takes a certain slant or means a certain thing.
  The real difference is that people who are making actual propaganda that has effect are in almost the opposite position artists are in. In the U.S. most people don’t know contemporary art exists at all. So besides being a strange match, even if it worked really well, who’s going to see it?
Q · You were talking about the politics of your art a bit in your Ruscha article.
A · I’m remembering photos of pathetic gas stations and large, foregrounded words, bam, right in the middle of the picture plane. [The latter] has this certain kind of presentation to it, almost body language except it’s not a body, it’s an image which happens to say something in English: with this really frontal quality, this look-at-me aura, a built-in feeling of importance.
  I think that’s actually how things that amount to propaganda work. If it’s too obvious, if there’s something that could easily be picked apart, if anyone feels like they’re being manipulated, it’s not going to work. But if it’s done through the tone, addressed like it’s an already established fact, or mentioned offhandedly when actually it’s the most important part, it’s kind of tricking you into having a certain attitude and thinking you had it before rather than someone else gave you the attitude. I do see that in the word pieces.
Q · Which of your works are you most proud of?
A · Hmm. If the question were of a category it would be the paintings. But I mean, if a painting is like a real failure, it doesn’t even get finished, there are a lot on the website with other paintings under them.
  Right now, I think, a couple not on the website, but one that is on there is the bright orange one “To Understand, and Communicate.” It’s painting that has a certain simplicity, it does what it needs to do, and conceptually I’m pleased with how it works, this literally bright and dynamic and even violent scene, but obscuring the most important parts of it are this completely boring sentence in a word balloon that’s sort of this beige color, ridiculous and funny. But there’s something about the fact that the text instead of explaining kind of does the opposite, gets in the way. That’s my current favorite.
  Another that’s pretty much done is with a life-sized figure in the panel, the background is black, the figure is really crappily painted, ugly globs of paint, nothing really illusionistic about this guy. He’s looking right at you, his eyes are at eye level, and he has a word balloon that says “This is what I’d like to convince you of.” So in one way he does look like a used car salesman, cheesy smile and all, but in another way [it reflects] the convincingness of an image and the weirdness of being addressed by a crudely made person, it’s kind of creepy, I’m happy with that one right now. Several people have told me it has an emotional, visceral quality to it where other of my work is cold and distant in a lot of ways. So it goes.
Q · Last question. Talk about two pieces of art or culture or whatever that inspired you, one of which has had an influence on your work and one of which has not.
A · In terms of what’s really fresh in my head, I just saw this film “The American Astronaut” that I really thought was brilliant, kind of absurd: an outer space western musical, more about these moments and these characters that are so perfect in certain ways, and it’s sci-fi but so blatantly low quality. The whole thing has this artificial quality to it, and because of that it has a real impact. If something is too convincing, you’re on your guard, like, I’m watching a movie. But at certain points say cartoons, because I’m off guard, have this amazing power to them. So now I’m looking at a very large panel I’m about to start painting, with all these sci-fi references to the future of the past, stuff like that interests me. So that’s one.
  In terms of something that isn’t, I don’t know, there are a lot of really great artists whose work doesn’t really have anything to do with mine, but I’m thinking of the Philip Guston show I saw last year [at the Met]. My own style of painting is intentionally removed or cold or distant or intellectualized or whatever, but the way he used paint, God it’s just amazing, the colors and the brushstrokes, I just stand there in front of the thing and, it’s like, it’s so simple, why hasn’t anyone else thought to do this this way? It’s honest and direct and amazing work that really doesn’t have much of a connection to mine.