The only graffiti I’ve ever made was in crayon on a carpeted floor in my first grade class room. It was a rather large rainbow under my desk and it was not well-received by the local authorities.
On the most basic level, graffiti is about ownership. I can attest to that: my colorful creation was under my (assigned) desk! This a unifying factor in an otherwise disparate genre. After all, the subjects of graffiti are varied--not everyone favors motifs like mine from two decades ago. In my current neighborhood, the walls speak of specific fears or of a certain paranoia. “Investigate” is scrawled all over half the buildings in the industrial district and stencils of a political or turn-off-your-television nature dot the urban landscape. Graffiti is a kind of guerrilla advertising, and, though it’s usually more propaganda than art, the fact that it’s embedded into the fabric of our environment lends it a certain gravity I think.
It was all these things that I was thinking about when I started the following painting for Apple Pie. Nixon Returning Home Robed In Embroidered Silks is a portrait of Roger as the former President. This sitter-icon combination was the subject’s own choice: Roger believes that Nixon is our greatest leader since he saved the world from Communism by going to China.
To start the painting, I layered graffiti-like on a strip of unmounted canvas. I wrote things like “rage” or “McCarthy lives” or “foreign devils” or “go home,” but also things like “hope” and “change” and “I believe” along with “free Tibet” and “call me.” I wanted the background for the painting to look like an old and well-used wall. I thought that the layers of meaningfully trivial mantras would do well in support an image of a Taiwanese-American man posing like President Nixon.
I chose to work on a banner (in which I later put grommets) to reference the corporate advertising banners favored by desperate storefronts. The self-promotion/self-mythology of the many manifestos I wrote on it fed into my ideas about Nixon and China, and the banner also happened to resemble a Chinese scroll.
I couldn’t paint Roger with the canvas spread out on the floor, so I tacked the scroll to a piece of board (which wasn’t quite long enough to show me the full image all at once).
Painting over the busy background was distracting and difficult to begin with…
...but the canvas was so thoroughly sealed with paint by this point that the layers in the figure went on smoothly (once I managed to figure out where to put the brushstrokes!).
Here, I’ve added in Nixon’s most famous quote, from his 1962 press conference after losing the election for Governor of California (following his defeated bid for the White House two years earlier but before is successful bid in 1968). In graffiti fashion, I’ve corrected it for today’s world.
I spread out the canvas on the floor again in order to get a better view of the full composition and to complete the painting.
Nixon Returning Home Robed In Embroidered Silks (Taiwanese-American)
2008
acrylic on unmounted canvas, grommets
24 x 68 inches
detail image of Nixon Returning Home Robed In Embroidered Silks
Half-visible here is the American flag lapel pin which reads “made in the USA.”
detail image of Nixon Returning Home Robed In Embroidered Silks
Hands are a new element in my work. I started working with them in 2006 in this painting but didn’t return to them in any committed way until I began work on the paintings of Apple Pie in the spring of 2007.
detail image of Nixon Returning Home Robed In Embroidered Silks
Ancient Chinese scrolls are usually covered in the seals of its various owners. It’s a good way to keep track of the provenance of the work, but there is a graffiti-esque quality to the seals being stamped directly on the art. I liked that, so I invented a few seals for the various “owners” of Richard Nixon. All the seals are in plain English.
nice work!