A train from Berlin to Paris, old artist cities, hard years, hands, money and the decision to give the next body of work enough time.
First-class delusions
I was on a new high-speed train from Berlin to Paris, in first class because the route was still cheap to promote. Paris was my first stop before a funded project in Spain building free software with artists and hackers. It felt like being in the right place at the right time.
When people talk about being an artist, I often hear that I should have arrived 15 years earlier. The timing is always part of the story, whether the place is Berlin, New York or the internet.
Rocky Horror and the Berlin inheritance
I first saw The Rocky Horror Picture Show in my early months in New York as a teenager. Artists there treated me as one of their own and took me to a screening in Chelsea that was also a live drag performance. Years later, Berlin still carries some of that same collision of theatre, outsiders and improvised survival.
I left New York because I felt I should have been there in the 1980s to survive in its scrappiest form. I first visited Berlin at 19, then waited five years to qualify for the artist visa. By the time I arrived, the post-Communist squats had largely been bought, costs had risen and everyone was still trying to hang on.
The artist neighbourhood
In Berlin I showed Rocky Horror to drag-artist friends in a cold Neukölln apartment while we ate soup. We live in a version of the 1980s Lower East Side, with rats, hard street scenes and dinners that need earning. When a man fell through my ceiling, a friend compared it to the broke artists in Moulin Rouge!, where someone also falls through a roof.
The stereotype is uncomfortable because it is accurate. I am trying to make a life in which the difficult parts do not become the whole story.
Hands before the next body of work
For several years I painted hands and worked in realistic oil painting. Hands are difficult, and the technical discipline mattered, but the deeper truth was that I was avoiding vulnerability. I was exhausted and did not yet have the time to go further into the work.
Now I am making that time. The next series is more conceptual, concerned with inner life and human experience in an over-connected digital age, with a touch of mental instability. THE FLOOR is part of that decision: my Berlin version of a project space shaped by the salon and the factory.
The sale and the next movement
I put past pieces from those five years into a discounted art sale because I was tired of looking at them and still did not want to be starving. That sale is part of the practical life around the work.
The practice moves forward through calculated risks, time and the willingness to show what is uncomfortable. A painting can enter a collection, a room can become an archive, and a place like THE FLOOR can give the next work somewhere to meet people.
Originally published on Substack