Vanitas Still Life with Straitjacket

I spent the summer of 2017 working on this painting. The idea came to me that spring, after several months of private performances in which I restrained my erotic partner in order to draw him. I fastened all of the buckles and zippers and then started a timer, sketchbook in hand. I commanded him to sit still for an hour as he writhed helplessly. These erotic scenes hinged on the act of drawing, which I never saw the same way again. Without drawing there would be no true reason to keep the scenes going. I wasn’t interested in role playing or pretending. It was real.

Following each scene, I removed the sweaty restraints and set them aside, sometimes onto the nearby dining room table to protect them from dust. As they dried, the canvas straitjacket and matching leg restraint kept their human form, like a shell, a haunting reminder of the body that had struggled inside them. One day, after an exceptionally brutal scene, the lights were off and the evening sun entered the apartment at an angle just so. The rays illuminated the straitjacket like a 17th century still life. My friend and I amused ourselves by searching around his place for various objects that would have been typical of vanitas paintings: a lemon cut in half, a candle, a skull, a butterfly… We applied various “vintage camera” filters to our photographs.

After our next encounter, I arranged the gear and photographed it with the blinds open. The muzzle stood in for a human skull; the straps curled down like lemon peel cascading from the edge of the table… A month or two later he and I broke up, but I had the photographs to remind me of the scenes we did and how dangerous they were.

During this photo excursion I realized that bondage gear is great subject matter for a vanitas painting, which traditionally depicted items of indulgent luxury combined with reminders of the transience of life, certainty of death, and futility of pleasure. In my experience with extreme bondage and breath play, there is always a sense of mortality and imminent danger; it is both exhilarating and terrifying. Not only is BDSM still a taboo subject in our culture—more so than “vanilla” sex or death itself—but the gear that is today more commonly used for erotic purposes was once used in medicine to “help” people. I found it funny to have insane asylum gear from the 19^th century in a 17^th-century-style painting. I should also note here that my mind was still saturated with all of the canvas, metal, and leather contraptions from the International Museum of Surgical Science where I spent two years in residence.

Other things contributed to my motivation for this project. I was facing both public and private horror (namely, Trump was president and my health was declining), and the most reasonable way for me to cope with these things was to embark on a reclusive and masochistic painting that would have me completely engrossed. I call it masochistic in retrospect because it turned out to be the most demanding project I ever pursued. I both loathed and enjoyed it. How could anyone derive pleasure from this method of painting without the accompanying frustration and madness? I guess the Dutch had groups of apprentices.

I remembered that my friend Chelsey had formal training in 17^th century Dutch/Flemish oil painting techniques, which involved layers of glaze on top of a dead layer. Based on her advice I decided to go with an alkyd gel and odorless mineral spirits. I reviewed my pigment transparencies, and started by drawing lightly in graphite on a gessoed panel followed by underpainting in umber to block out basic values. I then proceeded with a brunaille dead layer (brown monochrome instead of the more common black and white grisaille). The dead layer entailed months of torture. In the meantime, I also went to the Art Institute and took notes on a Pieter Claesz still-life from 1625.

I took some time away from this painting, returning to it intermittently over the next two years. Whenever I added something, I would have to wait at least a couple of weeks for it to dry. During this time, I worked on several other projects. My relationship to the painting changed with each season and each layer. I tried glazing with phthalo blue and it looked terrible. (I should have listened to Chelsey!) Later I noticed that the unsanded surface made the background look increasingly “dirty” as the glazes pooled in and around the imperfections. Although it looked wrong by traditional standards, I liked the gritty result and decided to keep it. It made me think of dungeon walls.

This may sound nonsensical, but the very torture of creating the painting was integral to the piece. The activity of making it—the performance—is where the art resided for me. Although I’ve grappled with ephemerality in my work before, this may have been the only time I felt I was making art that no one would see—except for maybe my studiomate. I wore my old science lab coat as I approached the activity with a certain amount of satire. Because of all this, I think that the context of exhibition for this painting is going to be even more critical than it is with some of my other work.

The straitjacket in the image lacks a body, but it is oriented towards the viewer. In Phenomenology of Perception, Maurice Merleau-Ponty writes “If I am ugly, then I have the choice either to be an outcast or to condemn others—that is, I am left free between masochism and sadism—but I am not free to ignore others.” I don’t think he was talking about beauty per se. This was about dealing with a fixed marginalized identity in the eyes of others.

I finally finished the painting in 2019 and have had a difficult time writing about it until now. I am happier and more fulfilled than I’ve ever been, and the world seems as cracked as ever.