May 02, 2003

Let's start off with the easy stuff. Let's get to know a little bit about the so-called "curious world of Lance Ehlers." What was your favorite movie death scene of all time?

It's a tie. Charleton Heston getting the javelin through the chest at the end of The Omega Man is deeply satisfying on many levels. And then, during the conclusion of Midnight Express, the hero of the film slams the prison guard in the gut with his head and accidentally impales the guard's skull on a little wooden peg. I think more films should end like that. I'd go see Julia Roberts' next film if there was a guarantee up front on the theater's marquee that her character gets her skull impaled on a little wooden peg.

Do you think the woman in Total Recall with three tits ever realized that if she had one lopped off due to breast cancer, she'd still be in good shape?

I see we're off to a sparkling, professional start here. Well, to answer your question, no, I don't think she realized that, because like the rest of us, she was preoccupied by the sight of the whore-dwarf with the machine gun.

You ever tried to draw drunk?

I'm pretty sure I've drawn while drunk, but I don't recall ever setting out to get drunk and then draw. Booze puts me to sleep and drugs scare me.

OK, enough of that. Let's make an abrupt transition into philosophical inquiries. Is there ever a catch-22 for you where you'd like the whole world to appreciate what you do, but you're aware many people outside the art community just wont get it, and you don't really give a fuck what they think anyway?

I wouldn't be able to get anything done if I was always worrying about whether what I do is appreciated or not. Creating things is just what I do. It's what I've always done. It's impossible for me to imagine not creating things. Yes, it's nice to be appreciated. We all want what we do to matter somehow. But the older I get, the less important it seems for me to worry about getting a pat on my back because I did something well. I'm interested in enjoying the process and the product. If someone happens to like what I'm doing, then cool. But I never hinge the success of my experience on whether or not someone understands or cares about what I do. Look, most people don't give a flying fuck about "Art." They've got enough on their minds. It seems pretty dumb to care too deeply about whether what I do will bring those people around and inspire them to drop $800 on a drawing to hang above the mantel. Is there ever a catch-22? Maybe. It's nice to be appreciated, but I don't expect much.

How supportive of your work has your family been, and has it changed over the years?

Very supportive, actually. I think I've had it pretty good in this regard. The part of my family I deal with regularly has always encouraged me. They don't always understand what the hell it is I'm doing, but they don't make a big deal about that lack of connection. I do have relatives out there who are intimidated or easily upset by my personality and by what I do and what I create. It crosses my mind from time to time as I'm making something how someone in my family will respond to something if they see it. But I don't let it get to me. I don't let it guide the content.

What do you do to earn the money to make your art?

Right now, I work full-time for one of the world's larger distributors of recorded music. This arrangement works pretty well, because it doesn't demand a great deal of me psychologically, and when I walk out the door, the job doesn't follow. I taught college for the previous 4 years. Teaching is ideal on a several levels, specifically because of the networking and because there's always an impending sense of urgency to create more artwork, better artwork. Sharing techniques and knowledge is cool, but teaching is so much more than that. It's grading assignments and worrying about discipline and attending meetings and setting up the classroom and dealing with departmental politics. There's a lot more to it than just showing up in the room and sharing what you know for a few hours. And unless you're tenured, the pay typically blows. And that's too bad, because I think I'm a pretty good teacher. I should be teaching. I know a lot of good teachers who are doing other things instead of teaching because of the work-to-pay ratio. Ultimately, every creative person wants to be able to create whatever he or she wants whenever he or she wants for as long as he or she wants without some other dumb economic responsibility slithering into the studio. At least I'm able to go home everyday and work on my art without being creatively drained.

As seems to be the case for many creative people, is it important at all for you to in an angry or foul mood when you're doing your work?

Who the hell wants to be angry? I don't feel it's necessary to be angry to create. My work isn't about anger. I've thought about this a lot, actually. I feel that most creativity grows from varying degrees of dissatisfaction, from some lingering sense that something is missing or incomplete. I don't see the point of creating something if everything is in its place. If you define "anger" as a state of extreme passion, then yeah, I've created work while angry. But more often than not, I'm feeling my happiest when I'm creating. I settle into a very focused state. I end up destroying things when I'm angry, not creating them. A lot of what I make is very tedious. I have to be able to concentrate. If I'm in a crap mood, it's more difficult to concentrate. I often turn to my work as a way of becoming focused. If I put myself in a position where I have to focus on my work, then everything else vanishes. The work becomes an escape. It's a kind of therapy. And it's okay to begin this with no plan and just start making a thing and see where it goes. I've known a lot of artists who feel they need to use their talent as some sort of grand social voice. That's fine if it comes naturally for a person, but it doesn't come naturally to me. It's going to be difficult to work on that painting you hope will lead to a ban on the use of landmines, especially now that that hot little number at Starbucks invited you over to her loft for a three-way. I've learned to value the surprise.

Who are your favorite current artists today, as juxtaposed against the artists that helped shape you early on? Or what influences you in general?

Paul Klee has been the one visual artist who has had the longest running influence on my work. Not only was he totally into the idea of being open to wherever the drawing or painting wanted to go, but he had great titles, too. He was an image man and a word man, so I feel like we're from the same sect. But I also feel a strong connection to the work of people better known for work made outside the painting and drawing world, probably because they get more press. For example, David Lynch has been a recurring influence. Not necessarily his filmmaking process, but his dedication to creating work that speaks this kind of language of intuition. He titillates that stuff in us that is tucked away in our subconscious and causes us to stew slowly in the afterglow long after we've left the theater or whatever. Brian Eno deserves his own wing in my Hall of Influences, too. It's awesome that he's been able to take so many creative risks and do so many different kinds of things. Eno's resume basically acts like a 12-pack of Red Bull for my creative drive. I see people like him doing these amazing things, and it reminds me to stop farting around and get the hell on with it and create while I can. I used to really be into people like Helen Frankenthaller, and Robert Motherwell and Mark Rothko, but the zeal has died down. It really bothers me to know that when Rothko committed suicide, he felt he was a fraud. I still like work by the people from that group, but it's just that, at this point, I get a whole lot more jazzed up by the honest playfulness of people like Tom Freidman.

How long did it take you to start making art that truly came from you and your voice, without being filtered through outside influences and expectations of what your work should be like?

That's a trick, because you always think what you are doing at the time is true to your voice until, hopefully, one day someone backs you into a psychological corner and challenges your commitment to whatever the hell it is you are doing. For me, I think this is what happened: My mom is an artist, so pretty early on I developed this competitive drive to create very high quality, imaginative, but fully believable imagery. My brother and I were both this way. I was working toward being able to draw photo-realistically from the moment I realized such a thing was possible, probably like age 3 or 4. I really believe that. I distinctly recall being a hardcore, competitive colorer in kindergarten. And then once I was in school, I had all these notions put in my head about what I should be making and how I should be making it. When I was in college, I was making a good chunk of change selling my paintings and winning awards. I was being the good boy. But I was also making all of this secret, crazy shit on the side that no one was seeing. I wasn't showing it to anyone, because it didn't feel like the kind of stuff that was expected from me. And then I got into Grad School and had this angry showdown with one of my professors toward the end of my first semester where we were telling one another to fuck off. He challenged and exposed my weak commitment to what I was creating at the time. So, I was forced to figure out what kind of an artist I really was. And of course, all that secret stuff I'd been making on the side moved immediately to center stage. If I wasn't committed to what I'm doing now, I think it would bug me more when people don't like it.

Do you worry that some people might find your sense of humor a little abstract and kind of sick?

I think about how people will react all the time, but I don't let it worry me. Worrying about stuff like that only leads to self-censorship and doubt. And if you're willing to allow another person to bully their way into your creative process, you may as well hang up the smock and start selling car insurance. Someone's always going to be upset or uncomfortable no matter what I do. I can't control every person's reaction. Plus, a lot of those people view artmaking as a bullshit pursuit anyway. If they're going to get their panties in a bind regardless, I may as well create stuff that interests me.

So, after years of plugging away at this shit with a modicum of personal fulfillment and professional success, can you say what your most and least favorite works of your own are and why?

That's hard to answer, because everything builds on everything else. What I do is an ongoing enquiry. Techniques evolve. Ideas evolve. One piece leads to the next. I look at some of my early work, and I can see where someone's opinion caused me to go in a particular direction because I didn't have confidence in what I was doing. Shit like that makes me cringe in retrospect. But there aren't specific pieces that were an absolute waste of time. It's hard for me to slam certain things I created years ago, back before I knew what I know now. For example, in college, I created a series of mixed-media paintings on paper. Then, I mounted the paper onto stretched canvas, but I purposefully made the canvases larger than the paper so there would be about a half-inch border around the paper. And now, I think the presentation looks like shit. I should have worked right to the edge of the canvas. It's generally the technical stuff like that which pisses me off more than anything else. But you have to learn this stuff for yourself. My favorite thing is always what I'm working on at the moment. Right now, I'm really into making small things with graphite. Before that, it was all about small things made with ink. I get interested in working with certain materials, and then I get interested in something else, so I do that until I want to do it some other way.

What's the first thing you're doing after this interview?

I'll probably end up spending the better part of the evening completely rethinking my opinion of everything I just told you. I change my mind about my work all the time. I think most artists do. Someone told me once to never believe what an artist says about his work. In a week, I'll probably read this and say, "Well, that's dumb. Why the fuck did I say that? I don't believe that."

ABOUT THE AUTHOR:

Kenny Herzog is Editor-in-Chief of CMJ New Music Monthly and Associate Editor of Heeb magazine. He has also served time (or enjoyed a delightful tenure, depending on who you ask) as Managing Editor of the Long Island Press and Editor-in-Chief of the New York Resident. His writing has also been published by Spin, Film Threat and AmpCamp, among others. Of course, due to poorly archived websites, the most likely item you’re going to find upon Googling him is an appearance on the E! True Hollywood Story or his bizarre interview with an Australian journalist about professional wrestling.