I like to back off and let a painting breathe, rather than make a move for the sake of making a move.”
CS: Is that a typical way for you to work?
EP: I think so. I’m an additive kind of artist. I keep adding, I don’t really subtract. If I’m going to put something down, I’m not going to take it away. If I’m going to put something on canvas, it’s got to be locked in. If I do see something and it’s reading kind of sour later, I’ll step back and just see how I can make it work. But I think all artists are like that.
CS: I’ve talked to some who throw something out if it’s not just right.
EP: Never! Never. That’s not me.
CS: I was reading about your admiration for the genuineness and sincerity of self-taught artists. Can you describe what’s so engrossing about that kind of sincerity?
EP: I’ve been really into outsider, self-taught, whatever, ever since the ‘90s. I’m still into it, of course, but the context around it has changed a lot since. These works aren’t made for an exhibition. They’re made because they have to be made. If you go visit a self-taught artist, they aren’t saying, “Oh, I’m working on this show.” They’re just creating, for hope, just for their vision to exist, just for the sake of making stuff.
CS: Then, do you find it disingenuous for artists to create for the market?
EP: No, not really. But there’s a filter. Or maybe a different lens applied to it. I mean, I can’t make a sweeping statement like that, but there is just that sincerity to self-taught art.
CS: Why do you value sincerity?
EP: It lets you know where you stand, I guess. It feels warm. It’s like Mr. Rogers, it makes you feel good. Otherwise, it’s like you have your guard up and you’re like, “Okay, where’s the hustle? What’s this racket? What bullshit are you trying to sell me?” But that’s pretty cynical. There’s a clarity to sincerity.
CS: When did you start embracing the idea of being an artist?
EP: It took a while. It would have started when I went to the community college in my hometown, San Antonio. I had dropped out of high school and went to get my GED. That was just a great accident. It introduced me to another side of the subculture in San Antonio. I was a punk rock skater kid and there was like four of us in a school of two thousand where the big thing was the athletic programs and stuff like that. So, when I met some of the Chicano students in the art program at the community college, it was like we were all going through the same thing.
CS: What was your early work like at the community college?
EP: Terrible! You know, that department was kind of against the idea of representation. They were all about abstract as the ultimate, the pinnacle fine art. They wanted students to go beyond just direct images. I think back on it as, like… innuendo art.
CS: What was it like to try something new in that environment?
EP: I embraced it. I was very interested, and just delved in. I spent four years there grabbing everything I could. They were heavy into Rauschenberg and Schnabel, and I can only do so much with that stuff. My roots were in that Mad Magazine aesthetic. Sure, I appreciate a good Rauschenberg, or whatever, but it’s not the way I speak or the way I make things. I was completely blind about what was going to happen or what I wanted from the future. I just had no idea. My voice started to find its own after I made the transition to the university level. Being influenced by Peter Saul, who taught at the University of Texas at Austin, it all started to make sense. I felt like it was a big no-no to try to bring a low-brow vibe into that world. Then, all of a sudden, being able to learn from Peter, all that baggage I brought along started to make sense and didn’t feel like baggage at all. It was me. Looking through the vastness of art history before the Internet, you know, it wasn’t easy to find, like, the Chicago Imagists, or Crumb. It was also great to see that someone like Peter Saul was making a living off of that kind of art. Pushing buttons, merging a rawness with refinement, and all that. But there was tremendous push-back from the faculty, and then especially from people I was interacting with after I moved to New York City for graduate school.
CS: What was the transition to New York like?
EP: New York is way more conservative when it comes to art than Texas. In New York, people were always throwing around the term painterly, like saying an artwork wasn’t “painterly” if it didn’t have the drip, or something. Well, what the fuck is painterly? It baffles me. When I look at a lot of the stuff being made now, it mimics so much of Black, southern, outsider art. Kids clamor to get educated at RISD, Yale, and these other schools just so they can learn how to inauthentically riff on this outsider art. Still, the New York scene is way better now than when I got here in the mid-nineties.
CS: What do you think changed, between then and now?
EP: The internet. Access to information at light speed. Likeminded people being able to get together and ask, you know, why people aren’t doing what hasn’t been done, doing what would be cool, why artists aren’t making cool, authentic art.*
This article originally appeared in Hi-Fructose Issue 49, which is sold out. Get our latest issue, while supporting our independent arts coverage by subscribing to Hi-Fructose here.