Also on view in Hess’ living room is “Past the Wit of Man,” its title derived from a quote in A Midsummer Night’s Dream. At the forefront is a creature with a male human body and the head of a bull, naked and posed on the edge of a river. A monkey in a red hat and vest is crouched on the back of the hybrid creature, lighting its fart. Meanwhile, a donkey laughs and an anthropomorphic rabbit in an ill-fitting blue suit and too-short tie holds a crown of money. Three nude women play music while perched in a tree and Hess’ dog watches the scene.
“It was a self-portrait in many ways about aging—but, at the same time, I realize that there is some of Trump in there and these two things can be held in the painting at the same time,” says Hess. “The painting doesn’t have to be perfectly logical. It can mean many things at once. Me being Trump is like antithetical things, but they’re both in that painting, so I gave that bull a slight tinge of orange hair just to add a little bit of that in.”
He did paint Trump once too. It came out of an exercise where he began with abstract painting on plastic, then cut the piece into smaller pieces. “Whatever I saw in the abstraction, I would paint,” he says. “The rule was that no matter how stupid it was, I would have to do it. In one of them I saw Trump and a bunch of stuff around him, like a burning KKK torches and flying pigs and all this stuff.”
Some of my colleagues at the Academy would complain that my colors were too American. Once you’re in America, this is not an issue, so color exploded out of me,”
It’s a sign of the times. “Trump, just as he has for everybody, worked into our consciousness and you can’t get rid of him, but it wasn’t something where I set out to make a statement to change the world,” he says. “That’s not going to happen.”
Hess paints near daily. “But I don’t paint if I don’t feel like painting,” he says. “It’s just that most days, I feel like painting.” He typically starts in the morning and finishes by six p.m. “I’m more efficient than I used to be too,” he says.
He says that, close to a decade ago, he saw a resurgence in his career that coincided with his use of social media. “That was important,” says Hess. “What I really hope is that it hasn’t changed what I make.”
On Instagram, followers can watch the progress of paintings like “The Dream of Art History” and “Past the Wit of Man,” with close ups of the figures as they come to life in the works. You can catch a glimpse of his palette, providing insight into how Hess himself paints, a subject he says he can’t teach. “My colors are all arranged and I know where they are and I just mix stuff,” he says. “To teach somebody that is very difficult, but I could teach you how Rembrandt painted.” In fact, Hess spent years teaching subjects like group figure painting. He even taught a class on Instagram once. Recently, though, he left his post at Laguna College of Art and Design to work on a mural commission.
Hess’ biggest show to date was The Paternal Suit: Heirlooms from the F. Scott Hess Family Foundation, a deep dive into the family history of his biological father with ancestors. It opened at Halsey Institute of Contemporary Art at the College of Charleston in South Carolina in 2012 and ultimately traveled through five different venues.
For more than thirty years, Hess was not in contact with his biological father. When they reconnected, at the end of the 1990s, Hess asked about details of the family history and received some vague answers. And it just so happened that one of his collectors was an amateur genealogist who found some unusual information about the family. Hess started digging into the history. “I spent so much time doing genealogy, I figured I should make art out of it otherwise it would be a total waste of time,” says Hess.
The family history unfolded in an exhibition of one hundred two objects. Paintings were part of the show, but so were “artifacts,” all made to help tell the story. “Basically, the history of the family is true and the artifacts are of questionable parentage,” says Hess.
The show became the central event in the documentary The Reluctant Realist.
“There’s this document now of this creative time, which is really quite wonderful,” says Hess of the documentary, made by filmmaker Shirin Bazleh. It’s also bittersweet. Hess’ biological father died a week after the exhibition opened. Meanwhile, his mother, who was also featured in the documentary, passed between the making of the film and its release. The Reluctant Realist also features commentary from Hess’ late supporter, Greg Escalante.
“A little too quickly, these things happened,” says Hess. “Things are changing awfully fast.”
This article originally appeared in Hi-Fructose Issue 49, which is sold out. Get our latest issue by subscribing to Hi-Fructose here!