Michael Dotson
ZÜRCHER PARIS / NEW YORK
56 RUE CHAPON F-75003 PARIS T.+33(1)42.72.82.20
33 BLEECKER ST. NEW YORK NY 10012 P.+1 212.777.0790
W W W . G A L E R I E Z U R C H E R . C O M
A Whole New World
by Alex Ebstein
W
hen I first met Michael Dotson in the summer of 2009, my partner,
Seth Adelsberger and I had contacted him to include his work in
the third exhibition that we’d ever curated collaboratively - a show that
we called “Picture Plane.” The exhibition was designed around Michael,
a painter we’d never met but whose work had completely captivated us.
His flat, graphic images emphasized the surface of the painting, while still
depicting a representational space. He aggressively cut his flat surfaces
into patterned planes and gradient color shifts, organizing taped shapes
into their own geometric clarity and neatly into the intricately stylized
spaces he rendered. Within the clean facets of his forms, he experimented
with changes in sheen, marbleized swirls and various applied patterns. An
unassuming painters’ painter.
In the years since, his work in this vein grew from the dense, small, paintings
on paper, thick with acrylic layers, into massive fantasy landscapes.
Airbrush and additional pattern techniques were added to his repertoire of
surface treatments, and his imagery began to move between studio banality
and a comical vision of luxury.
With a style that blurred the line between abstraction and representation,
his work continually had a foot in each camp until a recent and dramatic
change. I sat down with Michael to discuss his new work, painting without
tape, and Disney as it parallels the American dream.
A: In both your older work, which resembled computer game graphics,
and the newer, Disney paintings you are using a recognizable, nostalgic
imagery or style as the compositional structure of your work. I remember
talking to you about your mom designing toys when you were younger.
It seems like that behind the scenes perspective was pretty influential.
The Disney pieces in particular, being so precise to the reference of the
individual cels, almost feel like they play on the culture of toy design:
limited edition action figures, the psychedelic Cinderella.
M: My mom didn’t start working as a toy designer until I was in 6th grade.
Although I spent a lot of time with her at her design program in the years
prior. I spent every Saturday in the Industrial Design department, where I
was surrounded by sketches of cars and other products. I used to love those
marker product renderings; they had so much energy, but retain such a high
level of description and legibility, they definitely stuck with me.
Toys often are replicas of characters from cartoons, transformed into
physical, 3D objects and given to a child who can then take ownership of
that character and insert them into worlds of their own. In this respect I
relate to the culture of toys, but I would put toys under the larger umbrella
of the mass reproduction of images and pop culture. I am interested in how
these images change through their proliferation.
A: How did you begin using the Disney scenes and how were you able
to find your own voice in such a recognizable, loaded, and copyrighted,
language? And, for that matter, how are you dealing with the issue of
copyright as it comes up?
M: I haven’t had to deal with it so far. What I am actually taking from, my
source material, is already removed from the original source by two or three
iterations The original painted images that make up a cartoon were never
meant to be looked at in this way. Although each second of film is made
up, typically, of 12 paintings, they are not meant to be viewed as paintings
and considered individually. Where I interact with this imagery is a source
that has already changed the paintings and film into a third thing – a set
of jpegs - and then I reference these images and change them into a fourth
thing. The web archive is already available through an internet platform
and invites people to make things with the images: gifs, photoshopping
the cartoons into photographs etc. I see these paintings as a part of online
decoration culture and aligned with websites like blingy and frame apps
that came out of that customization impulse.
Again with regard to copyright, It does make people hesitate about certain
reproduction projects, like prints or clothing. With music you can use a
certain number of seconds without paying for it, and in changing an image,
once it enters critique or parody, it’s yours. The archive I pull from is
out there for anyone to access, like so many things on the internet, so I
feel like I have a right to use it, like making paintings that change the
images so radically is the least of their potential problems. The fact that the
characters and familiarity with these images is a massive campaign by a
major corporation, which forces its imagery upon us throughout our whole
lives, only strengthen’s individualized association of Disney with one’s
own experience and childhood. Regardless of the archive, these scene exist
in my mind, I should be allowed to use them.
A: Many of the darker color pallets feel very much influenced by digital
tools, screen color inversion and photoshop hue shifts. Essentially you’re
using these scenes as a framework to redefine the familiar and assert
your aesthetic signature onto a classic iconography, treating its surface in
vibrating textures and jarring color schemes. Its interesting to think about
them alongside the work you were making when we first met. Where your
practice was once so devoted to fine-tuning a believable, graphic, stylized
space – interior dream houses, crashing ufos, stadiums, etc. Even though
the images are recognizable, in many cases you’ve taken the flat line work
and sort of applied it the canvas like a grid or a devise of abstraction. In
many ways the Disney paintings are part of a definitive move toward
flatness.
M: The way I came about this body of work was a mix of a natural
progression – and yes, a progression toward flatness - and a bit of random
luck. For a while I was rendering these mimetic spaces in my work that
were completely made up. Eventually, the spaces became more and more
shallow, until it was basically just a figure ground relationship. I saw an
image on Tumblr, a still from some anime of a girl from the waist down,
looking up her skirt. Formally, the image was pretty similar to what I
was doing in the abstract, so I decided to paint it. I disguised the image,
changing color and texture but the “upskirt’ was still there. I made several
paintings from anime, but something about it didn’t feel totally right to me.
I don’t know anything about anime, its culture or intricacies, and also the
images were almost too well done, it put me at a distance.
At the same time that I was exploring this in my work, Facebook introduced
the “Timeline” feature, which allowed the user to put a large, landscapeoriented image on the top of their page. This was a bit of creativity and
individuality that had long been absent on Facebook. I remember I wanted
to find a film still from Bladerunner to use as my picture. In my search, I
also found the website with every frame of every Disney movie. When I
found that site, I had no intention of using it for my work, but it caught my
interest and I bookmarked it. I found myself coming back there again and
again, just scrolling through the images for my own pleasure. That period
in Disney’s productions employed amazing painters, and I enjoyed being
able to appreciate these images at my own pace. It was when I found a
still of Jasmine sitting down from behind that I thought, about making
a painting. The image was strangely abstract and iconic, and I cropped
the composition to a vertical from the horizontal frame. My interest in
the images as paintings kinda took over from there. There are so many
moments that are totally unfamiliar, but so interesting as singular images.
Most of the time I look for two things when finding source material, the
first being some sort of emotional connection, and the second being room
to insert myself. Sometimes just cropping the image and replicating it in
paint is enough.
A: Its obvious that you love paint and painting, there were a number of
pieces you made in the past couple years, as you mentioned, that were
completely abstract. Large zig zag forms, single brush stroke gestures
overlaid over other textures, works that sort of speak to painting as a skill
as much as an art. It seems like working as a studio assistant for another
painter sort of puts you in a parallel position to a Disney production painter,
filling in the prescribed palette and imagery all day to create the work and
brand of someone else. It makes a lot of sense then to choose something
that we know as so rigid and make it flexible- to freak out within the given
confines.
M: Working as an art assistant is like doing art pushups all day, it keeps
my hand sharp. Before I worked for Erik [Parker], I didn’t paint anything
without tape, you know my work from when there were no curved lines
in an entire painting. Now I paint more fluidly, free-handed. My color
decisions have changed as well, seeing all the colors that another artist
mixes and combinse expands your vocabulary.
In my new work, it’s kind of like doing the same thing as my day job but
having a little more control. I think of it as playful: a game, with rules and
limits to the process, but setting up each piece so that I can have as much
fun as possible within the boundaries. Both working for another artist and
using the Disney source material gives me access to things that I wouldn’t
be inclined to do naturally. This framework establishes a challenge in
making the piece, forcing me to open my mind, my hand and my practice
in a way that is counterintuitive.
A: In thinking about someone like Roy Lichtenstein and his use of
recognizable imagery, he culled contemporary source material that was
part of a niche culture, on the fringes of the mainstream. He was widely
criticized for both his “copying” and for not attributing comic art to their
original artists, who were also alive and working at that time. However,
you’ve chosen a set of images that are so ubiquitous that your paintings
have an inescapable co-authorship, Dotson and Disney, no way around
it. Also, the images pre-date you and ends in your childhood, but exist
today in a detached context as a cache of images methodically indexed
online. Does your connection to the imagery become more scientific in
your ability to look at the films in this dissected form? Does the emotional
reaction you aim to find refer to the composition or a nostalgic attachment
to the characters and story lines?
M: The process does have a sort of scientific or archeological feel, but
without a specific procedure or order. Peter Pan was my favorite Disney
movie, but the feeling or intuition that an image will make a good painting
is not really linked to my memory of the films, I am able to keep that pretty
separate.
But I am not watching the movies, just scrolling through pages of
thumbnails, so the images are really changed. They have no real significance
in the narrative sequence or my memory of the story arcs, they become
completely formal compositions. I end up saving a ton of them and using
photoshop to mock up crops and color changes as digital maquettes. Most
of them, like sketching, are discarded. I observe, sketch, and keep the best
ones, only it all takes place on the computer. I am not trying to harken
back to that time, more the stylistic language of that time period that was
incredibly two-dimensional. Contemporary cartoons don’t have the same
restraint as animated style used in the sixty years from Snow White (1937)
to Hercules (1997).
A: The color choices and patterns you use to fill otherwise familiar sections
of images are ones than you’ve honed through a number of bodies of work.
They have their own retro associations with movie theater and bowling
alley carpets, bus seat upholstery and allover print sweatshirts. How
intuitive are the color and texture decisions in each painting? And some
images are almost unchanged, like the “Perfect Fit” and “Sky High.”
M: More often then not I will change colors distort the image and add
various forms of patterning and flat paint application. A lot of repetitive
textures I add are nods to the flatness of the image, a way to express that
I am painting something that is flat and not trying to embellish that world
or create a new space. The distortions seen in recent work are also to
emphasize the image’s flatness, they show the edge of frame within the
frame. I think also that the choices I am making in some way express the
feeling that I get from the image.
Most of the figures are so boring, sometimes they’re even rendered without
a background. There is so much empty space to treat and fill that they end
up having a similar intuitive construction to my flattest, abstract works.
Contours of the figures and parts that are rendered more true to the original
palette push the planes of pattern into a simultaneous state of flatness and
the shallow depth of the cartoon image.
“Sky High” and “Perfect Fit” are pretty rare, there was something pleasing
about each them that made me want to paint them like that. The airy, cloud
background that stretches to the foreground seemed really interesting to
paint, I had never tried to render clouds like that. The “Perfect Fit” image
is pretty true to the frame, but it is extremely zoomed in on the foot. These
tiny feet that are so much smaller than the hands, its kind of perverted – so
much focus on tiny feet.
A: “Perfect Fit” almost resembles a John Wesley painting, the graphic
simplicity is so elegant and concise, but there is definitely something
unsavory in the portrayed gesture. There are a lot of images that seem
a little dark, even though they are from the diluted, G-rated versions of
stories that are much darker: the little mermaid doesn’t turn to sea foam in
the cartoon.
M: Yeah, they completely gloss over the part where the stepsisters try to cut
their feet so they fit into the tiny slipper.
A: So you’re looking to play up these creepier moments or is it something
of a happy accident?
M: These pieces are not really about mining Disney for the weirdest stuff,
or even the research part of the process, it just provides a framework to
make a painting that I enjoy. But, there is definitely something sinister
that comes across in most images, and is probably something that I am
unconsciously attracted to in selecting them. The image seems to have a
potential energy. Sometimes its a surprise, I wont think anything of it and
then, in having a painting seen by a second party, I see it as stranger than
it appeared to me on my own in the studio. The Bambi image looks like
Illuminati symbol to a lot of people, but wasn’t something I noticed in
selecting it.
When it comes to the cultural perception of Disney, there is what it is and
there is its founding idea, the idea of unfettered imagination. For me it’s
both formative and default – the culmination of imagination and the most
basic version of it at the same time. Disney’s aesthetic has a consistency
to it. It also represents everything good, magical, safe and ultimately
unattainable. The world of Disney presents a particularly American vision
where hard work and struggle pay off in a happy ending. I think to some
degree my work has always been about presenting a fantasy-reality that
is just outside our reach. This is similar to the mimetic possibilities of
painting, which are enchanting, but merely an illusion. In this respect, with
the work’s insistence on distorted illusion, the fantasy takes on a darker
tone.
Excerpted from conversations between Michael and Alex during December
2014 - February 2015.
Alex Ebstein is an artist, writer and curator based in Baltimore, MD.
In 2009 she founded and became the co-director of Nudashank, an
independent, artist-run gallery that showcased work of emerging artists
between 2009 and 2013. In addition to producing its own programming,
Nudashank curated exhibitions at Reference Gallery in Richmond, VA,
presented exhibitions at Art Blog Art Blog and Shoot The Lobster in New
York, the University of Maryland’s Stamp Gallery in College Park, and at
the Katzen Museum at American University in Washington, DC.