Ross Bleckner Pretends He's Still an Emerging Artist With Something to Prove
At 75, he wants to use every bit of his remaining time to paint. He also feels our current political crisis is too diffuse for him to play artist-citizen the way he did during the AIDS epidemic.
Hey Caftaners. How was your weekend? Mine was hectic: Saturday, I hit the anti-Trump protest in midtown NYC for a few hours with friends…
…then jumped in the car, drove to Boston, went to the shiva of the father of a dear longtime friend, drove on to my mom’s, had Easter brunch the next morning with her, my mother, sister-in-law and four-year-old niece, then back to my mom’s for coffee, then in the car back to NYC. Whew!
Before I’d left, though, I’d already started putting together (complete with an audio clip, wow!) this interview I did last week for two hours with painter Ross Bleckner. You’ve likely heard of him, but if you haven’t, suffice to say he’s one of the best-known artists associated with the height of the AIDS epidemic in the 1990s, both because his “cell paintings” of that era were inspired by AIDS (as in literally on the cellular level) and because he marshaled the art world at that time to support Community Research on AIDS (CRIA), where I worked briefly myself in the late 1990s. Bleckner helped raise the group’s budget from $100,000 up into the millions. And this was around the time when, in 1995, Bleckner—whose first show was in 1975—became one of the youngest artists ever to have their own show at the Guggenheim.
As I told Ross, I’m not an art-head and Caftan isn’t really an art blog. (I’m much more versed in other forms of culture, like books and theater and music, than I am in visual art). We don’t go too deep into his body of work here, which, with my amateur’s eye, I like because it’s abstract but quite visually beautiful, with a depth you can lose yourself in and, often, a blurriness that gives it a haunted quality, as though it’s vanishing before your eyes.
But mostly in this interview, we talk about Caftan stuff—the life cycle, relationships, family memories. We talk about creative work a lot in the context of how it drives and shapes our lives, and how much room it leaves—when you are really driven—for anything else.
I really liked Ross. He didn’t know me from Adam before we were introduced over email by a wonderful mutual friend, my fellow writer Bob Morris. But he was extremely laid-back and open as we talked for two hours—which I’d hoped he’d be, because that’s how he seemed in other interviews, notably this very long one he did in 2016 with art writer Linda Yablonsky for the Smithsonian archives. I’ll let the interview speak for itself. Of course we ended up talking about the political situation.
My thanks to Ross for this great conversation! And my thanks as ever to all of you for reading, especially the longtime or new paid subscribers. You help me to continue to grow this, bit by bit. If you’re a free reader, please consider subscribing at $5 a month. There’s nothing I like doing more than these Caftan interviews, and the more support I can get, the more I can do. xo Tim
Ross, thanks for talking. So your day in the studio has wound down, yes?
I’m posting what I did today on Instagram.
Do you post your day’s work on IG every day so people can see it in progress?
Sometimes. But usually just finished work.
So today you posted something you finished? Hang on, I wanna look at it.
It’s really beautiful. You wanna talk about it a little bit?
What I was doing was, I’ve been doing these paintings for a while and what I wanted to do was make more abstract paintings. So I scraped the paintings off. But you can’t see the scraping in the photo. But in person, it was a flower painting and then I kind of wiped it away. So what you’re seeing is the residue.
Well, in fact, I was going to notice this motif in your work of this blurry quality, which is so beautiful. Can you talk about how you achieve that? Almost like you’re looking at it through a Vaseline-smeared lens. (The below all from Ross’ Instagram)
I like things to be somewhat out of focus, because then you have to think about what the image really is. So it kind of deconstructs the identity of an image. A flower is beautiful and full, and then it’s gone. That and a little explanation sums it up. There’s a life cycle that lasts a second. Our life cycle, cosmically speaking, lasts a minute.
Technically, how do you achieve that blurry evanescence? You paint it sharp and then wipe it with a cloth?
I use a palette knife and a dry brush to push everything away.
Fascinating. I feel like I’m looking at it through a blurry window.
That’s how I feel like I look at my life—through a blurry window.
Right. Well, as I think I mentioned, I’m not really an art fag and this isn’t an art blog.
Right—nobody’s interested in that.
Well, I think a real art head would be, but I don’t think my readers are art heads. But I love that blurriness.
What do you think your blog is about?
Us as gay men as we age. How we live our lives and what’s important to us.
Who’s aging?
[I laugh] Well, I am!
Okay, well, too bad!
You’re how old now? Seventy-five.
Mmmm….yes.
Okay, well take me through a typical day in great detail. Do you divide your time between Soho and the Hamptons?
Yeah. I used to have a building in Tribeca but now I live in the West Village and my studio is in Chelsea. And I live in NYC six months a year and then a home and studio I love in the Hamptons for six months.
But you’re in NYC right now.
Yeah.
In a loft building or new?
It’s near Washington Square, an apartment in a really nice building on the top floor.
Do you live alone or with a partner, pet, friend?
[laughs] I’m actually living with a boyfriend now, since last summer.
Oh! Can you say who he is?
A terrific young artist named Jesse James Thompson.
He lived with me last summer out on Long Island where I have a residency. I have another studio on the property and he came and painted there all summer. We met—I’ve been a professor at NYU for many years and he was a graduate student. We didn’t really interact much then. But about a year ago he contacted me and asked if he could come to my studio and I said sure.
I’m looking at his Instagram now. His own look has a bit of a Mapplethorpe vibe.
[laughs] He’s a really terrific photographer and his side gig is doing social media for people.
What is your relationship like? What kinds of things do you do together?
We hang out—you know, I kind of keep—let me think about this for a minute. I keep my focus on my work. So I do what I do and I hope that who I’m with, my partner, has enough of what they do to do what they do, and then we meet at night and we hang out. I had a partner—I wasn’t expecting Jesse to happen. I had a partner for 30 years who died three years ago from an accidental overdose who was also an artist. His name was Eric Freeman. He’s still on Instagram as etf70.
Can you talk about the experience of losing him after 30 years? That’s a really long time.
It changed my life. I’m not the same person that I was. We were partners—we weren’t romantically boyfriends any longer. We were only together that way for seven years. We met when I was 42 and he was about 21. He died at 53, when I was 70. And we were friends for a few years, then boyfriends for seven years. Then we just loved each other. When boyfriends didn’t work out, we decided we would stay together as life partners but not be romantic partners. And that worked really well because our lives revolved around each other. I had boyfriends, he had boyfriends. But he had the final edit! If I went out with someone and he didn’t like them, that would be it.
Audio clip of this part of the interview:
If he said, “No, not that guy,” you’d cut it off?
I would eventually. Usually the guy I would go out with would say to me, “I know Eric comes first for you,” and I would just look at them and nod. Because I knew.
That they were right?
Yes, that that was true. I wouldn’t deny it.
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