Sculpture Painting With Pig Doll

Los Angeles, 1998

There’s a photograph of me taken in 1981, in my studio on State Street in Santa Barbara. The image is blurred, because I’m dancing. I’m dancing because I’m 27 years old and deliriously happy. The walls are covered with art. I’m surrounded by my droll sculptural creations, my jubilant graphic output, hopeful of a future when my genius will be recognized. There was still time. It didn’t bother me that I was living illegally in a small, shared studio in a downtown building and sleeping on a Goodwill couch. David, my studio mate, brought up takeout coffee in the morning. We worked all day, listening to Roxy Music and Talking Heads. Every hour was filled with inspiration, fabrication, conversation, romance.

There were many other artists in the Park Theater Building. I remember Michael Gonzales, a brilliant young painter who co-founded the annual Summer Solstice Celebration, and who would later die of AIDS. And Tim, a crazy person who always painted the same thing—a flat-topped mountain—and accused me, absurdly, of stealing his mail. But I had a good friend in Marsea Goldeberg: a brazen, hilarious, spontaneous woman who painted with a broad brush and bonked any number of our romping, oversexed cadre. She and I even got into a make-out session once. Marsea recoiled, complaining that my tongue was too big. It isn’t. It’s perfectly normal.

In 1983 I moved halfway across the world on a year-long fellowship, and never returned to Santa Barbara. Marsea and I stayed in touch. She married a fellow artist and moved to L.A., where she designed fabric prints for a while. She even opened her own gallery, which has become a success. And she was still painting— bold, colorful canvases featuring stuffed animals that she found in thrift stores.

I visited Marsea in 1998, a few years after she’d had her first child. Before I left, she gave me two stuffed animal paintings: one with a mounted lamb, the other with a pig. As my images of those happy years grow ever more blurred, and those vivid days of dervish dancing evaporate into mental line drawings, the lamb might bring back some happy memories. As for this pig… well… It reminds me of a big, pink tongue.