Speaker 1: This is Alec Baldwin and you're listening to Here's the
Speaker 1: Thing my guest today. Painter Eric Fischel became known in
Speaker 1: the nineteen eighties art scene for work that explores issues
Speaker 1: of sexuality and power in what it means to become
Speaker 1: a man. In Bad Boy, which Fishel describes as his
Speaker 1: most famous and notorious painting, there is a naked woman
Speaker 1: lying on a bed. A young boy is standing in
Speaker 1: front of her, his hands behind his back, seeming to
Speaker 1: be taking something from her purse. The complexity of his
Speaker 1: early pieces can be attributed Fishel has acknowledged to his childhood.
Speaker 1: He grew up in the privileged country club culture of
Speaker 1: Long Island, to be specific the Port Washington Yacht Club,
Speaker 1: but his mother suffered from depression and alcoholism and committed
Speaker 1: suicide when Fishel was twenty two. After decades of living
Speaker 1: in New York City, he and his wife, painter April Gornick,
Speaker 1: now live full time in eastern Long Island. In his
Speaker 1: recent autobiography, Bad Boy, My Life On and Off the
Speaker 1: Canvas Official details his youth the art world, his own
Speaker 1: struggles with depression and substance abuse, and his thoughts about
Speaker 1: the creative process. For Eric Fishel, the book challenged him
Speaker 1: in unexpected ways. The difficult part of writing it wasn't
Speaker 1: the early stuff where it was about family traumas and
Speaker 1: you know, the sort of dealing with that. That was
Speaker 1: actually the easiest part to write, because I put that
Speaker 1: into my paintings and stuff, so I had already kind
Speaker 1: of gone through the emotional ramifications. What was difficult was
Speaker 1: actually trying to find some perspective in the present moment
Speaker 1: as to what my feelings were, what was going on
Speaker 1: in the world around me at that time. I went
Speaker 1: through a lot more confused feelings about the present in
Speaker 1: the past. I dealt with it so much in the
Speaker 1: work that I I knew exactly what I felt. It
Speaker 1: was just a matter of putting in the words. Eric
Speaker 1: Fishel first picked up a paintbrush in college, and experience
Speaker 1: he describes as an awakening. Official was in the first
Speaker 1: undergraduate class at cal Arts, a place that would become
Speaker 1: known as much for orgies as conceptual art. It would
Speaker 1: be some time before his skill, talent, and voice found
Speaker 1: a home in realism. I started out being trained as
Speaker 1: an abstract painter. You know, if you you were going
Speaker 1: to be a painter, you should be an abstract painter.
Speaker 1: So I tried. What it turned out was that every
Speaker 1: abstract painting I made felt like it was absolutely the
Speaker 1: last painting I could make. Then at some point I
Speaker 1: started to work with figures and with narrative and language
Speaker 1: and stuff like that, and it flowed. That's when I
Speaker 1: realized I was now doing the work that I was
Speaker 1: supposed to do, that that I was built for. And
Speaker 1: then it was a matter of getting better at it
Speaker 1: and you know, perfecting it, honing it, etcetera. And what
Speaker 1: was among the first things that that led you to that, Like,
Speaker 1: what was the story? What was the narrative? You thought,
Speaker 1: I want to put that on canvis somehow? It was
Speaker 1: a process actually, and the process was that I um.
Speaker 1: I found this transparent paper called glass seeing paper. It's
Speaker 1: this kind of paper they used to put chocolates in
Speaker 1: and stuff. It accepts oil paint beautifully. That is that
Speaker 1: the brush feels gray gliding across the slick surface. If
Speaker 1: you make a mistake, you wipe it off. Very little
Speaker 1: shows of that, you know, and it's got this transparency.
Speaker 1: So I would start with an image a chair, and
Speaker 1: I would paint a chair on this paper and I'd
Speaker 1: stick it on the wall, and then I would sit
Speaker 1: and look at and I'd say, Okay, where is this chair?
Speaker 1: Is it in a you know, the living room, is
Speaker 1: it in the dining room? Is there anyone sitting in
Speaker 1: the chair? And as I as I was thinking that,
Speaker 1: I go get another transparent piece of paper, relay it
Speaker 1: on top, and say, Okay, it's a person and they're
Speaker 1: sitting this way in the chair. Now that didn't work,
Speaker 1: Take that off, get another one, put that on. Okay,
Speaker 1: they're actually standing next to the chair. So I would
Speaker 1: paint that. I would just talk to myself and as
Speaker 1: I did, I would sort of create these images, and
Speaker 1: eventually a scene would emerge that seemed to resonate for me,
Speaker 1: that had some kind of memory to it, some kind
Speaker 1: of feeling in it, that was expressing something about relationships
Speaker 1: between people, families, inter family relationships, people and objects that
Speaker 1: they surround themselves with. And then you know, eventually I
Speaker 1: decided I wanted to actually bring that into the painting
Speaker 1: world and with color and canvas and stuff like that,
Speaker 1: and more detail, more specific detail. So it evolved into
Speaker 1: the work that I do. Now there's a description in
Speaker 1: the book about how with a as times you were
Speaker 1: comfortable being alone when you have those tools in the
Speaker 1: material in front of you. Which I found fascinating was
Speaker 1: the river. I thought of you doing something else creatively.
Speaker 1: Music was out of the question because I haven't toned
Speaker 1: deaf years and there no way I could do that.
Speaker 1: I was in a a play in eighth grade in
Speaker 1: which it was called It's Cold and Them Thar Hills,
Speaker 1: and I played this hillbilly named Zeke, who didn't speak
Speaker 1: through the entire play, but was on stage the entire
Speaker 1: time until the very end, when I had this like
Speaker 1: big speech where I proclaimed my love for this person
Speaker 1: who didn't know I was even present. You get the
Speaker 1: girl and I get the girl. But it was like
Speaker 1: spending a lot of time. Kind of being present and
Speaker 1: absent at the same time. Was actually a profound experience
Speaker 1: for me, but it it didn't lead to me wanting
Speaker 1: to do with the next play or to do that.
Speaker 1: And I've actually become much more of a public person
Speaker 1: over the years. I was much more reticent, much more
Speaker 1: behind my eyes, which is really where the painter comes from.
Speaker 1: And it was a lot easier for me to in
Speaker 1: private have my thoughts and feelings and you know, sort
Speaker 1: of express them before anyone ever saw them. And so
Speaker 1: I could actually control the form of expression before it
Speaker 1: entered the world gave art and yes, exactly exactly. But
Speaker 1: my sensibility is very much I think, consistent with you know,
Speaker 1: an an actor's sensibility and a director's sensibility, and in that,
Speaker 1: in that sense of you know, understanding what a dramatic
Speaker 1: moment actually is, where where meaning is present, and how
Speaker 1: it comes through not just a language, but it comes
Speaker 1: through a body language, it comes through a light source,
Speaker 1: it comes through a a clearly defined space, and how
Speaker 1: one sort of negotiates that space. And those are the
Speaker 1: things that I'm most compelled with and and in fact,
Speaker 1: my my greatest pleasure is when people in the dramatic
Speaker 1: arts connect to my work because I feel like, you know,
Speaker 1: they get it in a way that that you know,
Speaker 1: people other painters don't. Necessarily, you do expect the images
Speaker 1: at some point to start moving, to move yeah, or
Speaker 1: speaking yeah. And you know, I I my work is
Speaker 1: based on or that as a source material photographs. What
Speaker 1: photography showed me, because it slices life so thinly, it
Speaker 1: showed me that everybody is in constant motion, and that
Speaker 1: everybody is is off balance, and that that animates the scene.
Speaker 1: You know that. It's one of the reasons I don't
Speaker 1: actually bring models into the studio and have them posed
Speaker 1: for me, because they become a static pose when what
Speaker 1: I'm looking for is something that triggers a feeling or
Speaker 1: a memory or a provocation of some kind. And I
Speaker 1: find that where you look at a photograph that you
Speaker 1: took of somebody that is, you know, just slightly turning,
Speaker 1: some shifting weight in their body, doing something like that,
Speaker 1: that that really sets those questions. What I love when
Speaker 1: I look at photographs, when I look at paintings, when
Speaker 1: I look at your paintings, when I look at films,
Speaker 1: I like and the visual because I went to an
Speaker 1: acting school where they said, watch the movie with the
Speaker 1: sound off, and if you can't convey something, if the
Speaker 1: picture isn't telling the story sixties seventy five percent of
Speaker 1: the time, then that the movies that wrong. Yeah, I mean,
Speaker 1: you know, the difference between film and theater and painting
Speaker 1: is that in both film and theater, you build an
Speaker 1: emotional sort of construct, You build a narrative construct over
Speaker 1: a set period of time with various scenes that lead
Speaker 1: to it. With painting, you're you know, you're trying to
Speaker 1: shrink it down into this one moment that when you
Speaker 1: stop that action is when it actually begins to spin
Speaker 1: the mood, spin the moment, spin the thoughts and projections
Speaker 1: and stuff. So it's about trying to find, Okay, where
Speaker 1: do I stop the action? Right for me, you stop
Speaker 1: it at something just before something happens, or just right
Speaker 1: after something happens. That if you if you stop it
Speaker 1: in the middle of something happened, what you end up
Speaker 1: with is is a kind of confusion that doesn't take
Speaker 1: you anywhere. But if you stop before the audience rushes
Speaker 1: in to complete it, they know where it's going now
Speaker 1: and that person is doing this and that's going to
Speaker 1: happen because they just blah blah blah. Or if right
Speaker 1: after dealing with the emotional aftermath of that, then it's
Speaker 1: then the the audience again rushes in with the memory
Speaker 1: of those feelings that they associate with what just happened. Uh.
Speaker 1: That I find to be the real challenge and the
Speaker 1: fun part of it as well. You know a painter,
Speaker 1: and this is my view, this is not I'm not
Speaker 1: saying this is a commonly health view, but this is
Speaker 1: my view, and that is the work I do. A
Speaker 1: It requires an audience and also somebody giving you a role,
Speaker 1: right and someone and exactly someone unless you're self producing.
Speaker 1: But for you, my view of it is I'd sit
Speaker 1: there with and look at painters and I think, God,
Speaker 1: that much I envy them that you sit in a
Speaker 1: room and you're totally self generating, and you do exactly
Speaker 1: what you want to do, and then you send it
Speaker 1: out into the world and say if you like it, great,
Speaker 1: If you don't, I really don't give a shit. You know,
Speaker 1: it's completely un self conscious in that way, unless you're
Speaker 1: doing a commission. Do you feel that is a protective
Speaker 1: is a response? I think it's like, God, I hope
Speaker 1: they liked that. Oh sure, yeah, but you know you've
Speaker 1: already done it. You accept that it may fall short
Speaker 1: of your hope and expectations. But I don't. I don't
Speaker 1: believe any painters sitting there pretending that they only do
Speaker 1: the work for themselves and stuff. They're they're they're seeking
Speaker 1: some kind of resonance, some some response. Yeah, have you
Speaker 1: have you ever done a painting and you were mistaken meaning,
Speaker 1: you did a painting. And I'm being very melodramatic here,
Speaker 1: but you did a painting and you were done. Even
Speaker 1: the said, good God, official, you've done it. There, it
Speaker 1: is there, you have it. And then and the painting
Speaker 1: did not succeed in one term, and then other times
Speaker 1: you sat there and said the opposite, this is a
Speaker 1: piece of crap, and it was one of your most
Speaker 1: successful has that happened, not in the extreme, but I've
Speaker 1: certainly done paintings that I thought were better than they
Speaker 1: were received. And I've certainly had the experience where I've
Speaker 1: seen paintings that I didn't think were so good when
Speaker 1: I did them and see them ten years later and go,
Speaker 1: you know, that, actually isn't that bad. So I don't know,
Speaker 1: but this is a little off the subject, but more
Speaker 1: back to sort of acting and painting. I did a
Speaker 1: project once where actually used actors. I was given a house,
Speaker 1: Miss Vandorot House and craigfelt Germany to do some kind
Speaker 1: of interaction with the house. I never worked with actors before,
Speaker 1: and so I went to friends who were in the business,
Speaker 1: you know, writers, playwrights, screenwriters, whatever, directors to give me
Speaker 1: some ideas that like how do you talk to an actor?
Speaker 1: What gets them going? Etcetera? Because I had no clue
Speaker 1: and the simple list advice came back from Mike Nichols,
Speaker 1: who said, I'll give them problems. They love problems. And
Speaker 1: I said, what the hell is a problem? They said, oh,
Speaker 1: you know, she wants to borrow five d bucks from him,
Speaker 1: but you won't tell him why. We just give him that,
Speaker 1: you'll see, right. I was like, okay, So I went
Speaker 1: into this thing with these two actors who happened to
Speaker 1: be German. They understood English, but they performed, and you know,
Speaker 1: they did whatever they did. And for him to choose,
Speaker 1: I know, and that's strange. And I was taking still
Speaker 1: photographs too. I was just clicking snapshots. I wasn't recording it.
Speaker 1: I didn't think I cared about, you know, the dialogue.
Speaker 1: I didn't care about the you know sound it said, whatever,
Speaker 1: you know. The all I wanted were these sort of
Speaker 1: still moments. What blew my mind was that I would
Speaker 1: give him a problem. And I was surprised at how
Speaker 1: fast I could tell that the problem I gave him
Speaker 1: wasn't any good. They couldn't get animated and they were
Speaker 1: just like it wasn't achieving the desire to feel they
Speaker 1: were They were just dead. It was like nothing. Their
Speaker 1: body couldn't even move hardly. So and and at the
Speaker 1: same time, when I gave him something they could really
Speaker 1: bite their teeth into. For example, well I did a
Speaker 1: sleep with you, but just to break up with their
Speaker 1: boyfriend first. The thing is the female actress had like
Speaker 1: zero interest in him, but she was very professional. And
Speaker 1: so we're going to do the bedroom stuff. And I
Speaker 1: set up some stuff in there, and it really wasn't working.
Speaker 1: It was saying, you know, there was something. They were
Speaker 1: dressed in evening clothes. It was late to come home.
Speaker 1: You know, he's drunk. She's hoping that, you know, they
Speaker 1: could have some sex. Maybe he's you know what, it
Speaker 1: can't kind of get it together. It was lame. So
Speaker 1: he gets up and he goes off to the bathroom
Speaker 1: or something like that. And so I say to her, look,
Speaker 1: take off your clothes and get into bed. You're a
Speaker 1: wild animal. Whatever you do, don't let him in the bed. Now.
Speaker 1: This bed that I had chosen was like a modernist
Speaker 1: bed that had this igloe of a mosquito netting over it,
Speaker 1: so it made like a cocoon or something like that
Speaker 1: a tent. So I said, whatever you do, don't let
Speaker 1: him in the bed, right, your wild animal. All of
Speaker 1: a sudden, she like curls up into this incredible kind
Speaker 1: of creature and then like pushes herself against the end
Speaker 1: of the wall and and and it's like just sitting
Speaker 1: there waiting, right, And he comes back into the room
Speaker 1: and now he sees her in the bed. She's naked.
Speaker 1: It's like, we're getting somewhere. We're getting somewhere, right, And
Speaker 1: he takes his bathrobe off and walks over to the
Speaker 1: net and he starts to lift it up, and she
Speaker 1: comes flying across the bed one leap and smashes him
Speaker 1: in the face, right, And he's like whoa. And then
Speaker 1: you got goes, whoa, this could be fun. I like
Speaker 1: to win be challenge. And I'm like going, oh no,
Speaker 1: and you've got good images. You got great images also
Speaker 1: that yeah. Yeah, And they did a whole dancer on
Speaker 1: getting in and out of the bed, and when he
Speaker 1: finally got in, she slipped out, and you know it
Speaker 1: reverse the roles and stuff, and that was that. But
Speaker 1: now it with people that you photograph, manipulate, paint, whatever,
Speaker 1: verb you want to use for the work you do
Speaker 1: and the stages of the work you do. How much
Speaker 1: would you say you're a view of people because because
Speaker 1: I think, like most men, we have this in common,
Speaker 1: which is this kind of relationship of your mother. And
Speaker 1: if you have a good relationship with your mother, let's
Speaker 1: say you want to replicate that a terrible relationship with mother.
Speaker 1: Do you want to find someone who's the opposite of
Speaker 1: your mother, or you want to restage the drama with
Speaker 1: your mother? As my as a therapist, one said to me,
Speaker 1: we want to restage that in our lives. And you
Speaker 1: get all the good lines now which which eluded you
Speaker 1: in your in your youth. So I think all art
Speaker 1: expression is in some way trying to correct a lot
Speaker 1: of stuff, and you put some clarity to it, some
Speaker 1: order to it make it makes sense. You know, how
Speaker 1: would you think that you're you? You're very candid about
Speaker 1: your mother, who was obviously very ill. You know, she's
Speaker 1: a very sick woman and that plays out on her behavior. Um,
Speaker 1: she wasn't a mean spirited woman, she was she was
Speaker 1: just completely overwhelmed. How would you say that? Colored? Because
Speaker 1: count to three when you read the book and your
Speaker 1: bell bottoms and hate Ashbury and you're into a very
Speaker 1: kind of summer of love sixty six. I thin because
Speaker 1: when you head out to the West Coast and you're
Speaker 1: in the thick of it, how do you think, what
Speaker 1: did you carry out there with few in terms of
Speaker 1: your idea about women, what you wanted or because when
Speaker 1: I get from the bookcase, you're someone who was kind
Speaker 1: of raised not to ask for anything. Well, I had,
Speaker 1: you know, sort of two kinds of relationships with women.
Speaker 1: One one was I was attracted to women that were
Speaker 1: absolutely bad for me. They opened up that void, you know,
Speaker 1: just emptiness that in a way that was yeah, and
Speaker 1: you know, it was full of passion and it was
Speaker 1: full of you know this, you know, profound need and
Speaker 1: stuff like that was very emotional and very short lived.
Speaker 1: And then the other kind of woman was one where
Speaker 1: you know, they were really stable, reliable and reliable and available. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and I married them. You're married to April. I married
Speaker 1: I was married before and stable, stable enough, Yeah, but
Speaker 1: then yeah, I married April and you know for the
Speaker 1: last thirty some id years. Yeah. Did your work change
Speaker 1: in sync with your attitude towards love and relationships? It
Speaker 1: did with time you know, the early relationship with April,
Speaker 1: for example, we were both young artists, really trying to
Speaker 1: find our voices, trying to understand who we were. I
Speaker 1: was dealing with the wounds of the past as opposed
Speaker 1: to the you know, the present with her. So it
Speaker 1: wasn't apparent then other than the stability of our relationship
Speaker 1: gave me the courage to look into these other Well,
Speaker 1: you know, she's incredibly bright and incredibly disciplined, and um,
Speaker 1: she she's somebody that can multitask in a in an
Speaker 1: emotional way. Do you have children now? Do you think
Speaker 1: that that was partly because of what your childhood? I
Speaker 1: think we're both April and I had a lot very
Speaker 1: traumatic things that passed that made that that seemed dangerous.
Speaker 1: Do you regret having not done that? There was you
Speaker 1: have a very warm, humanistic your personality. Yeah, there there
Speaker 1: was a point at which I felt like I could
Speaker 1: handle having kids, but April wasn't there yet. And the
Speaker 1: one thing I wasn't gonna do was insist that we
Speaker 1: do it my way, because I knew what that she
Speaker 1: was only going to indulge you so far. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: and or or it was going to break her down
Speaker 1: in a way that I couldn't bear. So you know
Speaker 1: it passed. Now. In the book your father, he went
Speaker 1: that route that a lot of dads go, which is
Speaker 1: he just wants to give you the safe advice. Yeah,
Speaker 1: his parental duty was to say to you, you know,
Speaker 1: let's be reasonable now, and he told you to go
Speaker 1: to get a business. Did your father live to see
Speaker 1: you become a great success? He did? Yeah, my my
Speaker 1: mother didn't. My father did he. He actually didn't understand
Speaker 1: what success was in art anyway, that he'd kind of
Speaker 1: given up by then, right, so understanding me, yeah, exactly.
Speaker 1: She was a very very kind of icy relationship with her.
Speaker 1: It was, it was volatile and complicated. But you know,
Speaker 1: he he really didn't know anything about art, so he
Speaker 1: didn't really know anything about what success in art was.
Speaker 1: And and back then, you know, success and fortune were
Speaker 1: not connected to each other in the art world. You
Speaker 1: you could be highly successful, you know, shown in museums
Speaker 1: around the world, and and still be doing a teaching
Speaker 1: job or driving a taxi or something to do it.
Speaker 1: So he was perplexed that I would even be in
Speaker 1: a field in which there wasn't a monetary reward necessarily, right,
Speaker 1: but at some point he uh started to see my
Speaker 1: name in print, and that was something that he understood
Speaker 1: as success. You know, all of a sudden local newspaper
Speaker 1: or you know, an art magazine or something. There there's
Speaker 1: his son, right, And then he really flipped from from
Speaker 1: sort of disengagement to the proud parent who you know
Speaker 1: we did. We'd go into a grocery store and at
Speaker 1: the checkout, cutry guard, you know who this is my son.
Speaker 1: This is the artist that he take the clipping out
Speaker 1: of his wallety exactly. This is from the New York Times.
Speaker 1: That's E I S F I S h L. Well,
Speaker 1: you know he uh he became an artist at the
Speaker 1: end of his life as well. He discovered collage and
Speaker 1: it took him a while after he retired to find
Speaker 1: He tried other things, and then all of a sudden
Speaker 1: he found himself like sitting in his office at home
Speaker 1: cutting pictures out and gluing them together. And and you know,
Speaker 1: he's he was not a schooled artist, but he had
Speaker 1: an eye and he had a kind of liveliness to
Speaker 1: these collages that he made that were very expressive. And
Speaker 1: by the time he died, I had realized that he
Speaker 1: and I could never talk to each other, but we
Speaker 1: just kept missing, you know, but we understood each other visually,
Speaker 1: and so he would send me his collages and I
Speaker 1: knew exactly what he was thinking about, where he was at,
Speaker 1: how he was feeling. You know, he was really communicating
Speaker 1: through these visual images, and he showed me that he
Speaker 1: was had been using my paintings to understand what had
Speaker 1: happened in our lives with with my mother and the
Speaker 1: whole family dynamic. And so we actually were both visual
Speaker 1: people who understood what that meant to communicate visually to
Speaker 1: each other. So it was it was deeply rewarding to
Speaker 1: me ultimately to but it took me a while to
Speaker 1: understand that they were talked to about your paintings and
Speaker 1: his view of your paintings. Well, at first, I mean
Speaker 1: he didn't. He talked to me about success. You know,
Speaker 1: you could see and be enthusiastic for this show and
Speaker 1: that show, etcetera, etcetera. But there was this uh thing
Speaker 1: that happened. There was I think, um, you know, really
Speaker 1: blew my mind, which was that I had done a
Speaker 1: painting UM called a Woman Possessed, and it was a
Speaker 1: painting of a woman outside the suburban home, drunk, passed
Speaker 1: out in the driveway, surrounded by these dogs that were like,
Speaker 1: you know, beasts from hell it or you know, some
Speaker 1: were sniffing her somewhere, growling at at the sun. Who
Speaker 1: had could just come home from school. The school books
Speaker 1: are on the ground as bicycle slipped over. He topped
Speaker 1: off his bike. So this boy is trying to pull
Speaker 1: her away from these dogs and her demon dogs. I
Speaker 1: I showed the painting in Toronto and the and the
Speaker 1: critic described it in the most beautiful terms. He understood
Speaker 1: it as as a painting that revealed the profound pain
Speaker 1: of love, of loving someone right, and it was. It
Speaker 1: was a painting, was the only painting in this show.
Speaker 1: It was a one painting show. And he wrote extensively
Speaker 1: about it. And so, you know, proud son sends it
Speaker 1: to my father and unbeknownst to me, my father sends
Speaker 1: the review of off to my siblings. Right, and my
Speaker 1: younger sister Lori writes back a her to him. She's furious,
Speaker 1: why is he trying to make her remember this painful time?
Speaker 1: You know? And he shared these letters to me. I
Speaker 1: didn't know they were having until the whole communication came
Speaker 1: to me, but he shared to me her response and
Speaker 1: then his response to her, in which he revealed that
Speaker 1: he had been actually using my paintings the whole time
Speaker 1: to understand emotionally what had been happening in our lives
Speaker 1: and stuff, and that he was just trying to heal something,
Speaker 1: you know, trying to bring her into it as well,
Speaker 1: into two, into a kind of healing process, and to
Speaker 1: acknowledge his awareness, yeah, which which took me completely by surprise,
Speaker 1: and that that he had been seeing the work as
Speaker 1: deeply as he had, you know, revealed as you intended
Speaker 1: it to be safe, which is what I intended, which
Speaker 1: would hope he might have been. Last exactly did he
Speaker 1: find his ape and marry someone that was reliable for
Speaker 1: him emotionally? No, I mean he he married somebody that
Speaker 1: was absolutely reliable, loved him, you know, stable. It's yes
Speaker 1: in that sense. But she was such an polar opposite
Speaker 1: of my mother. I was surprised because I I thought
Speaker 1: my father would just find some uh some a little
Speaker 1: bit more you know, manageable version of my mother, that
Speaker 1: the things that he loved in my mother, her creativity,
Speaker 1: her Yeah, But instead he he wasn't attached to that
Speaker 1: part of her coming up. In part two of our conversation,
Speaker 1: Eric Fischel talks about the challenges of becoming a first
Speaker 1: time our teacher. I was only a couple of years
Speaker 1: older than them to begin with. You're a young teacher
Speaker 1: and I had I had never been taught techniques and
Speaker 1: the benefits. That's where he met his current wife, April.
Speaker 1: This is Alec Baldwin. This is Alec Baldwin, and you
Speaker 1: were listening to. Here's the thing. My guest today is
Speaker 1: Eric Fishel. For years, he and his wife worked out
Speaker 1: of their downtown Manhattan studio, but he says the city
Speaker 1: doesn't feed him like it once did. Now he feels
Speaker 1: a greater connection to nature. Back in the early eighties, however,
Speaker 1: it was the perfect place to develop his craft. Soho
Speaker 1: was was percolating. I mean it was. It was a
Speaker 1: real village of artists, you know, the all of the
Speaker 1: It wasn't Lower Madison Avenue like it is now. No,
Speaker 1: it was. It was not a mall. It was it was.
Speaker 1: It was a village and and you know the kind
Speaker 1: of thing where you would see people you knew on
Speaker 1: the streets every day, you'd sit and talk. You know,
Speaker 1: you'd break bread, hang out at art art bars and
Speaker 1: stuff like that. It was it was great. And there
Speaker 1: was you know a kind of exciting tension between the
Speaker 1: older artists and and us young kids who had come
Speaker 1: there to to make a difference. And and you know,
Speaker 1: there was a rivalry and a kind of healthy competitive
Speaker 1: thing going on. We wanted to kill them and they
Speaker 1: wanted to ignore us. By them, who do you mean
Speaker 1: particularly well, there was ah, you know generation of artists, um,
Speaker 1: you know, half a generation of five ten years older
Speaker 1: for example, that were doing sort of minimalist work. For
Speaker 1: example of people like Don Judd or Carl Andre or
Speaker 1: Sol Wite. There were conceptual artists like Larry Weener or
Speaker 1: Joseph Kasooth or um to name a couple that doing
Speaker 1: a whole different kind of thing painting. Painting had become
Speaker 1: a disregarded, uh medium. So part of my generation was
Speaker 1: trying to see if we could reassert some kind of
Speaker 1: authority and authenticity to painting. And the kind of painting
Speaker 1: that the minimalists had done had brought painting to its
Speaker 1: ultimate conclusion, which was too essentially have a kind of
Speaker 1: nothing there. A lot of artists felt it was a
Speaker 1: dead medium, And then there were other artists like myself
Speaker 1: who was absolutely no their paintings real and you know,
Speaker 1: you just have to find the truth, find the you know,
Speaker 1: the things that matter and convey them convincingly. There there
Speaker 1: wasn't yet the limos, there wasn't yet the kind of
Speaker 1: rock star status. All those things were to come when
Speaker 1: probably by eighty five it started to happen. How did
Speaker 1: you and how would you describe that it was? When
Speaker 1: it came? It came? How people weren't collecting? You you
Speaker 1: talk about painting was an overlooked medium art form. We
Speaker 1: read about the art world where you know, dead masters
Speaker 1: continue to sell paintings for tens, if not hundreds of
Speaker 1: millions of dollars. And at that time, in the late
Speaker 1: seventies and eighties, is that what the art collecting world
Speaker 1: was confined to were the masters of art? And everything
Speaker 1: contemporary was just no what it was? Was there? There
Speaker 1: was a warhole. Wasn't warhole then? Was he? He wasn't
Speaker 1: In terms of financially it wasn't. His paintings were still
Speaker 1: selling pretty cheaply, but a collector base entered that had
Speaker 1: made money very quickly in the dot com world and
Speaker 1: then moved into uh, sort of buying art and speculating
Speaker 1: on it. Um. There was a sense that the object
Speaker 1: was to find the next genius, right, So what you
Speaker 1: did was you started to speculate on young artists, buying
Speaker 1: a lot of a cheap hoping that one of them
Speaker 1: was going to turn out to be Picasso or something
Speaker 1: like that. And there were all these stories so that
Speaker 1: you know, a collector buying a Jasper John's painting for
Speaker 1: two fifty dollars and you know, selling it for eleven
Speaker 1: million dollars giving it to you to pay his rent,
Speaker 1: or one of those exactly that kind of thing. So
Speaker 1: there was like this whole so kind of vogue among
Speaker 1: collectors to just go in and put money into young arts. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and uh, you know, it was a way for them
Speaker 1: to deal with their money anyway, because they had to
Speaker 1: change the art world. Now it's hedge funders. And I
Speaker 1: have a guy who's a friend of mine who's an artist,
Speaker 1: and then one guy will say to me, hey, in
Speaker 1: and he says, you know, without ann ounce of cynicism,
Speaker 1: go online and look at Kevin Johnson. I'll make up
Speaker 1: a name. Go see Kevin Johnson and Kevin Johnson has
Speaker 1: just a white canvas. It's just white. He's like, no, no,
Speaker 1: you don't get it. Man. He's like this, this guy
Speaker 1: is white. This is what's happening right now. Everyone's just
Speaker 1: digging on Kevin Johnson's. This isn't white, it's Kevin Johnson's white.
Speaker 1: It's Kevin Johnson's. When everyone's just Jones in for this
Speaker 1: white You're gonna buy this now for a hundred and
Speaker 1: fifty thousand dollars, and about five years now you're gonna
Speaker 1: sell it for half a million dollars maybe a million.
Speaker 1: I mean, everyone's going nuts for Kevin Jones. And I
Speaker 1: look at paintings and I thought to myself, it's just
Speaker 1: a game I didn't want to play, but people are
Speaker 1: playing that game constantly. Yeah. I don't understand why people
Speaker 1: don't have a space in their life where they don't
Speaker 1: do what they normally do. You know, Like, if you're
Speaker 1: a hedge funders, some financial guy, why why do you
Speaker 1: have to turn everything into transact monitor? Why do you
Speaker 1: have to monetize? Why why isn't there this one place
Speaker 1: where you do something just for yourself. How do you
Speaker 1: feel knowing that you're going to do a painting, and
Speaker 1: that painting is done, and you sit there and say, now,
Speaker 1: this painting may wind up like in an apartment at
Speaker 1: fifteen Central Park West, some guys just gonna punt it
Speaker 1: to another guy and another guy. And do you just
Speaker 1: don't even have any feeling about that? You just accept that,
Speaker 1: what did it piss you off? Yeah? Well, it completely
Speaker 1: pisses me off. It's the kind of thing that if
Speaker 1: I actually let it get into my studio, it'll destroy
Speaker 1: what why I make hardlock. And obviously it gets increasingly
Speaker 1: harder and harder to do that. I mean, I do
Speaker 1: these works on paper that oil on paper, their sketches,
Speaker 1: they're a great pleasure for me to do. Some of
Speaker 1: them lead to painting, some of them don't. But it's
Speaker 1: it's an activity that I do, and they're There was
Speaker 1: a time when they would be sold, you know, for
Speaker 1: like five thousand dollars and then you know, ten thousand dollars,
Speaker 1: and I uh, at some point on the secondary market
Speaker 1: they were selling for a hundred thousand dollars. You know,
Speaker 1: I would sell sell it to you know, in a
Speaker 1: show for five thousand dollars. Is six months later there
Speaker 1: and an auction in place for a hundred thousand dollars, right,
Speaker 1: So you go back into the studio and you're, you know,
Speaker 1: I'm making my sketches and stuff like that, and I'm
Speaker 1: looking at and thinking, well, why not do a couple more?
Speaker 1: You know? Why not? You know, it's like all of
Speaker 1: a sudden, they're starting to turn into currency, you know,
Speaker 1: and which is a totally different sort of way of
Speaker 1: thinking about and how much and how hard is it
Speaker 1: for you to resist? Because I was joking with a
Speaker 1: friend of min and I said, what it must be
Speaker 1: like in your world where you're completely self determined, where
Speaker 1: you're completely self generating. I get kind of amazed to
Speaker 1: sit there and say, got Eric official is the kind
Speaker 1: of guy where if he and April are like laying
Speaker 1: there in bed on Sunday, I mean, I have a
Speaker 1: very kind of a silly improv comedy view of April
Speaker 1: Gornick and Eric Ficil are lying in bed on a
Speaker 1: Sunday reading the New York Times, and she turns in
Speaker 1: and goes, Eric, I'd so love to go hell is
Speaker 1: skiing reading the papers November. I still love to go
Speaker 1: hell of skiing in British Columbia in January and you're like, sure, baby,
Speaker 1: let's go hell and you go out and you paint
Speaker 1: a painting hell of skiing trip. I mean like like
Speaker 1: you can, you can just go do a painting. You're
Speaker 1: Eric official and running out the door, whether you like,
Speaker 1: like how hard? Have this fantasy that when my muse
Speaker 1: left me, I would still be able to make product, right,
Speaker 1: that I that that I wouldn't be making art anymore,
Speaker 1: but I'd be making things that look like art, and
Speaker 1: that that was okay, right, And so there were times
Speaker 1: in my process where I got stuck. I I the
Speaker 1: inspiration was gone, and I was sure that it Now
Speaker 1: you know, my mused, my inspiration had left, right, a
Speaker 1: total blockage kind of thing. And what I found, to
Speaker 1: my horror was that it didn't just leave my head,
Speaker 1: it left my hand, and that I actually couldn't paint anymore.
Speaker 1: I couldn't draw, I couldn't make something look like something.
Speaker 1: It literally left every part. And that was terrifying. Right,
Speaker 1: That's that's like your worst nightmare. And uh so I
Speaker 1: have that memory which keeps it keeps me somewhat, you know,
Speaker 1: focused on on staying to true to my ultimate goal.
Speaker 1: So you're there and you're in that space and the
Speaker 1: and the muse isn't there for you, and you've decided
Speaker 1: not to engage, preferably if you don't. So what's the
Speaker 1: longest period you went you didn't paint. It's it's not
Speaker 1: so much that I didn't paint. I kept trying, like
Speaker 1: a bulldog one and I just keep trying to go
Speaker 1: through it. It's just it's dead, dead, dead. So I
Speaker 1: try to keep in mind that there's like U two
Speaker 1: audiences and there's only one audience that's actually worth playing too,
Speaker 1: And it's an audience of voices that are in your
Speaker 1: head there that are made up of um heroes, you know,
Speaker 1: artists I admire. Well, you know, there's historical figures. They're like,
Speaker 1: you know, the the greatest you know arms sculptor, you know,
Speaker 1: Michael Angelo, say, the greatest sort of anger painter, Max Beckman.
Speaker 1: You know, they're they're they're like they have very particular
Speaker 1: things for me that I admire that I either emulate
Speaker 1: or can't do and wish I could, and you know, etcetera, etcetera.
Speaker 1: But they're clarifying. And there, you know, there's the mother voice,
Speaker 1: the father voice, the gym teacher voice, the you know whatever,
Speaker 1: and yeah, yeah, and they're all in there sort of
Speaker 1: saying what I can and can't do, what I should
Speaker 1: and shouldn't do, etcetera. And so I'm like each painting
Speaker 1: is sort of proving did these voices that this was
Speaker 1: the right move? You know, that I was going to
Speaker 1: do something that they would admire, something that would finally
Speaker 1: shut them up, finally, you know whatever. Anyway, I said,
Speaker 1: this is a an audience of um that is stands
Speaker 1: outside of time. It's it's constant, and it has a
Speaker 1: quality standard to it that I understand. You know, I
Speaker 1: can tell when I'm my paintings are falling short of
Speaker 1: that performance that you know it didn't reach where I
Speaker 1: needed it to go, because I knew that I was
Speaker 1: falling short of this person. I admire this person, and
Speaker 1: I hate in so far as your own paintings through
Speaker 1: your success are monetized or just collected by by pure
Speaker 1: collectors and or hanging institutions. Have you yourself collected others paintings?
Speaker 1: Have you used your success? Whose art hangs in your home?
Speaker 1: Have you collected art I have? I don't consider myself
Speaker 1: a collector at all. What I what I did was
Speaker 1: at a certain point. I wanted to acknowledge my peers,
Speaker 1: so I want I wanted to collect something of each
Speaker 1: of the people that I admire, who you know, have
Speaker 1: inspired me, supported me, you know what, helped me form
Speaker 1: my thoughts. So you know, I have examples of their work.
Speaker 1: That's why I'm not a collector. It's because I don't
Speaker 1: have the connoisseurship in terms of going after the best
Speaker 1: David Sally painting, the best Cindy Sherman, the best Anselm
Speaker 1: Key for you know, things like that. What I have
Speaker 1: is examples of their work that that somebody looking over
Speaker 1: my shoulder would say, oh, this was your time and
Speaker 1: these were your people and stuff, and what about your
Speaker 1: own work? Have you finished a painting you said? That's
Speaker 1: for me? Yeah. Yeah. And the older I get, the
Speaker 1: more I do that. Yeah. Early on I couldn't afford it,
Speaker 1: and uh, you know, let some of my my best
Speaker 1: work go out the window. Yeah exactly. Now I'm a
Speaker 1: little bit more precious about about that. And and part
Speaker 1: of it is the you know, the the love doesn't
Speaker 1: come back in the way you need it to come back.
Speaker 1: The extreme change is not you know there, it doesn't
Speaker 1: really work. And the way you wanted to, which is
Speaker 1: to say, I make a painting out of love, right,
Speaker 1: and and a profound love which includes respect, admiration, desire, need,
Speaker 1: you know, all of the things that go into you know,
Speaker 1: being a human wanting to communicate to another human and
Speaker 1: and connect to another human. I call that love and
Speaker 1: and so I make a painting out of love, and
Speaker 1: I'm seeking love in return. I want that. I want
Speaker 1: that to come back in that way. Right. So somebody
Speaker 1: gives you money, right, which, on one hand you think, well,
Speaker 1: that's an expression of love. They want to possess your work,
Speaker 1: so so they're they're expressing love. But money doesn't feel
Speaker 1: like love because it's a neutral currency. Now I have
Speaker 1: to change that money into something that tells me how
Speaker 1: much love I just got back? Right? How do you
Speaker 1: do that? Exactly? That's where the issue. How do you
Speaker 1: do that? You know you've done it well, so you
Speaker 1: you know, you buy a car, or you buy a house,
Speaker 1: you you buy onto your house, Yeah, exactly, you do
Speaker 1: you do things that you want slash need. You do that,
Speaker 1: and then there's a point in which you don't need
Speaker 1: those things anymore. You've got all your toys and stuff,
Speaker 1: your mortgage is paid exactly, but now you have access right,
Speaker 1: So is that excess love or is that just? But
Speaker 1: my question for you is when the muse goes away,
Speaker 1: when you lapse into a period of product versus art.
Speaker 1: When when the artist, and that's a very real condition,
Speaker 1: uh struggles. I found people where it affects them in
Speaker 1: many ways. It affects their appetite, their sexual appetite, their
Speaker 1: physical health, their emotional health, their sleep. I mean, it
Speaker 1: really really really damages them and it hurts them. Have
Speaker 1: you gone through periods of that where you were, like,
Speaker 1: really really I thought you were losing it? Would you
Speaker 1: do to get out of it? I painted your way
Speaker 1: out of it? Ultimately painted the way out of it.
Speaker 1: But you know, rely relied a lot on April too.
Speaker 1: You know, keep me sort of above, so you bring
Speaker 1: me to So you bring me to where are the
Speaker 1: One of our last two questions is, let's go to
Speaker 1: Halifax and you meet April and where are you at
Speaker 1: your life when you meet April? And what happened? I'm
Speaker 1: I'm twenty seven years old or something like that. I'm
Speaker 1: teaching at this art school. It actually is a very
Speaker 1: sort of advanced thinking place that lie cal Arts, where
Speaker 1: I went to school. Nova Scotia College of Art and
Speaker 1: Design was also sort of based on the most radical
Speaker 1: art of the moment um, anti painting. So they hired
Speaker 1: me as a young, untested painter teacher simply because they'd
Speaker 1: fired somebody mid semester, needed someone right away they could
Speaker 1: care less about painting, so they took a risk on
Speaker 1: this guy based on what my former teacher had recommended.
Speaker 1: I get this job. I'm in Halifax, Nova Scotia. I
Speaker 1: go up there with my wife at the time. Uh,
Speaker 1: spend three months teaching there. She lapsing into a deep
Speaker 1: depression because she she's rootless and being ignored. And I'm
Speaker 1: following you basically and following me, and I'm not sensitive
Speaker 1: enough to it. You know what that sacrifice was. And uh,
Speaker 1: you know, we moved back to Chicago in the summer
Speaker 1: and I get rehired and she announces she doesn't want
Speaker 1: to go back and our marriage is over. And that
Speaker 1: following year I meet April. I didn't plan on falling
Speaker 1: in love. I just planned on having sex. And shame
Speaker 1: on you, Eric, shame on you call me shallow. Anyway,
Speaker 1: one thing led to another, and and what it was was.
Speaker 1: I was actually going through a very sort of complicated
Speaker 1: set of emotions for uh, you know, I had never
Speaker 1: mourned the death of my mother. I had just broken
Speaker 1: up with, you know, split with my wife kind of thing.
Speaker 1: I was now falling in love not wanting to with April.
Speaker 1: My work was going through a transition where I was
Speaker 1: giving up the artists I thought I was going to
Speaker 1: be for the artist I ultimately became. And that period
Speaker 1: of doubt threw me into a kind of series of
Speaker 1: anxiety attacks, panic modes where I really began to have
Speaker 1: some serious psychological issues. I was dissociating and you know,
Speaker 1: and ended up on you know, any psychotic medicine and
Speaker 1: stuff like that to stabilize me. Meanwhile, I'm teaching Meanwhile,
Speaker 1: you're up showing these young impressionable minds the world through
Speaker 1: your eyes exactly, let me show you the world through
Speaker 1: my clumb up and soaked eyes. And the thing is
Speaker 1: that I was only a couple of years older than
Speaker 1: them to begin with. Your a young teacher, and I
Speaker 1: had I had never been taught technique. So I'm teaching
Speaker 1: you thing like your teacher were doing at cow Arts.
Speaker 1: And that day, Okay, great, to hear that, you know,
Speaker 1: to some extent, I was definitely going through several women
Speaker 1: in the in the student body, but not all at
Speaker 1: the same moment. But it was a sacrifice. Yeah, I mean,
Speaker 1: it's a you know, it's a small isolated community that
Speaker 1: winters are harsh up there. Yeah, and when the skipper
Speaker 1: runs into Ginger and Maryanne, we can only talk about
Speaker 1: the weather for so many times because then the title charts,
Speaker 1: So go ahead, So the skipper runs into Ginger and Marian. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and ultimately ran ran into April. And she stuck with
Speaker 1: me through this time, which was really difficult and in
Speaker 1: a kind of way that you know, I just couldn't
Speaker 1: imagine there being anybody else, so we did. Now, she
Speaker 1: was a student who started out doing very conceptual art.
Speaker 1: I actually the way I tried to impress on her,
Speaker 1: to make her look at me was I found her
Speaker 1: working on a on a project. She was doing some
Speaker 1: something that had she was gluing pieces of wood to
Speaker 1: a piece of paper and then writing some obscure philosophical
Speaker 1: text around and it was you know, I just went
Speaker 1: up to her and said, you know, the idea of
Speaker 1: gluing wood onto paper just seemed the redundancy. That was
Speaker 1: so stupid. I can't imagine why anyone would do it,
Speaker 1: thinking that she'd want to have dinner with me having
Speaker 1: said that, and she just told me to go fuck myself,
Speaker 1: and and that was that. And and then for the
Speaker 1: next six months I tried to make nice to to recover,
Speaker 1: to recover from your offense. And yeah, so I don't
Speaker 1: I don't know what made me think an insult would
Speaker 1: be the way to open the door. Did she ever
Speaker 1: return the favorite work? Did she ever return the favorite
Speaker 1: she ever walke into your studio and say, what were
Speaker 1: you thinking? Yeah? This is just yeah, No, she she's
Speaker 1: actually my greatest, most clear scene critics, your most prevalent subject.
Speaker 1: If you painted her more than any other person, yes, yeah,
Speaker 1: I've painted her a lot. I've painted her in in
Speaker 1: dispised ways, and I've painted her in ways where you
Speaker 1: can see it's her. Um. So, now you are a
Speaker 1: very well known man and your work is very popular.
Speaker 1: You and your wife are a very admired couple in
Speaker 1: a community that you live in. And I want to
Speaker 1: ask you, you know, a why do you live out here? Particularly?
Speaker 1: You could escape, like a lot of great artists find
Speaker 1: they won't have real anonymity and peace. You can go
Speaker 1: live in Italy or anywhere you want to go. Why here?
Speaker 1: And also, let's be honest, we live out here, and
Speaker 1: there are certain social rhythms out here, and there are
Speaker 1: certain patterns that repeat themselves almost metronomically out here all
Speaker 1: the time. And do you find in a strange way
Speaker 1: you've washed up on the shores of your own Port
Speaker 1: Washington yacht club in a way, I mean, there's are
Speaker 1: kind of a rigor to the way you're living now
Speaker 1: that you didn't bargain for. Yeah, I think there was
Speaker 1: a moment a while back where I kind of looked
Speaker 1: around and went, oh, my god, you know this is
Speaker 1: this is where I grew up. I'm in a different
Speaker 1: relationship to it. But it's definitely, you know, more of
Speaker 1: a suburban than an urban environment and a suburban kind
Speaker 1: of rhythm to it. But everybody needs a sense of community,
Speaker 1: needs a sense of place where where they belong. Right, Um,
Speaker 1: I grew up on Long Island. You grew up on
Speaker 1: Long Island. I used to come out here in the summertime.
Speaker 1: It's familiar territory, etcetera. It seems natural in a way
Speaker 1: to to want to be here. And also it's there's
Speaker 1: a scale to it that makes you think that you
Speaker 1: can make a difference. It seems like pretty much everywhere
Speaker 1: you go we're in a state of you know, transformation
Speaker 1: or decay or something where it's you know, it's what
Speaker 1: it was going to take ten years before this place
Speaker 1: gets ruined and you go to someplace el is going
Speaker 1: to take another five years before that one does it.
Speaker 1: So you think, okay, I'll stay and fight it a
Speaker 1: little bit and do that, plus plus on some you know,
Speaker 1: sort of basic level, you actually feel like you belong here,
Speaker 1: you know, so you you want it to mind to
Speaker 1: do it. It's other people's and its mind. So is
Speaker 1: it safe to say, just to conclude this, if you will,
Speaker 1: that the eponymous bad boy of the title still has
Speaker 1: his doubts, still has his anxiety, still has his fears
Speaker 1: and issues and so on. He just just learned to
Speaker 1: handle them differently. I think that's true. Yeah, absolutely, they
Speaker 1: don't go away. I thought that the older you got,
Speaker 1: the easier at God, it turns out the opposite. We
Speaker 1: just learned how to manage patty, dismanage it. Yeah, that's true.
Speaker 1: M H. Eric Official says he didn't set out to
Speaker 1: write a memoir. His friend Michael Stone was writing about
Speaker 1: cal arts, which then morphed into their book Bad Boy,
Speaker 1: My Life On and Off the Canvas. This is Alec
Speaker 1: Baldwin and you're listening to here's the thing.