Everyone understood the romance paintings pretty well. So I tried making other things, that were harder to understand. In 1984 I had a show of paintings at Metro Pictures, all patent medicines, or salves and oils, or other things that had slightly medicinal, druggy, sexual overtones. That is, a mostly empty bottle of white vinegar, which is used for douching. A bottle of Vaseline lotion or a bottle of Johnson's baby oil (Johnson & Johnson bought it for its corporate collection -- I also liked these images because they were "pre-tested" -- that is, their appeal to buyers had already been engineered!), or a box of Tampax that was my "fertility" painting (I did several, all titled "Woman" -- the third one, the "shy" one, was "Woman III," and faced away from the viewer! I still have it -- no one wanted to buy it!). It was all about desire -- I would paint a big bottle of Excedrin, or a big bottle of Bromo, because of the way I felt -- that is, I knew that when someone has a headache or indigestion, they just HAVE to have their medicine.... it was a bit of a joke, but also serious. . . .

 

These product paintings all positioned a single product in the middle of  a canvas, and kind of big (for me). The paint was put on with a swashbuckling hand, and made to look juicy -- just like the viscous material of the things I was painting! 

 

I think this show also included a painting of a bowl of sugar cubes, like you might find in a diner -- I told my wife-to-be that it was a portrait

of her, ha ha.

 

Later I did groups of products -- a still-life of several lotions and salves, all sexual, including KY Jelly and Tiger Balm (that great artist Marcus Harvey did the same thing in a show at Mary Boone about five years ago). Or I'd do still lifes of several different types of aspirin and call them "pain killers." I was into the notion of killing pain -- I was a tortured soul.

I did a painting called Lung Cancer Cure -- a bottle of aspirin and a jar of Vicks Vaporub -- when I'd have chest pains (I smoked), I'd use those two products and feel better. I traded it to Timothy Greenfield-Sanders for his portrait of me.

 

 I  have a painting called Pharmacology, that I joke is a color composition -- a bottle of brandy, a pack of camels and a small plastic container of Bayer aspirin -- everything is brown and yellow. Later I started painting beers -- I'd buy two six packs, and drink as I painted, so there would only be five or six beers in the finished painting but they'd be called "two six packs." Ha ha -- we call that alcoholic thinking. I had four favorite kinds of beers, because of the colors -- green Heinekin, red and white Budweiser, yellow Miller and brown Guinness. I painted a bunch of them on pieces of white cardboard very fast -- I was developing the swashbuckling painter look -- and sold most of them. In fact, I sold most of these paintings, I don't know why I didn't become a great success!

 

I still have a rather large painting of three cans of Budweiser in a row, a "shorty" of about 5 oz., a regular 10 oz. can and a 16 oz. one -- my little daughter, Antonia, named it -- "The Three Beers."

I also made a painting called "Lotion or Powder," showing two bottles of the title stuff -- you know what that is? Back in the 1980s, in massage parlours, that's what the girls would ask you. Ha ha.

But I always wanted to make abstract paintings. I'd been making spin paintings on the boardwalk in Ocean City, N.J. ever since the mid-1950s -- some forgotten entrepreneur, inspired by Abstract Expressionism, devised a little machine so that tourists could make themselves an automatic abstract artwork -- and somehow I'd gotten a kid's toy spin-art machine, and was making little paintings on cardboard using housepainter's enamel, which you could buy in small half-pint sizes.

I wanted to make them larger, but didn't know how to make a big spin-art machine. So my girlfriend (who I later married) went down to Canal Street and bought a fan motor and a pulley and rigged up a little spin-art machine. It sat in a wire base and had a three-foot-wide arm made of wood, with little L-angles on the ends to hold the canvases on. That was that.

.

"Untitled", 1986, 36" x 36", oil enamel on canvas

 

At Pearl Paint, I bought three-foot-square Fredrix prepared canvases, five to a box. I would set the spin machine up on the floor of a borrowed studio, and build a kind of corral around it with scrap lumber and plastic dropcloths. This would catch the paint as it spun off. I put a on-off switch in the wire, and controlled the machine by turning it on and off.

"An Ugly Trap", 1986, 36" x 36", oil enamel on canvas, Collection Harry Druzd

 

I used One Step sign-painter's enamel, and poured it straight out of the can onto the spinning canvas. The paint is high in lead content, and gives bright colors. It was very heavy. I made the paintings so fast that I had to build a rack to dry them in, not unlike the racks that bakers have for their loaves of bread.

"The Void, Death and the Infinite", 1986, 36" x 36", enamel and latex paint on canvas

 

The idea of the spin paintings was to have a machine that would take all the subjective, arbitrary decisions out of making abstractions -- decisions that always seemed so trivial. The machine would make the artworks automatically. But in the end I subverted my own plan for subversion, and struggled to use the machine as a tool.

"Keen Edges of Despair", 1986, 36" x 36", oil enamel on canvas

 

Instead of random abstractions, I made "target" paintings, after Kenneth Noland, and tried to make imagistic spin paintings as well, like "exploding hearts" and "volcanic eruptions." I made Op Art paintings with bright blue and red, and "composed with the entire palette" like Hans Hofmann. I made "rose window" paintings by first using oil enamels to make a multicolored image and then pouring black water-based enamel on top of it, with the resulting "resist" creating a latticework and stained-glass effect.

I had two shows of spin paintings at Metro Pictures in SoHo in 1986 and 1987 -- and no one paid any attention. No reviews and only a few sales. I got all 50 spin paintings back. I was kind of happy about that. My plan was to have a show every year, and every year make the spin paintings bigger. I did in fact make some paintings that measured 4 x 4 feet, but a little math will tell you that even though it's only a foot larger to the side, it's almost twice as much area. To make a spin painting that large takes a lot of paint, and a lot of power to spin the canvas fast enough.

Then other things began to happen, and the spin paintings went into storage. I'd spun enough canvases, at least for the time being.

This story is to be continued.

-- Walter Robinson,  4/27/05

Walter Robinson has exhibited his work at Cabinet Gallery in London and Tricia Collins in New York.  In the early 80s he first exhibited his psychedelic  spin paintings at Metro Pictures Gallery.  His book, Instant Art History was published in 1994.  He also has over 20 years experience in print journalism and a reputation as one of the top art critics in the US.  Mr. Robinson spent 18 years as a contributing editor and news column editor at Art In America.  He was the founder and editor of  Artrite in the 70s and the Art Editor of East Village Eye in the mid-1980s, correspondent for the Manhattan public-access television program, Art TV Gallery Beat.  He is currently the Editor in Chief of artnet.com.          

www.artnet.com