TERRIBLE INFANT (2017) My paintings are like my children: I love them all equally but I am more proud of some than of others. Jokes aside (I only have one child and I am very proud of him!), this is one of the most important paintings to my painting practice that I’ve ever done. Terrible Infant initially started as a 6 foot tall exploding Philip Guston head that I painted at the suggestion of then-classmate Nathan Zeidman to try and freak out my professors. Failed canvases are like a freebie for a painter. They leave you with nowhere to go but up. This canvas sat in the storage rack for two years before I decided to cash in on my freebie. I worked it on the wall, on the floor, and upside-down; I added patterns, body parts, color swatches; I painted with my eyes closed and in the dark, and with a six foot-long brush. This painting had an awkward adolescence and was looking pretty ugly. One day, after losing all hope of saving it, I decided to ruin it once and for all. I opened my sketchbook and selected a trivial little drawing of a coy devil to superimpose over the top of it all. When I stepped back, I cocked my head to the side and thought it was less terrible than before. After staring at it for another few months, I realized that it was done, but wasn’t sure how to do it again. It was only in backwards-engineering it that I started to understand the importance of process & procedure in my work, and Terrible Infant’s surprising relationship to both the Kitchen Sink paintings and the Gutter paintings. More on that, later… #frankjstockton #denkgallery #terribleinfant https://www.instagram.com/p/BnjL3DEBcdT/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=jhl0556ds7in
