Jazz: Could you describe your painting Dwarf Toss as if we were doing a radio interview?

Love: Oh, I can't describe paintings because paintings are something you paint, you know, it's something that I just don't do. I carry around pictures of my work so that when people ask me what I do I can show them. Cause if I tell them I'm a painter, they're gonna ask do I paint houses or pictures? Well what kind of pictures? Then what do you say? I'm not easily categorized, I'm self taught. If I wanted to describe the paintings I'd have to get into categories and I don't fit in to any.

Jazz: Here's my theory about the painting. The town is sponsoring this annual dwarf toss, right, and somehow the dwarves got angry and burned the town...

Love: Huh.

Jazz: There's a girl in the foreground of the painting with her leg torn off, I'm not sure if she's a girl or a dwarf...

Love: Ah. That's interesting...

Jazz: I was thinking if she's a dwarf she might have more developed breasts, she seems more like a child.

Love: That's the thing that paintings do. Everyone has their interpretation of what the painting means. And I didn't have a particular story in mind when I painted it. It's as if I'm a tourist and I just come over a hill and I see something going on and I take a picture of it.

Jazz: So did you actually go to a town where they were having a dwarf toss?

Love: Oh no. It's just images. You know. It comes from the experience of being a human being in the modern day. It has a lot to do with how I feel living today.  A lot of the titles I give to the paintings, like Dwarf Toss for instance, are jokes. They're done with a real tongue in cheek sense of humor, cause I don't even like to title paintings. There's one painting of a young girl in Antarctica, alone, she's been left by a ship on an ice flow which she is chained to and she's wearing a summer dress and the ship is leaving and there's just nothing but ice flows there and she looks kind of prayerful or pensive like maybe she's a bit stupid or something. And they're just leaving her there and that painting is called, Still Life. [we laugh] I have a lot of humorous titles for my paintings, sometimes I don't even title them until I'm finished with them and the way I do it is that friends of mine and I might get a little bit drunk and sit around make up names for the paintings.

Jazz: At the bottom of the Dwarf Toss painting it says that it is part of a trilogy--

Love: Actually, there are four paintings in The Love Trilogy. Which is also a joke.

Jazz: What are the other paintings?

Love: There's the Love Trilogy part two: the Locust Queen. Then there's the Love Trilogy part three: Somebody Else's Family Reunion and then there's the Love Trilogy part four: Epilogue. None of the titles really have anything to do with the paintings, but you just have to title paintings so that when you're talking about them in interviews people know which one you're talking about. I don't like the idea of numbering paintings. "Painting #1" "Painting #2," what a bore!

Jazz: Which you would have to do if you were Mondrian or Joseph Albers or one of the people who painted squares.

Love: They could do that, "Painting #1" "Painting #2" I can't do that. I put more into the paintings. I never did get much out of abstract expr- I never did personally. I just paint what I want.

Jazz: Do you think of the girl in your painting as a character, does she have a name that only you know?

Love: Oh no, I'm not that far out in my own dream world. She's from a book a friend of mine had about mannequins. She was a French mannequin. I painted her from the photo. A really beautiful mannequin.

Jazz: I know that girls appear in a lot of your paintings. Are they all different girls.

Love: Yeah. They can be from post cards. I see images of little girls that strike me and I'd like to use them in a painting. Sometimes they're right from out of my head. Such as the painting If My Hand Should Offend Thee, I just painted that girl from out of my head. Sometimes I look through a lot of books for pictures that I like and want to use, but I'm real selective.
 
 

Jazz: I was going to ask you if you ever used live models?

Love: That's difficult, children are so wiggly. There's a problem these days, you know, "Oh god no, not naked children!" You can get yourself hauled off to jail.

Jazz: Especially, naked children with their limbs amputated?

Love: I can always come up with that from my own brain, I don't really need to amputate someone's limbs.

Jazz: Have you ever seen someone with a real amputated limb?

Love: Yeah, I've known people with amputated limbs. They're pretty common.

Jazz: I mean freshly amputated.

Love: No, I've never had the displeasure of actually seeing that happen.

Jazz: I was wondering if you see yourself as part of a tradition or a school of art? Are there other artists that you feel connected to right now?

Love: Nope. Not really, I don't feel like part of any school or any movement. Like I was saying earlier people like to categorize art, but once they start doing that they've already lost the idea of appreciating the work. Once they start to think, 'Who is this like?' Once you start your brain in the process of categorization you lose the experience of looking at the work. I'm not part of any school, not part of any movement, I've never been a joiner. I've never been to art school.

Jazz: Are there other artists that you think are doing interesting things right now?

Love: Yeah. Certainly, um, I don't get out around the art scene much. There's an artist who recently died in Berlin, in Germany, named Blalla Hallmann who was doing some amazing stuff. Joe Coleman, I like his work, I think it's really exciting what he's doing.

Jazz: Have you ever met Joe Coleman?

Love: No but I'd like to.

Jazz: Could you tell me a little about yourself and your background and where you started and where you've been?

Love: I was raised in Albuquerque, New Mexico. I was born in Des Moines, Iowa. My father was in the Marine Corps, he was a gunnery sergeant in Vietnam. He would have to leave for a year at a time or a few months at a time, I remember when I was like two or three years old he had been gone for a while and mother would take me out to the seaside and we would see the ships come in there at Oceanside and I would always wonder, every time I would see a marine in uniform I would say, 'Is that my father?' you know. After he retired in 1969 we moved out to Albuquerque, New Mexico where I grew up. When I came of age and could drive and make my own decisions I took off for San Francisco for four years, I'd lived in Boston. I spent some time in New York. Other than that I lived for about three years in Berlin.

Jazz: Has it been essential to your art to live in these different places?

Love: No. It just happened to be where I ended up. I got kind of stuck this last year in Berlin and I have done shows. I was based in Berlin. There's this American thing where it's good to travel, you know, they feel like traveling broadens your horizons. It does in a way, but it also depends on where you go. Some places are not so good, I was raised in the southwest in New Mexico a very slow paced laid back easy place to Berlin which is easier to live there as far as standard of living than any of the big cities in America because they have better social systems going on, you don't see homeless there for instance, not much death by violence or shooting.

Jazz: You said you got stuck there, what was that about?

Love: I couldn't get back. I had to wait to do these shows which were paced out, and it was economically hard to come back.

Jazz: So when you went you didn't have a round trip ticket?

Love: Shh. We won't talk about that. [more laughter] I didn't find Berlin to be all that inspirational. I think it has to do with World War II, it destroyed- I hate to make broad sweeping generalizations, cause I love the people I know there. I have real good friends there, but in general people in Germany are not happy people, they don't see happiness as being much of a virtue or something to attain. They place a high value on the ability to suffer and take it. To them life is hard. It's not something to be reveled in. They don't think about it like that.

Jazz: So what do you find inspirational?

Love: I went to Palermo, to Sicily, and I found that more inspirational than Germany because it's not so controlled. Germany doesn't hold a lot of surprises. Basically you know what you're going to see before you get there. Like 'Okay we're going to go to this museum that shows this, this, this and this.' In Sicily or Palermo, you wander the streets where there are ruins that are hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of years old that are just crumbling. You look inside the ruins and you see renaissance architecture and tiles and paintings and it's all just crumbling, next to buildings that are half crumbling that people are still living in, next to newer buildings. Palermo has been inhabited for so long that there are buildings built on top of other buildings on top of other buildings, it's just like a honeycomb. It's incredible. A city like that they let it just fall apart gives you room to dream as you wander the streets, whereas in Berlin it doesn't because there are no surprises. If they got something crumbled down they clean it all up and put a fence around it and make it into something else. I don't like cities like that so much.

Jazz: Do you think of your paintings as pictures of dreams?

Love: No. What I find inspirational, growing up in New Mexico, I like wilderness I like to go out in the desert, wide open spaces, where you don't see any body. It gives me a feeling of freedom. I like to know that there are still places where you can go to get away from everybody and everything.

Jazz: Did you find a place like that in Germany?

Love: No. There's no place like that left in Europe. Unless you want to go to mongolia, but that's a long way. People don't really value it much in America. They think of land as something you need to use. They think of land left alone as something that's being wasted. But that's not how I see it. I don't like the idea of living in a place where everything is controlled, everything is owned and you have to pay money no matter which way you turn. It's getting to be that way. This conflict that I have is what inspires my work.

Jazz: So in the Dwarf Toss painting the conflict is maybe industrial?

Love: Partly, but it was also a relationship I had just broken up out of. Doing that is kind of like cutting off your own leg, like sawing of your own leg, like a fox that chews its leg off to get out of a trap. It's hard to do that, but you have to if you want to be free and do what's best for you. That had more to do with that painting than anything else.

Jazz: When you look on your body of work as a whole, do you see it breaking down into different stages?

Love: It changes over time, but I don't see periods really. I'll have to leave that up to the historians, they can dig it all out and look at it. Then they'll be able to put their period labels on it. I think I've gotten better as I've been painting; it might not be so good to get too technically tight, I'm not sure if that's even what I want.

Jazz: Do you ever look back at what you call your first painting and think 'Wow I would never do it like that now?'

Love: I've been painting my whole life, really, so it's kind of hard to say what would be my first painting.

Jazz: What about the first painting that you sold?

Love: The first painting I sold I loved. I would have done it like that again.

Jazz: Do you keep track of the paintings?

Love: That one is owned by Mark Macleod, in SF, he has the Psychedelic Solution Gallery. It's called Self Portrait. Of course it looks nothing like a standard self portrait.

Jazz: I wonder if losing your paintings is like losing your children as they get dispersed around the world?

Love: Not like children. I love my work, but I wouldn't draw that comparison. I have to know where my work is, because it is really important to e, I love the work, I don't care if it sells or not. I paint it for me, I'd rather have it camped on my own walls. But that's why people have to pay for it, the ransom, so they can take it and put it one their walls.

Jazz: What does your dad and mom think about the work? 

Love: At first they weren't sure what to think of it, my father asked me, 'Can't you paint any nice pictures?' [I burst out laughing because my father says the same thing to me about my books]  They are nice pictures. But now they are very proud. I've taken the pains to explain to them about the work and they really love it. They are noticing that it's actually making a living.

Jazz: There was one picture and there was a guy holding a penis or something with a lot of pins stuck in it, and there was a little girl who was nude sitting in the foreground and there were some other people standing around the bed... and I know how my parents would react to that.

Love: Oh I didn't show that one to my parents. It don't mean I'm not going to do it.

Jazz: John Waters was talking about how his dad basically financed Pink Flamingos, but he never saw it. I guess he knew he wasn't doing it for them.

Love: That's the thing, I'm not painting for my parents, god forbid if I was.
 

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