In this episode, we speak with artist Mathew Cerletty about the selective nature of seeing, the many meanings of portraiture, and the questionable value of sincerity in artmaking.

Podcast produced by Ryan Leahey
Original theme music by Kasper Bjørke
Photographs by Kava Gorna

Mathew Cerletty:
Hello, hello.

Landon Metz:
Hey Mathew, how's it going?

MC:
Pretty good! Nice to see you. 

LM:
I see you’re at your studio in Williamsburg, on Richardson Street?

MC:
Yeah, it's Richardson and Leonard. I’ve been in here for – God, since 2006?

LM:
Oh my God. I used to hang out over there a lot. I actually got a studio on Frost Street, in that old Catholic schoolhouse. Do you remember that place? 

MC:
Sure.

LM:
There were a lot of artists there.

MC:
What was the cross street? Is it past Graham?

LM:
I think it was Frost and Richardson. There's a Catholic church there, and then there was a school attached to it that was no longer in service, and the priests from the church wanted artists to use it. So it was effectively free. My studio was like two hundred dollars a month.

MC:
That that era is over. [laughs]

LM:
Yes. Unfortunately, that's very true.

Christopher Schreck:
We were messaging ahead of this call, and you mentioned that you're generally in the studio on weekdays from 10 to 6pm. Have you always worked with a set schedule like that, or is that more of a post-parenthood development?

MC:
Yes. Having a child has civilized me. I used to be here for like 16 hours a day, and I would just waste time. I liked working until like four or five in the morning - especially years ago, because the work I was doing was so labor intensive, and at night I could get into the zone a little more easily and just work for eight hours straight. But nowadays, I get home for dinner.

CS:
Yeah. We’ve spoken about this with a few other people, and the general consensus seems to be that working within that constraint of time and energy actually brings a lot of clarity and increased productivity. I'm not sure if you can relate to that?

MC:
Ah yes, of course. I mean, I still do it. There’s something magical about, like, “Oh, everyone's asleep and I'm here making a painting that I'm excited about.” It just kind of emphasized even further this idea of, “I'm just a person in a room by myself” to have it be dark out. It still works like this, but it does feel a little more like, “Oh, yeah, this is a job.” But I've been doing this for 20 years, so it turned into a job anyway.

CS:
You mentioned a moment ago that the works you were doing a few years back were more labor intensive. Is your current work less labor intensive?

MC:
I'm trying to tell myself it is - especially the recent stuff. It requires a marathon day, where I have to finish something big, while it’s all wet, in one shot, but it's not the same as having to do 200 hours of work. I can't do half and come back the next day - there would be seams that would show up - so there are still things that are intense, but they're sort of broken up a little bit more.

LM:
Do you counteract that with scale? 

MC:
Counteract what?

LM:
The one-shot nature of a long day. Like, is there a maximum volume that you can apply in a given period of time?

MC:
Yeah. Right now, I'm doing these paintings of a close-up of a big skirt. There's a red skirt in that show that's up in Oslo right now. You kind of have to do this whole skirt in a day, and it's challenging. I'm basically trying to figure out, can I hide seams of two different days within this thing without it drying and being noticeable? But yeah, there is a kind of limit.

CS:
Ed Ruscha has this quote where he said, at one point, that it was “an enormous freedom to be so premeditated” about his art. As your practice has evolved, have you found a similar sense of liberation or possibility, the more conceptual or more technically involved you've gotten?

MC:
I think I understand what he's saying. If I try to improvise and just paint on a day, the results are not great. I've wanted to be that kind of artist. I love that kind of work, where you can see somebody figuring something out in the picture, but it's just not really who I am. Most of the conceiving of this stuff doesn't involve paint; I get a game plan and I have a pretty good version of these things on the computer, and then it's, “Okay, so this is looking good, now I’ve got to pick a scale for a painting.” I'll order the canvas, then it shows up, and then I kind of break it down and just try to execute. So yeah, I think I probably work in a similar way to Ruscha. What was the second part of your question?

CS:
Just whether you’ve found that liberating. For him, I think you can imagine that as he was coming up, he was presented with either having to engage with the language of Ab Ex, which had kind of entered this level of parody by that point, or find a different route. So for him, looking to someone like Jasper Johns, he found that the more premeditated, the more cool and conceptual he got, the more free he felt he could be, rather than having to follow something that was predetermined or prescribed.

MC:
Yeah. I guess I don't think of myself as a performer, and you kind of have to perform a little bit if you're improvising. If you're an abstract expressionist, certainly. There’s this old video of Robert Rauschenberg where he's like, “To be an abstract expressionist, you have to feel sorry for yourself.” [laughs] 

CS:
Yeah! That's in “Painters Painting.” That's a great movie.

MC:
Yeah! He’s sitting up on a ladder and he seems drunk. Yeah, it's great. But I think maybe there's something Midwestern about the approach of just like, “We’ve got to do this work. How do we do a good job?” And then you do the work. You have to feel like you're of an elevated status to think, “My handwriting is important.” So putting that work in before, so that when you do it, it's successful - I don't know, it seems very practical to me. Where's Ruscha from? Oklahoma?

CS:
Yeah, like Omaha, then Oklahoma, or something like that? But at the same time, do you ever you ever look at other artists whose practices or processes allow for a certain amount of spontaneity, or energy, or even less precision, and feel envious?

MC:
Oh, yeah. Those are the people who I find most fascinating. I don't necessarily learn as much from them - I feel like I can learn more from artists that have a practice that's closer to the way I work - but yeah. Like, I love Chris Martin’s paintings, and people that seem comfortable making a big mess. They seem much more free to me. You used that word earlier, and I suppose I found a different kind of freedom through the process that I use. It's the freedom that works best for me, but seeing somebody that can just come into the studio not necessarily knowing what they're going to make, that seems exciting. It just doesn’t work for me.

LM:
On that note, do you have any relationship with failure?

MC:
Don’t we all?

LM:
Sure, but what does failure look like to you? I guess maybe it's a two-part question: How premeditated is the creative act in your work, and are you discovering gestures and images out in the world by accident, or is there a lot of dedicated agency and time towards searching for images to work from?

MC:
It’s both. I think that when I start trying to find interesting images that might have something useful to me in them, that's usually a sign that I'm uncomfortable and need new paintings. I need to make something. Usually that discomfort, even though it feels bad, will lead to a solution. It may be that I find something really quick in the moment - for example, I was panicking a year ago or so, and I went to a deli and looked over the guy’s shoulder and saw a box of Band-Aids, and there was a phony rendered image of a Band-Aid floating on a blue background. I was like, “Oh, that looks like something I would do. I'll just do that.” So that was sort of a lucky occurrence. Then, other times, it'll be an image that I've been kicking around for five years and just can't quite figure out, but something that's happened in the meantime has maybe given me a formal ingredient. It's like, “Oh, I never imagined this at this scale, or with a different composition or a different cropping,” just something that allows the thing to finally move forward. So it can be an accident. I write lots of things down, little phrases that I'm like, “Maybe that'll lead to something,” or find images and just put them in a folder called “Ideas.” Most of them don't go anywhere, but every once in a while, it's like, “Wait, didn't I put a picture of a rubber duck in this folder two years ago? What does that duck look like? That might be a good idea right now.” So anything goes.

LM:
So does failure look like a folder full of images you didn’t use?

MC:
Failure typically for me feels like I went down a road that was more about something I needed than something the painting needed. And that can be, “I need to do something bold” and I start forcing a small idea to be big. It can be just kind of forgetting how I work, and saying, “Oh, I'll figure this out later. It's not quite right, but I need it to be right.” Because my stuff is so planned in advance, it's rare that it happens on the canvas, but it does happen, maybe once a year or something. I'll be like, “Well, that didn't go,” and then it sits around for a month or two. I can actually show you one, if I'm allowed to get up and go grab something? 

CS:
Yeah, of course.

MC:
So I wanted to do this painting of a folded piece of primed linen for my last show. You probably can't tell, but this does not look that good, this texture. It was driving me totally fucking crazy, making me squint, and I just couldn't see it. I was like, “Oh, it'll look good if I just keep working on it, it'll get scrubby and look like linen weave,” and it just looks like a blurry shitty photo. It had to be so good when you got like three inches away; it had to be like, “That looks real.” I think there's somebody out there that could make this thing work - maybe me 15 years ago, but I just I don't have it in me anymore. So yeah, I put that aside and did a different painting about the same size for this show, just to solve an installation problem. So that'll sit there for another month or two, and then I'll be like, “Okay, now I can throw this thing away.” I'll be over it, but it's still here just in case I get inspired to fix it. But I don't know, is it a failure? I'm a big believer that those situations are where you learn the most. 

LM:
And are there some works that feel more in service of a group than necessarily standing alone?

MC:
Yeah, for sure. These days, I love working on shows, and the way I do it is the first couple paintings are whatever they are. I just start working, and it's sort of a more experimental time, usually, at the beginning of creating a new show. I'm allowed to make a bad painting then. Then, after a little while, maybe a few months, I have three finished paintings that I'm starting to feel good about, and then it starts to be about adding to the group, where there are requirements that it connects. And then the next one. Let’s say I've got eight paintings and I need eleven or something. Now, it gets really narrow, what can work, where it's just like, “I know where these are hanging. I need something for this wall, and it ideally is yellow and vertical.” Or, “I've got all this graphic stuff, and I have these more rendered forms, so it needs to bridge the gap and kind of be half and half.” Or, “The mood here is a little down. I need to kind of lighten things up or make something funny.” It's like a mix tape or something. You’ve got to have this connective tissue and you've got to keep adding to the whole. I want the experience of the of the show itself to be as good as it can be, as coherent and dynamic as it can be, so it tightens up, basically. But that's okay. 

CS:
Yeah. That sounds to me like selecting and sequencing songs on a record.

MC:
Yeah, totally. You’ve got your ballad, you need your banger, or whatever it is.

LM:
The narrative and the context also seem like they have a lot of room to evolve as you add works.

MC:
Yeah. Sometimes you just get an idea, and it wasn't exactly what you would expect for the group, but it's so good. You’re just like, “Well, I have to add this one, and it's going to steer the whole ship over here, so now I need things that help make that work.” The last that show I did in Los Angeles, I was two-thirds of the way done, and I had the idea to do a painting that was just the cover of “Pretty Woman” without the people. I had the old VHS tape, and I felt like it was a much splashier painting than everything else that I had made up to that point. But it I was like, “Well, I have to do this.” It seemed great for LA, and it was exciting to me, but it just brought a different feeling to the whole show, where the things that filled in after that were a reaction to that one being included.

CS:
I remember that piece, that's a great one. 

MC:
Thanks. Yeah, I was happy with that.

CS:
I've been really curious to ask you: I've seen the word “sincerity” brought up in a few different contexts in regards to your work, and I'm wondering, as an artist, how you relate to that word. First, do you think of your work as being “sincere” on any given level? And if so, is it important that your viewers perceive it as such as well?

MC:
First, I want to know where you are. Where are you? You look like you're in the Midwest or something.

CS:
I'm in Chicago.

MC:
Oh, there you go. Yep. That's some fine Chicago woodwork back there. [laughs] 

CS:
[laughs] Well, I know you've talked about that elsewhere, suggesting that being a Midwesterner adds some earnestness to your approach, but that read as a deflection to me, honestly. That seemed like kind of a “wink.” But for me, I guess what's coming to mind is that with some of your prior shows, there was this idea that the investment of time and effort that you were putting towards producing a work could somehow be equated with sincerity or authenticity, which I think are probably two distinct things. Does that make sense?

MC:
That makes sense. I mean, it's hard to work on something painstakingly for 150 hours and not call it sincere. That dedication to the craft is sincere, and part of how I choose images is to contradict that sometimes. I kind of think oil paintings are fancy, they’re high status, so I'm drawn to painting subjects that are more low status, or just ordinary, as a way to contradict the kind of inherent cultural value of a painting. More and more, I think of my work as being about finding a little space where things are contradicting themselves, so it can be very sincere and it can also be sarcastic. Is it possible to make an image that feels like both, that feels like one to one person and the other to another person? That's what I think brings these things to life. But I think the part that's most sincere is my dedication to the craft of painting, but then also to making these things work. I mean, just because I pick something that might be perceived as ironic doesn't mean that it's not a sincere dedication to creating. Like, is Jerry Seinfeld sincere? I feel like he is sincere, even though he's a weird guy.

CS:
He’s many things.

MC:
[laughs] He's many, many things.

LM:
But there's an intentional sense of humor in your practice for sure, no?

MC:
Yeah, yeah. 

CS:
But I know you've talked about this, the way humor transforms over time, and the way jokes evolve. Like, Jerry Seinfeld is a perfect example of craft and effect being parallel but not always in a direct line, because the joke can work as a joke, but the impact of that joke can change. It seems like with a lot of your work, the humor element - whether it's the humor that you find initially in the subject matter that motivates you to paint the thing, or just in the way it's received by viewers - it seems like what can start off as sincere, or humorous, or even autobiographical, can transform through time and through these acts of translation into something that's beyond the initial impetus or intention.

MC:
Totally. Yeah, usually it’s ideas that make me laugh, and I’ll be like, “Oh, that would be such a dumb painting.” And then I think about it more, and I'm like, “Maybe it's actually not that dumb,” and it starts to evolve. I think looking at paintings, it's kind of a slow process. I would love to live with stuff, you know? I feel like that's the best way to absorb things, and obviously, I can have a relationship to paintings in the studio, because they're here for months. But yeah, I think those impulses where you go, “This is like the ‘A-Ha!’ moment, I think this is going to be a good idea for a painting,” even if it's funny or it’s maybe more of a superficial reaction, once you start making the actual painting and choosing every little detail about that painting - the scale, the surface, whatever it is - it changes. It warps that humor, where it’s not exactly funny anymore, you know what I mean? I suppose it’s like comic timing. So if you start to warp that, it’s not funny unless you do it perfectly on this beat. But if you know that the thing that you're hearing is a joke, if it's not on the right joke timing, then it becomes something else.

LM:
Mitch Hedberg.

MC:
[laughs] Yeah.

LM:
I have a question, and I'm not quite sure how to word it, but I think your practice seems to have a relationship to Americana. I think it’s an embodied one, in the celebratory relationship to labor, but it also seems deeply inherent to the visual language, the sort of images that you're choosing to work with. Do you feel that your relationship to Americana is something inherent just to who you are as a person, because that's what's been readily available, kind of natural and organic to your human experience? Or are you intentionally celebrating and twisting the knobs at these cultural references that are explicitly American? How significant is that to you? Like, would the work make as much sense if you were to take up residency in Scandinavia for three years? Would you find new images that communicated the same way, or would you feel compelled to continue communicating with the same vernacular? 

MC:
Yeah, it's more just that's the material I've got. I grew up in Milwaukee and watched a whole lot of TV. I'm just desperately trying to make a good painting, and anything that I have that I think could possibly fit the bill, I will use. So I think that if I moved to another country, maybe not right away, but slowly, there would be stuff there that I would use. It's not really an intellectual pursuit, where I’m like, “Oh, this is my subject and I'm researching it and finding the perfect through-line of Middle America” or something. It’s just more my lived experience. I'm looking around as an objective outsider. 

LM:
But I almost feel like you're not giving yourself enough credit there, because while they are images that you have access to, and you say you're desperately trying to make a good painting, they don't function solely as images, at least to me. There is this dry sense of humor to them that that feels very sensitively attuned to their cultural positioning, and even just the act, the amount of labor of rendering them so meticulously and flawlessly perfect in oil paint does something to them. I don't know if it like makes them transcend, but it alters their context in such a great way that it's not just a photograph, it's not just an image, it's something else. I don't know that it's a cultural social commentary, but it has a self-awareness that the sense of humor feels very intelligent, but also well-studied. Maybe that study is an intuitive thing to you, but from my position, I don't think that you're just “desperately making good painting.” I think there's something more bubbling behind the surface there.

MC:
I've been waiting for somebody to say this to me. This is a dream come true.

LM:
Are you serious? [laughs]

MC:
[laughs] A little bit. I mean, you're putting your finger right on it. Like, I don't know if I have anything to say other than, “God, I hope that's true.” 

LM:
I mean, it absolutely is true. And this is what I mean about its relationships to Americana, because you could move to Western Europe and have a really nice life and paint wayfinding signage and things about that culture that may be visually interesting to you and to anyone viewing the painting - but to me, that's not the intelligence of your work. I think we can all admire your dedication to skill and craft with oil painting, and you could apply that to any old image, but the way that you've chosen to select images and to create synthesis between them and build storytelling – that, to me, seems to be the real medium and the real material. That's where I see your creative output happening. The painting and the studio just seem like a means to you. It’s almost like, “Well, you have to fucking do it, and these are the hours that it takes to do it.” And I know that you’re confident that you can do it, because your paintings are insanely well-made, but the creative act for you seems to be an extremely intelligent sense of humor or something. Weirdly, Jerry Seinfeld doesn't seem like a terrible reference.

MC:
He’s the king of Normcore, you know? [laughs]

LM:
[laughs] Yeah! I just think if you see a knob that’s turned to three, you're like, “Why don't we turn it to three and a quarter and just see what that feels like?” That takes a great degree of sensitivity, but also nuance and intelligence, to be able to find a sense of humor in such a mild degree, you know?

MC:
Great. Yes. Print it. [laughs] The only thing I would say is that after making these things for so long, working so hard at it and getting better, the painting part isn't totally a means to an end. It can drive, and it's doing that more so now, I would say. So the work that I'm making, I would love to use bright colors right out of the tube for every single painting. I kind of want every color on every painting. But because the ideas were in the driver's seat, and still are, I guess I'm trying to take a little more control and let painting be in charge. That sink behind me is a good example. I just want to do a really beautiful purple surface, and putting the sink into it is a way to make it one of my paintings, basically. It's a little bit of a struggle so far, but I'm trying to let those be the guide more and more. It’s starting to be more like, “Okay, so I know I want an orange painting, and I want it to be this size. So what image, what idea fits into that?” So that's what I'm working on lately, and maybe it’s just a way of being rigorous in the studio and feeling like I'm evolving and making work that's surprising to me. It’s like, “Oh, I've never really quite done this before.” I'm often looking at paintings, and other people's work, and using that as a guide, like, “I've been seeing a lot of surreal landscapes. I'm going to not do that. It looks like people have got that taken care of.” And then I'll go somewhere else, do what people aren't doing, and I think that's a good way to work for me. It's just always being worried about being original.

LM:
You used to actually paint people more.

MC:
Yup. I went to Boston University, which at the time was pretty academic, like, “Go paint the model, do a lot of self-portraits, learn how to use the materials.” So that's how I started. Then I started adding more and more personality to my paintings, and I learned about the figurative painters that were popular at the time, like Currin, Lisa Yuskavage, Sean Landers, and started wanting to make work like that. Then, when I came to New York, I realized the stuff that was most exciting didn't have people in it, so I started trying to get the people out of it. They come back every once in a while, but not very often these days. It’s been a while. 

LM:
Can you elaborate on why it was more exciting to see images without people?

CM:
It was just exciting to me. Basically, I didn't know anything about recent art history. I had taken big art survey classes or art history survey classes, but nothing really connected. So moving here and meeting other people that were really passionate about art, it was like, “Oh, I got a Jasper Johns book. This guy's great.” I was 23, and learning about Bruce Nauman and people that were maybe more cerebral and more calculated, I realized, “Hey, maybe I can do something like this, too. How would I do that? What would that look like?” Because I started showing when I was 22 and just kept going, I felt like there was a little bit of flailing through shows, instead of at grad school, like most people do it. Typically, people start having shows when they're a little bit older, but I, just through dumb luck, got connected to a gallery when I was really young. So I look at a lot of the work with figuration as kind of like, “Should I do this? Should I do that?” Just kind of trying on different hats and seeing what felt right, and over the years, it kind of sorted itself out.

LM:
With the earlier figurative work, did you consider those portraits?

MC:
Yeah. Well, they were all just portraits of me, I guess, even though I had other people in them.

I would ask friends to pose, but I wasn't trying to capture something about them beyond the image. I just felt like they looked right for some idea. I just wanted the paintings to be weird and cool and kind of look like a fashion magazine or a still from a David Lynch movie or something. 

CS:
So would you say, in terms of capturing something essential about your subjects, did that change when you moved away from people and towards cultural objects and ephemera? 

MC:
That's a good observation. Yes, I think so. As you get older, you get more sensitive. Maybe that was like an evolution of, like, “I'm painting this thing, I should care about it and be sensitive to it, because that will make a better painting.” Also, everybody has so much baggage when interpreting a picture of a person, and I felt like I wanted a little more control over the experience of the viewer. I think that there's something a bit more neutral about a still-life image, or an object, or a scene. People tell themselves too many stories when they're seeing a person, and I didn't really want it to be about a story.

LM:
Speaking about stories and people, can I ask you about the painting “Father”?

MC:
Um, is that me? Is it a self-portrait? [laughs] I'm like, "Which one was that?" It’s the priest, right? 

LM:
Yeah.

MC:
Yeah, that’s me. You know, I was educated by the Jesuits, and I had a good experience with the Catholic church. I'm not religious, but it was fun going to high school and having some sassy smart priests as your teachers. So there was a couple years where I dressed as a priest for Halloween, and it was just kind of like, “Oh, I should do a drawing.” My aunt was a nun and lived in the Vatican; she would she would come to Thanksgiving from Italy, and we had to be on our best behavior when she was around. She wore the habit and everything. 

LM:
Are you Italian American? 

MC:
Not very much. Like, Cerletty used to be spilled with an “i,” but then some spineless ancestors were trying to pretend it was something else.

LM:
My family did the same thing. Actually, Chris's family I think also did the same thing. We're all Italian American.

CS:
Out of curiosity, what would you say is the last great art show that you've seen in person?

MC:
I don't see as much stuff as I want to. I saw the Ruscha show at MoMA, and I'm very glad that's here. I feel like he makes it very clear to everybody that art is about ideas, and I think he's extremely generous. It just seems well-timed. I would like to see paintings that are more about ideas. 

CS:
Agreed.

MC:
What else did I see? I went to Chelsea and saw I saw the Charline von Heyl show, and that was incredible, because she's continuing to be so experimental. It's nice to go to a show where you're like, “That painting is beyond-belief impressive, every ingredient you could want is there, and then this one next to it is just okay.” Just the humanity of it, like, she's going for it and hitting these high notes, but also is trying things. I saw the Wade Guyton show, and I thought that was very cool. It’s pretty neat, that installation. I feel like I could stay there for hours. There's a lot to look at. Just being able to see the backs of the paintings is very cool. I came to him maybe a little late, given the meteoric rise or whatever. In the early days, I was dating somebody that bought one. It was in her apartment, and I was looking at it, like, “This surface! You like this thing?!” I think she paid like $10,000, which is an extremely low price.

LM:
Wow.

MC:
It was way, way back. I was like, “It just looks like it's ripped out of a magazine!” I was very anti, but over the last five years, he's convinced me. Oh, and I saw the Tillmans show at Zwirner, and of course, I walked in and it was as if my eyes suddenly were in focus. There's a clarity and ease to those images, and so much information. Those three shows in Chelsea were really the ones for me, but I suppose Ruscha is the big milestone show. Ruscha was another one where I feel like I don't think about him that much, but seeing that show helped me to understand. Our sensibilities are so close already that I don't have quite as much to learn from him. I just look at it like, “Yeah, I get it.” But it was interesting to see some of the early paintings, where the scale wasn't quite right. It looked a little bit like you go to the art store, and you go, “I'm going to get some 60-inch stretcher bars, and I'll just have those, and then maybe I'll have an idea, and then I'll put it together.” Like, “Oh, I’m going to write ‘Boss’ on it,” or whatever. “I’ll use brown paint and a palette knife.” It just felt like those were more like raw ideas, and then later in the show, every part - the scale, the composition - is perfect. It's kind of interesting to see that evolution. I don't know that one is necessarily better, but with people that you think of as being so talented and out of reach, it's kind of nice to see that they’re human beings. Maybe you have a chance to make something great.

CS:
I agree with you, but I also think some of his later work – especially the political stuff from the George W. Bush era – falls flat sometimes as well.

MC:
Are those the ones with flags on fire and stuff?

CS:
Yeah, there's the torn flag and all that stuff. It's so serious and so unambiguous. There's no “wink” there, the way that there is in so much of his other work, so I feel like it already hasn’t aged as well as pieces from the ‘70s.

MC:
Yeah, I agree with you, they’re lacking mystery - but we were at war, and you had to pick a side! [laughs] I don't know, I'm not sure what he was up to at the time. There was a really cool painting that I’d never seen before of a guard rail that would be on the side of the highway. It's long and horizontal, and then on the left side, there’s suddenly a background which might be the interior of a tunnel. It kind of looks like suddenly this guardrail is in someone's living room. And then there's a little bit of airbrushed smoke coming from behind. That one really struck me. It’s recent, and it's doing all the stuff you want it to do. It's hard to pin down what it is.

LM:
Would you ever work with assistants?

MC:
I do work with one, and I have at different times over the years. Right now, Lee Maxey is my assistant, and she's great. She comes here three days a week. A lot of what she does is, I'll draw out an image, I'll have a plan. I'll mix the lightest green to the darkest green in six steps, and I’ll draw the outline of the gloves, and then I will give her two scale printouts that are the right colors and she'll just slowly put the first layer of paint down. Maybe she'll do the gloves twice and then I'll do them once, like the third layer. Other images, I just do the whole thing for no particular reason, but sometimes there are ones where she does everything. Not typically; usually there's at least 10% where I'm like, “Okay, I want to go in here and fix this and change that,” because they're so planned. 

There are certainly people that could do them start to finish, but then some of the details that I'm concerned about are pretty subjective, and I want them to hit all those notes or whatever. But like your initial question about my workdays, having an assistant makes me get a lot more done, because she's coming and I have to have something for her to do. It's also kind of nice to be in here and have somebody to talk to. I feel like I used to be much more like, “I'm in the room alone, and that's how it's got to be.” Now, on days like today, I'm here alone, and I'll probably get a little done, but I might leave a little early to go see my family or something. I feel like I'm getting soft. [laughs] But yeah, we listen to a million podcasts and we get this stuff done.

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