ABOUT HIS PICTURES PAINTED

"I expect that my work will look familiar; also strange" — DXY

In all of David X Young's work can be found the sensual pleasure of the paint itself, acquiring a taste for itself, flowing, scraping, smearing, impacting, thick and thin, often transparent, creating veils of light in some cases, blunt opacities in others, flat here, glossy there, whether forming abstract pattern or picture-of. It is a painter's language, a painter's eroticism, as differentiated from other activities in the now bamboozled lexicon constituting the definition of "art", whatever that might, one day, prove to be.

A very young Young blundered into painting in the middle of this century partly by accident, partly by ignorance, partly by luck and partly by talent. An art instructor, Lawrence Kupferman, brought his student work to New York and suddenly Young found himself in The Mortimer Levitt Gallery while but a sophomore at the Mass School of Art, an institution he detested. This surprise turn then motivated him to gravitate from his birthplace on mid-Cape Cod to Cape's end, where serious painters were known to vacation.

His natural feeling for color and texture, the sense of materials and the painted surface was, coincidentally, part of the vanguard action at the time ( later to be reflexively , and rather stupidly, categoried as Abstract Expressionism ) and, as that group of painters was very small and anonymous (only Pollock was then well known) it was relatively easy for this young artist to connect with that Few as they poked around their New York lofts and bars, Provincetown fishing shacks, and partied La Vie Boheme, not having the slightest idea of how famous --and rich-- they were soon to become.

His two favorites, as artists and as men, were Franz Kline and Willem Dekooning.

Spontaneity was a key word, improvisation a close second, jazzlike ideas stemming from the automatism of the surrealists, but in many respects akin to the think-slow, act-fast of the traditional Zen watercolorists, only done on a larger scale and with heavier materials. The joys of paint-as-paint were then regarded as independant of other visual skills such as design and drawing, most explosively when Pollock, in frustration and fury, simply heaved it at the canvas. The allover-pattern, enraged. But Pollock freed paint to be paint, and wonderfully so!! What joys were possible within this new liberation!! But a rather puritan intellectual conceit then circulated among the culture-vultures --none of whom painted---most notably Clement Greenberg, that the image, the 'picture-of' was passe-- in fact, verboten. No more faces, trees, houses, lakes, breasts, buttocks, apples, jugs, skies, eyes, things---- just patterns; an autographic geometry, if you will. Dekooning and Kline rarely bothered with any of those restrictions, but the atmosphere in general bogged down under the great weight of such pompous artspeak and what was an invigorated new freedom for the talented Few eventually became sourpussed der riguer for the Greater Many.

Young, who could easily produce a painterly surface pattern long before he could comfortably handle design and drawing, had always been excited about what paint-as-paint could become-- picture-of included. And what about the cartoon? Had not Picasso, himself liberated by way of the African masks, come very close to the cartoon at times? There seemed apparent a wide range of visual possibilities to explore, to godgel and caress within the sensuality of paint, juicy paint, and to refuse its picture-making aspect would be to kill a major part of the possibilities, a major part of the fun. So, against the prevailing canon, Young punched and smeared and washed and brushed this joyful sensuality to increase his catalog of look-see. A sojurn into Haiti, following a love of jazz rhythms, was like walking into a living abst-exp creation; the bright colors, slap-dash houses made of collages of tin and mud and wood scraps, nacreous fungi on cement walls, all added to his veneration of texture and surface of the primal painterly instincts; primitive to the core and dark with a then unfathomable magique. He would return many times to better penetrate its culture. It was all of a moment for awhile; drums, jazz, voodoo, peyote--a true magic from and of the Few.

But the Many, growing exponentially with actual cash a-coming for art newly seen as a speculative commodity, art-as-currency, were also itching for pictures-of ( but a more easily comprehensible "image" pushable to the mediocre moneyed mass) ---then threw painterly instincts to the wind-- or, more likely, never had hold of them to throw in the first place. Images Popped Art, and the opaque projector, the comic strip, the silk screen, the illustration, the doctored photograph, flat acrylic paint, the computer, etcetera, replaced the painter's sensual erotic, and, over recent decades, made the whole idea of brush-on-canvas a suspect antique. Neo-Dada made most of it a joke. Add; art as politics, art as agenda, art against AIDS, art as sociology, art as sexploitation, art as envelope-pushing or perhaps just envelope stuffing --all took the natural eye far afield from its natural pleasures of direct perception under the brand-new boggle-weight of art as whatever-it-is that anyone-wants-to-say-it-is. I.E., don't look, listen (and when in doubt, put in a penis). A new legion of culture-vultures emerged to continue to spoil the fun; from single verboten image to a tidal frenzy of them, yelping and pushing from every gallery, web sight and cable channel "look-see-me / look-see-me".

So here we are. But Young, now less young, finding nothing better, kept to his heterosensual instincts doggedly, and simply improved working the way he started. He remains 'retinal' , and juicy, of a wide variety of interests and happily inconsistent visual modes, with good notice of patterns, faces, trees, houses, lakes, breasts, buttocks, apples, jugs, skies, eyes, things. You may enjoy to look-see them. Even linger, with reward.

—Juan Osaka McFelsnir / Nov. 1997