Ep: 015 - Vincent Desiderio

This installment of the Art Grind podcast features a painter who has been a longtime personal role model for several of the podcast's hosts. Even as he is a creator of absolutely monolithic paintings, Vincent Desiderio, a veteran lecturer at the New York Academy of Art and elsewhere, also manages to be an incredible speaker on the subject of art; laying out an ideological landscape that encapsulates why artists (including Desiderio himself) do what they do and how they do it. Both as a painter and an art theorist, Desiderio seems to inhabit a sort of isthmus, a place which he himself describes to be a liminal boundary which, once you push past it, "you experience something that is absolutely unforeseeable...and that is a total engagement with the process of painting.” In this episode of Art Grind, Vincent Desiderio maneuvers flawlessly between mini-lectures on semiotics in painting, the advance of postmodernity and the elusive avant garde, and the constant reassessment and summoning of drive involved in making one's life as a painter. In recounting his own ongoing battle with this last topic, Vincent enchants us with stories from his own art career, encounters with art critics and other villains, as well as personal crises including the day that a crucial moment of his career coincided with a medical emergency. Resounding through much of these stories and lectures is the concept of 'terror' and of 'opting to thrive' in the face of it -- an undercurrent which is reminiscent of Antonin Artaud's famous claim that "No one has ever written, painted, sculpted, modeled, built, or invented except literally to get out of hell.” Written by Michael Gusev. Interview recorded and edited by Michael Gusev. Support the show