Visiting Mike Cockrill's Gowanus stuido was a trip for me, Frau Kolb. I got lost, of course. I jumped down into the subway, then I felt I needed air so I got out and walked to a bus stop and then I walked the wrong way and then I asked a couple of ladies sitting before a restaurant enjoying a sunset bottle of red, "Which way to The American Can Factory?" I arrived at Mike Cockrill’s studio winded and sweaty but he was gracious and professional in guiding me into his studio, work, history, and present state-of-mind. It was an enlightening experience to visit the talented artist in his private work space.
My hair! Please forgive me for not getting it perfectly coifed before this historic and significant interview with an artist of note and merit. Butt, we know it doesn’t really matter what MY HAIR look like, right? Anyway....
This interview is great. Mike Cockrill, the painter of the American nightmare circus of unending grace, often comparted to Norman Rockwell for his seductive images of Americana nymphs, children on the brink of self-destruction, horror just a clown's mask away, takes Frau Kolb on a private tour of his creative crisis and the powerful output created by his willingness to DIVE back into the cosmic pool of creation and get a grasp of the essential, the primordial, the intensly insane and swirling core of powerful source material which burns like a fire at the center of an ancient cave at the pit of the abyss or infinite creative worm-hole of dawning dreams for his devoted fans and stead fast collectors.
His work has taken a dramatic turn for the way much BETTER in my little brown and pink leather trim ART book of opinions written in ornate letters, in an almost steady hand. Open to Cockrill’s art history rich painting practice RIGHT NOW and get it that some artists mature slowly over decades, and thus reaching a point when they EXPLODE into a new universe of ideas and experimentation! Thus, leading the way for other artists to discover their own path to buried treasure(s). Discovery is only possible in this extraordinary circumstance; of talent and experience coupled with knowledge and the courage to charge forward and explore new visual language(s).
Bravo, Mr. Cockrill for you excellent NEW work! Work which address the bigger questions in painting and addresses Western Civilization’s greatest issues and goes beyond this limit to the fertile source of all creative thinking.
Cockrill explores meaning, mythology, and his own twisted and dank shadow, as he dives DEEP into his “Modern Breakdown!”
The glittering visual art treasure, his NEW, powerful, cosmic world-class painting, is more than merely American genius. The work remains a little kitsch and is based on a cartoonist’s, storytelling sensibility, which is Super POP... in a sense... without the advertising angel. Can POP be a philosophy? Hum… It is work which wings forth toward the Velasquez, Picasso, and DeKooning as material ripe for plumbing and re-thinking. Cockrill is raiding the loot of inherited visual culture and creating totems to his painterly prowess.
Cockrill generously shares on how he has integrated the feedback of his on-line following into a research base for readings and dazzling New Age poly-neo-internet surfer religious iconography.
Now, THAT is impressive!
Anyway...
Traveling into Brooklyn is pretty new to me. Despite the fact, that I'm from Manhattan. (Imagine! I leave my warm cozy beach property in Los Angeles, and go out in the world to interview art personalities so powerful that they drag me cross-country out of my little bed, with my camera, tripod, high-heals, messy hair, and rushed make-up; drawn in by their powerful magnetism.
It is official: I’ve transformed myself from an almost matronly beach mama into a raging huntress of information, knowledge, art experience. Ah! Interviewing Mr. Cockrill at his spacious and bright Gowanus studio proves my claim, my cosmic point, and un-dying purpose as artist and alternative art NEWS source.
*Special thanks to Skip Snow.