Sam McKinniss is making a scene. The Connecticut-born and -raised painter exists at the epicenter of an art and party community in Hartford, Connecticut. While Sam's got the brains, brawn, beauty and talent to be a real bona fide New York Art Star, he's in no hurry to move. He's had solo shows at some of Hartford's most prestigious galleries and museums, including the New Britain Museum of American Art, and has been thriving outside of the New York City gallery system. He also maintains a blog, chronicling the glamorous Hartford nightlife, employing a high/low cultural contrast also seen in his paintings. Here's what he had to say about his life in Hartford, his paintings, and his thoughts on desire.

Max Steele: Where are you from, originally? Have you always been an artist?

Sam McKinniss: I'm from Connecticut. I've always been an artist in the way that most kids are artists, and then I grew up, and I was still an artist.

MS: One of the first things I noticed about you is your personal sense of style. What do you wear when you want to impress someone? What do you wear when you're just staying at home?

SM: When it really counts, I like to expose my collar bones and chest, usually with an unbuttoned shirt. Having one good navy blue blazer is important.  A clean shave goes a long way. I like old world New England preppy dress-codes and dressing for dinner, but it also needs to be just ever so fucked-up. Maybe that's just how I was raised. At home I mostly just wear tons of fabulous jewels!

MS: Your blog, Weekend Party Update, makes Hartford seem so glamorous! Is it really like that? Why live there as opposed to New York City?

SM: Weekend Party Update started vaguely as an art project, where I would document my life in Hartford in the hyper-young, hyper-fashionable mode of a New York City party blogger. There are so many people doing this in New York like Nicky Digital, Cobra Snake or even Brad Walsh. It make sense, I guess, for where they are and what they do, but I wanted to bring that sort of faux-photojournalism to Hartford because it seemed absurd and funny and nobody else was doing it.

Hartford is not glamorous and it's not fun to live here - we need to get that straight. My friends and I are fun and glamorous, however, and we do have good parties, so I wanted to see if I could portray Hartford as this undiscovered hipster gem, relying mostly on the force of my character and powers of persuasion. Its really about a kind of fantasy where I would like to live. It's a persona I've affected in order to make life bearable in this otherwise terrible city. I hope the blog works that way. I try to think of it as Tina Barney meets Last Nights Party. That is, all of the pedigree, money and good manners of Connecticut mixed with kids who just want to party and have sex.

There is definitely social coterie and a classist flair to everything going on here, and I'm attracted to that in a lot of ways while also being repulsed by it. I'm talking superficially about hand-me-down Mercedes Benz's, The Dead Poets Society, country clubs, J.D. Salinger, Yale and Fairfield County. I love that crap. Have you ever noticed how Chloe Sevigny always mentions growing up in Connecticut in every interview? There is this quiet, well-mannered and hidden exoticism about Connecticut, it slowly reveals itself to you the longer you live here, and then it quickly becomes irrelevant the minute you leave.

MS: You say that your number one goal in painting is to fall in love "quickly and without moral discernment". Are you usually in love with the people you make portraits of, or does it happen while you're making the painting?

SM: I have been trying to replace the confusion of falling in love with another person with falling in love with a material object, to make romance easier. In a scenario reminiscent of Dorian Gray, I'm trying to make a lifelike stand-in for somebody that will stare back at me with love and devotion, forever. I'm doing this because my relationships with men don't usually go this way, even though I'd like it if they did. I'd like there to be this perfect romance with every boy I've ever been into. I paint people who I am strongly sexually attracted to, straight men mostly, so I can pretend to have a perfect affair with them. The letdown is realizing that art cannot love you back - though this doesn't stop people from looking at my work and saying "I love that" and then buying it.

I think that kind of transaction is strange, because here is an object that cannot love you back, but the emotion you've devoted to it begs for reciprocity. The art world is a big, fucked-up love economy, but I like the way buying and selling feels. So much of it is based around love and desire. The way I feel about consuming an image is devastatingly similar to the way I feel about meeting attractive men. At least when I'm painting, I can have a flicker of a few moments to myself where everything is right and I feel I've lived with him, whomever he is.

MS: Your work is sweetly, gently political (to me). You playfully explore issues of identity, power, and the queer gaze. Do you think of yourself as a politically-minded artist, or a romantic?

SM: I'm decidedly romantic and reluctantly political. I make figurative pictures and I overuse the word "love." I deal with the effects of light within a pictorial frame. I'm interested in pop music, dreaming, sex and magic. These are very romantic things. But I'm making representational work, which is inherently political because somebody is getting represented. Who is posing, who is looking, who is buying and who is profiting? These are political questions. I'm interested in advancing a gay gaze, but I'm also interested in helping to form a post-queer art-world, if you will. I'd like homosexuality to be a non-issue, politically. I'd like for everybody to have the kind of sex they want to have, and I'd like it to be perfectly acceptable to lust after whomever you please, and live with whom you want. This is not exactly how things are in the mainstream, but it's close, and I'm going to continue operating as if it is. I feel like I have power when I can politely convince a straight friend to sit, pose and look at me like he wants me, and he does it willingly. No one is taking advantage of anybody exactly, but I have turned the tables and made total dudes believe that this kind of thing is perfectly normal. I'm living the dream. That's politics.

My work also makes a subtle attack on bourgeois configurations of love and normalcy. For example, I present 15 portraits of different men in one room and call it "True Love". I think this exposes the impossibility of locating one partner to live with happily ever after within the traditional framework of heterosexual marriage and social organization. The shock of recognition is felt and repeated 15 times from every direction and from different men, defeating the likelihood that 'one true love' exists. I've replaced that trope with a network of connections that is based entirely on desire, reaching out and wanting to touch.

MS: Who are some of your personal heroes or role models? (I'm thinking along the lines of gay artists, etc. but they can be anyone, of course.)

SM: I think about John Singer Sargent a lot, mostly because of his unknown private life and very public fame. Also Mark Morrisroe, Oscar Wilde, Wolfgang Tillmans, Maureen Gallace. Andy Warhol is an obvious one but that should go without saying.

MS: Does your boyfriend  mind when you paint loving portraits of other boys?

SM: No he likes it. We are very protective of our respective independence in art and in life. I do whatever I want and so does he, but we have sex only with each other. Its very stable and very good.

MS: You've done a few self-portraits - is this something you'd like to continue doing? Can you fall in love with yourself?

SM: I don't like self-portraits. I like the way Jack Pierson handled self-portraiture by photographing idealized youths, models and actors - basically everybody else but him. His various desires collate to compile an accurate picture of what he is attracted to, and tell something essential about himself in the process. I don't really respond to the way Robert Mapplethorpe did it, as an example. I don't trust the cliche, the "artist looking inward and revealing." Can that happen in real life? I doubt it. It's not very modern. I don't like to admit to self-absorption, because what artist isn't totally self-absorbed? It's a given.

I think you are referring to a self-portrait I showed last summer in Brooklyn, which was an ink drawing of me in my briefs, standing on a rock next to a lake with the inscription "I WISH I COULD HAVE BEEN WITH YOU AT THE SWIMMING HOLE." I made that as a missive to Thomas Eakins' beautiful male nudes bathing in a similar swimming hole from 1885. I made it because I  felt like I needed my own body to invoke the desired sense of longing. Look: here is my body and look at how badly it wants these bodies which are referenced but absent, and in this fixed and permanent picture, the image of my body will stand here in wanting for all time, lusting after another image which will also stay fixed for the length of history. When a work of art references or quotes another work of art, that's a lot like unrequited love. I don't usually want to paint myself. But I did want to put myself out there for this cause, because Eakins' swimming hole imagery haunts me in the most visceral way.
MS: Unrequited love seems very productive for you, Sam. What do you think your work would look like if it depicted reciprocal love? Is that possible?

SM: I am trying to work that out now, because I happen to be in love and in what seems to be a long-term relationship. Go figure. I am trying to maintain and enhance the sensuality and magic of pictures without having to chase every hot guy. There are so many hot guys out there. I mean, look at Eastvillageboys. Who has time? To quote the Mamas and the Papas, "unrequited love's a bore, yeah/and I've got it pretty bad/but for someone you adore, it's a pleasure to be sad."

I'm trying to make pictures that sweat and lust in their own way with their own private, obfuscated erotic life freed of this self-determined agenda. I'm trying to sublimate more and substitute pictures of inanimate things, places, pop stars and private memories for how great it feels to get a hard-on. But I still like making portraits and I haven't stopped. I'm just trying to expand the program to include my experience in the studio, now that reciprocal love is a personal reality and not just some distant vision of getting laid. Lately I'm working on a big painting of Crystal Gayle's 1977 album cover for We Must Believe in Magic. It seems right.

MS: Have you ever done animal portraits? What would be your ideal animal to depict?

SM: I drew a swan the other day just for the fun of it. I've always been attracted to Degas' racehorses and jockies. George Stubbs' horses are fabulous too. I have a little bit of that in me. I like what animals have meant for society pictures, historically. Power, virility, status and portable property. Domesticated animals are the ultimate luxury item. In art school I painted a really flamboyant portrait of my really gay friend Joe with his lapdog, Maggie, and it remains a personal favorite. The lapdog in serious portrait art is a convention which has fallen out of fashion, but it might be ripe for a comeback.

MS: How do you organize your artwork? Do you have a thematic idea for a series first or name them after?

SM: For my two shows last year, called "True Love" and "Fierce Doubt". I wanted every portrait for "True Love" to stare directly at the viewer, and in "Fierce Doubt" to look away from the viewer. The shows were up simultaneously in different venues across town and I wanted this difference to be noticed, felt, and taken personally. Like finding true love followed by experiencing fierce doubt. That was my big style concern going in, which I thought would act as a good organizational parameter.

Color and mood can be just as important for me when putting work together. I tend to work fast, so my palette is often consistent for a number of weeks or months, and lots of things will relate formally that way. But it's also important to me that nothing looks like it is part of a series. A big group of new work gets made, and I want them to be linked together by secret ties and relationships, because that's so much riskier and sexier. Nothing is ever the same size, and the pictures' relationships to one another are all private or obscure. If they work, my paintings hang well together because they have my certain style.

MS: You've been selling quite a bit, Sam. Where is your work ending up? What do you think of people's reaction to your artwork?

SM: I have a few very committed collectors in Hartford, and they've been quite supportive. A lot of gay guys buy my work, believe it or not. Gay guys and the women that love them. Straights too, I don't mean to leave anybody out.

Portraits of Sam McKinniss shot for EVB by Nodeth Vang
All artwork ©Sam McKinniss
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