Ivan: Oh, the romantic notion of a painter painting! Isn’t it grand. I truly think it is, no irony attached. It’s like DeKooning said, “Painters don’t have particularly bright ideas. They’re just talented at painting things.” What a beautifully humble statement! I remember seeing him say it in Emile de Antonio’s film Painters Painting, which is a film that literally rocked my world, and DeKooning was so direct and honest in the way he said it. For me that whole period was kinda like this: Painting as Painting. There it is. Paint on a fucking canvas. Take it or leave it. There was a breathtaking simplicity about it. The same way Fellini talked about “pure cinema,” this was pure painting. Unfortunately, today these classic ideals of High Modernism are often looked at with a smirk of irony, sometimes to the point of cynicism.  Words like truth, beauty, and authenticity are either a full-fledged taboo today, or they can’t be mentioned without some ironic subtext. Everything now seems to be a comment on something, its validity questioned if it fails to exhibit a critical awareness of context and lineage.  Pollock was burdened by lineage, but not in a sense where he felt the need to show an awareness of it or critique it in his paintings, he just wanted to take a **** on it and leave it behind. Gertrude Stein said that originality (another TABOO!) or revolutionary thinking (even bigger one) comes from a complete disengagement with the past, a destruction of the past.  Cubism and Pollock’s drip paintings were largely irrational moves; it takes many pages of critical text to examine the reasons for their origins – reasons which I’m pretty sure Picasso and Pollock were not that consciously aware of.  This is one of my big problems with much recent painting.  It is extremely self-conscious, painters are extremely knowledgeable of art history and are often burdened with the need to have a very clear critical awareness of the territory they are charting, because painting is such a charged field, that if you don’t have this awareness you face the danger of not having your work taken seriously within the current painting paradigm. (For example, Matthew Ritchie and Fabian Marcaccio are pretty well aware of the situations they are trying to examine in painting, and they’ll sure tell you about it.) Well, if Picasso wanted to be taken seriously in 1907 Paris, he wouldn’t have painted Les Demoiselles. You know, we’ve got to break free of this pointless burden – it’s what’s holding painting back.  Just do whatever you want to do and don’t care about the reasons behind it so much.

INTRODUCING: We’ve established that you don’t make art to comment on anything, your work isn’t political, but don’t you think when done right, art could be a very powerful vehicle for ideas and opinions? How about your recent painting that says 'Twitter Rocks' on it? Isn’t it a form of commentary?

Ivan: The Twitter painting started I think when I was looking through some old lithographs that I’d printed on fabric a while ago. When I was printing them, I had no idea why I was printing them or what I’d use them for. This was when I was in my BA in Boston and I just went into the school’s print shop, took one look at the presses and was like, ‘I wanna see some fabric go under those rollers!’  Nobody was printing on fabric, I mean people were printing t-shirts, but otherwise everyone was doing traditional etching or lithography on paper.  And I just wanted to see some fabric go through those rollers. I think it had to do with me being in love with these old fabric shops in central Boston, left over from a time ago.  I just loved walking through those old streets on Saturdays and I’d get some dried fish from Chinatown that I’d munch on, and I’d pop into one of those fabric shops, with fish in my pockets. They had a surplus of cheap canvas-like fabric and I’d buy as much as I could possibly carry in several giant black plastic bags.  Then I’d take the T, the Green Line, which starts out as a subway and then becomes a ground-level tram, back to the school and drop them off.  And I’d just randomly pick some images and print them. 

But it was so much about the experience of walking through Boston, eating fish, getting the fabric from guys that still smoked cigars as they unrolled it for you, riding back with it on the T, and watching it go through that press with a lithography plate sandwiched to it. So anyways, I printed an insane amount of fabric and didn’t do anything with it for about 8 years. It just sat as a mound of fabric in my closet, and one day last year I started looking through it. And as I was looking at the prints I didn’t think much of them other than that I thought they looked cool. And I had some frames I was building so I thought I’d stretch some of them. The structures of my frames are often designed to have inset panels within the main frame, a frame within frame type of thing. And this Twitter painting was like that. So I stretched the printed fabric on the frame that was going to be inset. But that was just random – the frame was just the right size for the fabric, and I also just wanted to see that particular fabric stretched on that particular frame, which just happened to be the inset panel frame.  And then it just sat for a long time stretched like that before I had any idea I wanted to paint Twitter Rocks on it. I started working on other bits of paintings.  My diptychs are built to set sizes so that I can work on different panels randomly and then be able to pair them up as I want to, without having to make initial plans.

Now, the other parts of that painting were inspired by rock ‘n roll music, believe it or not, and I think that’s why I wanted to put the word Rocks in there. It also had to do with my love for the Rock ‘n Coke music festival in Istanbul. I like the ad banners at rock festivals or events in general.  They’re often so standard looking and soulless, but there’s also a freshness to them. Like, just the word ROCKS is so simple and clean and fresh, and delightful to see on a banner. So I wanted to see it on that fabric above the print. And I wanted to see it in a specific reddish color, written in a specific way.  And right when I was thinking all this, Twitter was just taking off.  And I just couldn’t get over how ridiculous a concept Twitter was. It was yet another confirmation of how robotic, impersonal, and systematized human communication is getting, and so that word Twitter, and that weird blue Twitter Bird stuck in my head, and I think really I just wanted to see how well I could actually paint the Twitter logo on there freehand. I knew I could get close but I knew I’d be somewhat off, and I guess I wanted the mark of the human hand in there.  So of course you can say it’s making a comment, but the painting had such a long road to get to the point where it had Twitter written on it, that the Twitter comment was really just an afterthought rather than the driving force behind the painting.

Perhaps it was what the painting had been leading to the whole 8-9 years it was in the making, and I just wasn’t aware of it. For me, it’s about staying true to my desires on a gut experiential level.  I think that the human experience of going into that fabric shop while eating dry fish, and talking to a cigar-smoking guy about what fabrics I want, and about how ‘they just don’t make ‘em the way they used to,’ has everything to do with why I eventually wrote Twitter Rocks on that painting.  You can call it conceptual if you want, and I think that art can carry powerful political messages, but for me, if I start out with the intention for a painting to carry such a message, I’d be hopelessly lost.  I have to start out with no intention at all…just walk around and eat fish, and see what happens. Oh, and it just so happens that the printed image I ended up using in the Twitter painting is of a protest. Is it a protest of Twitter? Or does it just bring up the notion of protests in general? Perhaps, but remember that that image was chosen randomly and came into being only because I wanted to see fabric go under rollers, and then Twitter was written on it long after I had chosen to use the image. Perhaps I just don’t want to be aware of my intentions, because that way they stay true and come from a deep place that is beyond words and even thinking. It’s pure, and I like to think that art can be pure.

INTRODUCING: The last question is the essence of everything that we've been talking about. Why do you make art? What drives you?

Ivan: Uncertainty drives me. Fear drives me. And the longing for innocence which you can never get back once it’s lost. Perhaps I yearn for a state of innocence and beauty through my work, but please don’t hold me accountable for that, because if I had to be brutally honest, I have no clue why I make art. And yes, that is a cliché answer.