In the preface of Arthur Danto's After the end of art, the philosopher and art critic focuses on the artist David Reed and his two obsessions. The first being Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo, which resulted in Reed inserting one of his paintings into the background of a bedroom scene and looping it in a video installation, and the second with an idea he terms as "bedroom paintings". The expression was used by his mentor, who would describe these works as "paintings that buyers would initially hang in one of the more public spaces of the home, but in time, they would move the painting to their bedroom where they could live with it more intimately."
Reed would go on to say, "My ambition in life is to be a bedroom painter."
I identify with that aspiration. As much as I respect theory and conceptual based art, my intentions were to connect with viewers, intimately and emotionally, through the aesthetics of my work. When I first began painting, fresh out of college, I was giving pieces away to family and friends, only to find out that they were being hung in their bathrooms! I was a "bathroom painter" in my early career. As time went on, I've graduated to people's livingrooms and even generated a few sales - which I hope that buyers would not intend to purchase my work only to display them over toilets and alongside medicine cabinets. Lately I've been working on smaller paintings on panel, as I've been interested in the connections a piece can have with a viewer in tiny intimate spaces, spaces that require someone to get up close to explore its surface and texture.
Who knows, maybe some of my old paintings have actually left the bathroom, worked its way down the hall, and may currently sit on a bedroom wall somewhere... maybe I've already reached my goal.
