I paint in the nude, at 4 a.m.! It’s a sacred, private thing,” he says. The resulting works, which he usually finishes in a day, have a “dreamy, beautiful, magical quality.” He often pours paint upside down, so the drips travel upward. He paints in his longtime East Village apartment, typically in the early morning, sprawled out on the floor bathed in dawn’s golden light. And only gay nightclubs.”Īs prominent as he’s been as a performer - and despite depicting friends and other artists such as Keith Haring and RuPaul in his paintings - Tabboo! has always kept his painting process very private. So if you wanted to be yourself, you had to be in drag, especially in nightclubs. There was no outlet for gay men to publicly perform unless you were in the closet - and I’m not capable of that. “You had to perform in drag, if you wanted to perform. “I’ve transitioned to my male self,” Tabboo! says. I went backstage to fix my makeup and missed him.”) But these days, he only performs as a male. (“Luckily, I didn’t run into Donald Trump. Tabboo! has made high-profile drag appearances over the years, including in the 1995 documentary “Wigstock: The Movie” and the 2019 HBO documentary “Wig.” And he appeared, dressed as Cher, in an episode of Donald Trump’s “Celebrity Apprentice,” which Joan Rivers won in 2009. The other thing that’s changed? Performing in drag. “The wild thing about California, unlike New York City - maybe because it’s the desert - you have phone lines above ground on telephone poles. He took inspiration from the city’s street signs as well as its flora and fauna, particularly the sinewy palm trees and craggy succulents on street corners. last year, he visited landmarks from those films such as the titular boulevard, the Hollywood sign and the Griffith Observatory. Tabboo!’s Los Angeles is conjured from film noir, he says, such as 1955’s “Rebel Without a Cause” and 1950’s “Sunset Boulevard.” On a trip to L.A. In “California Sunset,” wispy palm tree silhouettes sway in the breeze against a fiery, burnt orange sky. “Orion’s Belt” features a thin black mountain range dividing a midnight blue sky and tumultuous ocean surface, both speckled with pinpricks of white paint. His “Lavender Garden” is backed by waves of purple paint tinged with aqua, as if the flowers and grasses were submerged under water. And L.A.’s Hammer Museum at UCLA and New York’s Whitney Museum of American Art both acquired works by Tabboo! in 20, respectively. Tabboo!, now 64, had two concurrent exhibitions last year at New York’s Karma gallery and Gordon Robichaux gallery, at which point his hometown paper called him one of the city’s “best painters.” The Museum of Modern Art’s Department of Film acquired Tabboo!’s archive of ephemera in 2017, including fliers for live shows dating back to the ’80s. He designed album covers for bands such as Deee-Lite and Book of Love, and created scores of fliers for friends’ punk, glam rock and drag shows.īut it’s only within the last five or so years, in his early 60s, that Tabboo! is finally receiving mainstream recognition as a traditional painter, a practice he’s been honing all along, he says in a recent phone interview. As a trailblazing drag queen in the early ’80s, Tabboo! performed as a singer and go-go dancer at the Pyramid Club, Mudd Club, Palladium and other legendary haunts of the time. Stephen Tashjian, has been a staple of New York’s East Village, where he’s lived and worked for more than 40 years. The multidisciplinary artist and performer, a.k.a.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |