Dana Schutz

Chicken
and Egg

This is a painting of the last man on Earth, from observation [Frank from Observation series (2002)]. I had made other paintings of him, and he looked different in each painting; but this is a painting of him at night, so you don’t really see so much of him. But I was interested in him as, finally, a maker. He was sort of building this machine that could either be like a painting – he is sort of facing it in the way a painter would – but it is also so much a sculpture; I wanted it to feel like it was almost projecting the landscape, projecting the stars in the painting. It felt like it could be a camera or a projector too. For me, it is often really like a colour painting, wanting to have this blue, that really is vibrant. I think the way I think about colour is often in a physical way; I feel like it can react to other colours within the painting, it’s different depending on its expanse or its proximity. I think colour belongs so much to light and it can emit a light in a painting. It can also describe a subject. If you were to paint a really painful sunburn or a figure that is really sick, certain colours are really cold, and they recede, and others are very hot and you can almost feel them. So that is how I tend to think about colour.