A concerned citizen recently wrote me (not my mother) about why it seems every week I post a painting or two or three featuring a subject in a pondering mode smoking a cigarette. I don’t know if they were concerned per se, but they asked a question, and after three attempts to spell cigarette correctly on a DM, I thought I should answer this in a broader forum.
I love a cigarette painting, a painting with a cigarette, a subject knee deep in addiction but looking good doing it. It’s historic and unhealthy, mystical and mythical. About 9/10, we don’t look like Miles Davis recording a 1959 session when we smoke, we sort of look clumsy and, often, kinda bored. But damn, a good painting with a cigarette makes you stop and think, connects the dots of time, makes you wonder the studio setting for which it was painted, created a striking mood of contemplation and desire. I think of Milton Avery, Danielle Mckinney and a recent painting by Nicole Eisenman and, yes, I posted each, and yes, I loved how the compositions were created and the atmosphere surrounding a lonely smoke. It is simultaneously mundane and richly expressive.
Mortality and addiction go hand and hand. I don’t aspire to be David Hockney, who nowadays almost mentions smoking more than painting in his interviews, but I am thinking a lot about mortality and there is something about seeing a smoker in a painting that captures a once youthful rebellion that, as time goes on, becomes a haunting obsession or conversation about your time left and time well-spent.
So that is your answer. It’s like most things as you age, you begin to think about time. I don’t encourage others to smoke, I don’t think it’s healthy, but the subjects in the paintings are suspended in time in a way we aren’t. And that is why I’m drawn to them… —Evan Pricco
