John Currin

And it was the most beautiful thing I'd ever seen, you know, just,

You know jeans shorts and and this lovely sort of glistening back I that's what I was thinking about when I made that and I think I

actually a lot of the imagery in my paintings is a, uh, a sort of child's, I mean, the one sort of facile way I would put it is, you know, it's a child's misunderstanding of, of, of sex and, um, and an adult's misunderstanding of childhood and, um, like a sort of retrospective misunderstanding of childhood.

To my mind, that's what the, the, uh, uh,

the um gigantic breasts for instance is yeah is uh is the it's just a theme that kind of popped up in the 80s uh in my in my work and and um i i don't know why i still don't know why but it but it uh it it it was uh i guess a um

I guess, a way to get the vulgarity out of the way, you know, first thing.

And then I could think about making something beautiful after that.

Well, they didn't get it about children anyway, but... Well, I moved from... As a small child, I grew up in Santa Cruz, California, which is an idyllic beach town with a university and...

it was just it was it was really kind of paradise and and then my family moved when I was 10 my family moved to Stamford Connecticut which is is sort of an awful place it certainly was an awful place in the 1970s and you know sort of instantly

Like the first day of school, you know, I got into a fight and basically got into fights, you know, every day thereafter.

And it was just the kids were so mean.

And I don't know.

I guess I was the new guy and getting picked on for that reason.

but it was, um, a rude awakening after this, uh, kind of, um, my mom was a, was a piano teacher.

So I always imagine, uh, uh, uh, in my mind, uh, uh, Santa Cruz was always a sort of Debussy, you know, piano, piano piece, you know, sort of Claire de Lune played over and over again.

And, um,

And Stanford, I don't know what the musical equivalent of Stanford would be, but it wouldn't be Debussy.

It'd just be like, I don't know.

Yeah, it would be some crappy, crappy 70s pop song.

Well, I do think as much as I lament, you know, moving to, to, to the East coast, how much I hated the East coast as a, as a teenager, I sort of think that's why I, you know, I, I guess I would have become an artist one way or the other, but I think it was a,