Words by Melissa Burgos
Photography by Antwan Duncan
John P. Desserau’s relationships define his art. Likewise, his art is defined by his relationships—his relationships with friends, family, his environment, and the city he knows best, New York. I met John one curiously cold May night at Deluxe, a Williamsburg salon, where the artist was commissioned to paint a mural on the wall. I was greeted with a warm and easy smile. The Carter III was playing and despite having just begun that evenings work, he was already covered in paint.
JD: Should we start early?
WC: Yeah, let’s start early. Are your folks from the Bronx?
JD: Yeah, my mom and dad met in high school in the Bronx, where they both grew up, and where I grew up too. I went to grade school there, and then I went to junior high school in City Island. My mom worked in the PTA, she always did, to make sure that me and my brother always went to the best schools. I went to Archbishop Stephanak High School in White Plains, NY. An all-boys catholic school.
WC: When did you discover you were good at art– Was it in high school?
JD: No, I discovered I was good at art, or rather that I wanted to be an artist, because I don’t know if I am good… I was always drawing. I was diagnosed with ADD as a kid. I would always draw in all my notebooks in the margins more than I would pay attention to things. And to this day, it’s always been like that. My reading comprehension isn’t that great, and I don’t find myself to be a sharp person when it comes to academics.
WC: Do you ever go to gallery shows?
JD: I do. That is my education. And I did go to college for illustration at The School of Visual Arts and I did graduate. But I’m not consciously active, and I hate talking conscious and subconscious, but I’m not consciously active in what exactly I’m trying to do. There’s no ‘well I wanna do this thing, like Jeff Koons did, because Jeff Koons did it this way. I think that’s a good recipe for me’. Ya know? I think a lot of artists are like that.
WC: Well then let me ask you, how has coming up in New York City influenced your art– Is that even a factor?
JD: It is everything to me. My work is about everyone I meet. And I try to keep my work as little about me as possible. I’m not making self portraits. The biggest critique I get is that my work is illustrative, or that my work is non-personal or that it’s not coming from this sacred place. I’m not interested in providing therapy for myself through canvas to share with the world. What I’m about is what I experience with other people, and how other people feel. So if that’s illustrative, then so be it.
WC: So what inspires you? People you meet?
JD: People I meet and what people are frustrated with.
WC: Really? Frustration is a source of inspiration for you?
JD: Frustration is telling a story of what people are bothered by, and that’s why a lot of times my work consists of business characters or money, or some sort of decay in social… socialization.
WC: Do you feel like on some level that helps you work out your own sense of frustration?
JD: Yes. It’s kinda cool because I worry about money a lot. And I get so frustrated with everyday stuff, like paying off loans and how am I one day going have a family, and just stuff like that plight becomes very much a part of my work. Like it becomes the story of how money is just difficult to obtain and why do you want it? It’s always this money versus creativity sort of thing.
WC: Does that ever dictate the logistics of your work? Like for example, a project like this [a commissioned piece] versus doing a project in your studio for you?
JD: I always come up with the money to paint what I want. I’d rather be broke than not. But at the same time I cant go ahead and make 14 seven foot paintings because, simply, I can’t afford it. That’s neither here nor there though. I like for my work to be seen on screens almost. I like when people visit my website or say ‘I like your images’ because at the end of the day, art has to tell a story. I can’t get past that.
WC: Does it have to tell your story?
JD: It doesn’t have to tell my story. It has to tell a story. Even in a very untraditional way, like I think about Rothko’s work. He’s amazing, because his work is about experience. It’s about being close to it and feeling the presences about whatever these giant canvases have. And that is something I can connect to, because it has a story based to it.
WC: So I noticed you have some portraiture on your website. What’s your connection to that?
JD: It’s a portrait series that I wanna revisit. The two that are on my site are about four or five years old, they are two of my very good friends. One is Jah Jah of Ninjasonik, and the other is Jahphet– he goes by Roofeeo– hes Santigold’s drummer and one of the most talented people I have ever met. He’s a longtime friend of mine. I met these guys when I first moved out here to Brooklyn, and I knew that they were special individuals, and I wanted to paint them. It’s cool because I was right. Because both of them are doing their thing, and they blew up. And I feel like if those paintings were, you know, bets on horses, I would have won, you know? The idea behind those portraits was that it was people painting people, it was applying paint to yourself, and then that being painted. That’s something I wanna still explore, and I want to get back to. It’s never something that I put away. I would do them bigger if I could, I would really shoot to make the portraits more classical and less in my lines. It’s something that’s on my mind, I just haven’t gotten there yet.
WC: What are you working on now?
JD: To tell you the truth, after this mural, I’m gonna take some time and work on my skill set. I wanna take some time to work on my flaws in order to help my strengths. I feel like I’m in this amazing free fall. It was about two years ago when I really buckled down and said ‘I’m gonna make a body of work, and I’m going to base it in illustration and I’m gonna get all these gigs and get my work out there,’ and it kinda happened. 85 percent of the time everything I do I’m told ‘no’ and the door closes in my face, and that’s fine, but I think I’m at a point where I can press the pause button and really think about what a body of John Desserau paintings will look like in a coherent way. 14, 16, 20 paintings of a body of work, not based upon how to use the material differently, or based upon making something that’s new, or making something that is the next step in art, just making something that is simply based on an honest body of work about what I see, how I feel and how the people around me feel. I think that is something that can benefit me. I’m not particularly interested in getting the art world on my side. I don’t anticipate it, it may never happen. The people that are interested in my work are the people that I can relate to, and those are the people that are now beginning to invest in my work, buy my work, inquire about my work. And I’m happy with that.
WC: It’s interesting that your background is at Artnet. Do you think you’ve maybe shunned that aspect of the art world as a result of your experience?
JD: I always felt like I don’t fit in, into a certain thing. I mean, this is my own opinion. If you look at how art and music, which are so connected– and I am deeply interested in both– the way art and music are connected now is so non-traditionally creative. So if you think about the biggest things that are out right now, you think about things like Lady Gaga, who is a rich kid, who went to high school with Paris Hilton and who comes from money, and about other artists like Damien Hirst and Jeff Koons and whoever else. When I was at Artnet, I learned about the art world, I learned about how galleries are run, and how these things exist. About the business side. It’s not like I’m afraid of it, or that I hate that world, but my responsibility is to make the best art that I can make on my own, without investigating ‘okay, what is the next cornerstone in art? How can I get on the next big thing?’ I just wanna be true to what I do and hopefully the cosmos will make a space for me to work, enough money for me to survive, and to have a family one day. And a dog.
WC: I don’t wanna believe it’s just a pipe dream for us, artists and the like, to be able to do what we love and survive.
JD: I don’t believe it’s a pipe dream either. Earlier you asked me what I was listening to. I listen to hip hop obsessively. I grew up on hip hop and rap music– artists like Jay Z. I think about my music like how certain rappers think about their work, how it’s about hustle and how it’s about consistency and perseverance. If I keep making work it has to go somewhere. If I’m doing this for 20 years, at some point someone is gonna look over and be like, damn, this dude is fuckin’ for real about what he’s doing. And thats what bothers me about artists that have a financial kind of thing, because, I don’t know where the… It’s too much of a hook… Its like, oh you are just this bohemian thing when in reality you’re not. And not to say they don’t have the right to make their work because, of course they do, and a lot of their work is great, but at the same time I have so much respect for the struggle, for the hustle. For those who wanna take nothing and turn it into something.
WC: Last question. Describe a day in your studio.
JD: I have a studio in my apartment. It’s in a separate room, but a normal day, it depends on if I’m working on something or not. I’ve been obtaining a lot of plants, I water them once a day. I have a lot of art books, I flip through them, I listen to a lot of music on vinyl, I listen to a lotta jazz on vinyl, I talk on the phone with friends and family, and I’m always connected. It’s in my blood, it’s how I grew up, and I hope that if people see my work they’re like ‘this is a New York artist,’ because I am. I can’t be anything else. I can’t be a classic renaissance painter, because I was never interested in making a painting look like a photograph, never have, never will. It doesn’t do anything for me. I get up pretty early, even if I stay out late. I don’t drink nearly as much as I used to, I smoke pot. What happens with me and ideas is that I see different things and I pull them together. One of the last paintings I made that really worked out well… It’s called Liar. It’s from a billboard– a billiards sign– and in the middle of the sign is the word ‘Liar’. I saw this sign, this image, once. I took a picture of it and printed the picture, and put it on my wall. I have pictures and stuff I’ve written on napkins on there. They may not have anything connected but when I start putting them up, a story starts to happen. This Liar painting was based on that. I had some pictures of former presidents up, like Reagan, and I had the billiards thing, and I was like ‘Wow, I’m just gonna do Liar, and keep it simple,’ but somehow, the other images around that were unrelated. Then another one– I found this really awesome picture of some shoes, and I put the picture up, and they were like really expensive-looking shoes and I was like ‘Man I could never afford these shoes, they’re fucking dope, I wanna get a vintage pair that are similar.’ Then I started thinking about who would wear the shoes, and it turned into this whole businessman thing, stomping on his employees. I found this painting by Keith Haring that was a stack of people, like an orgy, but it was like a bunch of people just stacked up, so I put the shoes on top of the Keith Haring image, and now there’s a picture of this powerful figure stepping on small people and I thought about that for a few days, and I had this dream about the sky and a box and I sketched that down. And then I made this painting called No Ceilings that I just put on my website, and I was listening to Lil Wayne’s Mixtape a lot, and all of a sudden it all came together and that’s kinda what I mean in terms of my work being illustrative, because I take these tidbits of what’s going on around me and I put them together to tell a single story about that time period, about what’s happening. It’s like this album came out at the same time, Keith Haring is fucking everywhere right now, but it’s like so contradictory because at the same time that Keith Haring’s work is everywhere, all over the place, there are billions of dollars that have just been pulled outta AIDS research and the global AIDS package. Keith Haring died of AIDS and his work was a testament to that. It’s like, we see his images all over the place, all these artists are sampling him, and at the same time the political machine is totally taking that culture of significance away and just mass producing it on fucking T-shirts and no one is paying attention… and it’s that kind of thinking that really inspires me.
To see more of John’s work click here.