On painting as John Dempsey, becoming Billy Tokyo, and how working under two identities changed the way I think about art.
For most of my life, I painted under my own name. John Dempsey. It seemed reasonable enough. It was, after all, my name. Over the years, that name accumulated the things an artist is supposed to accumulate, influences, habits, techniques, successes, failures, and perhaps most dangerously, an idea of what a John Dempsey painting was supposed to look like. Once you have painted long enough, your history starts following you into the studio. You begin a painting and, without quite realizing it, thirty years of previous paintings are standing behind you, watching. They seem to be saying that this isn't really what you do, that it isn't your style, that people won't recognize it as yours. You spend years trying to develop a recognizable style, only to discover that you have succeeded. Now you have to find a way out.
My escape route was a guy named Billy Tokyo. The name came from the collision I saw happening in the work. Billy was Western. Tokyo was Eastern. The early images brought together Western outsider and cartoon art with the exaggerated sweetness of Japanese anime, particularly its bubble gum cuteness, which could somehow be both innocent and slightly unsettling. Billy didn't begin as some grand experiment in artistic identity. He began as a commercial venture, with bright, vector based illustrations and design work for clients and projects including Lollapalooza and the Chicago Cubs. There was something freeing about working this way. The work was immediate and unburdened by any expectation that it should resemble the paintings I was making under my own name.
Somewhere along the way, Billy started getting ideas above his station. The work became less commercial, the computer gave way to painting, and the imagery grew stranger and more personal. Buildings began leaning. Figures appeared. Narratives developed, and the humor became darker. The Chicago Imagists were a strong influence. I have always loved the freedom in their work, the strange characters, aggressive color, humor, vulgarity, beauty, comics, advertising and outsider art, all colliding without anyone seeming particularly concerned about whether they belonged together.
Chicago's writers also found their way into Billy's world. I've always been drawn to James T. Farrell, Nelson Algren and Saul Bellow, three novelists who explored the forces that shape our lives, the dignity of society's outsiders and the complicated inner worlds we carry around with us. I think about them when I paint Billy's crowded urban scenes, where a multitude of figures go about their business amid a city that seems to be coming apart at the seams. The scenes may be chaotic and funny, but each figure has a life of their own, a private collection of ambitions, anxieties and distractions. The city may be absurd, but the people inhabiting it are worth taking seriously.
Billy gradually became an artist in his own right, and I found myself in the unusual position of being able to start over. When I worked on his paintings, I asked myself a wonderfully stupid question. What would Billy Tokyo do? Not what would I do, but Billy. He could distort perspective, put something funny next to something disturbing, and borrow from whatever visual debris happened to be floating around in my head. Most importantly, he could fail. If a painting was terrible, what did I care? Billy painted it. The arrangement worked beautifully for me and rather unfairly for Billy.
But Billy wasn't simply an escape from John Dempsey. There were things I wanted to do with abstraction that didn't belong in figurative work, and things I wanted to say about people, cities, politics and contemporary life that couldn't easily be expressed through abstract forms. I have always been interested in how shapes and colors interact, how they push against one another, balance, collide and establish their own kind of order. Graffiti has influenced that vocabulary, too, with its energy, its layering and its disregard for the boundaries between art and the everyday world. I like the tension that comes from putting forms together until they seem to be holding one another in place, but only just.
I suppose that is also how I see society. We build systems on top of systems. People depend upon people. Institutions lean against institutions. Everything appears solid until suddenly it doesn't. There is tension in my abstract paintings, but also optimism. Somehow the pieces keep balancing, at least for now. I am interested in the moment when an arrangement begins to feel unstable, when one more shape or one more shift in color might change everything.
Then I walk across the studio and look at a Billy Tokyo painting. Buildings teetering sideways. Some have already fallen over. Others appear to be propped up by something that could not possibly support them. People wander through these unstable cities, frequently distracted by their phones and apparently unconcerned that the civilization behind them seems to be tilting. I look at the painting and realize that Billy is doing much the same thing I am.
John Dempsey works with abstract forms, color and the tension between shapes. Billy Tokyo builds unstable cities populated by people trying to get on with their lives. The vocabulary is different, but both are concerned with what happens when complicated things are held together under questionable circumstances. One painting might approach the idea through a stack of brightly colored shapes, another through a building that appears ready to topple over. Neither requires everything to resolve neatly.
I love working in both styles, and I move back and forth between them according to where I feel the energy. I admire artists who spend their lives digging deeply into one visual language, but I'm apparently not built that way. I don't want Billy Tokyo to become another rigid style, either. The moment I start thinking about what a Billy Tokyo painting is supposed to look like, I've simply built myself another fence. Then I'll probably have to invent a third artist, and frankly, two of us already take up enough room in the studio.
Working under two names has made me question the idea that an artist should have a single, consistent voice. Why shouldn't an artist contain contradictions? Why can't one part of you want abstraction and another want narrative? Why can't one painting explore color and form while another turns to humor, social commentary and the absurdity of everyday life? We contain all these things ourselves. It seems unreasonable to expect our paintings to be less complicated than we are.
Perhaps that is what Billy Tokyo ultimately gave me. Not another identity, exactly, but permission to follow an idea wherever it leads and to let my imagination take another avenue into another universe. The farther I allowed Billy to wander away from John Dempsey, the more obvious it became that the two of us had been looking at the same things all along. We just found different ways to paint them.