Beer With a Painter

What I hoped to get from talking to David Humphrey were answers. The images in his paintings are zany, raunchy, and wild: a girl in a lawn chair holding monkeys by their scalps; a woman absent-mindedly marking another woman’s buttocks with daubs of paint; cats sitting beside slices of white bread partially spread with peanut butter. I wanted him to explain what it all meant.

When I first met Eric Aho in New Hampshire two summers ago, we were sitting in the grass in front of the bakery at Orchard Hill Farm. We bonded over the best bread in the world (really!) made by his former student at the Putney School, and the next day I visited his studio, just across the Vermont border.

Graham Nickson and I met in his offices at the New York Studio School, where he has been Dean since 1988. There was a pointed severity to our meeting-place, which offered no distractions from the task at hand.