Two Painters Juxtaposed:

Story and Photography by James Finch Jr.

The “research” for this article entailed the author spending countless hours with the subjects: In bars, flophouses, and various other bohemian hives in the Sacramento area. It cost him the health of his liver and a portion of his pride. The subjects were observed and photographed by the author for the purpose of this in-print analysis without their knowledge, but permission for publication free from prior restraint was obtained.

It was 3 a.m., but the clock might as well have read “Tecate.” Time had become irrelevant—existence was now measured in ounces of cheap Mexican beer. The two guys at my kitchen table were clutching five cards in manners alternating between maternal and disinterested, as if poker was born in their souls and slipped out the back door only to come crashing back through the front.

Artists generally make bad company. They too have been caught in the culture’s outlandish conception of them, whether they have talent or fame or neither (rarely do the two go hand in hand). And these two painters, by this point in an evening of consumption, were no exception.

When the suspicion of cheating arose between them, one insulted the other by calling him a “cubist” with feigned disdain. I shook my head, knowing that if earlier in the day I might have been in the company of genius, I was now certainly in the company of drunks.

Believing artists to be a class of their own—romantic beings of barely human origin—has become commonplace in our culture. The most celebrated are cast into floodlights and tabloids, into myth and outright lies, the rest passing virtually unnoticed. It is as if the whole of western culture has never recovered from the disappearance of Rimbaud.

Parallel to this phenomenon, an artist’s greatness is judged by the mass appeal of his or her work. And so the well known are of the Brittany Spears/Thomas Kincaid ilk. Our culture seems to emanate from a mall-shaped wound in our moral fabric.

And so it goes. Artists of any kind are held apart as anomalies or anachronisms, allowed to starve for lack of commercial appeal, and their work exists as miracle or horror, detached from the maker as much as possible by the specialization and mystification of the creative process. But just as an impatient man is a bad fisherman due to his impatience, so do the many facets of every artist’s all-too-human personalities breed their work and writhe across its breadth.

The carpenter’s nails and saw, the painter’s brushes and oils, the businessman’s savvy, the musician’s tense strings—all can be the tools used to achieve greatness from little These drunken clutchers of cards sometimes revel, sometimes their ideas and will bring honey from stone and sometimes shit from sky.

One of them, David , has been an acquaintance of mine for a few years. I met him when, after several drinks, he had a grand mal seizure on my front yard while dressed as a cow (the night being Halloween). When Mad Cow disease became an epidemic in England a number of years later, he was frequently heard taking credit for starting a worldwide epidemic. This kind of outrage and the ensuing braggery was to become a trademark of my encounters with him.

A gangly man of 23 with a shock of light brown hair and a personal presentation ranging from cocky to condescending, somehow manages to turn being an unpredictable lout into a social virtue more often than would be expected. His clothes are often fine, but with a worn, slept-in look. He drinks, talks, and does just about everything a little too much, with the exceptions of working and bathing. He can be charming, intelligent, and a complete pain in the ass.

The other, Sterling Phillips, I had just met the morning preceding the stupidly surreal hands of poker. A thin, dark-skinned 28-year-old man with television hair and a hooked nose indicative of his Native American ancestry, his dress and manner have the deliberate, polished air of a full-time professional, or what would be referred to in some circles as a pretty boy.

Sterling had been introduced to me by David as his “painter buddy,” and I was quickly shown a large work-in-progress that was resting in the bed of his pick-up truck. I was struck by the precision of his brush strokes, which were nearly invisible but for the perception of their total. His textures, colors and themes seemed meticulously contrived to give what I assumed to be the desired effect: A sense of perfection in the relative sense–that this image was achieved through as much precision and care as was humanly possible.

Also in the truck, to my surprise, was a Pomeranian. Sterling, after I told him he could bring his dog into my apartment, told me the animal’s name was Picachu, “but his friends call him buss pass.” I nearly vomited. I have an aversion to tiny dogs and the people who own them, but it didn’t keep me from seeing a congruency: Sterling has an appreciation for fine, delicate things even if they can be overbearing, distracting and useless in their fineness and delicacy.

Begg’s painting reflects his personality in a similar way. At once striking in its bold use of color and somewhat irritating for the same reason, there is no middle ground in Begg’s work—everything is taken to an illogical extreme. His slathers whatever luckless flat surface he gets his hands on with so much oil paint that some of his works might not ever dry. A human face can be green with purple highlights, most colors in chunks of paint applied directly to the surface from a tube and then spread with what once was a brush but is now a stick from lack of proper care.

“I have no concept of what paints I use color wise,” says. ”It’s like painting by ear.”

Begg’s haphazard Zen and Phillips’ all-encompassing mindfulness have a gulf between them capable of absorbing the sea. This void is the space in which an artistic dialogue can thrive. Should they be similar in style and personality, they would most likely growl like a dog into a mirror.

After we had gone back into my apartment, Phillips showed me a slide portfolio of works displaying similar precision and mindfulness to the work-in-progress. Some compositions were muddled by the presence of far too many compositional elements, the result of Phillips’ ambitious pursuit of visual narratives that describe the creation of emotion, poetry, etc. Others, while maintaining their ambition, were done with such care and discipline that they are impossible not to admire on at least one level.

The direct influences of Diego Rivera and Salvador Dali could be seen in nearly every piece. These comparisons, which are common, are far from detraction; Rivera and Dali were dedicated craftsmen, as is Phillips, who has come to take comparison as an insult to his singularity as an artist. While being irritated with constant comparison is understandable, Phillips’ insistence that these artists do not influence him borders on absurd.

Begg, in this rare instance, is more reasonable. Van Gogh’s ghost has urinated on Begg’s palette, and he knows it. Having taken a wise course in embracing an origin of his style, he has noticed areas where both he and Van Gogh were lacking—lighting and use of earth tones—and has begun studying the works of Rembrandt to strengthen himself in these areas.

I, having seen Begg’s work intermittently over the last year, had thought his take on Van Gogh’s expressive flamboyance compensated for an inability to depict a person or an object realistically. It was not until Phillips and Begg were working together on a mural that my conception of his skills was changed.

Phillips, whose precision I have already noted, turned nearly all of the human work over to Begg, whose treatment of portraiture I have grown to respect. “He can replicate anything he sees,” Phillips said of Begg’s skill.

Despite the flood of color and texture, Begg’s characters’ simply feel human. Perhaps it is this nearly inexplicable human quality that allows him to behave like such an ass and still keep decent company.

As Begg describes his approach to painting people, “I use the brush strokes to trap the humans…I don’t want the person to breathe into the painting, I want the paint to breath into the person.”

Phillips, on the other hand, demonstrates a tendency to objectify people in his work, be it through a cubist rendering or a presentation of the human form as nearly elemental. On the myriad occasions were I have witnessed him working his pace was slowed tremendously by bodies and faces.

The one time I have seen him do detailed portraiture he was relying on a photograph, and in doing so made a perspective error while concentrating on unorthodox texturing of the subject’s skin. This could be attributed to particular care or a technical weak point, or to yet another manifestation of conscious or subconscious elements not directly related to art finding their voice in art nonetheless.

Since his divorce a number of years ago, Phillips has said he is incapable of “loving another individual like that again… I love everyone now.” Whether this love is sincere or not is debatable, but the effect of this outlook on his art is undeniable. Individuals portrayed in Phillips’ paintings have lost a degree of their contrast, and are presented much in the way that fire, water, earth and air are.

“It’s because I don’t know what the fuck I’m doing,” Phillips said, presenting another likely source of this detail in his style.

Phillips’ unrelenting pursuit of virtuosity, partially enabled by his cocksure demeanor, will inevitably result in an admirable effort, if not a success, to correct this lacking. For if there is a solitary thing I can say about Phillips’ character, it is that he is wholeheartedly dedicated to being an artist.

The decision to dedicate his life to artistic advancement has come hard and gradually to Begg. His attention span (or lack thereof), coupled with the time consuming combination of booze and women, render him a person flitting from flower to flower to gutter to floor. His laziness, which at times seems boundless, has left him poor and homeless, and most of his energy has been devoted to staying warm, fed and drunk for the last few months.

Springing from this lax attentiveness is also the vague outline of a renaissance man. Begg plays classical piano and has a passion for martial arts, both interests he has pursued with and without the benefit/hindrance of instruction.

His piano playing, like his painting, seems to well up from the part of him devoted to excess. He sits down and pounds huge cavalcades of notes, sometimes in such a swift and complicated manner that it is hard to tell if he makes a mistake until he rises from the bench cursing and reaching for a bottle. Much like his enormous chunks of paint might obscure a lack of intent or precision.

He links these two interests with a simple statement, “…art is a frozen frame of music.” He even went as far as to described the relationship on a physics level by comparing color frequency to pitch.

Begg’s interest in martial arts (and violence in general) can at some times manifest itself in a calm tutoring of his peers (or debate among others with similar knowledge), but can also lead to sparring that often ends stupidly. Quite frequently these bad ends are the result of Begg taking the “conflict” a step or two too far in order to best his “opponent.” The tendency to behave excessively is once again significant.

One Sunday in mid-March, , our friend Ryan Elias-Berg, and I spent a calm afternoon drinking fine French vodka together. We were on the sidewalk about to part ways when the two fools began wrestling on the concrete.

“Like most fights, we ended up on the ground,” says Elias-Berg, describing the senseless incident. “We were rolling around and he said, ‘I’m going to make you eat dirt, bitch.’ I told him,‘No, you’re not’ and closed my mouth tight as he grabbed a handfull of dirt and pressed it to my face. I grabbed a fistful of his hair and pulled his head back to try and get him to move his hand. He grabbed that hand and bit my finger. When I opened my mouth to scream he shoved the dirt in and said ‘See, I made you eat dirt, bitch.’”

Begg is unapologetic about such instances, and maintains his freindships partly due to his consistent inconsistency—you don’t know exactly what to expect from him except the outrageous, be it savage, pointless, brilliant or all three.

“He reminds me of how people told me I acted when I was his age,” Phillips says of Begg’s sporadic irrationality, sounding as though he was trying to explain their relationship to himself as well as to me. I was never able to get more out of Phillips as to how he behaved at 23, but I do know he didn’t begin painting until the age of 22.

“If a major loss in childhood is indeed a necessary ingredient for greatness, then for Phillips, sustaining the repression of his energetic impulses qualifies as this loss,” writes Sita Rose, Phillips’ former lover, illuminating a possible cause for his reluctance to even so much as acknowledge the portion of his life prior to discovering his medium.

When speaking of his own or others’ works, Sterling has an air of authority that can become cumbersome as the desire to explain himself gives birth to the desire to explain the universe. This tendency is often apparent in his creative process: He would rather attempt to boggle the mind and the eye than delicately explore one concept completely.

At times it seems that Phillips is eager to verbally dismantle another artists work out of xenophobia. On a day that I spent with both Phillips and Begg at the formers’s A-frame cabin in the hills outside Lincoln, was preparing a board with Jesso (a primer used to lock out the corrosive powers of oil paints). As he swirled it onto the board, he mixed in large chunks of dirt to add even more depth to his already chunky style. After Begg and I took leave of Phillips’ hamlet before the board had tried, Phillips intentionally left it in the rain, saying later; “He might have seen his next masterpiece, I just saw a waste.”

Phillips and Begg have been in nearly constant company since January, a detail significant to building a contrast between the two of them and their work. With the exception of instances such as the preceding (the likes of which both parties stand guilty of), the influence of these disparate men who share a medium upon each other have been striking and positive. One never really knows each rooster’s strengths and weaknesses until they’ve begun circling each other in the lantern-lit dust. They have butted heads and been conspirators in affairs of both wholesome and dubious intent. Partnering up to paint has had visible, positive effects on their respective work. Phillips’ presentation of the human form has gotten warmer, as has his attentiveness to the overall feel of his characteristic massing of details.

Begg and Phillips are in extremely different stages of professional, artistic and personal development. Phillips has sold individual works for over 2,000 dollars, while Begg will take 50-75. Phillips has run his own gallery, the Running Stream Fine Art gallery, and Begg is currently homeless, his paintings scattered across the Sacramento living rooms of his friends.

Whether they as people or artists are great is debatable, as all things eventually are. But they are undoubtedly human, something many artists are never recognized as.