2 Crowns began as disparate sheets of silk and satin brought home from India in 2009. After driving across America for the first time in 2010, I was asked to do a live painting at gallery 25CPW, and I fused the pieces together in a tapestry that recalled the cross country Road in a somewhat Anselm Keifer manner without the blowtorch. Years later, I brought the piece outside and throughout a summer of rainstorms, I painted an ode to Basquiat, the iconic and overused crown. I had just seen a Basquiat retrospective in Basel (one of my greatest inspirations), and was overwhelmed by the tangibilty of expression, such fearless reckless joy, freedom, and success creating the expressionist iconography of the street king, but also the underbelly of it, the haunting structure of racism, the isolation of artistic rapture, the drugs.
The symbol I pulled out of this was the double crown, inverted, linked, neither one rising above the other, both in play at once. I left the painting out for almost a whole year, and was considering letting the mycelium and nature take it completely back. One day I will put another ‘2 crowns’ on a hill, on silk using only natural pigments and binders, letting it flourish gloriously into wilderness. This, I decided to save.
