How would you describe Canyon Castator? If everything goes as planned, I’ll never have to.
Over the years, the nature of your work has changed immensely. What dictated this transformation? I mean, we’ve known each other for over ten years—imagine if the work hadn’t changed and I was still making angsty early-20s skater bro paintings. My life has changed dramatically; the work has changed with it.
Were there any pivotal moments or influences that pushed you toward becoming a full-time artist? The reality is, to be a full-time artist, you have to sell. The work sells, or the story sells. I couldn’t have made that leap without working with some incredibly sharp gallerists and dealers. Magda and Tamas at Postmasters contextualized the work in a way that made it legible—and sellable. Carl and Hat at Carl Kostyál brought the work before an eager European audience. These kinds of relationships and connections are essential. Otherwise, it’s very hard to make paintings for a living. It takes a lot of work to make a halfway decent painting, but it’s just as hard—maybe harder—to sell it and sell it well. Even then, maybe it’s best to keep a day job.
Your work blends chaos with precision. What artists or movements have influenced your style? There’s a Bob Dylan song on his 1976 album Desire called “Black Diamond Bay.” That song is more influential to how I think about putting together a painting than any artist or movement I can think of. My work is obviously very referential—it’s an arranged response. Those references live on a non-hierarchical plane, a place where Ren & Stimpy and Velázquez are equals. I like a lot of stuff. It’s all important.
Your compositions are densely layered and full of movement. How do you know when a piece is finished? When the game’s checkmate, it’s over.
Do you plan your work in advance or let spontaneity guide you? I do a lot of preliminary work. All of that thinking lives off the surface. I build out characters, scenarios, and compositions until I’ve got a fully developed drawing. By the time I start painting, the chaos is pretty well scripted. That script is always subject to rewrites and improvisation from the cast. The material pushes back, has an opinion or an insight, and that becomes part of the outcome.
Much of your work feels like a visual overload of modern life. What themes are you intentionally exploring? Themes? I don’t know—I just hold up a mirror. The way we consume media is insane. It all comes in at once now: violence, virtue, thirst traps, somebody’s breakfast, a head-on car crash, the dumbest bro take on “alphaism.” You try to make sense of it, but it moves too fast to matter. Overload, conditioning, indoctrination. Just con dressed up as content. There’s not a message—just the noise. I’m interested in the noise. Creating characters to personify that noise and letting them loose on each other.
There’s a sense of humor and menace coexisting in your imagery—how do you strike that balance? I don’t think it’s a balance so much as a blur. The humor pulls you in; the menace shows up after. You laugh, and then you realize what you’re laughing at. That tension—the shift—is what I’m after. Nothing lands clean. Everything’s got a shadow.
What emotions or ideas are you trying to communicate through your work? I’m not trying to make anyone feel one specific thing. If anything, I’m just trying to show these figures for what they are—characters locked into belief structures they didn’t choose, performing roles they inherited. They’re not villains. They’re not heroes either. They just are. There’s a kind of sympathy built in—not because they’re innocent, but because they’re so deeply conditioned they don’t know they’re acting. And maybe the audience doesn’t either. That grey area—that’s the thing I’m after.
What do you hope people feel or experience when they view your work? Ideally? That same feeling Mel Gibson gets when he has to buy a copy of The Catcher in the Rye.
What has been the most surprising reaction you’ve had to one of your works? I did a show at Postmasters in New York about conspiracy theories—not the theories themselves, but the effect that kind of thinking has on the mind. And people took it literally. I had someone get genuinely upset that I’d paperclipped America’s space program to Nazi Germany in a painting about Stanley Kubrick faking the moon landing. Another guy—who I’m pretty sure moderates a JFK message board—cornered me to ask for my sources. As if just depicting these things was somehow endorsing them. When really, the goal was to force a confrontation—to look at the brutality embedded into so much of American mythology.
You’ve worked in both painting and drawing—do you approach these mediums differently in your practice? The voice in my head has a different tone than the one that comes out of my mouth. Drawing is thinking. Painting is forming the sentence. Drawing works out the structure; painting delivers the line.
Your work often feels like a response to the information age. How do digital culture and media impact your practice? I think we’re all victims of it. We live in a time where silence is a luxury tied to suspicion—if things are quiet, something must be wrong. We’ve been conditioned to crave that “something’s wrong” feeling. The echo chamber is serving lunch. The work doesn’t comment on the digital culture system—it’s built from inside it.
How do you feel about the role of art in today’s cultural and political climate? It’s useless. Like bringing a foam sword to the front line. If your intention is to change the world with a painting, you’ve failed.
Do you think your art functions more as catharsis, critique, or something else entirely? I think my paintings look really good above a couch.
Are there any mediums or projects you haven’t explored yet but would like to? I’d just like to keep painting. I’d like how and what I paint to change.
What’s something about your work or practice that you think is often misunderstood? I don’t think the surface of the work translates to a screen. The texture, the scale, the way the materials interact—all of that gets flattened. The work’s misunderstood until it’s seen in person.
What advice would you give to young painters trying to find their voice? It’s important to live a life worth making paintings in response to. Don’t paint a painting for painting’s sake—it’s masturbatory and boring. Surround yourself with interesting people. Go to interesting places. Be uncomfortable.
If you had to swap your painting practice with a completely different creative outlet for a month, what would you try—music, dance, sculpture, something else? I’d ride a motorcycle in the globe of death in the circus.
What is the most challenging part of being an artist? Remaining delusional.
How do you stay motivated over long periods, especially when not actively exhibiting or selling work? I don’t. You can’t pull water from the well every day and expect it not to dry up. I know where the well is, I know how to get to it—but sometimes you’ve got to leave it alone. Let it refill. Living isn’t exhibiting or selling art—that’s just what spills over when you’re living right.
How would someone find you on social media? Please respect my privacy at this time. Cheers.
