Interview

FEINSTEIN: So I had all these sign paints for my sculpture just lying around, and I started messing around with them. It felt good in my mind to not use a small brush. I would use big brushes, and I would use a palette knife, so I would feel like I wasn’t making paintings. If you’re scraping a palette knife on a mirror, it doesn’t feel like you’re painting—it feels like you’re sculpting.

O’BRIEN: So maybe Cy Twombly really is a sculptor because he uses those sticks and twigs—anything but a brush.

FEINSTEIN: Exactly. Anyway, when I was doing my 2005 show with Marianne Boesky, I wanted to make a show about those mirror paintings and these old women, and I ran out of source material. It’s hard to find pictures of old women dressed up in costumes. So John said, “I get models. Why don’t you just get some models.” And it was like a revelation. I asked Cynthia Rowley and other people I know in the fashion world, “Can you cast old women? Are there agencies that specialize in really old women?” And Cynthia gave me the name of one or two, and I did a casting call at my house for women over 80. It was fantastic—like 10 of them came, and I chose six. It was hysterical. I got makeup, and I rented these incredible wigs. Another friend of mine is a Broadway star named Melissa Errico. She was in My Fair Lady. She helped me set up the wigs and costumes. And then another friend, a professional photographer named Alexis Rodriguez-Duarte, is really good at black-and-white Hollywood lighting, so he set up a whole professional studio, and we shot everyone in two days. I have an incredible stack of pictures that I can use now. The weird thing is that now I feel like I have to do something different. But I have all this incredible source material.

O’BRIEN: Well, you can always do a book of your old-lady photos.

FEINSTEIN: It was a funny time. I was also doing the Marc Jacobs campaign, and I had just had my first child, so I felt really strange in my own skin for lots of different reasons. I guess these women became almost like my doppelgangers. The hard thing is that it was very successful, and so it was like, “Oh, we want more of these paintings.” I’m thinking, I don’t know if I can make any more because it might have just been a specific period that’s over.

O’BRIEN: Is it true that John was painting somebody who looked like you before you met?

FEINSTEIN: Yeah. It’s really weird. I had just gotten out of college, and I got this apartment on the corner of West Broadway and Prince Street—it was a hole in the wall. And I worked at a bar, and I would walk around all the time in the neighborhood. Andrea Rosen Gallery was on the corner of Prince and Wooster streets, and John used to go there all the time, so he thinks that he saw me occasionally. He can’t completely be certain about it, but he started to kind of put me in his paintings. That was from ’93 to basically September ’94, but at that point, we had never met. And then I was in a group show that he was in at the Sonnabend Gallery—actually it was the first show that I was ever in. He had a drawing in it, and I had a sculpture, but he didn’t go to the opening, so we didn’t meet. Then in September of ’94 I was in another show at Exit Art—this group show where I built a big, Sleeping Beauty’s gingerbread house that I slept in. I would sleep there during the day, because I was working at night, and you could watch me getting humped by this motorized castle while I was sleeping. It was really crazy. I would wear a fresh cherry on my neck every night, and I had platinum hair, and I wore big glossy red lipstick, and I would wake up, and the lipstick would be smeared all over my face, and the cherry would be smashed up, and people would look in at me through this frosted glass window . . . The night of the opening, this man came up to me and said, “You look like a woman in John Currin’s paintings.” At this point, John wasn’t super-well-known, and I didn’t know who he was, so I said, “I don’t know who that is.” He said, “It’s so strange that you have to meet him.” I said, “I’m not interested.” And the guy was a little bit weird. He was wearing a leather vest, leather jacket, leather pants, leather boots—he was almost like my leather fairy or something. I thought he was trying to hit on me, but I couldn’t figure it out. And then he started to call me at the gallery all the time. He started really harassing me, and I just said, “Leave me alone.” So then he decided to call up John. He looked up John’s number and called and said, “I saw one of your paintings in some show in Boston a year or two ago, and you’ve got to see this girl.” And John, being a man, I guess, instead of telling this guy no, walked over that minute and into the gallery. I was standing there wearing this big kind of frilly pink underwear that Patricia Field used to sell and a shirt that said I’m a satisfier on it. I was just waking up, so I was all messy . . .

O’BRIEN: You’d just been humped by the castle?

FEINSTEIN: Yes, I’d just been humped by the castle. And he walked in, and it was crowded—there were probably 50 or so people there, and for whatever reason I walked straight up to him, and I kissed him on the lips. And he said, “Are you Rachel?” And I said, “Yeah.” And that was it.

O’BRIEN: Wow!

FEINSTEIN: [laughs] It was really strange. And we’ve been together for 15 years now. Yeah . . . [laughs] Really, really weird. The funny thing was, about two weeks later, he had a show in Paris, and neither of us had a pot to pee in, so he borrowed money to send me to Paris for the weekend. I got off from my bar job for two days and flew over, and he said, “Let’s get married.” We had known each other for 10 days or something . . . So I said, “I’m going to marry you. I just can’t do it unless you meet my parents first.” It was so unromantic that he got mad at me. And then he made me wait for, like, three and a half more years to get married. He made me pay the price. [laughs]

O’BRIEN: I proposed because we were having a fight, and Gina said, “You’ll never marry me.” And I said, “You wanna bet?” [laughs]

FEINSTEIN: That’s so awesome.

O’BRIEN: I think our son came about in a similar way . . . It’s funny how romance works.

FEINSTEIN: The strange thing for me and John was that neither of us really had anything at all before that. I never really had a boyfriend of any kind. I had friends who I would have relationships with, but they weren’t boyfriends. And John had weird relationships with various women that were, in his words, “terrible.” They were always about both people basically not liking each other. But he said that it was really good for his art. He had confrontational relationships with women, and you can kind of see it in a lot of his earlier work. The position of the women is very odd. I don’t know if you could make out what he thought about women . . . [laughs] Still, when he has to give a lecture, and he shows all of his early work, he’ll say, “This is my girlfriend who really wanted me to commit, but I didn’t want to,” and he’ll talk about this body of work in
relation to that girl, and this body of work in relation to this other girl, and then all of a sudden this one painting comes up, and it’s this woman with enormous breasts, feeding a little man that looks like him . . . And there’s another painting of this woman with enormous breasts and there’s a clown with black gloves touching her enormous breasts, and he’s closing his eyes. Whenever one of those paintings comes up on the screen, he’ll say, “And then I met my wife . . .” I think my whole thing with him and his whole thing with me is that we both have what the other one doesn’t have. I think that’s why it works so well. I’m a pretty positive person, and I kind of think that everything will work out in the end and that you kind of have to be free and just let go. And he’s the total opposite—he’s doom and gloom. He thinks the world is going to end at any moment, and you have to prepare for it. Taking things seriously is John’s aspect. Then, when he starts getting too finicky and he obsesses too long—maybe, like, painting a hand for a month—I’ll suggest that he move on. I think that’s why we’re a good combo artistically. But then we also primarily like the same things. You could actually put either of us into the same room separately in a museum we’ve never been to, and we’ll each probably choose the same thing that we like the best. It’s really weird.
O’BRIEN: I can relate to that. But if you critique one another, is there ever any, “What do you mean?”

FEINSTEIN: Oh, yeah, totally. There’s even anger at times. But the good thing is that we really do say what we feel, and if you really believe in your own opinion, then you’ll fight the other person on it, and they’ll come around. A lot of times I’ll throw something out there, and, if he’s wavering, he’ll say, “I’m going to try what you asked me to try.” And by using the other person as your sounding board, you’re making a point more clear. A lot of times, I’ll have had a fight with John about putting something in the work. He’s very clean and mean. He’s all about strict form and he thinks that a lot of the times people—including myself—gild the lily and add too many things that distract from the form. So sometimes I’ll want to put something in, and he’ll say, “You don’t need it. Don’t do it.” And if I’m certain about it and I do it, then he’ll say, “You shouldn’t have done it.” And then we’ll see the piece like a year later, and he’ll be like, “You were right.” It’s a strange thing, but by having that argument you’ll make yourself realize that you’re doing the right thing. The other thing is that when you start getting successful, you start to not believe what anybody says about you anymore.

O’BRIEN: Yeah, flattery is more available.

FEINSTEIN: Everybody just says, “Yes, yes, brilliant, great.” And then behind your back they’re saying, “That’s so stupid. I can’t believe she did that.” But that doesn’t happen in a relationship. It’s hard, because I’m so involved in it that I don’t have a very clear vision of his work anymore either. It’s not like I could go in and see a show without knowing everything about every aspect of where it comes from. But I think that a lot of times people really lose track of what their goal is because of success. And with artists, especially, you have to be so careful because there’s this fine line between continuing the same thing that you’re known for and what people love about your work, and reinventing yourself.

Glenn O’Brien is Interview’s editorial director.