Brooks Thank you so much for agreeing to do this again. I'm so sorry that our first conversation didn’t record. I knew this would happen eventually, but I’m sorry it happened with you.

Cudahy It’s ok. The last time was practice.

Brooks It was practice. Thankfully, neither of us said anything interesting and we were really tired and made no sense. {laughs}.

Cudahy Yeah. {laughs}

Brooks Today we are in our best form, although I have to say I'm quite tired. I went to see Cat Power last night.

Cudahy Oh, she's touring with The Greatest twentieth anniversary?

Brooks Exactly.

Cudahy Where did you see her?

Brooks At the Orpheum, which is a beautiful theater in downtown L.A. She performed the full The Greatest album in order, and then maybe five or six other songs.

Cudahy I love her.

Brooks Me too! I’ve seen her a couple of times, though it's been at least probably five or six years. I had seen her previously in smaller venues, like bars. She was great. She was very…Cat Power.

Cudahy Yeah.

Brooks Have you seen her before?

Cudahy I saw her once. I forget the name of the place. It was the year before Sandy hit; there was another hurricane that hit New York and I saw her the night that that storm hit.

Brooks Oh, interesting.

Cudahy I just remember that the sound person wasn't doing her right or something; she kept trying to get her mic pushed up.

Brooks Oh.

Cudahy {dog groans in the background} That's my dog.

Brooks Hello Seneca. Even Seneca knows you’ve got to have your mic right. {laughs}

Cudahy Yeah. {laughs}

Brooks Her voice has such a rich tone. She did a version of The Moon, which is one of my favorite songs, and she used one of those microphones that make you sound like a synthesizer…

Cudahy A vocoder?

Brooks Yeah. It was great. She closed with…I guess it was a Tom Waits cover. My Tom Waits knowledge is pretty limited, but she started off the song kind of mimicking his singing style.

Cudahy I wonder what song it was.

Brooks I don’t know, but I’ll see if I can find out. Since we are talking about music, how present is music in the studio for you?

Cudahy I always have music playing. Music physically changes how you're painting, like the energy that you're giving the painting, but I just also really like thinking about other mediums that aren't painting and how they hold all this information. I’m very much an album person; I think about them as kind of an alternate world version of an exhibition where you get to hit at all these things thematically. I like thinking about what the musician I'm listening to is doing in terms of those themes across an album. I feel like that helps me think about what I want to do across a group of paintings.

Brooks I agree. I'm also very much an album person. Unless I've made a specific playlist, especially if I'm in the studio, I’m almost always listening to albums. And not in every case, but in many cases I'll get on a kick and listen to several albums by the same artist in a row.

Cudahy Oh yeah.

Brooks Yesterday I listened to like four Concrete Blonde albums back to back. I usually listen to two or three albums by one band and then move on to a different artist. The music I listen to on any given day has to do with my own mood rather than what I'm thinking about with regard to the work I’m making. Is is that true for you or is the music you choose more related to what you're working on?

Cudahy It's more mood based. That being said, I’m very much like a sad or emotional music listener, and I think the only time that I really can't listen to music like that is when I'm actually truly in a depressive moment. When I'm in a goofy or a good mood, I'm still listening to, like, Xiu Xiu.

Brooks I think you and I are very similar. If I'm at the gym, maybe I'll listen to something that's less moody, although I have been known to pump iron to The National.

Cudahy Yeah, even when the music is dancey or upbeat, I want it to still have the emotional catharsis. It just feels better.

Brooks Yeah, like The XX or something.

Cudahy I’ve never listened to them.

Brooks Oh really? They're very good.

Cudahy I do play and love electronic and dance music but it is very sad. {laughs}

Brooks I know that your studio and {your husband} Ian’s {Lewandowski} studio are separate, but they’re also sort of open to each other. Ian listens to a lot of Tori Amos. You must either love her or hate her now.

Cudahy I got very much into the Tori universe, but I feel like I like different eras and albums more intensely than he does. And there are ones that he's more obsessed with that I don't really get.

Brooks Which albums do you really like?

Cudahy I really love From The Choir Girl Hotel and To Venus And Back; that chunk of her career is my favorite. Ian is really into American Doll Posse, which I don’t not like, I just don't have the same feelings about it.

Brooks I'm with you. When I talked with Ian for Other Swans last year, we talked about her, too. Tori was very important to me when I was younger, but after Scarlet's Walk, I stopped listening to her like I used to, and that is as much about me changing as it is about her newer music, which I don’t really think I’ve given a fair chance. But everything from her debut until Scarlet’s Walk is really so important to me.

Cudahy I like all the stuff earlier than Boys For Pele, but I think Pele is when she's fully genius. That album is one of the ones that I think about when I think about information being packed into a medium like that.

Brooks That's a great point. I love her first two albums; they both, well, all three, including Pele, came out when I was in high school. Under the Pink is particularly is very important for me, but Pele, which recently celebrated the thirtieth anniversary of its release date—which is hard to believe—definitely felt like a step up in terms of the confidence in her style, her songwriting, the instruments.

Cudahy Yeah.

Brooks The harpsichord is so present on that album.

Cudahy Yeah.

Brooks I mean this is as a huge compliment, but I think Pele is where she starts to reveal her deep weirdness, and her very specific vision. I totally understand the correlation you’re making with building a visual world. There's narrative in her work, but it's also obscured,  like it's not linear. There’s something there that we can relate to your painting practice. You think about narratives, you set up a scenario for yourself and for the viewer, but it’s not explicit.

Cudahy Yeah. I relate to how Tori incorporates really disparate sources and references into the lyrics and like the genre of play that she's doing across that album; she is making a world of association. What I'm interested in as far as “narrative” is making the setup for the narrative. I like putting things in close proximity and then allowing their sort of comparison or their closeness to say a third thing that either symbol by themselves wouldn’t.

Brooks I think about the same things with my work. I’m pulling from so many images, some of which are my own, and others are found, others are from pop culture or art history. I like the idea of using something that comes with weight,  with a shadow, with a history. And it is the choice to place A next to B, so to speak, that then creates some kind of new juxtaposition and context, that gives the viewer the tiniest bit of a suggestion to go down a certain road.

Cudahy I also think it’s this roundabout way of trying to understand what you yourself are drawn to. I feel like you're always in the periphery, tinkering, trying to figure out why certain things resonate with you. I feel like setting up the paintings, setting up the narrative, is as much for you to go down this generative path of like what is this saying?Why am I drawn to this? What unexpected thing is happening? I love the synchronicity of later seeing connections and this sort of path that you didn't realize you were traveling on, you just kind of trusted your intuition. I don't know what the narrative is doing other than opening up more possibilities.

Brooks Yeah, I agree completely. As the creator, as the painter, I don't feel like I have the answers. I don't feel like oh I'm doing this and putting this together because I'm saying exactly this; it's the questioning, and the generative nature of creating. Using existing imagery but then creating new imagery with that provides a kind of fertile ground for the  exploration of infinite possibilities.

Cudahy I think the quotation is important. When I'm setting up the images myself, usually I'm inspired by or quoting a pose or a gesture from somewhere else that I found. I was thinking about that last night. I saw a screening of the Charles Atlas 80s film Hail The New Purtian. There is so much choreography and dance, and really just the whole film, it’s all a world that I feel like I don't have as much of a handle or understanding on as I do with painting. What I was really drawn to was, within the choreography—and I feel like there's something similar happening within image histories—where there is this sort of weirding of movements that people do. In the film, at the end, there's a club scene where the main character is leading all the other people along in this choreographed dance that just cycles through what are really a lot of insulting gestures.

Brooks Such as?

Cudahy What's it called, the Italian thing where you like, with your hand, you graze under your chin? The choreography in the film, even when it's not that direct, it's a sort of weirding of movement or like emphasizing expression of movement. In a way, it’s kind of like the really famous Hannah Wilke early video works, when she would do like a gesture, like slapping her face in shock, and she would do it like thirty times. It's like when you read a word too many times and it becomes something just completely unintelligible and different. If that makes any sense, that's kind of what I feel like with the quotations and image histories; there’s a level of wanting to understand something by making it strange or weird, so you can see it from this other angle.

Brooks Yes, and there is the paradox that sometimes when you are looking at something repeatedly, or when you are using an image or a reference repeatedly, in an effort understand it more, the more you look at something closely, it starts to make less sense. You start to like question how does this whole thing even exist? It's completely made up. You can almost watch it dissolve.

Cudahy Exactly, and it's like realizing how much of thinking about the world is just sort of on autopilot, where you are not actually engaging with what's in front of you. We allow our brains to act in a way of predictive pattern recognition. One of the first assignments that you get in foundation painting or drawing class is a lot of like trying to not to draw something based on what you think it looks like, but what you actually see. One of the assignments, for example, was doing a still life but drawing something upside down, and there were other ways to get your brain out of the autofill mode. I think it's a long term interest of mine in painting, to find that specificity, and that’s why I think I'm drawn to representational painting. I like thinking about like likeness, and I think there's something to noticing all of that and trying to have a specificity.

Brooks  Totally. That relates to a conversation you and I have had before about the very specific things that happen in the making of paintings that are both planned but also occur in the moment, in the making of the work, that are so specific. Because of the way that you paint, for example, there are things that happen, moments in the paint itself, that are not ever re-creatable.

Cudahy Right.

Brooks  Nancy Friedland, whom I’ve also spoken with for this issue, had been an Instagram friend for a couple of years until we met in person in New York a couple Septembers ago. The very first day we met, the very first thing we did together was to go and see your concurrent shows at Hales and Grimm.

Cudahy Really?

Brooks Yes—and she and I talk about this in our conversation—you made us cry.

Cudahy Oh?

Brooks Yes. I’m not telling you that to give you a big head, but there were a couple of passages in the paintings, that were so specific, so special; they were moments that you could never have planned for—not in the exact way that they were created—but they also felt like they couldn’t have been painted any other way.

Cudahy Do you remember which paintings?

Brooks One of them was called How To Transform Time, which is a portrait of Jenna Gribbon, and she's wearing this kind of checkered, striped tank top. And then there's a painting of you and Ian. What is that painting called?

Cudahy Dusk and Dawn With Perspective Machine.

Brooks There is this swirl of pinks and purples and orange and some blue in the crotch of his pants. He's kind of lying down on the floor and it's so perfect. Anthony! I love it so much.

Cudahy Thank you.

Brooks The specificity of these moments really moved me. They made me feel like this is why I'm painting, because of this right here, because of this thing. This is why painting exists.

Cudahy Wow, ok. The reason that that is so overwhelming to hear is because, like we talked about before, I feel like that, too. Usually what happens when I have a really emotional reaction to an artwork or painting, it is because there's this moment of true specificity. That is the thing that really moves me. Titian is really great for that in the sense that he was such an expert at painting different materials and textures. He really understood the essence of oil paint, and also other materials he was depicting, and there is just something meaningful about the act of trying to preserve that, or to draw attention to something that you've noticed. It’s a way of honoring it.

Brooks Yeah, it is a way of honoring the material;  it's a way of honoring the subject; it’s a way of honoring the process. That sounds very high-minded, but it’s true, even if you're not necessarily working with that intention at every second. But, generally speaking, the act of making and depicting is a way of documenting and honoring and pushing something forward into the future.

Cudahy Yes.

Brooks It's so interesting to hear certain responses from people looking at your work, when they’re like oh my God, I love this part but you, as the artist, might know that part was such a struggle. As the creator, you have a vision in your mind, or you may have even made a sketch or a preliminary work, but the work you end up making is going to have natural variations, via the process of making it.

Cudahy Right.

Brooks You may be very satisfied with the painting,  but there are probably things in it that are not exactly how you envisioned it, but no one else can see that. People, everyone else, simply takes it in as it is. They may like it or not, but they take it as it is, without expectations. That is one of the gifts of being a viewer. The viewer hasn’t had to deal with the making of it. As a painter looking at other peoples’ paintings, I think there are places in some paintings where we can see that that person really struggled, but sometimes those are the most interesting parts.

Cudahy Yeah, and I like playing with sort of limitations that I have. I watched this talk with Catherine Murphy, and she was explaining this one school of painting that feels very American, like Fairfield Porter, and Lois Dodd. She was talking about how there's this like American flat-footedness to the painting. I like the idea of putting things in my paintings that I know that I cannot realistically or, in sort of an academic draftsman kind of way, depict. I also like including a strange pattern or something that repeats because I know I can't do it perfectly, and there's going to be this kind of dissonance between my mark and the thing that I'm trying to portray. Does that make sense?

Brooks Absolutely.

Cudahy I like playing with limits. I got so used to painting really large works that I kind of had no idea what I was doing with tiny paintings again and then that was exciting for me because, in some way, I like that stage of not knowing where something is going. It can be really frustrating, but I think it leads to more interesting stuff. I like what you said, that with each painting, there’s this quality of it can't be repeated and part of that is reacting to things as they happen while you're painting, and part of it is your own limitations. I'm very specific about color, but I don't think I could do an exact match if I had to redo something in a painting. I redo the entire section if I have to, because I don’t feel I have the skill to do it any other way, but that is something that I think makes the color and the paintings more interesting.

Brooks I totally agree. As someone who is largely self-taught, basically everything I know about color and about paint are things that I figured out for myself, or read about, or another artist told me. I am very much interested in color and in exploring color, but people often ask me oh, how did you make this color and sometimes I can say well, it's this and this and this, but sometimes the truth is that I can’t, because it’s an inexact recipe. I can't recreate it and I'm not interested in recreating it. It's the variations and the possibilities of that that are often most interesting to me. I don't need to know everything. When you say you don't have the skill, you could certainly learn that if you wanted, if that was like really important to you to be able to recreate exact colors, but you're not interested in that particular knowledge.

Cudahy Yeah, I’m not interested and then I also think the lack of knowledge is actually providing something interesting to the work. I don't one hundred percent agree with him, but Peter Doig always talks about how he wants artists to deskill themselves; he’s of the mind that the better you get at painting, the worse the paintings are. There’s some truth to that.

Brooks That’s so interesting. Obviously it’s good to have some skill and knowledge, rather than fumbling completely in dark, but the line between where it helps you and where it hurts you is fuzzier than people want to admit. Doig is such a great example. I love his work so much, and Nancy {Friedland} and I also talk about his work and how important he was in her development. I’ve seen a lot of his work over the years at various galleries. I saw the retrospective he had at the Tate almost 20 years ago, which was one of the big catalysts for me really wanting to learn to paint, and I saw the show that was at the Courtauld a few years ago and there are parts of his paintings that are really funky, like fuuuuuunky, but they're so much better for it.

Cudahy Yeah.

Brooks What’s that painting of his that's at the Met? I think it’s called Two Trees. The last time I was there it was next to Salman’s {Toor} Fag Puddle.  There are are three figures, and the central figure has on what looks like a swimming cap. It's a white, kind of lace lacy looking thing and and it is so funky. You would never teach someone to paint like that; you just wouldn’t. But the knowledge of materials that Doig has amassed, and how carefully he has develped his own style and his own language, is so clear. It’s clear that he knows all the rules but is disregarding them.

Cudahy Yeah.

Brooks I want to also ask you about R.B. Kitaj. I know he’s an influence for you, just as he is for me. There’s something in the way that you construct your compositions that really signals an awareness of Kitaj.

Cudahy I didn't really know about him until like later on in my painting life. There was a Matthew Marks show, probably in 2018 or 2019, that was almost a survey of several periods of his work, and it was relevatory because it felt like a discovery. You know when you're first discovering artists, modern and contemporary artists, it feels like a world opening and then as time passes, you already know a lot, and there just aren’t very many more earth-shattering moments of seeing something completely new, or you rarely to come across  somebody you have no awareness of, but  that happened to me with Kitaj. Even though he was so closely tied with a ton of artists that are very well-known, I didn’t know him, and I was shellshocked by his work. I went to the panel discussion related to that show and one of the people on the panel was his painting assistant, towards the end of his life, and she provided a lot of like information about the actual day- to-day life he had, how he painted. His last works are a lot more spare, there's like a lighter touch, there's less paint being applied, it's more targeted. She talked about how he would make a mark, and then he would sit for like an hour or two and look at the painting and then get up and make a mark, and that really resonated with me because I feel like I'm a very fast painter, when I'm doing the actual process of painting, and then the works kind of sit around for weeks and months. I look at them a lot and spend a lot of time thinking about them and then when I make the adjustments finally, it's also very quick, but it's only quick because I've been obsessing about what I was going to change for so long. I like that, the going between working really quick, to get the marks that you want to make, the gestures you're trying to get, because it has to have that loose quickness to it, but then there is the rigor of really thinking about the next moves and what you're going to do.

Brooks There's a need for both. It isn’t just laying the groundwork, but—not in every painter’s case, but certainly in yours—there is a record of action. You see brush strokes, you see some layering. There’s a physicality, however restrained it might be, to some of the parts of the work. That has to be done in the moment, it records the moment. But I also see the deliberateness that develops toward the end of the process of making your paintings.

Cudahy There's so much letting things happen and reacting to things as they happen, but  ultimately I feel like so much of the finished painting is what you choose to let stay there and then what you choose to edit.

Brooks And how do you make those decisions?

Cudahy It's just that you know?

Brooks Right.

Cudahy When a painting's not working, you know that it's not working.

Brooks That’s true.

Cudahy And it's the worst feeling, it's like this itch that you can't scratch until, however you settle it, you set it right.I don't know what makes the painting finished, but I do know when it's not.

Brooks Right, and it could be the smallest thing, or it could be a huge change that it needs to make it work.

Cudahy Exactly.

Brooks You recently opened a show called metronome yawned in Calgary at the Esker Foundation in Calgary.

Cudahy Yeah. They do really interesting shows. In lieu of having a themed group show, they do this thing where they have several solo shows that happen concurrently that share thematics. I like that idea for presenting work. There is a connective thread between me and the three other artists who had shows at the same time, but each of us is presenting a show that's  independent from each other.

Brooks I like that way of working too. My show in Cincinnati, at the Weston, opened a couple weeks ago and there are two other shows that opened concurrently. One of the artists is the amazing Beverly Fishman, and the other is Terrence Hammonds, a Cincinnati artist who works with collage. You have to walk through Terrence's show to get into my show and while our work is very different, there is certainly a connection, a kind of conversation that's happening. And Bev's work and my work are very different, but we share a color palette.

Cudahy In the Esker Foundation show, seeing all the work in person, I think the real thread that connects—and this is also just the kind of painting that I'm drawn to—but everybody was very focused on making really thought out and complex surfaces. The painter Magalie Guérin, who is making more abstract work, has so much going on on the surface that related to the work that the other three of us, who are way more representational, are making. There is just this care and this consideration of the surface that connected all the work.

Brooks The shows look beautiful, as does the space.

Cudahy Yes. None of the install shots and walkthroughs that I had done virtually really were able to really capture how good the space is.

Brooks And what’s coming up next for you?

Cudahy My next thing is like a year from now, which is also kind of strange.

Brooks Is that fun or scary, to have it be so far into the future?

Cudahy Right now I'm thinking fun.

Brooks I know you've had periods in recent years where you were just working on so many things at once.

Cudahy Yeah, so this is nice just to have so much time leading up to a show.

Brooks Can you say where the show will be?

Cudahy It’s going to be at the Grimm New York space, and I’ll have upstairs and downstairs.

Brooks How exciting.

Cudahy I’m starting work on this video animation thing, which I wanted to do for a show two years ago but truly there just wasn't enough time to do it. For this show, I feel like I have enough time to really be kind of ambitious in what I’m doing.

Brooks Have you worked with animation before?

Cudahy Okay, so it’s animation light. It’s not stop motion, but each drawing is like a slideshow.

Brooks Okay. Cool.

Cudahy It's not so much like an actually animated thing.

Brooks It's interesting that Ian has made a film and you're moving slightly, ever so slightly, in that direction.

Cudahy He's filming things in sixteen millimeter, and digital handycam, and then actual high quality digital footage, and archival footage. The mixing of all those textures has been really inspiring to me. I feel like it’s kind of what we have been talking about with the surface of the paintings, thinking about the video as having a surface, or like different textures and feelings, and it’s like that is a place for the content, or the emotion, or the narrative to go. That's definitely on my mind when I'm thinking about how I want to make this video.

Brooks That's so cool that you all are influencing each other, and developing together, and exploring similar things in different ways.

Cudahy I feel like our practices have been so entwined since we met. I feel like a lot of time we're responding to each other, and maybe because we work in different mediums, or because they aren't always immediately shown in context with each other, so that might not be super apparent, but I feel like our work is like very enmeshed.

Brooks I listened to a podcast you did with Unibrow Radio a couple of years ago and you talked a little bit about how your work and Ian’s work are connected. I loved that you said if he has a really strong idea, you can’t say no to him. You just have to let it happen.

Cudahy Yeah. I feel like I do this definitely with with Ian, but also with any artist, really. If they’ve asked me to be a part of their project or to collaborate in some way, I feel like I have to say yes. It’s a kind of reciprocity. If they trust what I’m doing, I need to do the same. If Ian is going to pose for me, in any way that I ask him to, then I'm going to do the same for him. If I respect somebody and their work and their practice, I want to trust them and I wouldn't say no to an idea that they had.

Brooks That’s wonderful.

Cudahy I do think in order to do that, you have to let go of your ego. Especially with Ian…he has a lot of really wacky and strange ideas {laughs} and he also likes to have people pose in sort of unexpected, strange ways, that you kind of have to turn off your brain and not worry about what you're going to look like.

Brooks Ian has very specific ideas and his aim is to make the photograph he wants to make, which is a different thing than wanting to flatter the sitter. That might also happen, but it’s not necessarily his aim.

Cudahy I feel like it’s noticeable because it's photography and there is this more one-to-one sense of like a good photograph should be flattering in the subjective ways that the person who's sitting for it wants it to be. I'm so drawn to the idea of him making the best photographs, and to the idea of him making what he wants, so I don't care what I look like.

Brooks Yes, and perhaps not in every case, but in many cases with Queer photographers, we're so used to seeing a lot of idealized imagery. I've sat for Ian a couple of times and he had very specific plans for me, and also for the other person I posed with the first time. I let him do what he wanted to do and one of the photographs, as a photograph, I thought it was very successful, even if it wasn’t the most flattering angle of my ass. To be fair, my ass wasn’t that great at the time. It’s much, much better now because I’ve been doing my squats and my lunges. So maybe we need to redo the photo. {laughs}. But accentuating my ass wasn’t the point of what we were doing.

Cudahy It's such an interesting can of worms; this is such a unique moment for portrayal of the self with how much control you have over the obviously edited social media version of yourself. It’s funny because there's this lack of control, like when you walk outside of your house, in New York City, at least, your image is surveilled like eighty-five times. You don't have control of your image. Your bank wants to scan your face! I feel like that lack of control on one hand and the control we have with social media has created a more obsessive —than in the past—drive to control your image in the world. We feel like our agency is in that portrayal. I don't have any answers or even any strong feelings about that, I'm just confused about it.

Brooks And you’re just letting things happen as they happen.

Cudahy Yeah, I guess…it's like a lot of things…when you don't have control over big systems, I feel like you try to control what you can or what you think you can control.

Brooks How does that play out in the studio for you,  with regard to painting, the balance of control and letting the moment or the materials take you where it will?

Cudahy It is impossible to actually do or really even know if you're doing it, but I try not to make things necessarily in response, or to subvert things, if that makes any sense. I feel like when you're working in that way, reacting to everything, you are always stuck with being obsessed with whatever the dominant culture thing is that you are trying to resist or subvert at the moment. I try not to make things as a one-to-one reaction or in response to a anything. It’s hard to explain, it’s so amorphous.

Brooks Perhaps the nature of working is that amorphousness.

Cudahy I feel like a lot of reacting is about reacting against harmful binaries that exist in our world.

Brooks Such as?

Cudahy Like there is human over here and then there's nature over here; the separating that we do and the reacting to it is almost, in certain ways, solidifying and upholding to it. I'm interested in maybe trying to sidestep that by not letting the oppressive thing always dominate the conversation.

Brooks You’re determined to forge your own path and not to react to or to be swayed by too much noise or or the dominant opinions or dialogues of the day.

Cudahy Yeah. I want to look at things with that specificity we were talking about earlier, which exists outside of the brain, when the mind is on autopilot. I’m just trying to present bodies, not in a neutral way, but not in defiance of anything.

Other Swans Conversation No. Fourteen

Anthony Cudahy (b. 1989 Ft. Myers, Florida) received his MFA from Hunter College, New York, NY (US) in 2020. His solo exhibition Spinneret debuted at the Ogunquit Museum of American Art, ME (US), and travelled to the Green Family Art Foundation in Dallas, TX (US) in 2024, accompanied by a dedicated publication. Cudahy held his first solo museum exhibition in 2023, titled Conversation, at the Musée des Beaux-Arts de Dole in France. His work has also been included in numerous international group exhibitions.