Fabulator, An interview with Tony Scherman
Robert Enright

cover: Tony Scherman, The Rape of Callisto: Jupiter, 1993, encaustic on canvas, 60 x 54". Courtesy: Fred Hoffman Gallery, Los Angeles.

Tony Scherman is a fabulous painter. I mean that not only as an aesthetic measure but as a way of drawing attention to the way he invents fables of painterly identity. For the last 15 years he has been populating literary and mythological worlds with an abundance of characters. He works in series - "The Rape of Callisto," "The Rape of lo," "The Rape of Leda," "Banquo's Funeral" - using the narrative frame of the story as a place to begin his aesthetic inhabitation. Scherman's practice is to take these existing stories and assume squatter's rights. He then sets about changing the narrative neighbourhood; some people move out; even more move in. Some are good citizens, sane and predictable; others are undesirable and wayward, perhaps dangerous. And, of course, in keeping with his fabulist convictions, some aren't even human. Scherman's dogs -Hamish, the Royal Scottie, Cerberus's Mother and his astonishing Panda Bear - merging like an apparition out of the Tuscany landscape - are exercises in the efficacy of anthropomorphism. It may be that he effects some kind of animal reversal; the right leg and shoe of Jupiter as a golfer in The Rape of Callisto has the weight of a bear's foot (the fact that he looks like a long-haired version of Jack Nicklaus, "The Golden Bear," is a curious coincidence). And the drips of red paint that streak precipitously from his knee and shin seem like evidence of a bloody encounter. I know of no other contemporary painter who can invest the relatively benign (if not silly) occupation of golf with an underlying sense of menace. Jupiter is a dazzling painting but like so much of Scherman's work, it gnaws away at you long after you've initially made its acquaintance.

Scherman's world is layered with bewildering implications. He freely interprets his source stories; the nymph Callisto is changed into a she-bear by Hera, the persistently jealous wife of Jupiter. Scherman's presentation of Callisto as a panda, the most exotic and desirable bear, is a smart touch. It makes her a luxurious target for her son, a hunter whom she is fated to meet. So the potential violence seeps around the edges of the character's lives like a virus; it's almost impossible in this world to determine who's more sinned against than sinning. What are we to make of the Goyaesque brutality of Jupiter as Diana, in which the shape-changing leader of the gods becomes a woman? Or how are we to read the almost comical portrait of the still-human Callisto, wearing a pathetic saran-wrap mask, her mouth an empty "0" of surprise, pain, maybe even pleasure? Callisto is herself a shape-changer. We see her riding through a landscape as a doppelganger for Rembrandt's The Polish Rider; or we see her intensely close-up, her face a blizzard of marks and scumbled pigment, the inside of her unnaturally oval mouth like some spectral cave from which might come the imp of the Dangerously Perverse. Her face is a topography; it describes less a personality than an atmosphere. Sometimes the surfaces of Scherman's paintings actually look as if they've been charred, or as if some corrosive has been thrown onto them. It's a fetching violence; the Starn Twins haven't made works as seductively ravaged as these and they work with photography; Scherman, amazingly, makes these large paintings (they're usually five or six feet high) by applying encaustic to canvas. He burns the candle at both ends.

Certainly his most recognizable series is "Banquo's Funeral" in which he's flipped over a page from Tom Stoppard's brilliant play Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. Stoppard took a pair of minor courtiers from Hamlet and built a play around their peregrinations as they wander in and out of scenes from the play. Scherman does the same thing with Macbeth, except that he chooses to focus on Banquo, the Scottish king's friend and fellow hero. Macbeth has him murdered but there is no mention of his funeral which, Scherman reasons, there must have been. So he plays undertaker (he says in the following interview he's "interested in people going down, not in people going up") and places a wailing Lady Banquo in his visual narrative, her face a suffusion of red pigment, as if she'd bathed in one of the "multitudinous seas incarnadine" that wash over the play. He also plays detective and paints Search for Banquo, a superb work in which a pair of spaniels begins to move towards the ominous red float which will conclude their search. Scherman is enamoured of red - it suits the play and it seems to suit him. Look how he works it; the full, beguiling lips of Witch no. 1 and her hypnotic eyes are in terrifying contrast to Witch no. 2 with her small, opaque eyes and indefinite mouth. Her lips look like they've been stitched together with bamboo pins. Witch no. 3 looks like a mad Beefeater; you can't tell whether you should be amused by her presence or feel threatened.

Always there are ambiguities in Scherman's work. A recent work from "Banquo's Funeral" contains a subtle reminder of how rich and confusing his painted world can be. It's a snapshot-like painting of Lady Macbeth at the funeral. All you see are her feet, seductively wrapped in black laced shoes - more like ballet slippers really - with ribbons of material gathered and tied above her shapely ankles. From the angle of her body and the way in which her weight leans forward, you think she's about to move or fall over. But thrusting in from the lower right-hand side of the painting is a large shoe. The man who wears it - I could be Macbeth? - is there either to support the flighty queen, or to hold her up in a completely different way. What story is being told in this inspired painting: is it about lust, or fear; does it imagine power or does it anticipate madness? Part of what makes Tony Scherman's work so fabulous is that it doesn't invite any easy answers or offer any moral lessons. It just keeps obliging us to invent new and more sophisticated questions.

BORDER CROSSINGS: What got you interested in Shakespeare's Macbeth as a subject for such an extensive body of work?

TONY SCHERMAN: When I went to school in England we did a lot of Shakespeare and it was the one play that stuck. Over the years I'd always had in my mind to do something with it. One of the things about Macbeth that was very interesting to me was the fact that it had such a bad rap.

BC: Do you mean that it was the Yahweh of theatre - a play whose name couldn't be uttered?

TS: Yes. So I was interested in what might occur if I painted it. Thematically there are so many images in the play that are archetypes, and more than in a lot of other plays, these types are extremely well drawn. I also think we're living in a time culturally where the power of women and where the presence of woman as a distinct entity is of genuine interest. And let's just say that in the play the presence of the female as a source of power - from Hecate and the witches through Lady Macbeth - is very clear.

BC: It's a power that can be put to evil ends though. By the time of her demise Lady Macbeth is described as the king's fiendish wife.

TS: Well, it depends on how you read it. I'm not convinced that she is fiendish. This may be a woman who is not only ambitious for her husband, but who, on receipt of the news of the prophecy, precipitates what she sees as inevitable. Where he pulls back, she doesn't. In other words, my Lady Macbeth moves around. There are paintings in which she is beautiful and wicked and there are others where she is quite sympathetic.

BC: You have no reservations then in freely interpreting the characters? Lady Macbeth can be a sexy movie star crawling in from a Monet-like beachscape, and she can be dangerous as well. You want the whole range?

TS: I'm just not restricting myself to one interpretation, so I can do many versions of Lady Macbeth. I can cast her differently. But I'm not actually painting Macbeth; I'm painting "Banquo's Funeral," which is the name of this body of work.

BC: Why Banquo?

TS: There are two things that I see in him. One is that he is Macbeth's best friend and as his best friend he also shares the prophecy. And in the prophecy Banquo's children will reign. As you know, Macbeth has Banquo killed but there is no funeral in the play. So Banquo's funeral is a meta-text - the text within a text.

BC: There would have been a funeral wouldn't there?

TS: Clearly. So it's my literary device to create a situation where I can have any character present at the funeral that I want. And it allows me to paint the characters as they would be at the time of his funeral. I didn't want to be illustrative.

BC: Were you concerned that if you stuck too closely to Shakespeare's text that you would have found yourself falling into familiar patterns of rendering?

TS: It wasn't that. It was really just a move out. I stuck to the text when I did "The Rape of lo" and "The Rape of Callisto". But I found myself painting pictures which were for my own movies, so to speak. Some of which were a sort of Godard movie from the early '60s. I was also thinking about Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead. It didn't actually occur to me until I had done about 20 paintings that I couldn't find Macbeth. I couldn't find what it was in Macbeth that I wanted to paint. I wanted to paint the witches, I wanted to paint everything, but that in itself wasn't enough. Then I was in Kensington Gardens in London, sitting on a bench when I saw a woman's foot in a high-heel shoe. All I could see was one foot crossed over the other. I looked at that foot and I thought, "That is Lady Macbeth at Banquo's funeral," and suddenly I knew what it was that I was painting.

BC: That's the painting where it looks like she's wearing funereal ballet slippers?

TS: Right, I did several versions. In the one you're referring to she's wearing black shoes - clearly inappropriate black shoes.

BC: But they are pretty sexy. I mean this woman is still on the move?

TS: Yeah, she's having a great time. And because of the pose you imagine that if you could see the rest of her body she'd be holding a champagne glass. There's another in my studio and one in Holland which shows a very sexy high-heel with an arched foot. She's clearly sitting because her feet are crossed. There's grass, and she's probably having a cigarette, waiting at the funeral. She's also probably bored. But the first 15 or so paintings were really a search for Macbeth. I was painting them and I was excited but to paint the play was too big. What interests me in narrative is the idea of painting a moment that would be seen from different angles. So the idea of Banquo's funeral allowed me unlimited scope because now I have Macbeth's mother at the funeral, I have Lady Banquo, who's wailing, I have the Royal Scottie and there are all kinds of walk-ons. I couldn't have all these things if I were just doing a particular scene from the play.

BC: Obviously Tom Stoppard's play informed you. His method of taking minor characters and making them main characters gives tremendous scope for inventing natrative.

TS: Exactly. It's a great technique. In fact, there's a touring production of Macbeth on at the moment in England which is using a similar device. But nobody's done this in painting. That's why it was exciting.

BC: Is your approach filmic too? Is this a series of takes on a film you're directing in your own mind?

TS: Yes, it is a film in my own mind. I'm editing shots, as it were. Let me go back a bit. When a lot of people first look at the paintings, they see them as essentially traditional, that is, they're concerned with issues like pictorial space and mimesis. But on a second look they have a curious contemporary feel about them which is like film or like television. People can't quite get what it is. Is it a stylistic thing? Because the pictorial space in the paintings is not the pictorial space of the history of painting. That's very important. All the shots are foreshortened, there's a compressed depth of field. So we're actually looking through a telephoto condition where the picture plane is compressed.

BC: So you're a kind of paparazzi then? You weren't invited to this funeral but you're there with your telephoto lens?

TS: Exactly, and I'm checking in on the movements of all these people. Now some of them are posing for me. Some are clearly shots that have been structured and others are momentary, like you say paparazzi. Voyeuristic shots that shouldn't really be seen - private moments.

BC: In fact you get in so tight with many of the characters that the paintings become topographies, facescapes essentially. Are there many works that are framed in this way?

Ts: There are quite a few in the series. But in general over the last two years I've been developing this close-up in painting. It's not at all what Chuck Close is doing. It came out of two things. One was the idea of figure-and-ground. By having the face cover the entire canvas I eliminated the ground. What actually happened was that the eyes, the nose, the mouth, became the figures on the ground. The skin in the painting and the skin of the canvas are the same and that constitutes the ground on which these objects are the features.

BC: Another way of talking about them is that they are remarkably painterly. These are virtuoso paintings. It's evident as well in the material you use - I don't know anybody else who paints encaustic on canvas in this scale.

TS: Let me say a couple of things. One, I've taken the medium further than anybody else has in its history. I've pushed the envelope way past what was done in ancient Rome and certainly past Jasper Johns and the few people who have used it.

BC: And this is a deliberate goal you've set for yourself?

TS: For sure. In that I'm a good modernist. I've gone where no man has gone. I'm on the Starship Enterprise.

BC: Paint Trek...!

TS: Yeah, I was aware of that when I started using encaustic back in 1974. It was very exciting because anything I did I invented myself. But I want to say something that may sound a bit odd to you. These are not virtuoso paintings. The truth of the matter is that none of us at the end of the 20th century can paint. None of us has been trained. I went to the Byam Shaw School of Painting and Drawing in London for three years and then I went to the Royal College of Art for another three. I had access to the best teachers that England could offer and at that time England really had the best in terms of the figurative tradition. And I can tell you that 90 percent of them were drunk most of the time and so cynical that it was very difficult to get anything out of them. You had to teach yourself how to paint and draw. What was being taught in art schools (and it's gotten a lot worse since 1970) was taught by people brought up in the '5Os who had already dropped the pencil. We're living in the dark ages here. In Conceptualism and other areas there has been a renaissance. But in terms of rendering the real we're probably back somewhere around 900. I basically took a position that mimetic painting did not die with Manet. So I taught myself how to paint in public. If you look at the early work it's pretty bad. It has a lot of things in it that might make it good, but it's very clumsy. These paintings take me a long time to do because I don't really know how to do it, so they get really thick, because that's the only way that I can get it right.

BC: Well, I admire your humility.

TS: It's not false humility. When I look at Tiepolo... no, forget Tiepolo. When I go to the antique market and see any 19th-century painting - just your average, common, forgotten, low-grade professional artist - these guys knew stuff that we can't know because the tradition has been lost. It's a verbal tradition that has to be passed on.

BC: You mention Manet. Do you sense that your relationship to film is similar to his relationship to photography?

TS: Yeah. I think about Degas and Manet. But my real touchstone is Velasquez. Because in Velasquez the presence of paint as structure and mimesis are held in a very fine balance. It's a balance that I'm developing in my own way.

BC: So what is the relationship you're after between technique and content? One of the things I was referring to in saying how beautiful I find your paintings is that I can easily get lost in those atmospheres of paint - Turner and Monet and all the best atmospheric painters come to mind. Yet at the same time I'm aware that I'm looking at a pair of elegant women's feet in a pair of unusual shoes. Or I am looking at a dog. Do you sense there are times when the balance is in some jeopardy?

TS: It's always in jeopardy. If you could have seen some of the work before it was finished you'd see how it vacillates. They're very precariously balanced at that level. I'm taking your question maybe in a different way but the issue of beauty is very big for me. It always has been in my work.

BC: Why does it matter to you to make beautiful paintings?

TS: A few years ago I realized I needed to make paintings that were beautiful in order to get people to look at them. And once I had them looking at them, then they could begin to deliver other messages. But it struck me that in my time - the end of the 20th century - the more subversive or covert route through beauty interested me much more than a declaration of intent made solely on the basis of painting an issue. In other words, the theme or the issue of the painting - what the painting is about - has become the first thing that people look for in contemporary art. The 1993 Whitney Biennial exemplifies the idea that art has an agenda. This really comes out of a misunderstanding of Marxism, that art is to be instrumentalized politically and that becomes the entry point into the work. And that's why, of late, and particularly in Canada, the grant systems and governmental interference within the art world, has fostered a situation where the most didactic art is being cultivated. Having anticipated this when I was graduating in 1974, I knew that I had to go a different way. My way would be to seduce and betray. I had a natural sensuality and I thought, why not instrumentalize that rather than bury it. People were telling me that the trouble with my work was that it was too beautiful. I'd hear that and think, God, how fascinating. I'd read Baudrillard and Roland Barthes enough to be acutely aware that the sufface was the key to what I was interested in. In exactly the same way that I used to go to the National Gallery in London when I was little, and my favourite painting was Christ's Baptism by Piero Della Francesca. I used to go and stare at it. What fascinated me about the painting was that on one level there was a complex narrative and extremely complex symbolism and on the other hand there was this buried geometry. I mean the syntax of that geometry was buried in the painting - it was not didactic, it was not up front. I was very aware that I was in the presence of a piece of art that was operating at different levels simultaneously. That fed into an interest in the esoteric that I've always had. I guess I became interested in the rather dangerous idea that the painting could operate as an irresistible construct at one level, and that once one was in it, it might actually begin to signify something else.

BC: I get the beauty side of it but where does the betrayal come in?

TS: In most of the paintings what I'm after is that they signify their opposite. So the Royal Scottie is the painting of a dog, and at one level it will always be just a dog painting; or another will just be a beautiful painting of a woman and her shoes. It might be for a shoe fetishist. But we can identify the mode: it's a dog painting; it's a portrait painting; it's a landscape painting; it's a shoe painting and it will always operate like that. But at the same time, it's Lady Macbeth, and when one is aware of that then the painting can never be the same again.

BC: I'm interested in the complexity you saw in the Piero Della Francesca and your decision to go after that. Does that complexity come most fully in painting; is it mimetic rather than abstract?

TS: Oh yeah, mimesis is the key because there has to be recognition in order for there to be signification. But my operations are much more radical than that. I mean radical in the sense that after falling in love with a woman's lips in the painting, you find out she's a witch. But you only find that out after you've fallen in love with the lips. One is always seduced first. Now, signification is an open condition. So, if somebody was not seduced by the painting, or indeed knew that it was Hecate and therefore would not allow themselves to be seduced, that would be their relationship with the painting, but it wouldn't mean anything to me.

BC: Also, reading the painting isn't necessarily a chronological process, is it? I mean it isn't based in time.

TS: It's which one you know first. I'm working on what it means to illustrate a text? What does it mean to represent something? In contemporary art the word illustration is a really dirty word. I guess what we're really doing here is knocking on the door of metaphor. If I succeed in creating a metaphor whose equation is X equals Y to the power N, as opposed to a simile, whose equation is always X equals Y, it's an arithmetic condition. Whereas the metaphor keeps on yielding new and limitless meaning. It's exponential.

BC: I like that thinking. So let me ask you whether that's a man's foot coming from the left-hand side of the painting and which rests between Lady Macbeth's feet?

TS: It is.

BC: And what if I knew it was a painting of Hecate, and knew she was a witch to begin with and resisted the seduction? Would I be a fool and a liar, or would the painting have been defeated by my pre-knowledge of the subject?

TS: It's not my intention to seduce and betray. This may sound like a contradiction but when I paint the picture I'm not thinking about seducing and betraying. I am thinking about signification.

BC: So the painting takes on a whole new meaning because that foot is menacing as well. You could assume it to be her husband, but then who knows?

TS: That's probably the only painting in the series that has two figures in it. All the paintings are singular people. There are two reasons for that. One is that I've always been interested in classical painting and classical literature in which one of the central issues dealt with triangulation. For instance there's a triangulation with Don Quixote and Sancho Panza and the reader. Or say, in Velasquez's The Surrender of Breda you have the infantryman looking out at you and he is sharing with us. But he is trapped in the picture so there's a triangle between him, us and what's going on in the picture. Again coming out of film, what I wanted to do was to collapse the triangle so that there would only be the viewer - me - and the thing viewed on the other side of the picture plane. To tell a story without any triangles, through a series of these individual encounters, would precipitate the voyeurism you suggest when the viewee is not aware that they are being looked at, or a direct encounter with somebody's eyes, say in a portrait where they are looking at you looking at them.

BC: So in that sense all of the physiognomies are direct encounters between the viewer and the viewed? There's a kind of equation there? But you do some pretty amazing things. I can think of two paintings of Macbeth - moments when he is either in the process of encountering the witches, or has just done so. In the latter one, his eye has gone almost opaque.

TS: He's not listening anymore.

BC: So he has either absorbed power and is no longer interested in it, or the viewer has all the power because he's able to see a man who has recognized his imminent destruction.

TS: Right.

BC: The way you talk about your compositional strategy and your psychological reading of the paintings makes me think these things are very carefully worked out before you start. Is there also a process of discovery for you as you imagine the psychology while making the painting?

TS: It's all metamorphosis. The one thing that I let run freely is intuition, or what I might call poetry. I know that I want to paint Lady Macbeth, or I know that I want to paint the dog, but I don't know whether the dog is going to be looking at me or not, or have a leash or not. So in the act of painting I define the painting. Some of them don't work and they just get painted over or thrown out.

BC: Is there a fair amount of pentimento in the work?

TS: Enough so that you are going to get completely different paintings. Occasionally you'll get a dog under a portrait, because the dog didn't work out or vice versa. But what you're going to find is that the eyes may be looking in four different directions or have ten different looks.

BC: I want to talk about some of the characters you've amplified. I sense that you really like Lady Macbeth.

TS: Well, who is Lady Macbeth? She's the quintessential bitch, right? She really is a monster but she's such a complete monster, and what's so fascinating about her monstrosity is that she cracks up and goes mad. So there's this incredible trajectory right into madness. I guess I feel sympathetic towards her because she couldn't handle it. I talk to my characters while I paint them and I've had fantastic conversations with Lady Macbeth.

BC: There are moments like the one in Dungarven where she's a dish. She's buxom, she's in a bathing suit. Or in the painting of her looking in the mirror. She is a beautiful woman.

TS: Sure, but what is the standard comment about Hollywood by European filmmakers? It's that Hollywood is superficial and so everybody's beautiful, right. So clearly if we're making a Hollywood movie of Macbeth, Macbeth is going to be good-looking and she's going to be beautiful. If we're making a Polish movie, she might not be.

BC: And if Godard were making the movie...?

TS: If Godard were making the movie, you'd want to fuck her. To me Lady Macbeth seduces Macbeth. In the play there's a tremendous amount of seduction going on. Now you may say that's my erotic projection, but in commentaries on the play there are many references to the fact that the witches were actually trying to seduce Macbeth. Hecate scolds the witches for trafficking with him and she scolds them because they wanted Macbeth to love them. And Lady Macbeth's soliloquy is very eroticized. There's this shamanistic transsexual commentary. So, you can imagine she used all her powers to convince him, because he didn't take the bait right away. There is clearly a case for Lady Macbeth being extremely powerful in a sexual way. But there may be other Lady Macbeths who are just regular women married to a regular guy. I mean I have yet to paint that. And it may not be for Lady Macbeth, it may be for other characters.

BC: What about the witches? We see the portraits of Macbeth when he's encountered them, but we don't see them; I thought that a curious displacement.

TS: Right, there are displacements. One of my witches is going back to the old Celtic tradition and one of them is a very young virgin.

BC: Oh come on, not the witches? I always thought the witches knew exactly what they were doing and I'm sure they were seducing Macbeth.

TS: But one of them is a child, one of them is a middle-aged woman of child-bearing years and the other one is old.

BC: This sounds more like Edvard Munch than Shakespeare.

TS: Right, but I did some witches who are like Revlon adverts. Remember I'm preparing for three or four shows.

BC: Is this inexhaustible material for you? When you say you re doing a number of shows, you don't say it with any trepidation. It's with a sense of excitement and expectation.

TS: I'll have to cap it. But you could give me any subject. The thing about Macbeth, though, is that there are so many players. It's a long play, there are a lot of characters and they all have a very clearly defined agenda. But the play's also full of dicks. It's like everybody you've ever met is in there, including yourself. But I do have future projects on which I'm doing research. I won't be doing this for eternity.

BC: What you said earlier about the power of women is interesting because other bodies of work you have done, something like "The Rape of Callisto" and "The Rape of Leda" and "lo" are all narratives where women are in positions of danger. You know "did she put on his knowledge with his power/ before the indifferent beak could let her drop?" I'm using Yeats to ask about your interest in women, including in Macbeth, who are in positions of danger and power simultaneously. Is that what interests you about these particular narratives.

TS: I think it's that I have my own narrative. And I think that when I tell their story, I'm plugging in. And my narrative is passing through their narrative. So in The Rape of Jupiter there is always this strange relationship - and I haven't finished with that - between Jupiter who is either seduced by, or rapes Callisto and lo. Anyway Juno takes vengeance on these women for having seduced her husband. From a post-structuralist view she's an enabler. What does she do? By punishing them as opposed to punishing him she literally sets things up so that he does it again. I mean he gets off with a light scolding. So it's like watching a couple of junkies. I think my paintings are probably for women. I've thought that for a long time. So if you ask me who I'm painting for, I think I'm painting for women.

BC: There is an absolutely exquisite painting, The Rape of Leda, where Leda is seen from under water. Why do you imagine this thing happening in a subterranean world?

TS: Most of these are water myths and in this one Leda is raped by the swan. You don't see the swan, but you're under water looking up. The question for me while I was painting the picture was, "Who am I?". Maybe I'm the swan coming up from the deep, maybe I'm Jupiter or maybe I'm a swimmer who's watching this as well.

BC: Where did you come up with the notion for this painting?

TS: I go to these markets and I pick up stuff and there were these terrific books called Photographing Unknown Beauties by P.H. Peterson. They were from 1956 and they're sort of soft porn. These girls are young beauties - some of them show breasts, and some of them are coy. And some are unbelievably beautiful girls. The book included a series of underwater shots. So a lot of the material comes from low culture. My job is to transform it into high culture.

BC: So who is the model for Lady Macbeth at Dungarven? She does look vaguely familiar.

TS: Well, she's actually out of one of these books. She's an extraordinarily beautiful women. I guess she was a model.

BC: She looks like a young Rita Hayworth or Ava Gardner or someone from that period.

TS: I think it's that these myths were popular. They were the low

culture of their day. So to go to those sources seemed appropriate.

And also when I was younger my life had a lot of what I paint in it.

So a lot of these paintings are autobiographical in some respects.

BC: In that they contain and make manifest desire, you mean?

TS: Desire and also a preoccupation with downside narrative. I'm not interested in people going up; I'm interested in people going down.

BC: Do you want a patina of decadence working in the paintings then? Does this interest you?

TS: No, I'm not decadent and my subject is not decadence. You could say that in the story of Macbeth there is degeneracy at a certain level, but I wouldn't say it is necessarily decadent. Decadence is a conscious manifestation. It is a decision people take in full consciousness; degeneracy is much more genetic. I mean people are guided by the subconscious. But for me decadence is a very conscious act. When we see the Rolling Stones or Rimbaud as decadent what we're really appreciating is that they're fully aware of what they're doing.

BC: They're in control of their constructed identities?

TS: That's what they want. That's precisely their form of radicalism. So it's not my intention to make paintings that are decadent, although some people would say that they were. I'll give you an example of what I find interesting, and then you'll get the whole picture. Up on the 54th floor of the Toronto Dominion Tower here in Toronto there's a bar and a restaurant. It's a beautifully detailed Miesian bar, and you get a view of the city which is unbelievable. But what is really great about it is that if you go up there at 12:00 o'clock on a Wednesday or a Friday night, really late, you find this extraordinary place. It's really sordid. You have a group of extremely well dressed people basically looking to get fucked.

BC: This is Toronto's upper level demi-monde?

TS: These people are brokers but they've had too much to drink and they're basically in for anything. There's a certain atmosphere. What doesn't interest me are white trash bans or strip joints. It's not interesting because there the signifier signifies what it is. What's interesting about the 54th floor is that the signifiers are all signifying their opposites. It's fascinating. Some guy or woman sitting at the bar looking totally elegant, really well dressed, great handmade suits. But in fact what's inside that suit is not what it signifies. That interests me. I don't know whether it's me or them who's decadent.

BC: In some ways it's not very different from the way I would describe Leonard Cohen's decadence.

TS: Yeah, or Balzac. It has a certain interest and a certain kind of pretense.

BC: You've said that the paintings are autobiographical. I assume they're also emotionally satisfying for you, not just because you love making paintings but because they work you through your life as well?

TS: I guess so. There's very little I've painted that I haven't seen.

BC: And yet you gravitate towards frames of narrative that are already given - like classical, mythological or literary sources. What would prevent you from inventing your own narratives without using an inherited story as a point of departure?

TS: I tried that in the '80s in various paintings. But I found what interested me more was the mimesis of the text. In other words it's like a double mimesis: the thing recognizing the painting, but there's also the thing recognized as the cultural entity.

BC: You also like learning and tradition. In that sense you're a traditional man. Since you're interested in complex ways of meaning and signification, if you take a passage or a story which is recognized as having meaning, then don't you already have a head start on anyone else in the race. It's already loaded?

TS: Yes, it's loaded. Except that the gun is pointing at me you see. If I paint Macbeth and screw it up, it's high risk. The whole point about painting these guys is that I reveal to myself where my depth might or might not be.

BC: I see what you mean. Then you're not a traditionalist, you're just arrogant because you take on everything?

TS: I don't have anything to lose. In other words it's not risky for me to paint Macbeth, it's only risky if I thought that I could be judged. These are genuine paintings, they're not paintings done for effect. I'm really not interested in a kind of critical effect. These characters, conditions of painting and narrative are all things that interest me. I'd be doing them on a desert island.

Tony Scherman, The Rape of Callisto: Callisto, 1993, encaustic on canvas, 60 x 54". Courtesy: Galerie Barbara Farber, Amsterdam.

Banquo's Funeral: Lady Macbeth, 1995, encaustic on canvas, 36 x 40". Collection: Irving and Jackie Blum, New York.

Banquo's Funeral: Lady Banquo, 1995, encaustic on canvas, 36 x 24". Collection: Galerie Daniel Templon, Paris.

Banquo's Funeral: Search for Banquo, 1994-95, encaustic on canvas, 48 x 48". Private collection, New York.

Banquo's Funeral: Witch No. 3, 1994, encaustic on canvas, 40 x 36". Courtesy: Galerie Barbara Farber, Amsterdam.

Banquo's Funeral: Witch No. 1, 1995, encaustic on canvas, 30 x 30". Courtesy: Galerie Daniel Templon, Paris.

Banquo's Funeral: Witch No. 2, 1994, encaustic on canvas, 30 x 30". Courtesy: Galerie Barbara Farber, Amsterdam.

The Rape of Callisto: Callisto, 1993, encaustic on canvas, 60 x 60". Courtesy: Fred Hoffman Gallery, Los Angeles.