My number one priority these days when making a painting or when circulating through the social set is to fall in love quickly and without moral discernment. Aesthetic taste shall guide any discernment. I’m looking to fall in love in a similar fashion to what David Salle described when he affirmed and denied critical opinion’s assertion that the paintings were dead. I want to fall in love with pictures over and over again and expect to receive nothing but heartbreak in return. For the same reasons why sad songs are the best pop songs, unrequited love is the best love because it incites the most intensely felt emotion. A portrait inspires this kind of one-sided desire, the kind that hurts so badly even though you can’t get enough.

I am not looking to capture any subject and I am opposed to any other such violent nonsense. I am opposed to the privileged status that male portrait painters historically have enjoyed. Instead, I am looking to be captured by another’s beguiling image as many times as it takes to never be satisfied.

Sam McKinniss, 2007

Image: Installation view of "TRUE LOVE" at Real Art Ways, Hartford CT. Summer 2008