The following are excerpts taken from an interview conducted by artist Sandra Low as a part of the catalog for Chinn's solo exhibition "On the Row" at Overtones Gallery in Los Angeles, March to April, 2008.
S: Let’s talk about your current series of work on homeless people. How did you get started on painting these people?
C: Well, after I graduated from USC, a few friends and I moved into the second floor of an old sewing factory. The building wasn’t zoned for residence, so we were living there illegally. It was in downtown, just a couple of blocks south of the Weingart Center, so we were just right outside of skid row. The Weingart Center is a homeless shelter. They have quite a lot of services aimed at very specific types of homelessness and different problems that homeless people face. They do a lot of research on homelessness too. We were living near by there and I had never ever seen that kind of living conditions anywhere. My Dad’s family is from Chicago, and I have been to Chicago, I lived in Los Angeles for three years, but somehow being there in downtown on San Pedro Street was… I mean, I just couldn’t not look at it, and it got to me. I’m going to sound like a “bleeding heart liberal,” but I really couldn’t stand it. You know I was painting pretty pictures of Mae [my wife], family and friends, and I walk out of the studio and there’s a guy who lived around the corner in this little palette and cardboard box thing that he made. He lived there for over a year. He never said anything. A lot of the people that I paint actually have really debilitating mental illnesses; some of them can’t even communicate. Some of them struggle just to put three words together. But I had to confront it somehow, and I guess the natural way for me to do that was with painting. I just decided to ask this guy if I could paint him one day. He was lying out on the sidewalk, and he was deathly thin, and looked like something you would see in photos from Africa or some third-world country. But there he was a block outside my studio under the hot, dry sun on a summer day, and I think that was in 2003, or 2002.
S: And he let you photograph him?
C: Yeah, I took pictures of him really briefly. I didn’t stick around to talk much or anything, and I went back and just painted it. I just kept doing it.
S: Have you always asked for permission to take their photos?
C: Yes. And now I talk with them a lot more. Sometimes I’ll spend an hour or more talking with them. Once you get them going about where they’ve been and what their life is like they will go on and on, unless they can’t. Then I will just kind of sit there with them.
S: Do you ever ask them to do certain things when you’re photographing them?
C: No not usually, I mean we might move. I remember this past summer it was really hot and I asked a guy if we could move into the shade, and he was more than happy to oblige. I have asked them to model for very specific ideas, where I had them pose in very specific ways, but that was when I was doing the elliptical paintings. No, I usually don’t ask them to do anything. We’ll just talk and every once and awhile I’ll take a couple shots or whatever. At the end I’ll go back and look at what I’ve got and see if there’s anything. I talk to a lot of people. It’s so easy to find something that will stand out to me. You just walk down a block and you can at least catch three people. At the end of the day I’ll look back, and I’ve talked to so many people. From all of that I just pick what stands out to me.
S: Do you compensate them? Buy them meals?
C: I do buy meals. I pay them sometimes if I feel comfortable doing that. I guess if I feel like they are going to buy drugs or alcohol I don’t, I try to find some other way, but occasionally I will pay them. A lot of the people down there have major drug and alcohol problems, that’s for sure. Most of the people that I talk with have more mental disabilities. I don’t know if they have as much of the problems with drugs and alcohol.
S: Do you feel like when you’re painting these things that you are actually painting their portraits? For me when I paint the human figure a lot of times they become types, like fictional characters. Do you feel like you are trying to capture them?
C: No. Absolutely not, in fact I change them a lot. Like in Market Street Pumpkin, I really exaggerated her wrinkles and made the nose larger. I actually invented the closed eye, and the neck. I really made the skin much more red. So, I change them a lot.
S: A lot of these pieces now have undercurrents of violence, and also a real biting humor too. Well, first of all there are a lot of them now that are decapitated, or have severed limbs…
C: Yeah, a couple of them. These two especially, Capitalist Casualty and Street Legal are clearly violent, yeah and the hand of Bubble Gum and Cigarettes too.
S: How did all of that come about?
C: Well, you know just in the last couple of years, I’ve been hearing news reports about homeless people getting attacked and beaten up, and also seeing homeless people in my old neighborhood without hands and feet. I have heard that some of the people would mutilate themselves in order to appear more sympathetic to pick upmore pocket change.
S: That’s so terrible…
C: Thinking about how cast off they are from the rest of society and how we generally look at them, and treat them, it really is an attempt to purge. It’s like, we don’t want to see them if we don’t have to. They should be on that far side of downtown, and they should not make their way to our nice neighborhoods. They should not lie around on our sidewalks. One thing after another, we are taking more and more away from them. I think it’s a way of avoiding that recognition, so that we can still feel good about ourselves. I guess that’s how I got to the heads. I think that the violence of some of the paintings is descriptive of how we, as a society generally view homelessness and those conditions, and how we purge ourselves, and our neighborhoods of those people. We try to get rid of them at any means possible. I think it is also descriptive of the violence that many of them face from time to time living on the streets, violence from us, which is both political as well as physical, violence from the police and even our hospitals, violence from each other, and themselves.
S: Do you get a sense then as the artist that you yourself, or at least metaphorically, and maybe visually are doing the decapitation, mutilating them?
C: Yeah, I think that I am implicated in that too, absolutely. I have those feelings too, I mean I think that is a part of it, dealing with my own guilt and shame especially when I was living down there. I guess it’s kind of different now because I am a homeowner and moved out of downtown. Maybe I am even more implicated in that now than before. But when I was in downtown I really felt guilty everyday, every time I stepped out my door, whether or not I gave them my pocket change. I just felt shameful and guilty and hate sometimes. Sometimes they can be very angry and aggressive, so it involves fear of them also. Absolutely, I think that was really what drove me, trying to figure out how do I live with all of this.
S: Is art making a compulsion to you? Your output is so productive. I am always amazed at how dedicated you are in terms of just that act of making.
C: If I can’t work I get really cranky. In fact I turn into an ass-hole. I don’t know what it is, I suppose you can call that a compulsion.
S: Do you try to paint every day?
C: Yes. I don’t, but I try to. Or draw, watercolor, ink, charcoal, something, I’ve got to do something.
S: What inspires you, or who, whether artistically or popular culture?
C: You know what really inspires me -- the Blues, and Tom Waits, Howlin’ Wolf.
S: Hardscrabble, lowdown, cry in your beer.
C: Exactly, that’s what fills the air when I’m working on these paintings.
