Around 1995, at the close of the birthday self-portrait ritual (1993-1995) and just before the SFMOMA guerrilla installation and subsequent travel, the artist made two works he has come to regard, in hindsight, as premonitions made at a real fork in the road. The SFMOMA piece (uncatalogued, likely never recovered) anticipated something about the artist's eventual relationship to the art world and its institutions. Self Portrait 1995 (BB-OGP-1995-010), examined in this session, appears to anticipate the vantage-migration arc that would not have its later chapters (Deutsche Stadt, Skate City) until 2021 and beyond. At this hinge point the artist consciously chose to carry his original, self-taught artistic spark forward rather than abandon it for a different direction -- a decision he connects directly to why an archive-legible throughline exists to find at all, three decades later.
Source session
Artwork — Art/Official session, August 19, 2026
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Also from this session
- Throughline: Self Portrait 1995 (BB-OGP-1995-010) may be the earliest, unrecognized seed of the vantage-migration throughline (DCS -> Megacities -> Deutsche Stadt's orbital overview -> Skate City's ground-level return). Unlike any single work in the later arc, this 1995 painting holds both ends at once within one frame: an intimate, mirror-sourced human face at close range, and a viewer positioned as if from a satellite, looking down. The later series arrived at each half of that synthesis separately and sequentially, over roughly three decades; this painting appears to have held both, by accident, at 21. Found in this 2026 session, not claimed or intended at the time of painting -- an instance of the archive's recognition-not-planning pattern applied to the artist's own formal logic rather than to an outside influence. The artist's initial, long-held reading of the piece as 'about to leave San Francisco' was also revised in this same session to 'ascent and return' -- a road up to a vantage point with the road home still present in the painting, not a one-way departure -- which changes how this seed relates to Skate City's later re-grounding at street level.…
- Throughline: A recurring mechanism across the artist's early self-taught period: not knowing a given synthesis or technique was supposed to be difficult or impossible is part of what made it achievable. Named directly by the artist in relation to Self Portrait 1995 (BB-OGP-1995-010) -- 'making things possible because it wasn't taught.' The artist's early practice was entirely self-directed: no formal art training, self-taught technique (including canvas preparation), preceded by independent reading in philosophy and literature and looking closely at art history before ever picking up oil paint. Loosely resonant with (though not identical to) the 'naive art' tradition of untrained artists working outside academic rules of perspective, proportion, and color theory -- and specifically with Henri Rousseau, a self-taught painter the artist actively admired at the time (particularly The Dream), whose biographical parallel (inventing imagined worlds -- Rousseau's jungles, this artist's invented SF coastline) was only recognized by the artist years after the fact. The artist has stated this autodidact period ran strongly up until he left San Francisco.…