Follow the instructions below to better understand what I am heretofore calling "The Nipple Initiative."

Okay. Picture yourself on a train in a station, with plasticine porters with looking-glass eyes.

Okay, that's just the warm-up exercise. Now picture an obviously pornographic image of a woman's face and neck, mouth open, lips red, teeth white, eyes closed, head cocked back, painted, let's say, seven feet wide by six feet high.

Something like this:



Actually not something like that, but that. That very image. At least that's the plan.

Now hark back to my painting titled "Close, But No Cigar" which I festooned with small red dots of paint, demarking, if you will, the corners of the squares that comprise the painting's primary grid.



Can you see them?

Now imagine the first painting festooned not with dots of red paint but, rather, with those amber latex nipples that you use with baby bottles.


Something like what's on top of the bottle you see here.

Now picture another painting, about the same size, of a some poor soul getting the waterboard treatment, likewise festooned (the word of the day) with nipples. Something like this, albeit with a closer approximation (perhaps flipped for symmetry) of the facial structure of the porn star:



This isn't a very good picture, but you get the idea. And finally...

Wait a minute. You're not going to tell them about your Dick Cheney idea are you?
Why not?
Because it's stupid. It's just one of those things where you have a good concept going and because you can't control yourself you end up messing it up.
I think Cheney is an integral part of the relationship between the two paintings.
How so?
Well, clumsily put, given that you've put me on the spot, the purpose of the two primary paintings is to stimulate debate on American foreign policy by juxtaposing the ideas of pornography and torture. Putting "Nipple Cheney" in between the two works because he is both obscene and demonic. Okay?
Okay.
I mean, if I'm supposed to be an important painter ... well, this is what important painters do. Witness Guernica.
Okay, I give up.
No, really. Look at it. The whole idea of that electric light near the top in the middle is to represent the artist shining light on the atrocity of war. More or less.

Okay. Sorry.
I mean, my upstate dealer subtitled my show "The most distinguished portrait painter of the century."
Okay, okay. No mas. I give up.
Good.
Okay.

Now, if I can get back to the narrative, picture a somewhat smaller vertical portrait of Dick Cheney planted in the middle of the previous two.

Festooned, of course, with nipples.

The primary paintings are called "Pornography with Nipples" and "Waterboarding with Nipples." The one in the middle is called "Nipple Cheney."

I wonder how quickly my taxes will get audited.

You're not that fucking important, you old gas bag.
What did you say?
Nothing.
No really, what did you say?
Nothing.
Okay.
Okay.