Various Spills memorialized as Playing Card Paintings

I've been doing a lot of painting lately, getting ready for an upcoming show at Max Fish. My friend, Max Schumann, with whom I'm collaborating on this endeavor, has decided that he needs more time, so it looks to be pushed back for a month. These are some of the smaller works I've made so far for the show. There are some very large works for the show to complement these. The subject is not a new one for me, but there is a vitality to the painting, despite the grim theme, that pleases me. I hope that it may please anyone who may come across them. The show at Max Fish is now set for April 2013. If you happen to be on the Lower East Side of Manhattan then you may look for it.

Samard Nhum, Recent Finds

It was my coming upon the first picture above (on a site where I frequently visit and leave comments) that prompted my recently renewed interest in this model, as the image came from a set of photographs with which I was hitherto unfamiliar. It turned out to be a very large group of pictures. They are meant to represent the work of a photographer with whom Sam proceeds to couple:

Of the remainder of this vast series of images, perhaps more anon. (I'm not sure that I want to show them as whoever was responsible for this group of porn pics slathered the pancake make-up pretty heavily on Samard's handsome face. Maybe he had a few zits on that unfortunate day, but I would have prefered his visage less artificially and crudely made up.) For now I would like to present the fruits of my quest, crisper copies of those initial photos which fixed this guy so firmly in my imagination.

Samard Nhum, Circa 1995



Seventeen years ago I made a video tape recording of one of my exploratory sessions on my roommate's (Mpoy Ngondo's) web TV (an early internet provider, expensive, archaic and slow) while he was at work (with his permission.) Near the end of this long recording there are a number of photographs of Thai male models, mostly naked (though sometimes the genitals are crudely obscured,) and among these pictures is a group of photographs of a young, very muscular fellow with the false name of Samard Nhum. For many years I've searched the internet for further glimpses of this ethereal creature to little avail until recently, at which time I discovered the picture search on Google image, where one is able to upload an image to the engine in order to find various sites where it appears, so that one might find a better copy with higher resolution, or perhaps even the source of the image, and so on.... In order to make this search I went about shooting digital photographs from my television screen and piecing them together (as the web TV browser only presented the upper or lower parts of the photo within its frame.) These then are the fruits of these recent labors: not the new, higher resolution images I searched for, but the composite photographs taken from television screen, which I ended up finding more interesting.