rachel feinstein

yesterday i was perusing the web and came across an interview with rachel feinstein (from interview: http://www.interviewmagazine.com/art/rachel-feinstein/5/), the new york artist/muse/fashionista/mother whose armpit has a tattoo of a vagina with ants marching out of it. oh, i do like her art, but the tattoo kills me. my favourite part of the interview recounts how she met her husband...

"...I built a big, Sleeping Beauty’s gingerbread house that I slept in. I would sleep there during the day, because I was working at night, and you could watch me getting humped by this motorized castle while I was sleeping. It was really crazy. I would wear a fresh cherry on my neck every night, and I had platinum hair, and I wore big glossy red lipstick, and I would wake up, and the lipstick would be smeared all over my face, and the cherry would be smashed up, and people would look in at me through this frosted glass window . . . The night of the opening, this man came up to me and said, “You look like a woman in John Currin’s paintings.” At this point, John wasn’t super-well-known, and I didn’t know who he was, so I said, “I don’t know who that is.” He said, “It’s so strange that you have to meet him.” I said, “I’m not interested.” And the guy was a little bit weird. He was wearing a leather vest, leather jacket, leather pants, leather boots—he was almost like my leather fairy or something. I thought he was trying to hit on me, but I couldn’t figure it out. And then he started to call me at the gallery all the time. He started really harassing me, and I just said, “Leave me alone.” So then he decided to call up John. He looked up John’s number and called and said, “I saw one of your paintings in some show in Boston a year or two ago, and you’ve got to see this girl.” And John, being a man, I guess, instead of telling this guy no, walked over that minute and into the gallery. I was standing there wearing this big kind of frilly pink underwear that Patricia Field used to sell and a shirt that said I’m a satisfier on it. I was just waking up, so I was all messy . . .

O’BRIEN: You’d just been humped by the castle?

FEINSTEIN: Yes, I’d just been humped by the castle. And he walked in, and it was crowded—there were probably 50 or so people there, and for whatever reason I walked straight up to him, and I kissed him on the lips. And he said, “Are you Rachel?” And I said, “Yeah.” And that was it."

rachel typically works in the medium of sculpture, however more recently has been working with palette knives on mirrors, building up images of elderly baroque women...

rachel in fur by her husband, john currin