David Schoffman is as reclusive as a prairie dog in winter, a solitary artistic egghead, an introvert of the first order. In our thirty years of friendship, I’ve visited his studio maybe a half a dozen times. He is famously secretive about his work. To see his paintings, one must wait for his intermittent exhibitions.
To follow the progression of his ideas one must rely on rumor. One such rumor circulating recently is that Schoffman has embarked on a singularly impractical project of such quixotic magnitude that most agree will never see the light of day. I am referring, of course, to the bizarre compendium of small paintings collectively known as “The Body is His Book.” It has been reliably reported and confirmed elliptically by Schoffman himself in an 2005 interview in ArtContext that the plan is to complete 100 pictures using only a double zero kolinsky sable paintbrush.
Sean Van Belge, the former Sotheby’s intern whose infamous tell-all memoir “Branding and the Credulous Collector: My Life in the Art World,” earned him the ire of just about every human involved in contemporary art, recently snuck into David’s studio posing as a UPS delivery man and snapped a few hasty pictures. The photographs above, originally published in Missile, appear to add credence to at least some of the speculation.
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