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New York’s favorite young artist talks about his art and his time at Roux

Arnie Palmer & the Academy Afterlife

Critics gone into exaltations trying to describe Arnie, “not Arnold,” Palmer’s paintings, calling them “drippy,” “gooey,” and even “masticated.” They hang in institutions as hallowed as the Met, the MOMAs on both coasts, and the Guggenheim, and the most prestigious galleries in New York and London. Arnie is also a graduate of the Roux Academy and he was generous enough to sit down with us and talk about his formative years as a student on the North campus, as well as life in the outside world. “To be honest, I never expected this kind of success. Part of me longs to go back to those days, sharing a studio, working in obscurity, but with friends.”

WORDS BY LAUREN GUEST PICTURES BY BEN GUEST

“Being an artist these days, people tend to latch onto you. It’s a cult of personality.” He laughs. “Maybe it’s the hair.”

Palmer is quite the icon. I saw him most recently in the last Sunday Times, exiting the annual Costume Institute Gala Met Ball with a pretty girl on his arm and that effervescent, Polidenture smile on his face. He’s the kind of celebrity unique to New York: an artist, an intellectual, a painter of all things. And unlike say Warhol or Pollock or Basquiat, artists we consider endemic to New York, he doesn’t seem the least bit gritty, damaged, or addled. Maybe he’s from a different time. The era of the new Times Square, with its squeaky clean streets and Good Morning, America crowd. Or maybe he’s just an artist with a more solid constitution.

Not that a lack of demons has affected his art. His paintings have both liquidity and punch, kind of like being knocked down and tumbled over by a powerful wave. Trying to hang onto the conviction that you’re an adult now, you’re not going to drown. At worst you’ll emerge with some scrapes and spitting

salty water. Yeah, that kind of a punch.

His work has been called “explosive,” “timely,” and, memorably, “Prozac-ian.”

“I wanted to create art that reminded people of what it felt like being alive. Not just the sensual but the visceral. And to be happy about it. I’m not the kind of artist that believes in the merits of suffering,” Palmer laughs. Palmer’s always laughing, at least in the time we’ve spent together. And drunken at least a gallon of sweetened green tea.

“I did literally live on this stuff at Roux. Tea fueled all-nighters! Not very debauched, I know, but true.’

‘During my first year, I had been messing around with inks, Sumi inks and blockwash techniques, combined with the tag style I was seeing on the streets. It was very cartoony and figurative. Over the years, the style has become more and more abstract. Last year, I completed a set of drip paintings [titled Seaward Exit: Brighton Beach] and it really freed me up to do more, I would say, languid work. And I’m getting older. There’s only so long that you can do that kind of young, hotheaded stuff.”

Palmer is turning 30 this year; he can no longer rely on the notoriety that comes with being a socalled “Wunderkind.” And he seems to have realized this on his own, putting motions in place years ago that would lead him away from the camps of contemporaries like Shepard Fairy and Banksy, a style expressed via nouveau résistance paste-ups and stencils. Palmer’s early work nodded at a different kind of graffiti anyway: wildstyle, an approach where the message was more typographical than political, involving interlocking letters that, in Palmer’s case, spelled out incomprehensible messages. “This is Peach’s war” or “Presumption faults presumption.” Far be it from this reporter to puzzle out the meaning, but Palmer says they’re mostly personal.

“Like most of the country, I was angry after 9/11. But I couldn’t channel that rage into a concise political opinion. The hurt felt far more private to me. A lot of real ‘street’ art isn’t made to protest the overreaches of the federal government anyway. It’s more about what’s happening of that person’s block.’

‘Which is not to say I don’t think there’s a space for that kind of art. People should vocalize their

opinions. I’m just not that kind of artist. And I thought I could be more effective at channeling the unspoken. Sadness and rage, sure, but the kind that’s not nameable and in a weird way, that’s sort of tied to joy. And all of these emotions are tied to colors. Once you see that, start feeling in color—it’s almost like synesthesia, but I don’t really suffer from that—you realize emotions can’t be charted along a spectrum, but a wheel. We’re just spinning in it.”

“Like hamsters?” I ask.

He laughs. “Well, no. Maybe it’s more like a wheel of fortune. You can’t always control where the needle lands, but sometimes you can push it a little. And that’s what I’m trying to do. Push people past their anger, to joy.”

Joy. Palmer says that word a lot. You would think he’d led a charmed life. But in fact it was less charmed than cursed.

Arnie Palmer grew up in Bed-Stuy, or BedfordStuyvesant, in the heart of Brooklyn, which experienced the brunt of the casualties from the gang wars, waged from the 1960s until quite recently. In the late 80s, when Palmer was still a preteen, he was

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conscripted on behalf of the Lo-Lifes as a lookout. He doesn’t like to talk about it, but apparently he witnessed some pretty nasty stuff.

“I don’t like to draw attention to it,” he said. “I feel like that particular story is played out and distracts from my work. You know, homeboy makes good, goes from shiftless criminal to responsible member of society. There are plenty of people that follow the same path out of a bad neighborhood. You just don’t hear about them. I got extremely lucky with my scholarship to Roux, but I also earned it.”

Which brings us to this article. “I’m a proud graduate of Roux,” Palmer says. “It was at RAA I found the mentors I needed to take my work to the next level. It may sound pat, but it’s true. I don’t find that I can think and paint in a bubble. And certainly, as a student, the more inputs you have, the better. The best thing about Roux is that everyone wants to be there, everyone wants to help everyone else achieve their best. And living in such a tight community, inspiration can come from some funny sources.’

‘I remember sharing a dorm room with this metal shop dude and he was describing his work to me in these oddball colors. I mean, he was working with steel, but in his mind, it wasn’t grey. It was colored by everything around them and he’d get excited by the idea of moving this massive sculpture, we’re talking ten feet high, into new spaces, just so he could see how it would take on new colors. And that got me thinking about light and reflectivity in a different way.”

And Arnie Palmer is not Roux’s only successful or even most successful graduate. Thousands of our students have gone on to thriving careers in graphic design, animation, architecture, fashion and design, and yes, fine art. It’s nearly impossible to walk the streets in New York without bumping into a former classmate, Arnie says, and because they’re in such different fields, he might not have gotten to know them any other way.

“But instead, it will be like ‘hey, so-and-so, architect of X,’ or a guy that does 3D animation, and I can invite them out for a cup of coffee and we sit

Placement After RouxInterestıng facts

The Roux Academy Career Placement department has been matching graduates with internships and employers for over 20 years. The department has teamed with major production companies, creative agencies, galleries, publishing companies, and other partners to help them find new emerging talent and find our students career opportunities in the field of their choice. 2011 statistics show we’ve successfully placed 1,649 of our 2,000 students from that year, within 3 months of graduation. Why the unusual success rate? Roux Academy dedicates a large recruiting staff: two members that specialize in the particular subject matter for each of our 10 departments. Placement Center recruiters work full-time throughout the year making sure that Roux portfolios make it onto the desks of prospective employers all over the country. They visit animation studios in Los Angeles and ad agencies in Chicago. In collaboration with the teaching staff, they also work with individual students to hone

their portfolios for the trends in certain markets. And moreover, they contact our large list of alumni actively working in these industries, who have so generously agreed to advertise employment opportunities at their firms and companies at Roux.

And that’s where we need you. Please contact the Career Placement center if you’d like to possibly source some of your talent from Roux. Not only do you get first dibs on the newest and mostly highly trained creative minds, but you help support the next generation of Roux alumni.

If interested, please contact Roxanne Carter at rcarter@rouxacademy.org or call 555-555-5555 for more information.

and exchange information and are really interested in what each other have to say. I guess it’s coming from an environment that encourages openness and collaboration. Nothing hard and fast has to fall out of it. You’re just sharing ideas. Being generous with them. And sometimes those shared ideas manifest in unexpected ways. David Giuetta [architect of the new Pegasus headquarters] emailed me the other day to say he took credit for the lines in Straight and Narrow, a painting of mine he saw in the Getty.” Palmer laughs. “I wrote to him and said, well then, I’m taking credit for the Pegasus.”

It is in the spirit of generosity that he has decided to sponsor this year’s Working Artist Scholarship, where one Roux alumnae personally mentors a selected student, as well as helps fund their education

here at Roux. After he volunteered, we asked if he’d be willing to star as our quarterly graduate profile and offer a few words to our students and prospective scholarship candidates.

“Don’t give up the joy,” he says. “Once you transition to the real world, the art scene, an office, or something else, there can be a lot of pressure to renounce or forget the wonder that is part of the creative process. Hang on to that. Roux is not a shelter; you can recreate and carry the experience you’re having now with you everywhere.”

And he laughs. Again! I tell him he’s going to have to stop that or people aren’t going to take him seriously. “Or maybe they’ll just take themselves less so. I came from a great place at Roux, but I’m still excited about where I’m going.” 

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“You’re just sharing ideas. Being generous with them. And sometimes those shared ideas manifest in unexpected ways.”

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