Saint Dirt
Dryden says that I stole this idea from him, and I used to deny it, but he may be right. The first time that I met Dryden he was working on a drawing of a Saint Sebastian poked through with needles, and later he got a start on a large version of the same idea. I really never felt like I had lifted the idea from him, but looking back on it I wonder how I could deny it.
Curt Witt was (and somehow still is) the neighborhood junkie. We used to call him "Dirt Shit" but we stopped because he liked it. For a time he was living in a house behind mine. He was really just crashing with some other guys over there. He took me over once to show me his room, which was only a mattress extending into the kitchen from out of a pantry.
The mattress is actually visible in the painting, and that's my old house through the window. I used the column in the window to suggest a post that he could be tied to, like Saint Sebastian. The hose and the needles refer to his affliction, of course. I like that title I gave it, "Saint Dirt." It's better than Saint Curt since "Dirt" sounds so venal. "Saint Dirt," it's like the sacred and the profane in one.
Degenerate though it is, this is a good example of my use of portraiture combined with established archetypes, even if I did rip it off from Dryden.