Behind the scenes at Let's Paint TV be Kevin Ferguson

This article is from Forestfire Magizine. -John

Profile
John Kilduff Does Everything

by Kevin Ferguson
John Kilduff has started swearing. With 60 seconds left until he goes live, he is still scrambling for his jacket. Another announcement is made: “get on the treadmill, please”. It can’t be found anywhere. He disappears from the studio, running frantically and returns to his treadmill while putting the jacket on. In five seconds his show will air, live, the countdown can be heard from the studio. John puts on his gloves and says out loud “What a bunk-ass experience.”

John’s jacket is devoid of sentimental or monetary value. It was purchased in a thrift store and, like its predecessors and successors, will be replaced when the suit it completes is too dirty and paint-ridden to be used in another show. Like the jacket, everything on the set of John’s show broadcasts that same air of pure functionality: the treadmill, the stove, the paintbrush, the telephone (to take live phone calls) and the cooking supplies all give off a paint-splattered utilitarianism. But on his show, Let’s Paint TV, he literally does it all: cooking, painting exercising; and he does it all at once.

John, 41, grew up in Oakland. He’s tall, balding, and outgoing, like the friendly uncle who hangs out with the kids at family gatherings. A lifelong artist, he received his Bachelor’s in fine arts at Otis Art Institute in 1987, and is a current Master’s in Fine Art candidate at UCLA.

When I first saw his show, I thought that John Kilduff wasn’t a real person, that some performance artist had taken the time to create an elaborate Tony Clifton-like persona to use as a vehicle for his art. When I met John, he had a mysterious scar on his cheek. I didn’t ask him about it. He later sent me an email explaining it was the result of a run in with some bougainvillea plants. It answered the question, but finally did in the idea that there was some mastermind behind the John Kilduff enigma. It ruined the suspense.

That same suspense was what I found most interesting about John’s show upon first viewing. On that episode he was painting, exercising, and blending a lemon-based smoothie. Seeing a man running on a treadmill while painting and cooking is an absolutely hypnotic image. To add to the psychedelic mayhem, John runs in front of the blue screen while layers and layers of tacky effects are piled on. At times, it’s funny, at other times the show is transformed into a visual representation of a distorted feedback loop: John Kilduff is infinity and this is art.

The image of the treadmill, the artwork, and the food, was in fact the impetus for the show. Before that, John’s show was only a somewhat quirkier-than-average painting program: liken it to a public-access version of Bob Ross. John would sometimes shoot on location in Venice Beach, or bring on an actor dressed as Saddam Hussein. Thanks to John, Saddam was finally able (bawling) to come to terms with his traumatic childhood.

Partly due to the treadmill, but also largely to his almost complete lack of preparation, Let’s Paint has an inherent chaos. For today’s show John bought a frying pan, oil, and pancake mix at a nearby 99 cents store. At the show’s start all of the items sit unopened next to his treadmill. The callers, mostly pranks, add to the frantic experience, and for that reason they’re welcome, “even when you think they’re bad they can actually be quite good,” John remarked.

After the show ends, I sit with John at a Denny’s across the street from the studio Let’s Paint is shot in. We’re sipping Arnold Palmers and eating a variety basket of fried appetizers. I ask him about where he got the idea for adding the treadmill. “Initially when I did do the treadmill painting it was an experiment I didn’t even bring it on the show I was doing it in my studio I had people sit and pose for me and I did still lives I got people from Craigslist. I got a couple of nice paintings that way.”

Most responsible for his relative notoriety (and many others’) is YouTube, he started uploading recordings of Let’s Paint in August. He’s uploaded every new episode since. “It’s great, it’s great. I mean it’s what I loved about cable access… you are your own person here. In theory you could have someone help you out, but basically you can do this yourself.” Between the two formats (YouTube and cable access) there is a common thread in their democratization of video media. The only difference being, is YouTube is more or less a million-fucking-times bigger than any public access channel. Said John: “Thank God for YouTube”.

On October 4th, 2006, Let’s Paint broke. Comic and art blog Meathaus (www.meathaus.com) posted a link to one of his best episodes: Let’s Paint, Exercise, and Blend Drinks. Chris McDonnell, who co-runs Meathaus, might be the only person who loves John’s work more than I do, echoing John’s credo, “You couldn’t pay someone to make a show like this. You couldn’t produce this anywhere else but a public-access studio. This may be the perfect television show.”

Noticing Meathaus, Boing Boing, an infamous group-blog, posted a link to that same video, that same day. Kilduff’s YouTube hits went through the roof. It’s not clear whether Kilduff is teetering on the brink of internet superstardom or an artist finally getting a little bit of well-deserved recognition.

John’s recent success has brought him a 30 second USA (the cable network) ad spot. He lamented to me that “They never aired it. They just put a montage of me on the treadmill”. More recently, John painted Tyra Banks’ portrait, from his treadmill, on her talk show in a talent-show style segment -- he won.

What fascinates me most about John’s show is that it defies classification. There is no clear line that differentiates John Kilduff, the MFA student and painter, from John Kilduff, the perpetually optimistic and perpetually out of breath public access host. There’s no clear line to say that the show itself isn’t art, a new hybrid of painting, video, and performance. He certainly isn’t going tell you that.

However, and this was before everything, before the Denny’s interview, before the frantic Jacket search, in the middle of our first interview he said, without provocation: “Can one be on a treadmill for the rest of their lives?”
But only if we could, John.
Visit letspainttv.com for more information and clips of the show.