F. Scott Hess

The Pissing Boy represents 3 PM in my Hours of the Day series. Six months after I completed it in 1998, I suddenly grasped what it was about, and how it intersects with my earliest art making. My parents divorced when I was seven years old, and after age eleven I didn’t see or hear from my father for 32 years. I began to make erotic drawings shortly after he left, and continued this through my college years. In my twenties I realized that my images of bound women were an attempt to restrain the archetypal woman (my mother), to prevent a further abandonment. This painting also made me understand that the erotic work, and to some extent my work as a whole, was meant to shock the establishment, the ‘paternal’ authority that I both desired attention from and simultaneously distrusted. The boy pisses into the room where the older men gawk in disbelief, while his father enters, too late.