D. Dominick Lombardi (DDL): The year after you moved to New York, John Lennon was murdered by Mark David Chapman. I remember that December 8th, 1980, evening all too well. I was in my studio when I heard the devastating news over the radio and immediately felt dizzy, so I just laid down on the floor. I didn’t wake up my partner, Diane, thinking she should have one more night’s sleep without knowing. I’ve never analyzed how much that event changed my work. However for you, that agonizing night left an indelible mark on your painting style. You note on your website your art would quickly become ‘psychosexual’. Critics called it “tasteless and offensive,” and anyone who had seen what came from your collaboration with Judge Hughes (a pseudonym) at that time was deeply affected by it. I still have the book you both published in 1982, The White Papers, which begins with the assassination of John F. Kenedy and ends with John Lennon and I have to say it has not lost any of its potency. How could it? You were one artist at that time, who was willing to go as far as expressing the insanity of both of those events, and how deeply it messed you up.

DDL: Since 1990 you have taken on a more subtle approach to your narratives. However, your paintings and sculptures are no less revealing of the darker side of human nature—you’re just leaving more to the imagination. This approach, while more palatable, still resides at the edge of rationality, reason and stability. I’m thinking of the Baby Doll Clown Killer series (1995–99), work which I first saw in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and later included in an exhibition I curated with Steven Lowey titled “The Waking Dream.” Powerfully challenging and beautifully painted, that series always stops people cold. The death of innocence, the loss of pure fun, the creepiness of the kooky clown, a bad dream, what is the basis of what we are looking at here?

Mike Cockrill (MC): First of all, you suggest that the assassination of Kennedy and Lennon “messed me up.” They didn’t mess me up at all. They clarified a lot for me. These things are eye-opening. It is a window into what is real. I thought these “tragic events” were kind of life-affirming in a very counter-intuitive way, because it was Truth. What disturbed me growing up was what people in power do with all that power. Particularly those in political power. They do things that can get us all killed.

DDL: Wow, I misread that whole thing completely, but I totally understand what you mean. So, let’s try to get this narrowed down a bit and expand from that. You state at the end of an interview with Ellen Lubell that your work may be about “the tension between life and Beauty and The Nightmare.” Have you thought about that, if that is an accurate synopsis of your work?

MC: Beauty and The Nightmare. They share the space with us. They sit on the couch together and watch us in the room. Beauty smiles and makes you want to live. The Nightmare sits without speaking and tips his glass of wine to his lips eyeing you over the rim with heartless dissecting eyes. Are these characters in a metaphor? I do notice in my work that I have a tug between my desire to make a beautiful image formally while I am also compelled to engage with something really dark. Beauty is one thing and the unsettling and troubling is another. Can you have one without the other? Why do I feel compelled to include both in the painting? Maybe because it makes me feel more complete. More fully human.

DDL: We do live in a world of extremes, despite the fear mongering that glosses over the complexities of all aspects of reality. That constant conundrum is life and has been since forever. Saint Sebastian (2007) is one of your paintings that has that complex mix, albeit relative to another day and time. We both lived through the Bay of Pigs and the ensuing Cuban Missile Crisis, which brought the reality of a nuclear threat even closer to home. Then you have the martyrdom of Saint Sebastian in the young All-American Boy with the adoring onlooker punctuating the suburban sprawl of new 1960s homes. There’s a lot of 1960s references in different periods of your art—can you talk a little about the origins of that reference?

MC: I was not aware of the Bay of Pigs fiasco as a child, but the Cuban Missile Crisis in October 1962 had an enormous effect on me. I was in the fourth grade in Catholic school in McLean, Va. The same church Bobby Kennedy attended every Sunday. People were stocking up for Nuclear Winter by filling their suburban basements with supplies. My father was a civilian working at the Pentagon. He reported directly to General William Westmoreland. We weren’t stocking our basement with anything. When I asked my father why, he said he didn’t want us to survive a first strike. If nuclear war happened, he said it would be worse to live. The nuns at school sent us into the sanctuary to pray. They wanted us to die there–not cowering in the cafeteria under tables. I had nightmares well into my early 30s.

        My painting of a suburban Saint Sebastian was a reaction to George W Bush’s invasion of Iraq. Painted in 2007, I set the “sacrifice” of an American kid amidst completely disinterested suburbanites who party on in backyard barbecues. This was actually my metaphor about Vietnam. In the background we see a smiling, empty-handed JFK, and a laughing Bobby Kennedy with “the papers” who hands it to Robert McNamara, who hands it off the LBJ—a death warrant to 58,000 Americans and untold millions of Vietnamese. A row of hotdogs grill in the center of the composition. Only a young American girl is there to mourn her sacrificed brother. The models are actually twins from Northern Virginia.

DDL: Jeez, Mike, no sugar coating in your past. We had the old “duck and cover,” decade-old attitude that felt pretty ridiculous even at that time, and, maybe thoughts of a blinding flash of light that would turn us all into a smoldering stack of bones.But having that happy-go-lucky, pipe-smoking Dad grilling hot dogs is quite iconic when I hear your back story. I also see the Vietnam reference in the Kennedys, the gaggle of helicopters, very “Apocalypse Now,” combined with the contrast of a beautiful, happy, hopeful palette, all representing the rapidly changing times of the 1960s that hits as hard as it delights the eye.

        The Storybook and Americana Series goes from 2000 to 2010. Your next big series is The Existential Man (2012–2013), where the struggles of simply being alive strikes a very humorously futile narrative of the day to day. I’m sure there were lots of transitional works between the two periods, and I am wondering if there was anything specific that brought you to the Existential Man?

MC: Total artistic despair. I had gone from having sold out shows in galleries ranging from LA to Milan to New York to then joining a blue-chip gallery in Chelsea where none of their collectors were interested in my work. They didn’t get it. They thought it was too sexual or too illustrational. (When I finally left that gallery, the works began to immediately sell to other collectors. Thank God.) However, before that and by 2012, I felt artistically frustrated and thwarted. I decided to completely change my work. Instead of the colorful, fully rendered figurative paintings of the Americana series I switched to a simple cartoon office drone in skinny tie, usually missing an eye, and trapped in the drudgery of cubical life. The Existential Man who inhabited a grey world with touches of color that have “the cheerful earnestness of a therapist’s waiting room,” as I described it back then. I drew on my early experience from my first job in New York—designing business forms in the Purchasing Department at Merrill Lynch from 1980 to 1982. It was a fascinating world— and completely stifling. I worked in a cubicle.

DDL: And despite the darkness in the Existential Man, I see in works like The Abyss that distinctive, Mike Cockrill-type mind numbing wit. Then you move on to the Collage Paintings (2015–present), which you state, includes “Rococo re-imaginings, Suburban Landscapes, Grey Men, and Fighter Jets” that all have the dark side plus the magnetic aspects of your technical prowess. This current series is most different because it is very tactile with the elements of glued-on fabric that adds pattern and a patchwork of distinct areas. The painting that I see linking most to your previous series is The Pentagon Man, while Fragonard Falling refers to a time in 18th century France when the haves lived in seamless bliss while the have nots suffered and eventually revolted. Is Fragonard Falling a reference to a more recent decade like the 1960s or perhaps our current time? And how much has this new technical approach of collage and painting affected your subject matter or narratives?

MC: The Abyss did signal a big shift in my work. As dark as my mood was at the time, I imbued the Existential Man series with a comedic hopelessness. I should note that Dr. Strangelove is one of my all-time favorite films. It remains brilliant. How do you convey the complete annihilation of humanity except as a comic absurdity? Kubrick did teach me a lot about how to convey the folly of human nature.

        There’s quite a bit to unpack in your question: My use of collage, the multiple possible meanings. The different references in my recent series.

        In 2012, I abruptly moved away from the “low art” vernacular of American illustrated storytelling, such as 1950s children’s books and Norman Rockwell, and shifted my attention to the “high art” of Modernism. And then more recently, I moved to Rococo, as you point out.

        I always loved Modernism, and I never liked French Rococo. Next to Goya, Rococo was offensively frivolous and cloyingly sweet. So, I decided to engage with the thing I never liked. I took the confections of Fragonard and crashed Modernism into it. I used torn and ragged fragments of fabric, a propane torch, and attempted to paint delicate passages on disrupted and stressed surfaces. The painting could be coming together or falling apart. Which is it?

        I’m very aware that the privileged lives of the powdered wig classes were going to be ended beneath a guillotine. And yes, I am offering it as a cautionary metaphor for our gilded classes of today.

        This is also my reaction to the widespread destruction we see unfolding across the world. The invasion of Ukraine and the slaughter that began unfolding really set me off back in 2022. Blood red paint began running down my drawings and paintings. Fighter jets appeared in my art like fragmented death machines that kill the target and pilot too.

        I noticed the work isn’t so funny anymore. But sometimes dark comedy does remain. Like my grinning American maps with legs and arms that grab and devour. But in the end, it’s still a painting. It’s about making an artwork.

DDL: In closing, I wonder, in your painting Suburban Houses Green you depict a housing development that appears uninhabited within a composition that harkens back to High Modernism, in what looks like the quieter part of a post-apocalyptic world. Are we looking at the end of the American Experiment here?

MC: My suburban landscapes encompass whole histories for me—having grown up in Northern Virginia on the killing fields of the Civil War and in the orbit of the Military Industrial Complex. We were aware of all of this as children. Among my earliest experiences is witnessing the earth being torn open and shaped by bulldozers and earth movers. Whole stands of woods were bulldozed. The trees were pushed into tower piles and burned in the sun. I would wake up to the sound of hammers banging together the new homes on our suburban street.

        It was destruction and creation. The past was erased to make the future. In the beginning, the houses stood on treeless lots of dirt. As a boy this was all vivid and mysterious. Who were these people moving into the new houses? What secrets did the different families hold?

        Digging in the woods, we would find musket slugs from the Civil War. You couldn’t really erase the past. At an art opening of mine last year, a young woman from Virginia said to me, “I grew up six miles from Appomattox (where Lee surrendered). There is blood in the ground everywhere.”

        All of these things are at play. The past that never goes away. A future that always runs a step ahead. In the end, it’s all unknowable.

DDL: Thanks Mike, lots of great insights into your thinking and processes—it’s much appreciated. Even though we are almost the exact same age, there is so much we do not have in common, having lived through the same era, that I really enjoyed this interview. 

D. Dominick Lombardi is an artist, art writer and curator. Recent exhibitions are “Smallish Season 2,” Gallery ONDO, Seoul, 2026, “Fingindo ou Fingimento (Pretending),” Braço Perna 44, Lisbon, and Atelier Ghostbirds, Caldas da Rainha, 2025. Writing credits include The Brooklyn Rail (2023), ARTnews (1997), New York Times (1998-2005), Art in Asia, Seoul, (2007-2009) and Sculpture (1999-2007). Recent curatorial projects are “Multiverse” (2025), Hampden Gallery, UMASS Amherst and “You Think That’s Funny?”, Hammond Museum (2025).