DeFeo's Crescent Bridge I looks like the rock bridges I would use to cross the river over to the woods as a kid, taking me from home to the wilderness.

Black water pooling around worn-smooth stones here suggests a kind of menace that could drown a child. It’s a joke, kind of, because it’s a portrait of Jay DeFeo’s dental bridge that she had made after a bout of gum disease. Making pretty art out of an objectively gross thing is funny-ish, but her dental bridge also brought her out of the woods and back to art. This was the first major piece after The Rose and her four year depression featuring alcoholism, divorce, the sputtering of her art career, and that gum disease. So a joke but also, not a joke.

DeFeo’s life was a roller coaster, she writes “I have such ups & downs.” *sigh* But Crescent Bridge I was the beginning of an up. It led to her only full time job, which allowed her to travel, not be broke and homeless, those kinds of things. And it’s important to note that this is after The Rose. She had already peaked artistically, and she knew it, but her life didn’t end. The bridge from crest to depressed through to the next peak; so positive! Where The Rose is this imposing, Finnegan’s Wake kind of tour de force, Crescent Bridge I is pretty. It’s creepy and dark definitely, but it’s graphic and simple and light. It moves. LIKE PEOPLE AND LIFE, IT MOVES.

This is exactly counter to Warhol’s New York City surface-level-only fifteen minutes of fame superficiality, this is the anti abstract expressionism. Deeply personal work that and a resurrection. Crescent Bridge I brought DeFeo back from the dead and the dark forms are the river Styx, or actually it’s composite resin, but same thing.

What does an artist do when her teeth fall out? Jay DeFeo made art, of course!

DeFeo got lead poisoning when working on her famous painting The Rose and like something from an anxious nightmare, all of her teeth fell out of her head! Lucky for us they don't put lead in paint anymore. We like our teeth. We like eating with them.

DeFeo, however, was unfazed. She slapped some dentures in there and got back to making art. Her teeth were the subject of photographs, and the inspiration for collages and paintings. In this painting, her teeth could be giant boulders, or relics. Kind of cosmic, kind of creepy. But props to Jay for making lemonade.