Brackett Creek Exhibitions: Okay, so the handful of years that I've known you... The way that I see you functioning with color is also the same way that when you're ready to go to the studio, like you've got to make your playlist, you have to be ready to jump in there, and there are a lot of steps for you to either turn off the world or to turn on the studio. Has this been something developing? What is it that you're waiting for? Is it a sense of color?
Brian Lotti: Color is a big part of it, and getting the mind to a lucid place is another part of it. Sometimes I’ll have all my colors mixed up the day before. I’ll paint little plein air paintings as warm ups, just to observe the world or a bush or the sky at a certain time. I kind of inhale that light and have this rooted sense of color in my mind when i get into the studio and the work I'm dealing with. My ability to think about and work with color becomes more intuitive this way, and that's the place where I want to dwell, where I have a path with colors and I’m not over thinking them.
Brian Lotti, Meadow Valley, 2019, oil on cardboard, 9.75 x 11″BCE: With the monotypes it's this painting without a net, like you don't have time to work on them, and you definitely don't have the ability to edit them and put another layer on and later they end up functioning as this time capsule of these groupings of color. Imagine if you look at paintings that you made over a couple of month’s period, color palettes can shift but can you then see them as these groupings of colors that were relevant. Or does the subject matter determine the finished work and overpower the color?
BL: That's a really good question. Color is the dominant concern even more than the subject matter. Absolutely. At any given time, there's certain colors that I'm exploring or excited about. Cobalt blue tennis courts or cadmium maroon sneaking into basketball courts; colors will kind of show up more than others for a certain series or a few works. It's all kind of an investigation of color, mark-making and texture while exploring subjects or realms that are interesting, or that I feel the need to express in painting.
Brian Lotti, Court 1, 2019, 30x22”, Image courtesy of Simchowitz GalleryBCE: So now you've moved back to Los Angeles. The paintings in this exhibition [Recreational Behavior at Simchowitz Gallery]? They're all New York works, correct?
BL: Yes, a lot of New York subjects, and they were all painted in Brooklyn. Absolutely.
BCE: And you did work for four years in New York?
BL: A little shy of four years.
BCE: Did you have a switch of palette, or, obviously, getting into New York, it's very hard to maintain privacy as an artist, it's a very different effort than maintaining privacy as an artist in Los Angeles who has to see color different, do you see the material different? Again, with the subject matter, I tend to find you give yourself the space to look at it, to have a sense of distance from it, which I think really enables the viewer to take the color in, it's continuing on the edge of all the paintings that you've liked, and all the paintings that have given you the invitation. Have you felt like you've had a schema shift? Are you coming back to where you were in Los Angeles?
Brian Lotti, Saturday, Ft. Greene, 2019, 30x22”Image courtesy of Simchowitz Gallery
BL: My time in New York helped me really embrace and use color in a more subjective way. I definitely work differently now from when I lived here in Los Angeles before. I’m much less dependent on observed color.
BCE: I guess looking at it for me, and knowing your practice and that you also have a plein air practice or that you're you're always sketching on an iPad and there's always something being squeezed out it looks like you got to make color decisions later and it wasn't necessarily about seeing these scenes, whereas Los Angeles color is so dominant.
BL: Absolutely. Early on, I was influenced pretty directly by the broad strokes of the landscape here and it was super easy to navigate and just soak in these naturalistic, local colors.
BCE: Like even going to New York I imagine it took a long time to get out those ghost images in your brain as the color you knew, and then so much is happening street level in New York, but it's hard not to see these experiences as potential threats.
BL: New York is a lot more hectic for sure. And the light there is different. I feel like colors are rich and full, not washed out. There's great light but things are darker in general. Probably the biggest shift thought was moving into a Brooklyn studio that had no windows. I really had to just internalize and think about color and create the windows for myself with the paintings. It became less about getting the color “right” and more about using colors that felt good. I just kind of took myself in hand and started making subjective decisions and was way less influenced by what I observed.
BCE: I noticed in the works that there's a lighter touch, like you're working with grays or color scales that are contrasting or they aren't exclamation points as much. LA has this idea that you can look at it anywhere and it's this perfect postcard picture. And then I imagine taking it back into a place without windows like when I'm not looking at a photograph and I'm trying to paint someone where I add depth to them as a three dimensional figure. Like where I add a shadow becomes this hypothetical space and it seems like New York for you was like that. With your Los Angeles paintings before it was loud and it was more about this freedom as opposed to this subtlety of breathing back out these images that you internalized.
Do you have any takeaways from learning to work with the absence of real life color in New York or was there a direct push towards almost like different composition elements because it's not a postcard thing to fill in anymore? Like you're not making paintings of the Empire State Building, you're not making the Brooklyn Bridge, or any of these iconic New York works. Right? You're dealing with a subtle slice of life in New York. It's also not just one pallette that you mixed up for all for all of them it looks like maybe several.
BL: I became more interested in using fewer colors and finding the charge and balance with those colors. And I wasn't trying to represent a scene verbatim, like some of the earlier paintings in Los Angeles. So it was like, Okay, here's a scene, I want to paint that scene. In New York I was inspired by scenes, but it was more about using that scene as a springboard for play with color and composition and mark making. Wanting to express the feeling of that scene, you know, or that feeling of being in the park. The New York work is still pretty mimetic; it's about real life. I don't feel limited by the subject. Hopefully the work is a little more expressive and free. I'm not trying to reproduce the scene, I'm more interested in the feelings, you know, related to that scene.
Brian Lotti, Evening at Fatkid, Oil on Stonehenge paper, 66x50” Image courtesy of Simchowitz Gallery
BCE: They’re somewhere in between memory and nostalgia, like they exist before memory turns. They're not just reminding you how good that cupcake was, but reminding you that you're seeing a cupcake. Sometimes there's so much input coming in at all times in New York, that you just have to get it down. To you, it's not about right subject; you can walk around and make a painting from anything and the colors are obviously the main concern, but then, where does composition fit in? Like, what are you looking for with the painting?
BL: A lot of it is what the subject demands, you know, if it's a trippy basketball court and I want to make the court some weird brown or red, and I think it would be nice to see a lot of that court, then I might make the piece horizontal, you know, and I might add a couple figures to the piece that weren't there just to just to give it more breath and to create some drama with the figures where they make an interesting movement across that space.
BCE: This body of work that's in the exhibition is interesting for how many figures are in action. Most of the times you see a body in a work of art. It's about the tension. With Robert Longo, you know, it's this implied sense of movement. And even when you're freezing, a jump shot or a backhand or someone on a hike or someone paddling, it's never about the motion like these bodies are at rest, like you have really hit freeze on the real world. You hit pause so you can go do whatever you need to do to you. How do you relate that to a sense of real world physicality?
BL: That’s interesting, haha! You see stillness in the work and I see, feel a sense of motion and things in motion.
BCE: Like any of the basketball works, whether the Fat Kid Park ones or the Fourth Street court. You look at someone taking a shot, you look at someone on offense or defense, you're not wondering if they made the shot. It's like you're walking by and this thing is in action, it doesn't matter who wins and it doesn't even matter who the tennis works are about. It's not about one athlete at a pinnacle performance level, beating another athlete, it's not about this tension of the body. It's about your emotion as an artist's like, weaving past one image to another. And they're not narrative based even though they have all these very direct references to the titles.
BL: No, it's true that in a way they are snapshots. They're these frozen moments from a floating world, you know? I wanted to kind of build a sense of motion or implied motion in them. I think when I used to paint a lot of landscapes it was more about creating the sense of stillness and rest and presence or whatever but now it's like I want motion or a kind of vibration or a distortion. But yeah, they're slices of moments that happen every day.
BCE: You want to talk a little bit about what the process of the monotypes is like? And I guess more as like, the artistic resonance, like for me making a lot of silk screens that aren't photo based or never using a computer, there's an artistic moment where I kind of had the idea, this thing that I want to put in the world. And then I’ll like hire myself as a fabricator until that moment that I pull the screen off of the paper or off of the shirt. And then there's this immediate rush of good feelings. It's like, wow, I wasn't stuck in the struggle for that long. So I have this art moment, early on, that gives me the push to make the thing. And then when the thing gets made, there's not that much that happens in between the two using the art brain. Do you find that sense when you do the prep cooking, when you figure out the image and you mix the paint and start painting on the glass, like is that the last artistic gesture, and the reward is pulling it away or how do you get a sense of catharsis for making art. How does that work with them?
BL: The monotypes have become more and more central to my studio practice and at this point I can’t tell the difference between them and more traditional approaches to making paintings. Screen printing is a good analogy; it's this color drop sequence, you know, so the artist’s brain starts with pulling and mixing certain colors beforehand. Sometimes I'll kind of mix a little in advance, or sometimes I'll just kind of work with some color I have left and just start working and the art brain is there with every mark and stroke along the way and it just gets more and more intense as the paint builds up on the glass or the plastic. Once enough paint is covering the surface, it becomes a game of scraping away, adding details, clarifying colors, etc. It becomes about how the pieces relate to each other and how to push the color relationships. This is when the larger mind really takes over and my smaller self kind of falls away. I get lost and disappear in the artist’s brain. Then at a certain point, without having to thinking about it too much, the work is done. I have to resolve the painting before the paint dries so the whole process has become this really intuitive exercise in economy. When I start “printing” the thing - transferring the painting to the canvas or paper with the little brayer - that’s when I can turn the artist’s brain off and kind of “hire” myself as a studio assistant to finish the painting and relax a little and maybe drink a beer or have a shot of tequila. *laughs*
Brian working on a silkscreen print at Brackett Creek, 2019BCE: Yeah, but how long do you feel like it takes you to see it without the baggage of making it?
BL: I think after it's printed, it takes several days, maybe a week or two, to be outside of the image enough to appreciate it as a thing. You know? It takes a little bit. Yeah, distance and time. Distance is good with everything. Agnes Martin said that when you finish your painting, turn it around, and don't look at it for a week. We don't know if anything is good or bad immediately. When we're working on it, or when we’re immediately done with it, you know, it takes it takes distance to have any kind of real perspective.
BCE: For sure, yeah, we think good or bad, but it's really just boring or interesting. Yeah. Sometimes when we're playing the role of the artists, like, the things that are interesting, they're not the things that are interesting when we look at it later.
BL: Haha definitely! And that’s been a nice shift in the past few years, being a bit less controlling in general, and allowing for chance, and other things to happen. Having a basic trust that things will work out, you know, one way or the other, and just kind of proceeding and letting things fall where they may. You step up and deal with something that's inspired, that's interesting, but, you don’t necessarily know what's gonna happen.
BCE: And this is also like, the biggest, fanciest show that you've had to date. This is like the fullest survey of mature work. That scary, or does it feel like you've gotten what you need from the works, and now you're just sending them off to college?
BL: Haha, it feels good. I'm excited that we can hang these works as a group. They capture a certain way of seeing, and it'll be fun to see them in relation to each other. It feels like a door has been opened and now there’s a strong interest to continue exploring color and materiality in these ways.
BCE: It's always a little naked up there. Do you feel if you push really hard for a day or two days you need to recharge or is it about being in the studio every day and maintaining that practice?
BL: It's both. I mean I like to work regularly to stay in the zone and have that coordination on tap. But I definitely take time off and lay low. For sure. And during some of these bigger works that go on intensely for a few days, I'll have to go over to a park for breaks and walk around to break the session up and get a little psychic distance for a while.
Brian Lotti, Recreational Behavior at Simchowitz Gallery, July 2021Image Courtesy of Simchowitz Gallery
BCE: Okay, so certain filmmakers when they're working on a film, some of them want to watch all the films that are out there. We need more films to be aware of that language. And some of them don't want to watch that. Like I could see with your practice that it could go both ways, because it's this idea that you're freezing time and then taking it into the studio, like maybe you don't always want the input from the real world. How do you decide what to let in? And do you feel like you've lied in other references? Like, you've given me a handful of books and clearly, you like to read. Is there a correlation from things outside of yourself or just inside? Not at all? or some combination of the above?
BL: Yeah, I’ll pull inspiration and cues from literature and poetry and definitely from other painters and things that other people are doing. I like to look through books and take in work art historically and also go to shows and see what people are doing and how they're dealing with materials and color. I like to absorb all of that and be aware of what’s happening. New York was awesome. It’s easy to see a lot of great work in a few hours and I find a lot of enjoyment and inspiration in all kinds of painting and sculpture. But yes, a great deal of the work I’m making is derived from some sort of meaningful personal experience. There’s an image that get’s lodged in me, and the fun, the challenge becomes how I can turn that into a painting. I remember going with you and some friends to that muddy Nascar race in Bozeman, and the sight of those cars whirling sideways around the curves as people were necking and eating hot dogs…. I carried that with me until I could make a proper painting to express the deep impression it made.
Brian Lotti, Victory Lap (western edition), 2021, Oil on Stonehenge paper, 22x30”Image courtesy of Simchowitz Gallery
BCE: In the time that I've known you, I haven't seen you be competitive about anything, even the way you want to participate in a larger art community it’s like the criticality that you bring to your practice is that you're a fan first. Yes, you're not competing with the shows like you don't want to shoot three pointers, because when you saw the other teammates, and you don't see artists as the other team, like you see it as somehow you're saving the world together and where, like, for me, I see it as a more insular process. And I really can't look at too much art. I just think about art and I can talk to my friends about art, but I can't visually let it in. But I think the way you form ideas more visually now, and I think it's interesting to see that maybe even visually, it's just color, it's a good thing that you're not colorblind! And I also think like, if you're seeing shows, it's not like the shows that you're seeing are changing your colors. It's just like, they're inviting you to be an artist with these other artists. And that's a pretty unique perspective. Not everyone can maintain that. There's a lot more insecurity that I think stays on the surface for most artists. Are there things outside of your practice that help you stay grounded?
BL: Definitely! My wife, our cats, haha! Walking. Walking through the park. But no, I mean, it’s always challenging to stay grounded. There's always potentially things that can throw us off. That's the little known thing. A lot of the work I put into my practice is just being in the right headspace and trying to live the life where things flow and I'm not getting too caught up and I'm able to tend to the inspiration kind of as it arises, you know? That may be the important work of being an artist; maintaining that headspace and motivation and discipline.
Brian with his catBCE: Do you see your role as an artist to pass on this idea of quality of life or, or to show that it's possible. Like, obviously, you can make work from the internet or you can make work as desire for revenge on something. It's pretty valid to make work from any place because somebody else has experienced that. Right? Somebody can look at your most envious painting that's dripping with rage. And oh, yeah, I know what that's about. But saying that it's about maintaining a healthy happy life, and then figuring out how to take that into the studio. Clearly, that's going to end up in the work. Is there an overt thesis for how you translate your life skills into what you're exporting through this content of painting?
BL: That might be a part of it. Absolutely. I want the paintings to be kind of joyous, or joyful. And with certain artists, you definitely see a certain happiness or peace they’ve arrived at in life. Alexander Calder seemed to have figured something out and was able to live with a kind of wonder and seeming simplicity. He’d go to the market on Saturdays and get veggies and bread with his wife, and go back and hang with his cats. That intention of living a specific way. Maybe it is a kind of unspoken thesis, and maybe that is one of the things an artist or a painter can bring to the world is the commitment to live a certain way. In spite of all the horror and the suffering, to decide to live a certain way. And that whole thing of, you know, “living simply so others may simply live.” I think that's part of it, too, and maybe that's part of my Buddhist background, you know, trying to tread lightly. And part of treading lightly is being happy in our lives. So we're living more and more from a place of joy and peace. Hopefully I’m kind of bringing that mind to most things I do.
BCE: I think about Mondrian painting his entire apartment white, and only having fake flowers that are the primary colors, or the story about Jason Rhodes before he passed away is that he lived this character of Jason Rhodes, the artist. He would eat at restaurants without utensils and eat like a pig right off the plate. I think a lot of that is like artists. We don't have structure applied to our lives. So we have to find a way to add structure like committing to a relationship, whether it's with an animal or human is creating a structure. You know, for me out here, it's like living in nature with seasons and living with a bunch of animals. There's always these things that are bigger than me. And I can never pretend that like no matter how grumpy I get from a bad day in the studio, that it's really the biggest thing in the world. Have to snap out of it. Yeah, I feel like it's easier to live once you realize that you don't have to suffer to make great art, like, just solve your life problems. Yeah, so can we touch on Buddhism? Like, did you do that as part of your practice at the same time as painting; was that at the same time as going to school or was that later?
BL: You know, there was actually a point earlier in life where a lot of things that kept me going started breaking down or falling apart. Discovering painting was one of the things that that helped me. And then yes, soon after, reading about Zen Buddhism, and then starting to practice meditation and do some retreats intensely for a few years. That was awesome. And that was also encouraging for my art practice as well. I met a lot of amazing people at the Zen retreats. A lot of them were also artists, writers, and musicians and were very encouraging. At the end of the day, they're like, you know, Zen is great but if you want to be an artist, go for it.
Brian Lotti at Brackett Creek working on new silkscreen prints, October 2021BCE: But can you even imagine what your works or what your practice would look like if you didn't have a relationship to meditation?
BL: No, I can’t. I might still be dealing with difficult things. I take it as a given now, but yeah, I need to be in an emotionally calm and clear place. I basically need to be happy to paint. When in the studio, we can transmute tough emotions and the psychic difficulties that affect us. That is true and that happens. But generally speaking, I need to be comfortable and happy going into the studio to really swing hard, and give my all to something. Meditation is a great tool in the same way that cooking a good meal for ourselves really helps and grounds us. A little meditation can settle the mind and get us closer to that point where we're kind of like an open vessel, maybe channeling stuff, sometimes maybe when we're working where our mind is a little more open to the collective unconscious and things kind of come through us and end up in the work and it gets surprising like that. That's the fun stuff. I think knowing how to meditate and quiet the mind absolutely helps and helps my painting practice and ability to follow an idea.
BCE: And that idea becomes something colored by your concentration, that ability to sit alone with the work is definitely important. I don't see you ever as a medium, I don't see you as sucking stuff out of the World Cup or even out of the world, sorry, or even having these qualitative experiences with cooking. Like, I see a meditative practice, like in your work or in your practice. Every activity, every verb that I've seen you put to work, whether it's walking, running, eating, cooking, petting, kissing, whatever it is, like, you put that meditation in, but maybe from the outside your work might appear voyeuristic. But there’s really more there; there's an acceptance of the world that I think people that practice Buddhism carry to everything. They're not cutting experiences off, because that's just what happens. And there's a comparison with cooking for you that relates to your practice. But rather than looking at the scenes that you're going to paint as a pervert, you just look at them for acceptance and say this is the world and I think that's a really fair place to work.
BL: Absolutely. I think that is kind of at the heart of it. The ordinary world, you know, is endlessly fascinating and amazing. I hope that in a certain way, the work is saying, “Hey, things aren't so bad. We actually have it pretty good.” The world is actually a pretty amazing and incredible place once we calm down and stop yelling at other people or beating ourselves up.
BCE: Don't rub that in everyone's nose. But at least you accept that there's reasons to get up every morning.
BL: Haha totally! I appreciate your sunny side up as well. But no doubt, it's not all sunny. But there’s moments when I'm sitting with someone at a park and other people are there, like on the hill under the trees, and everyone is kind of in that collective trance. There's this subtle awareness that this is kind of phenomenal and it’s enough. You know, everyone is just in this zone together. I don't know, those are some of the best moments, I guess. And they’re very ordinary.
BCE: I always think it's one of the biggest ingredients in your work because you're not role playing as a certain type of painter and your work isn't overly conceptual. It’s like you're channeling history or an awareness of an art history. But it's also that you're not; you're not pining away for a time that doesn't exist. Your paintings, not gleefully, but very broadly, accept the modern experience. Like they're not trying to shut things out. I definitely find myself trying to remove topical references from the work but somehow you're able to put people you know, someone in a certain type of basketball shoe that's never existed before 2018 and still have it feel timeless. And I think it’s like, you're not trying to put a charge with the signifier of the time you live in like there's nothing signified by the sign.
BL: Totally, there’s nothing overtly conceptual and not much manufactured artifice. I think the works are a heightening or a celebration of the way things are, you know; a kind of reportage and an appreciation of things.
BCE: I like that the painting doesn't require a visual literacy click the way that other images we process like painting can be turned into an image. And I think anybody that's processing a painting as an image is just missing all the nutritional value. So to say that they're exclusively visual is I think underestimating them. The joy is that nobody knows what's there. Like, I think about my work as either talking or listening, and I can never place if your works are talking or listening or doing something else. And that's why whatever that secret ingredient, or secret ingredients, is why people stand in front of them. Not because you're just making pictures. Like, why does this feel like a homecoming? Why does it feel like I'm coming back to something that I know, but like, if not the thing that I know?
If we come from Africa, and then we come across the land bridge, and then we’re working in the Great Plains, and it looks like Africa, these ancestors, they had this feeling of being there and how good it felt. And then it just told them to be there at once in Siberia, where we had to learn how to sew skins together to keep warm and it was the mega fauna in the space that told us we can survive here as a species. There's something like that happening in the work there. That's not just seeing, seeing the meal and eating the meal. There's something else that traps people in front of it.
Brian Lotti solo show at Brackett Creek Exhibitions, Summer 2019
BL: That's encouraging, haha! I don't want them to be nostalgic or too cheerful, but I hope there's some kind of low level warmth or optimism about them. I hope that, energetically, they have a kind of poetry and grace and spaciousness that lends others some psychic space. You know, and a curiosity about life and a love of particular things like someone with an umbrella walking through a basketball game. I strive for a kind of warmth and simplicity.
BCE: But so ironic, though, because artists are the most complicated people that have all this unstructured time! Why are we the most obsessed with wanting things to be simple. Just one line! We want it to be perfect. Everything else is so messy. It's like we need our sense of gravity to come from making something ordered.
BL: Absolutely. The canvas contains everything, a kind of projection. Transmuting all the uncertainty and the tough, base feelings and distilling down to an acceptance and joy and sometimes triumph. That’s the struggle, right? Isn’t that the alchemy, and one of the marks? Simplicity is a result, not a starting point.
BCE: But you also realize you're an artist who is outside of the world's orbit enough that you can report back on it?
BL: Totally. I’m fortunate to have the freedom to comment because I’ve created a certain distance for myself.
BCE: So I just advocate for more distance. I think when we're not putting our social anxieties into the work, the best work functions that way because of your practice. It's not good to carry the social anxieties into the studio because in the end, you do that and you're just looking for someone to look into the work and tell you that you're lovable.
BL: Yeah, again, a big part of the work we do is to keep ourselves in that independent headspace and live the life where we're feeling well (or well enough!). Maintaining our minds and spirits so the word can proceed. The thing meditation and art making both have in common is encountering and exploring the unknown.
BCE: I agree. The biggest thing for me as an artist is how do I keep going. The exhibition is a validation statement. I've already released the work by the time of the exhibition I’m onto something else. And so for me, it's about beating the post show depression. How do I make sure that when I go back into the studio, it's not about my relationship to the validation of these things? I don't want some other parent yelling at me because I changed the way that I raised my kids. I want to raise my kids based on my set of ideals, and the type of world I think I'm preparing them for. So yeah, creating this distinction. But I think you put that into your practice on a daily basis. Where I think I need a much larger sense of structure. And that's maybe where we differ.
Brian Lotti, Recreational Behavior at Simchowitz Gallery, July 2021Image courtesy of Simchowitz Gallery
BL: I love that thought and I think we both tend toward the monastic at times to get our grooves on. I really thrive on a daily rhythm and a kind of regularity. I think you love those rhythms too, although they are different. You might concentrate your most focused work at a certain time of the year, like the winter when you can kind of take advantage of being snowed in and having lot more time to yourself.
BCE: I have this engineer’s brain and I'm looking to solve problems or looking to diagnose them. So the structure that I put in is about that. I carry that into the real world like my Larry David personality traits, where I pick fights when I'm not trying to. It’s all about me looking for a real structure and looking for holes in the bottom of the boat, where you can walk out in the world, or walk through your practice, or walk through your studio, and you're looking to love everything, where that’s just not the metrics that I use, like, I'm looking to understand things. And my poetry is in that, like, my poetry is in the schematics where I think for you it’s like, it's in this place of like, radical love, you know, not to go full Cory Booker on you, but yeah, I can see that. Yeah, we both have this exacting desire in the very fabric of our beings and we both love to work really hard to put in the structure. We've tried every type of haircut that we can try to make us feel better.
BL: Oh, yeah that’s a Dr. Seuss book! “Oh, the places you'll go.” Yeah, we build our practice up out of nothing but contrast experiences. We find what works through trial and error.
BCE: So the big question is, what is art and what's its purpose? And then we can call it call it an interview.
BL: I think art, like music, is a kind of spice in life. It’s visual energy and feelings and vibrations and so much more. It’s where our humanity meets the universe and is also kissed by the universe, haha! Art is possibility, period. A glimpse of the bigger mind at play. For so many of us, art is the swagger that makes life exciting.
BCE: All right. I can live with that. Brian, I love you. Thank you so much for sharing.
