News and Views:

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2/16/10
Lesbian Swim

I just had the opportunity to see Swimming with Lesbians a documentary film by David Marshall. It was shot in Buffalo, and features Madeline Davis, longtime gay and lesbian-rights activist. It’s been making the rounds on the film festival circuit, winning awards, and it will be distributed by Frameline starting sometime in March. Of special interest to followers of my artwork is the long segment of the movie that was filmed in the UB Anderson Gallery during my survey show Bruce Adams: Half Life. You get a glance of much of the first floor part of the exhibition, and a long look at the Tattooed Women series, which actually plays a pivotal roll in the film. I’m excited to have my work included in this excellent film.

2/10/10
The creative process

“You’re so creative.”

I get that one a lot. Or, “You have so much talent.” Or worse, “You're so gifted.” These declarations are made as complements of course, but buried within all of them is an inference, the suggestion that the ability to make art just comes naturally. All a creative person does, the thinking goes, is let that inborn talent flow and wonderful things happen. And the truth is there might actually be artists for whom it all comes easily. I don’t know any myself, but I suppose there are savants in every field. Not most of us though; not me anyway. I find art-making hard work, and I study the field, and think an awful lot about what I do. There are false starts and periods of frustration in the creative process.

I mention this because I am working now on what might be my last piece from my Divine Beauty series, certainly my last major work in that group. (I'll be putting more images from that series on my website soon.) It’s a large altarpiece, maybe seven or eight feet tall and twelve feet wide, in three panels. I plan to have the panels fold shut like altarpieces often do, so there is some fabrication involved. I’ve been researching altarpiece themes and compositions. I’m also looking through hundreds of found fashion images for ones that will work for this piece. I’m pretty jazzed about it. This will be the most complicated work from the series, and if all goes well it will see its premier at the Beyond-In Western New York exhibition next September (see exhibition dates and locations to the right).

Meantime I’m also deciding what I’m going to do next. The problem isn’t thinking of an idea. Ideas come and go like fleeting moments of sunshine between clouds in a gray Buffalo sky. The problem is settling on one idea that I’m willing to spend the next couple of years exploring. I’m leaning toward something less defined than many of my earlier series. I have more freedom to experiment now that I am not teaching. I want to move away from dependence on found images, but that presents its own problems for a conceptually based representational artist. I'm in the gestation stage now, and it's not coming easy. Coincidently, I just saw Fellini’s 8½, which is a movie about a director who is creatively blocked while trying to think what movie to make next. I could relate.

11/30/09
Remembering Jackie Felix

It was a radiantly beautiful early autumn day a couple weeks ago, when close to two-hundred members of the Western New York art community assembled to celebrate the life of artist Jackie Felix. Family, friends, and art colleagues alerted by phone and email came from as far away as Texas to remember the artist who had passed away in September. As befitting an agnostic who devoted half her adult life to the art world, the event took place, not in a synagogue or church, but at the Burchfield-Penney Art Center. Jackie's loss may have been felt more acutely than usual by those of us in the arts community who knew her, because she was such an active and vital part of Buffalo's artistic landscape. For me, there was the added loss of a valued next-door neighbor of twenty-nine years, but long before Jackie moved onto my street, I had admired her work as a painter of uncommon ability.

Widely exhibited, Jackie was one of those artists everyone knew. She was actively involved in the art community, particularly as a member of Hallwalls Advisory Board. She made practically everybody's short list of exceptional area painters. She was a master of obscure narratives with an artistic flair for the theatrical; she occasionally even painted curtains along the wings of her single act canvas dramas. Jackie was a great observer of the human condition. Her paintings were populated with men and women, saints, sinners, performers, and lovers. Always interacting. Even with her paintings of tables that were depicted isolated in desolate empty space, there was the feeling that someone had just stepped out of the picture moments before. The primary career-long focus of Jackie's work was on human connections, how people interrelate, or don't. To Jackie, even a gun suggested a connection between people, albeit through violent interaction. Sex, love, lust, relationships between the sexes; these were the territories Jackie staked out for herself. "I always have sexual content," she said in a taped interview shortly before her sudden illness. Indeed, viewing the images of her paintings flashing on the screen behind the speakers at her memorial, it was clear that sexuality dominated her work. Her approach to it was often somber though, even mordant. The dark works of German Expressionist Max Beckman were one of her influences. But Jackie could also be wryly humorous and highly inventive.

Jackie lived one and a half hours past midnight on the day of her eightieth birthday. She held on weeks beyond her doctors' expectations, predicting at one point that she would die on her birthday. She was determined as ever to do things her way, and with a dramatic flair right to the end. To some people, eighty may seem like a ripe old age. But adjectives like old didn't describe Jackie. Maybe that's because she only became the person we all knew later in life. She grew up amidst an immigrant population on the south side of Pittsburgh Pennsylvania. Discouraged by her father from following her art muse, she went to college in New York City to become an elementary teacher. While in school, she lived downstairs from struggling actor James Dean and his girlfriend who she would occasionally have over for dinner. She found Dean to be lacking personality; vacant good looks were not Jackie's taste. That was classic Jackie, always bucking popular opinion. She met and married Philip Fine and when he was drafted she lived on army bases during his tour of duty. Before long she found herself the mother of four daughters. Her children reminisce today about what it was like being raised in a creative household where gift-wrapping paper was expected to be hand designed, and the kids didn't just color in coloring books, they made them. But the demands of raising a family prevented Jackie from any formal pursuit of art.

After Jackie's husband left the army he found work in Buffalo, so the family settled here. Jackie remained a devoted mother and housewife until her husband was tragically killed in an automobile accident. She went back into education again, this time doing substitute teaching as a means of survival. Eventually she met Al Felix, who was a widower at the time with three children of his own. Al was an Orchard Park English teacher, who wrote poetry on the side and shared Jackie's love of the arts. They got married, and though raising seven high-school aged children was a strain on their budget, Al supported Jackie's decision to go back to school at the University of Buffalo where she got her BFA and eventually her MFA. At fifty-two, an age when many artists are coasting on their laurels, Jackie launched her art career.

Jackie and I had many over-the-fence conversations over the years, often about art and the art community, our struggles and successes. She was acutely aware of the challenges older artists face in the youth-oriented art world. She often commented that she felt her age was a disadvantage, but she defied stereotyping. She had the spirit of an enlightened woman in the prime of her life, and hers always seemed like a young person's art. Jackie once said that when she lectured at colleges she made sure to use the F-word early on to establish with the students that this wasn't their grandmother up there.

Jackie had many other interests about which she was equally opinionated. For instance, gardening; she was the first one to sell me on the wonders of the vegetation killer Roundup, and soon after she was the first totell me I shouldn't use it due to its impact on the environment. Jackie was very assertive in her beliefs and did not suffer fools gladly.

Right to the end, Jackie's work displayed artistic courage, inventiveness, even audacity. She was still challenging herself, leaping into unfamiliar artistic terrain. Her biggest fear was repeating herself. Her work and thoughts had a direct impact on me, and will continue to do so in the years to come.

9/16/09
Style Jumping: the Beatles White Album

I recently bought the newly released digitally remastered Beatles box set, and I was reminded of the character Kay in the movie Men in Black. When Kay, played by Tommy Lee Jones, acquires advanced alien recording technology, his only reaction is: "…guess I'll have to buy the White Album again." The White Album was always my favorite Beatle album, and it really holds up in the new remix. I was listening to it while I was painting a few days ago, and it occurred to me that the White Album provides a good analogy for one of the most common questions I get about my artwork: why do I employ various painting techniques and styles, even within a series? In the Divine Beauty series for instance, I began with an almost naive approach, and gradually moved toward stylized realism. At times I reference illustration, Medieval art, the late Renaissance, and with the most recent work (to be added online soon) pop/baroque.

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So why do I do this? The short answer is, because that's what I do. Underlying each of my painting series is a conceptual framework that I adhere to pretty tightly. That's the constant. From there, I explore different approaches, often referencing historical painting styles, because my work is always at least partly about the act of painting itself. In the White Album the Beatles bounce between light pop, blazing heavy metal, ragtime, dance-hall music, show tunes, wistful ballads, classical chamber music, and scorching blues. Inspired by Yoko Ono, John even contributes a little John Cage-like sound art with Revolution #9 (which I actually like). Some music critics complained about this diversity, but I think the album is so good precisely because it jumps from style to style. It's also ranked by most sources as one of the best albums of the twienteth century.

Using diverse painting styles in my art is like the Beatles using various music styles in the White Album. Except I have a unifying theme. So unifying in fact, that exhibiting single pieces from a series often feels inappropriate, like they're fragments of an unapparent greater whole. In my Research and Development series, I took this idea to the limit with a body of work that intentionally appeared to be done by a variety of artists from different periods.

There's another factor at play here too. To illustrate, imagine you discover the best food ever; let's call it Creplaque. Now imagine that for a couple years Creplaque is all you eat. No matter how good it originally tasted, you'll eventually grow to hate Creplaque. That's how I would feel confined to a single painting style. The closest I ever came was in the Paintings of Pictures of People with Paintings series, and that wasn't easy. Having said that, I really don't think there's as wide a range in my work as people sometimes think. It's mostly figurative, nearly always with a flattened picture plane in which negative space functions as an abstract counterpoint to the figures. I usually employ a limited palette, rarely more than four colors, white, and black.

9/8/09
Divine Beauty homoerotic origins

A recent conversation with a friend about my Divine Beauty series led me to reflect again on my intent. I have an artist statement, but artist statements are, by design, brief and to the point; much gets left out.

The origins of the Divine Beauty series goes back to a conversation I had with an artist named Sadko Hadzihasanovic at his exhibition opening in the first year of Beyond-In Western New York. Sadko (as he's known professionally) told me that he is often mistaken for being gay because he deals with the male figure (he references a variety of sources, some of which no doubt do have homoerotic undertones). This annoys him, because the male figure, and particularly according to Sadko, the male chest, has a long tradition in European art. I was intrigued by the idea of a straight guy making homoerotic art. I saw it as something of an artistic challenge; am I capable of dealing with male eroticism? Is it really about light and shadow, paint and brushstrokes? I left the exhibition that evening energized. As I exited I told curator Sandra Firmin that I had just decided the artistic direction I wanted to take next. Actually though, I only had a vague idea.

To some degree this elusiveness of purpose has never completely abated because, as in all my work, there are multiple layers of intent, some conscious, some not fully conscious. Even within the framework of the series, the work keeps sidling off in diverse directions. Different layers of intent are emphasized to varying degrees within each piece. In the past I've used my work to comment on the "male gaze" as it pertains to the female figure in art, subverting the conventions of the nude in historical painting, so I wanted to do the same here with the male figure. Religious iconography seemed to be the ideal vehicle for this. One reason is that depicting biblical scenes and the martyrdom of saints was for a time during the middle ages the only opportunities many Western artists had to portray the human figure. And it occurred to me that fashion advertising today often gives off the same vibes as religious art in a world where the male figure is still something of a taboo. Ad art and iconography might even perform similar functions in their individual fields.

Some people have expressed difficulty getting a bead on what I'm doing, which makes me wonder if there's something about this series that causes some sort of cognitive dissonance. In an email exchange with my friend (and critic) Richard Huntington, he reacted to my concerns that the intended effect--especially the homoeroticism aspect--might be incomprehensible: "Martyrdoms, St. Sebastien the most obvious, have been given homosexual emphasis since the renaissance and before. Posolini's film, "The Gospel According to St. Matthew," has played in church basements for decades without any of the uninitiated noticing that it is gay-themed. The guy off the street might be befuddled [by your work], the Jesus star-struck born-again might be confused and offended, a gay man might mistake it for actual gay depicted salivation over sexy guys, but the rest of us smart asses shouldn't be having any trouble. It might have been befuddling if you had done the ads straight (sorry) without all the embellishments that ring bells that you are totally aware of what you are doing and clear-cut in your relationship to your subject."

As I mentioned in my last entry (below), Catholicism played a big role in my development as a child. It left its mark and there's no escaping that fact. Today I look back at my religious rearing with a combination of bemused detachment and incredulous affection. I am an unbeliever with nostalgia for belief. As a skeptic and humanist, I have issues with religious indoctrination of any kind, but that's not at the heart of this series. I just really respond to religious imagery, and of course religion plays a huge role in Western art. Part of what this series does is ask the question, what if we retained the conventions of religious iconography, but transferred them to fashion ads? Part of what I'm saying is maybe we did.

I've had people tell me they didn't even realize the paintings were riffs on religious imagery, and I've had one visitor to my studio name most of the saints in the paintings by their symbols ( where I use symbols). I'm interested in artistic and cultural conventions; where they originate, how they develop and change, and how they reveal the predilections of the cultures they emerge from. I started this series by referencing art styles of the middle ages but with a loose, expressive painting style. Gradually I drifted into stylized realism, and baroque and renaissance art. I've included a few women in the work. Lately I'm changing directions again, employing glazing to give the work a sheen and luminous quality like old masters. I'm also thinking of transitioning to mythological subject matter (the other great theme of European art), but with a new approach, no more fashion models. I may go back to using live models. Or I may drop the figure entirely. Who knows?

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8/25/09
The role of Religion in Divine Beauty

 

Working on the Divine Beauty series in my studio.

My recent series of work called Divine Beauty deals with religious iconography. I was raised Catholic and for most of my elementary school years I was required by the Catholic school I went to--St Leo's the Great--to attend mass daily. I accepted this as my lot in life. The parish was an early product of suburban sprawl, having quickly acquired a large congregation long before it had a proper church. Services were held in the basement of the school, though on Sundays you could also attend outdoor mass, which was like a drive-in movie except you sat in your car facing an elevated glass-enclosed alter with your windows open listening to the proceedings over loud speakers. It was especially enjoyable in the rain because you had to close the windows and watch the action through water-streaked glass, leaving no clue as to what was going on. As the congregation rapidly grew, the school's gym/auditorium was pressed into service as another makeshift auxiliary chapel with worshipers sitting on the basketball court in metal folding chairs facing a stage. It was like a high school play performed in Latin. But the cavernous L-shaped basement chapel was the primary house of worship. It was a mid-twentieth-century concrete version of the Roman catacombs: dark with heavy poured-concrete columns, low ceilings, orange painted pews, and rows of flickering votive candles. The few existing metal grille-covered windows were at ground level well above worshipers' heads. Next door was the school's cafeteria, and next to that was an 18-lane public bowling alley--all subterranean.

Framed paintings representing the Stations of the Cross were spaced evenly around the basement perimeter. Once a year we would endure the hour-long reading of the Stations, a thankless job relegated to second-in-command Father Knalber. The boys would wait with anticipation for station number 13, "Jesus' body is removed from the cross," because the reading included the words "...and she pressed him to her bosom." It was all we could do to conceal our laughter from the piercing gaze of the ever vigilant nuns. Other religious art was distributed throughout the church and school. The parish pastor, Father Snider, had quite an art collection, and during his years at St. Leo's there was always something interesting on display to capture our imaginations. There were also religious images in our catechisms and on the holy cards (like baseball cards only with saints) the nuns gave out as rewards for good behavior. Years of daily indoctrination left me with a genuine deep-rooted attraction to religious iconography. I didn't realize this when I started the Divine Beauty series, but an exhibition I recently had at the Center for Inquiry in Amherst NY, caused me to reflect on the role religion has played in my artwork over the years. I hadn't previously noticed this, but certain themes and stylistic conventions reappear with some regularity.

8/23/09

A view of my studio:

Corner view:

8/19/09

Adobe Creative Suite CS4

In June I purchased the newest Adobe Creative Suite CS4, partly to update this website. My original version of Dreamweaver was so outdated, and even then I only knew the basics. This new version is completely beyond my skill level. I'm back editing with my old version.