Writing about my artistic process feels obscenely self-indulgent. Is this really a necessary part of my artist’s journey? Do I need to compound my overactive self-loathing with voluntary plunges into Deadly Sin No. 4? Typing the first person pronoun actually makes my stomach lurch. Ow. Ouch.
But when one makes a commitment, one must soldier on until the task is complete. Read on.
Introduction
Here’s a distinctly American cultural trait for you—one I can identify with and that I've had to think through with regard to my painting: we (Americans) have a peculiar urge to fabricate histories for ourselves when little or none previously existed. Alexis de Tocqueville observed this way back in 1831 or whatever when he noted that members of our freshly minted nation were unusually passionate about antique furniture. He surmised—correctly, I think—that this was a consequence of our youth as a nation. As he saw it, we were retrofitting our homes with aging furniture to make up for the time we’d lost moving to the New World and casting off the Crown and its colonial history. Two centuries later, we’re apparently history’s most evergreen empire, still carrying these complexes of our youth.
Full disclosure: I haven’t actually read Tocqueville. I only quote him when I’m either trying to look smart or win an argument. I read that bit about him in an essay that appeared in Harper’s magazine about 20 years ago, by a gay interior decorator living in San Francisco who was musing about some of his community members' preoccupation with all things old. He quoted Tocqueville, above, and related it to their perhaps-sublimated desire to create a history that has been denied them.1
I can’t speak for the gay community. While it’s possible that some may feel this longing for a history denied more acutely than others, in the mineshaft of American culture, everyone is a canary. And the impulse to create an artificial history for ourselves does seem to be an American phenomenon. You can see it in our fascination with distressed jeans, vintage eyewear, the naïve futurism of mid-century modern architecture, 75 percent of Pottery Barn’s inventory, Instagram’s faux-retrogressive filter settings, &c. And Americans have always been consumers. Logically, then, lacking a satisfactory story of our own, we simply go to the mall and buy a new one. (Critics may call us out for being phony, but when you look at the deeper yearnings such behavior implies, there is also plenty to understand and to love.)
The Harper’s essayist took it a step further, deconstructing the costly, time-intensive faux-painting techniques that carefully mimic the ravages of age. (He was restoring a Victorian house while writing the piece.) I don’t remember exactly how he put it (and I can’t find the damn article), but as I recall, the point was that such faux-finishes are an almost grotesque parody of our inclination to rewrite our backstory.
With the foregoing as my foundation, I can finally circle back to my own approach to painting and the fulfillment of my promise from Post No. 2 that I would start offering up some concrete theories about my work.
Body (A few actual thoughts about my theoretical approach to my art)
In creating paintings that are built up and layered and then sometimes scraped and then layered over yet again, I want to emphasize that I’m not trying to recreate an ersatz antiquey-ness, or trying to recreate “found art.” If that’s all I wanted to do, my work would go a lot faster—or I would take up photography and move to Tuscany. I’m really aiming for something more essential than surface attributes. Bauhauist Paul Klee pointed the way when he emphasized that the aged look of his paintings wasn’t there merely to give them an “antique look” (nice to know that he, too, equivocated over this) but, rather, to give them the worked-over look of a finely crafted and revered object; to draw attention to his otherwise tossed-off-looking, whimsical pieces as objects upon which great care had been lavished.
You can click on all these pictures to get a better look:
Red Balloon, Paul Klee, Guggenheim Collection, 1922
My Great Friend and Muse, Meredith, observed the other day that there is no “creative vocation outside that of the storyteller.” 2 And while some post-modern dickweed will probably come up with an exception or two to this rule, I think it’s basically true: every good song, guitar solo, dance piece, painting and so on tells a story. With paint, I’m trying to tell a story that words can't adequately express. I’m trying, through visual means, to convey a sense of narrative and, if you haven’t figured this out by now, a feeling of longing (Port.: saudade). If I’ve done a good job, these two elements—story and mood—will be easily apprehensible.
But that Harper’s article left me chilled. The author was pointing up the failure of faux-finishes to replace a story that’s not in our possession to tell. Reading it, I felt outed. By then, I’d already started collecting antiques, beginning with this piece of stained glass, my first purchase after moving back to Portland:
The fact is, so much about me is made-up (compounding hyphen added for emphasis) that I feel like a work of fiction myself.
Let’s start with my last name. Originally, it was Larimer (Irish-English), but my biodad dropped out of the scene early on and when I was ten, my mother and stepfather filed for a name change, adopting me into the family name of the latter, Carroll Gunz (Germanic). Sure, as a result, I get to have a really cool last name, but it isn’t my own. It tethers me to an ethnicity that’s not in my veins. As a family, we tried valiantly to breathe life into a story that Carroll was my sisters’ and my “real father”; following the adoption, we actually used that term in general conversation, and my biodad (rather flaky, but otherwise not a bad guy) was all but off limits as a topic for conversation. This was an intentional effort to rewrite the story of my family origins. In a bid to inject some fact into this fiction, I became obsessed with my geneology. My aim: to trace my family tree back far enough to discover an actual blood tie to Carroll (or, lacking that, a hint of royalty). But the line petered out at my step-great-great-grandfather in Dornbirn, Austria.
The fictionizing didn’t end there. I was raised in the Jehovah’s Witnesses, a religion that popped up in Allegheny, Pennsylvania in the late 1900s. But the Watchtower authors claim that representatives of the “faithful and discreet slave”—AKA true, anointed Christians (AKA proto-JWs)—actually stretches back to apostolic times. Like a doofus, I spent hundreds of hours researching non-Trinitarian, blood-refusing, politically aloof Christian sects, trying to reconstruct that pedigree. It doesn’t exist. (Are you detecting a pattern here?)
Looking back, it seems I was groping for truth in the fog of a fiction to which everyone subscribed but me.
At the same time, I was making up my own stories about myself.
I come from a blue-collar family—Carroll was a mailman—and for much of my youth, this was a source of embarrassment to me (c.f. my motives behind my genealogical project, above).3 I tried to distance myself from this fact and rise above it. Incorrectly surmising that better-bred people knew a thing or two about art, literature and gourmet food and wine, I decided to bone up on these subjects too. For instance, after saving up my lawn mowing money, I would hop the bus to Lloyd Center and spend it all at the posh Aladdin Restaurant, where, to my shock, I was first addressed by an elderly black waiter in a yellow waistcoat as “sir.” I must have been about 10 at the time.4
The Aladdin's floor-to-ceiling windows (left) once overlooked Lloyd Center's Ice rink. In 1990, the restaurant was shuttered and replaced by a food court.
At the same time, a glass dome was clamped over the top of the mall. Before that, it was open-air; birds flitted in and out of the space and it featured fountains, abstract bronze sculptures and spiral staircases like this one.
Most of the interests that characterize my lifestyle are a set of methodically acquired tastes that I once associated with “high culture”: food and wine, literature (the classics and modern), art history. I can tell Brahms from Bartok. But this is all a put-on. I picked out these Richie Rich-inspired trappings of “culture” because I didn’t like the real ones that were handed down to me. Now, at 47, I’ve been doing all of this for longer than the earlier years when I didn’t. By dint of longevity, this now is my story. But it is just a story. What started out as a sort of charade became something kind of like the real thing-ish.
Still, I don’t regret when, at 18, while on my graduation-gift trip to New York, I blew my vacation money on dinner at the Algonquin Hotel, where I rubbed shoulders with the ghosts of Dorothy Parker and Robert Benchley and, in a bottle of Mâcon-Lugny “Les Charmes,” ’82, discovered a corner of my soul that I didn’t know existed.
This label matches that of the 1982 vintage that I ordered in the Algonquin dining room in 1984. It's hard to say where my infatuation with Mâconnais wines began—with the waiter's presentation of this gracefully aristocratic label (a difficult balance to achieve, when you think about it), or with its contents. Although this is a low-res image, you can still pick out the dark metallic gold of which "MACON-LUGNY" and the border is comprised. The famed vineyard, Les Charmes, is given pride of place and set off in an elegant cursive, while the idiot-proof descriptor "white Burgundy wine" was likely added as a hint for American consumers, along was the further-explanatory "Chardonnay," both in smaller type, almost as an apology to more educated consumers. This label harkens back to the late 60s/early 70s era of Time-Life's "Foods of the World" cookbook collection, which my mother owned and I pored over as a kid and still refer to when I want to take a mental trip back to the Old Country (which I've never actually been to).
This is the current version of the label, which takes advantage of more advanced printing techniques to offer bric-a-brac scrollwork as a distracting underlay to the text. In comparing the two labels, it's easy to discover a change in priorities. "Les Charmes" is now given standard Roman typographical treatment, while, in order to lure more sophisticated American wine lovers who appreciate terroir's site-specificity, the term "single vineyard" has now been added. Conversely, in order to satisfy less-knowledgeable consumers' unslakable demand for the world's number-one best-selling white varietal, "Chardonnay" pops out in large, bold, blue type to actually upstage "Les Charmes" and "Mâcon-Lugny." As such, while the earlier version quietly states its case and, secure in its value, waits to be noticed, this label strives to be all things to all things to all people (in its target market). Mâcon-Lugny Les Charmes remains one of the world's great wines in its price range. The vigneron who decided to maximize its marketing potential deserves to have his ass kicked.
Because, which is a more “real” reality: my somewhat artificially cultivated affinity for Mâconnais Burgundies that is now linked to some of my most cherished memories, or a very genuine drive home from work that I can hardly remember?
Conclusion
My story may not have a lot of “truth” behind it. Fuck, it might even be one big lie. (Isn’t that what storytelling is, anyway?) But my experiences have been very real; over time, as these layers have accumulated and gotten smudged and futzed over; my story has become true—even better than true.
I'm doing my best to tell you what I'm trying to get at here. But I think the best way might be with paint.
And with that, I’m sorry. This post hasn’t included as much concrete theory as I’d hoped, or promised. Please don’t give up on me. I’ll try to do better next time.
1 Even fuller disclosure: I can’t find any of these Tocqueville passages, nor I can I find the Harper’s article that I’m trying to recall from 20-odd years ago. I could have dreamt this whole thing up!
2 She posted this on a Facebook thread at more or less he same exact time that I was (narcissistically! Ouch!) thinking about the meaning of my art, which is why she’s my muse.
3 Carroll Gunz was also embarrassed by his career choice. Siring a child too young, he dropped out of medical school to support his then-wife and took the civil service exam, subsequently joining the nation’s army of postal workers. Later, he divorced her, joined the Jehovah’s Witnesses and married my mother. As an elder in the religious community, all that’s left of his youthful dreams is an impeccable bedside manner.
4 In all fairness, a good deal of my fooding-and-wining and high-cultural aspirations are influenced by Alfred Hitchcock, who also came from humble beginnings and seems to have tried to elevate himself to a higher class by way of food, wine, fine art and, eventually by setting sail for America where he could finally get the respect he felt he deserved. I never made the connection until just now: I started geeking out on him right around the same time I began refashioning my life into something that better sense for me. Huh. ↩
No comments:
Post a Comment