It's my story and I'm sticking to it: Why I paint, part 3

Preface
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.

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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. ^↩

Why I Paint - Part 2

"Living, for you, is an exercise in finding things to write about." That's what my great friend and muse, Meredith, had to say to me. She's almost right. The fact is, even though I make my living as a writer, I'm not sure if this is my best mode of expression. I think in images and abstractions; translating that into English can be rough going. In conversation, I fish for words and say "um" a lot. So I'd like to amend Meredith's observation to state:

Living, for me, is an exercise in finding things to create about.

If I'm not doing something creative with paint or words or music, let the record (and my Internet history) show that I'm just not good company for myself or others. Plus, I've always dabbled in visual arts, messing around with graphic design like this:

or mixed media stuff like this:

59 degrees and 54 feet North, 10 degrees and 54 feet East, magazine pieces, found paint and found glue on wooden architectural scrap, 10" x 5.25", 2011. 

...and this (they come as a pair):

Haugesund, They Say, Is Built on Herring Bones, magazine pieces, found paint and found glue on wooden architectural scrap, 10" x 5.25", 2011.

I also do conceptual installation-type pieces, like this:

Hazard, typewriter, wooden box with scary stickers, driftwood, 27" x 27", 33 pounds, 2009

None of this may be to your taste. And that's okay. I'm just trying to illustrate a point. But paint has always lurked in the background; specifically abstract stuff, like this really tacky riff on Japanese calligraphy that's so bad I can't even show it to you:

Thus, as I take up painting once again, I'm feeling the exhilaration that comes after a long dry spell: I feel myself coming alive, like a tree warming to its sap after a long winter. When it comes my neo-expressionist stuff (their label, not mine), that dormant season extends back to before I can remember.

Joel's Painting Improved: Now with 30% More Piss!

When Alfred Hitchcock's masterful Rear Window was released in 1954, conservative critics complained about its subtext of voyeurism. Hitch responded by saying that "no amount of moral consideration could have prevented me from making this." The way I see it, those are eternal words to at least consider in every area of life. What does this mean for the kind of painting I'm doing right now? My current project was borne out of a deep dissatisfaction with the status quo at the alt-healthcare clinic mentioned in my last post. The walls were bare, we had no budget to do anything about it and business had gone into its seasonal decline. I had a little extra time on my hands and a lot of pent-up, frustrated energy. The project emerged from a big bucket of FUCK IT.

Then, when I first disclosed to one of my business partners that I was going to take this art project on, he expressed doubts about my ability to pull it off (as he'd continually been doing about a business that was—and is—doing quite well). His defeatist attitude gave me a gunpowder-spark I could use to show him, myself and whatever audience the the paintings might have that I could produce material art. FUCK HIM.

Also, when I was a Jehovah's Witness, I allowed my path as an artist to be quashed by a code of arbitrary, byzantine rules laid down by its governing body. In that world, your life is expected to revolve around studying Watchtower literature, attending Kingdom Hall meetings and, of course, going out in the door-to-door ministry. Any other interests were supposed to be mere hobbies. But if you're going to create anything of lasting value, you pretty much have to orient your life around that artistic pursuit, one way or another. For years, I dealt with those warring interests. Keeping art in my life then was an act of rebellion; ten years after leaving that religion, I still feel like I'm transgressing.* FUCK THEM.

As you can see, there is anger behind my work. But that doesn't mean my work is angry. I just want to contribute something beautiful to the world and, in view of the obstacles I face(d), I've been able to leverage the caustic value of my anger to make it happen. When used properly, anger can be the Ajax Cleanser of the soul.

Though I did dip into the business for a few bucks, most of the money to take this on came out of my own pockets—money I could ill afford. For me, then, the "moral considerations" that I needed to repudiate came in the form of discouragement from others, the morality of financial responsibility and the ingrained Witness code of "normal behavior." That latter obstacle was a doozy for me. It kept me in a screwed-up religious community that, if allowed to continue, probably would have killed me.

Jungian philosophy argues that the obstacles we face are actually created in our subconscious; that they are equal in size to the life we want to build; that they are there for this express purpose: to be overcome. The point is, I had to deal with a lot of demons—internal and external—just to clear away the space needed to create something of any worth. That's part of the ongoing process that I'm trying to document here.

What I'm trying to get at is the big WHY. Why the hell am I doing this art thing? Why am I writing about it? It seems 50 percent too pat—too MarketingRetreatBreakoutGroup—to call this a discovery project. I feel like I'm digging a tunnel through a mountain from two opposite ends: on the one end, I'm trying to articulate my (presumably pre-existing) theoretical underpinnings; on the other end, it seems as if I'm conjuring up theory where none existed before. The latter sounds off-puttingly haphazard, as if I'm making theory up as I go along. (And that feeling might account, in part, for the fear that many artists have, that they are mere hacks.) But there does seem to be a scientific basis for it. I think there's a whole meta-branch of physics devoted to considering that moment of singularity where hypothesis and discovery fall into each others' arms and sculpt reality as they go. Isn't there?

All right, that's enough of me! I'm going to take a whack at explaining this in more concrete terms in my next post.
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*If, contra Witness teaching, the "kingdom" that Jesus was always yammering about can be equated with reality, then his words can be reframed suchly: "Seek first reality and all these other things will be added to you." "Authenticity is within you (or, 'in your midst')." "Our ultimate truth who art beyond the veil of maya, let thy reality come." This is the only way Jesus' teachings make sense for me any more.

Why I started painting -- and, now, writing about it

At the suggestion of my great friend and muse, Meredith, I've started to articulate with words what I hope to accomplish using paint. The idea, she says (and I'm paraphrasing here), is to document the process of creation, for this can help bring about a sense of clarity and focus.

(This is my thought, not hers:) if we cannot clearly state what our artistic aims are, then maybe we don't have any -- unless they are so subsumed behind overt intentions (dreams of fame, daydreams about actually making a living at this) that in the execution we might miss a deeper mark, in the manner of a swimmer who, crossing a channel in the fog, misses his/her island goal. Conversely, chronicling your work as you go can also help you to find a higher purpose for it than mere "weekend arts and crafting" (her words) could ever hope to accomplish on its own. The point (and, once again, I'm paraphrasing -- albeit in my own voice, with my inflections) isn't to just make pretty pictures, but to find your own voice and cut a path to expressing it as clearly as possible. That's why I've started writing about my art.

Meredith's suggestion was to journal these thoughts -- to put them in a private place where only I will see them. At first, she expressed doubts about my desire to put them into a blog, because it's not the publishing (fr. Latin publicare, i.e., to make public) of my aims that matters, but that I ''took the time to think things out.'* Well, I don't work that way. I don't keep private logs of my activities; hell, I can hardly maintain an appointment calendar. I write web logs -- blogs. And since that's what I do, this is what you get.

I started making neo-expressionist paintings in October, 2012. A year and a half earlier, I'd started building an alt-healthcare clinic and among my other tasks (setting up the business and pretty much running it single-handedly) it was also my job to provide interior design and decoration. We were in start-up mode, bootstrapping the project as we went, and there was no budget for artwork. Hence, the walls went bare. Finally, irritated at this bleak situation, I took matters into my own hands and decided to create art for the clinic, mostly at my own expense. Having just visited the astounding Rothko show at the Portland Art Museum, I thought I could create a few knockoffs of his paintings -- pale imitations of his masterpieces that would nevertheless add color to those otherwise eggshell walls. Not sure about how to go about doing this, I surfed how-to videos on YouTube until I found the the documentary Gerhard Richter: Painting. Immediately, I knew I'd found what I was looking for -- along with a great instructional video that would help me get there. To be sure, Richter's a skip and a jump from Rothko, but somehow his large-scale abstractions resonated. It's what I was meant to create. I didn't know why at the time, I just knew.

Here's the first piece I did:

Untitled, Acrylic on cabinet door, 19" x 20" (October, 2012)

It's a flawed attempt, but the sheer pleasure of schmeering paint across the surface of that cabinet door was a joy, not unlike the pleasure I, as an infant, must have had, dragging a crayon across a blank page or the inside of an expensive book or a living room wall just for the sheer thrill of seeing pigment appear as if by magic. I hope to never lose that thrill. So far, so good.

That was the circumstantial beginning. But the deeper, teleological, story can be traced back to my teen years. I think my first real exposure to abstract expressionism came from the cover art for Stan Getz' and Joao Gilberto's "Live at Carnegie Hall" album. It stuck with me. In fact, my painting above is blatantly derivative:

I loved that cover art by Olga Albizu as much as I loved the music.** As a teen I would sit on the floor in front of the stereo with my knees up and prop the album cover on my thighs, tapping my drum brushes along to that featherlight bossa nova locked in place by drummer Milton Banana, while Joao Gilberto softly sang "Samba de Minha Terra." The Brazilian concept of saudade -- a free-floating, melancholic longing for a lost home, homeland, friend, family member or lover -- is pretty much my default mode. And (surprise, surprise) I tend to be prone to bouts of depression. Listening to Joao and Jobim and Stan Getz helped connect me to those feelings and Albizu's paintings will always be a part of that.

My abstracts are an attempt to seek out my lost past (or, frankly, a past that never existed no matter how much I might wish otherwise), to express it in the form of a multicolored EKG, a radar sweep that says I was here. And here. And here. To be more specific, they are about my yearning to reconnect all those lost, perhaps never-existent, dots; an attempt to get at the marrow of my history, in the way that I might chew on a cold sore; a returning to the process like a dog who finds meaning in worrying a bone. Freud called it repetition-compulsion.

At 47, I've created a history for myself and there are layers of relationships both maintained (such as with my children and a handful of old friends) and ended (through divorce and separation from my former religious community and all the others ebb tides of life), all of whose influence will undoubtedly stay with me all through this life. New relationships are constantly being formed as well.

Thus the layers of buildup in my paintings are like the accretion and attrition of lives lived, conversations shared and subsequently half-forgotten; persistences of vision obscured by new images, the parchment and palimpsest of my unique story. All that remains, all that exists in this moment, as I sit alone in my apartment typing on my laptop, is the memory of accumulated experiences.

There's more to come, but that's all I've got for now. Boa noite.

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*As Tony Wendice says in Hitchcock's Dial M for Murder.
**Albizu's work appeared on several albums, primarily from Verve, but also from RCA.