Everything Is a Self-Portrait
In October I had the opportunity to go to the opening of Tour and Trance, Matt Blackwell’s exhibition at the Edward Thorp Gallery. It’s a strange animated narrative that contains a whole cast of characters experiencing events and simultaneously forming and disintegrating in one moment. That evening
In October I had the opportunity to go to the opening of Tour and Trance, Matt Blackwell’s exhibition at the Edward Thorp Gallery. It’s a strange animated narrative that contains a whole cast of characters experiencing events and simultaneously forming and disintegrating in one moment. That evening we had some conversations on his life and thoughts and the stories that came out felt like some of the missing puzzle pieces. So, we began a conversation. I realized, I didn’t want to ask him the details behind specific pieces or anything detailed in general. I wanted to ask him vague, open questions with a lot of room for rambling so we could meander around in his thought process the way his paintings meander around this weird world.
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Sarah Walko: Who are you as a character in your work?
Matt Blackwell: In my paintings I’ve been a donkey, a carburetor, a goat, a bear, a hermit, a potato, a head of cabbage, a stone, The green man, pan, a wolfman. They say everything is a self-portrait. Maybe.
SW: Why do you make your work?
MB: I work because there is so much to tell. And because the more I do the more I can see to do. Yeah, lead me to greener pastures. I work to be surprised at my own process and to put out what fills me up, be it formal stuff, a memory a fantasy. As you push through your fifties you realize your time is measured. I’ve got things I wanna say and ideas come along in strange synapses and sequences making me believe in some sort of spiritual plan that I don’t want to name, but that feels just out of reach. Sometimes it’s just all work and I think if I stop that I’ll sink like a stone. But I find the work exhilarating, kinda like swimming laps at a pool.
My favorite artists never stop. De Kooning, Diebenkorn, Lois Dodd, George Bellows, Guston, Max Beckmann, Matisse, Judy Linhares, David Park, Steve Di Benedetto and Summer Wheat. They’re all aggressive like it’s a game, and work should be that way. Play really.
My audience is particular. They’re invited to view my work, but I hope I’m not pandering too much to taste, or letting my invention be too ruled by art history. I want to be informed not derivative, a lot of failure there. Failure may be necessary to move to something that is your own. One has to be one’s own critic.
SW: Is there a protagonist in your work?
MB: The protagonists in my paintings are fools, clowns, exiles from Beckmann paintings, Shmidt-Rotluffs, red bohemians, bears, donkeys, goats, friends, goddesses, heroes, girls, ass kickers, rednecks, no necks, freaks n’ geeks, roosters, gone byes and passed overs, leftovers, the dead. Mr. Natural thrice removed, devils, mystics, v-8 engines, Greek gods, Rastas and farmers, vets, cats, girlfriends, dead friends, Jesus, Dick Cheney, saints, sinners, losers and winners (J.R.Robertson, W.S.Walcott Medicine Show, Stage Freight, The Band).
I often use groups of figures to convey my narratives. However, they exist as a reason to push paint around. Sometimes I have a clear agenda on my narratives, other times it comes about through painterly process. I want the work to be born from the realm of paint not illustration
My work has grown out of looking at early expressionist painting and more specifically Californian Bay Area painting, particularly David Parks’s work, a melding of abstract painting and figure in strong light. Max Beckmann, the 20th C. German Expressionist painter is also important to me. I love his twisted narratives, so hard to decipher but so lived! Its Brecht on canvas. James Ensor also is very important to me, the grotesque carnival, painterly invention, weird narratives, smoked herring. Also a friend just gave me a CD compilation of African American gospel music called Fire In My Bones. Unbelievably, raw and varied … sustaining in its riffs and sincere faith.
SW: What’s your definition of failure?
MB: As far as failure goes its just another place to push off from. I don’t give up easily, so some works go on for years in the studio. Some adhere to original ideas, others mutate into what they need to be. I’m not anal about my surfaces. If they get too snotty, I chisel pieces off.
SW: What were you thinking about a lot today?
MB: Today I went into my storage and pulled out a couple dud paintings. One was of a car. I turned it on its side and started making some figures out of the car body, which had a few good passages. I went as far as I could and then wrote into a blog from my hometown — Lyons, New York. People write their memories in and they have great photos.
I wrote a story about being hired with my friend Bobo Lauster to dig a grave at the graveyard across from his house managed by his grandfather. To a couple of 18 year olds with a six pack this sounded like fun and the money was good … the backhoe was broken down so our backs were valuable. Down near the bottom at twilight we hit what looked like a piece of milled wood, probably a coffin. This blew our 18 year old immortal minds. I wrote it in the third person, and kind of cast it in a Poe like way and musing on mortality, which this gospel music is all about. It steered me that way. After I did this I went back to my painting, and developed some charterers into a Halloween scene by a convenience store but taking some serious liberties, trying not to be illustrational. Looks like upstate New York to me or New England.
I’m kind of surprised how ideas get born, memories get jarred loose, or fiction makes reality real. Its been a good day to conjure. I think there’s a painting in that grave digging story, but I’ll need to look at the late great painter Jan Müller before I begin.
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Tour and Trance is on view at Edward Thorp Gallery (210 Eleventh Avenue, 6th floor, Chelsea, Manhattan) until tomorrow, December 10.
