Image Galleries
Artist's Statement
Career Narrative
azo@alexoneal.com
NEWS
RECENT WORK June 26–August 15, 2009
OPENING RECEPTION: Friday, June 26th, 6-9 pm
Linda Warren Gallery
1052 West Fulton Market St.
Chicago, IL 60607
Tel. 312-432-9500
www.lindawarrengallery.com
I am pleased to have a second one person exhibition at Linda Warren Gallery, Chicago.
The show's most recent works, made at Camargo Foundation in France this year, are linked in the text below and viewable in the 2009 Work section.
The 32" X 49" oil pastel on my show's announcement, "New Looks and Accessories For The Delta Scene"(2009), puts into focus a lot of what occurred in studio over the last two years. Though still rooted in my past premise- a narrative involving anarchist Mean Hippies anchored to Mississippi’s Delta, their eccentric relationship with animals and the natural world, and an awkward fashion statement arising from these militant hillbillies' disguises- I have decided the work speaks more personally and specifically and refers more to the dysfunctional family unit. I believe I am Pop Art-izing this small dysfunctional community that, like my Mean Hippies, has its resident anarchists and terrorists, veiled in various disguises, and ready to drop their bombs at family gatherings. That being said, I have been bringing new formal aspects to the works as well- especially totemic form likely inspired by medieval architecture and Pacific Northwest Coast indigenous art, plus unusually inventive European Art Brut. The candy striped elements of past work is furthered by neck ties, King Tut masks, and platform boots. Hair imagery remains important and a new wig-combing or hair-tugging character is a poor man’s Delilah.
I am pleased that this summer exhibition will reveal so much of what I have been thinking during the last two years. The amount of works will also illustrate how an artist's works benefit from the ones he or she makes before others. That is, I feel a viewer to my show can see more how an idea or image began in one work- or was simply hinted at- and came into fruition within a year or two. Some recent paintings and drawings seem like letters I've composed of personal symbols. They have visual narratives that keep giving a viewer clues that even I have yet to fully understand.
Four works in the show were made in Cassis, France, this last winter and spring at the Camargo Foundation and have new imagery and incorporate some new phrases. During those months in France, sidetrips to Heidelberg, Lausanne, Bern, and Barcelona had some immediate influences which was unusual considering how I usually digest information. Large, decorated hearts, a kind of sweet talk beyond my characters' peppermint tongues, were real objects, big iced cookies that weighed down Heidelberg candy wagons like ex-votos. Colorful stickers, advertising Spanish locksmiths, I peeled from Barcelona shop doors and collaged onto “Flea Market Superstars (Painting with 25 Suns)” with an unintentially pun about unlocking hearts. Of the most noteworthy in my new work are flamboyant, glam-rock characters proclaiming, “The Art World is not your friend!” or “The Art World is not my friend!”. For my paintings' and drawings' Mean Hippies and other characters to be saying this makes them the anarchists I envision them to be.
January 2009
The site was updated with new work from May-December 2008.
May 2008
The 2008 work that updates the site includes a group of drawings, most of which were begun in Mississippi last summer, and two large mixed media paintings from the winter. Except for "Drawing with Badges", begun in Catalunya in 2006, the oil pastel drawings were influenced by the environment in and around a rural cabin in the hillier area of Mississippi. The small, unpainted, pine cabin was once the home of one of my great-grandmothers. Though the new drawings that took root there continue my narrative and symbolism, there is different imagery inspired by the hawks, owls, and eagles that I see or hear near the cabin. A deprived, rural landscape is suggested by a sign advertising or someone exclaiming “DIRT FOR SALE”.
Mean hippies or anarchist characters in the new drawings further push their disguise, including the ability to mimic or incorporate appearances of animals. With an air of momentum, entourages of flamboyant, militant characters are both camouflaged and glamorized by more pronounced patterning. They appear as vague superheroes with paraphernalia and mascots. The image of the candy shoestring, which refers to a Delta band I drummed for in the Seventies, has branched out as peppermint-striped snakes, ropes, tongues, and clothing. Though I mainly see the homegrown anarchists of my work as referring to a broader dysfunctional American landscape, lately I see their community as a metaphor for the family unit that has its own resident anarchists and history of secrecy, as symbolized in the heavily-disguised participants. I recently told someone I might be POP-izing the dysfunctional family. Disguise, here with the original goal of assisting anarchy, goes beyond as drag. (As well, the mean hippies and animals in the drawings are becoming the other.) This impersonating may suggest that an artist, necessarily isolated in a studio, can easily refer to or need to create a both-gendered, that is, complete, world in his or her art.
Of the new paintings, "Modern Day Tarzans", among other things, refers to my meeting the most famous Apeman portrayer, Johnny Weissmuller, in Jackson, Mississippi when I was six. The experience made mythology very real and was a most welcomed escape at that time, 1963, when my hometown of Jackson was in chaos. But, this painting’s versions of Tarzan, young and old, are still the fashion-conscious anarchists who, with futility, hide and plot within the natural world. In their most glam clothes, they hang out in their unpeaceable kingdom. Hoping to embody and exploit nature’s power, one character charms a snake while another is poorly dressed as a satyr. The other 2008 painting, "Studio Ghosts", comments on both the artist's mindset in studio- among other past businesses, my Brooklyn workspace was once a funeral home- and Hollywood, which is echoed in some characters' star language (collaged photo images of Veronica Lake and Judy Garland). Paint globs on several characters' faces suggest symptoms of a plague, but illustrate the paint-covered, working artist. Recently, such a “hands-on” painter, that, in real life, would have accumulated paint trails on their clothes from wiping brushes, is ironic, even humorous, because this artistic persona seems to be disappearing from urban streets as new media and photo-based work fills a larger part of the art world. Both paintings include older style telephone receivers that suggest paintings are communications: between artist and inspiration, the viewer and the art, and the form and content of each piece.
I want to thank the Ragdale Foundation, of Lake Forest, Illinois, for providing me some needed time and space outside of Brooklyn to resolve recent work.
December 2007
New 2007 paintings had been added to the site.
New work furthers and also “turns up” existing themes in my paintings and drawings. Those are disguise, anarchy, and my characters' efforts to gain associations with and the power of animals. All these comment on my ongoing mean hippie, a sort of Southern anarchist, militant hillbilly, and homegrown American terrorist. From a more sedate point of view, there is also metaphor for the secretive, dysfunctional American family.
The two 2007 mixed media paintings on the site elaborate more on the element of fashion as it creates disguise. The Delta Scene shows glam hipsters, tigers, lions, and snakes wrestling around a bottle tree, that homemade, African-rooted spirit catcher of the Deep South. Here it could suggest many things: false idol, liquor as something to aspire to, trash taking root, a landscape element, and/or the enchanting bottle tree itself. It’s a different arrangement of the collaged liquor bottle images I used in mid-Nineties works, like Groovy Dudes Hunting Club (1995), to create atmospheres of alcoholism. Though I have been spending more time in Mississippi, Untitled (Wigs For Sale), 2007, is among new paintings that reflect my New York experience of the last nine years- in particular, sidewalk merchants and wig shop displays of 14th Street and Sixth Avenue: good sources for disguises.
2006 drawings were tremendously and a bit magically influenced by August spent in Farrera, a Catalan village that supports an artist's residency program. I also painted there in 1996 and works from that year are on his site. It was more than interesting to see how the village and its small population had changed over ten years. Though many of Farrera's past memorable characters had either passed or were spending retirement with family in the lowlands, a familiar enchantment was still in the air and in Farrera's stone structures, some as old as 900 CE.
What I'd like to tell viewers of the 2006 oil pastels is that the works personify the large, dramatic weather systems (El Temps) and landscapes of the Pyrenees north of Barcelona. Huge figures are the mountains, the fog (La Niebla), and the storms and they dominate a kind of opera with accompanying characters and animals. In most drawings, small, exposed mountain villages must witness and survive the eccentric, pseudo-mythological activities of their natural world.