The Artist Profile: The Work Before the Work

A snapshot of the rabbit holes I tumbled down preparing to interview a painter.

A glimpse of a studio I visited last week in preparation for an artist profile I’ve been commissioned to write. Readers will learn the artist’s identity after the piece is done.

A couple months ago my 14-year-old son brought home a hardback edition of Bram Stoker’s Dracula from the school library. It was not an assignment, but he’d heard that next semester, it will be, so he was determined to read it on his own—which he did.

To shamelessly employ a cliche, the apple didn’t fall far from the tree.

I’ve always loved the work before the work officially begins, the prep, the preliminary research, reporting, working ahead, whatever you want to call it.

This sensibility has served me well in theater, although there the prospect of embarrassment and humiliation serves as a powerful motivator. I absolutely don’t want to be the one who, three nights before opening, is still calling for lines. I’ll get a script before I even audition, and on a few occasions I’ve started memorizing lines for the character I want and intend to play before I’m even cast. I recall only one instance where another actor got a part I’d already started memorizing lines for. Yes, that was a humbling experience.

I’ve been in this mode now for a few weeks on two projects. I’m watching films online in advance of the McMinnville Short Film Festival here in Oregon, which I’ll cover in February at Oregon ArtsWatch. But I’ve also spent a good chunk of January wading through an eclectic “to do” list in advance of interviewing a painter in his studio. I’ve been asked to write a short piece about an exhibition that will open in the Willamette Valley this spring.

Having attended a talk he gave at a local library and listening to a radio interview he did last November, I acquired a pretty comprehensive picture of this artist’s influences and, accordingly, a longer-than-I-expected list of artists, art movements, filmmakers, poets, paintings and music to research as quickly as possible.

I was already fairly knowledgable about two: The films of Stanley Kubrick and Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone. Others were familiar but required some catch-up: The French filmmaker Jean Cocteau, the painter Robert Colescott, Bay Area figurative painting, and surrealism. Others were new to me: The painters Joan Brown, Elmer Bischoff, Richard Diebenkorn and the famed early 20th century surrealist painter Rene Magritte, and the music of Erik Satie. I read some work by his favorite poet, W.H. Auden, including one that inspired a painting of his I’d already seen.

Also, knowing that the artist lived in the Haight-Ashbury district of San Francisco in the late 1960s and early 1970s, I called up the top ten pop songs from each of the four-year period he was in school there and made a playlist—my own ‘Top 40-list—so I had a feel for the music that shaped him, the music he and everyone else his age would have heard when it was new. I was surprised at how many were familiar, the songs you’ll hear today on old AM stations.

Venice Under Moonlight, 1869, by Caravaggio. One of many, many, many paintings featuring the moon.

And then there was the little matter of the moon. I’d learned from the artist talk that the moon would enjoy a prominent place in the paintings for the show he’s preparing that will open later this spring. And so off to the library I went.

Here’s what blows my mind about the moon, among its various oddities: Other than the sun, which is technically a ball of gas and therefore not solid, the moon is the only unique physical object that everyone who has ever lived in the history of the world has seen, and it appears to us exactly like it did to everyone else, including the Babylonian artist who carved it (along with an actual man “in” the moon and other features) into a clay tablet about 800 B.C. that now sits in a museum in Berlin. A photo appears below:

A Babylonian clay tablet, estimated to have been carved in 800 B.C.

Whoever rendered the moon in that fashion would not have thought of themselves as an “artist,” nor would they have made any distinction between what today we identify as the categories of astronomy, philosophy, art or mysticism.

“All of these realms were inseparable from the broader field of science as it treated the Moon,” Scott L. Montgomery writes in his 1999 book The Moon & the Western Imagination, one of a couple books I consulted for this aspect of the story. “Indeed, it was art far more than science per se that made of the lunar orb a planet in the modern sense, a world in motion yet fixed with a geography of names, places and thus earthly projections.”

So the moon ended up being a rabbit hole, one which included listening to my favorite podcast, Weird Studies, Ep. 94 in which the co-hosts do a deep dive into the Moon card of the Tarot deck and what all is going on there.

I don’t know how this reporting regarding the moon will manifest itself in the profile I do of this artist, but I can’t imagine that it won’t.

So … that was the work before the work. Work that doesn’t feel like a “job.”

I love that shit.

* * * *

At 10 a.m. Friday, I arrived at the downtown Salem address of the artist’s studio, just up the street from my favorite coffee shop. The gate leading to the stairs had been left unlocked for me, and I went up, a bit steeper than I’d have liked. It was very quiet. All the doors on the landing were closed. One led into a mid- to late-20th century looking bathroom with an old poster for Cocteau’s Orphee displayed over the toilet. Another was a private investigator’s office. The place had that kind of vibe, a bit run-down, not warm enough, probably on its second or third remodel.

After a minute or so, one of the doors opened and the artist, a spry gentleman in his seventies, welcomed me into a gallery full of his paintings.

We talked for two hours.