Paul Warren: You’re absorbing the images through mass media, so how can they not filter into your work?

Paul Warren is an artist and illustrator with an interest in surrealism and abstract art. He works in a variety of different mediums, including collage. Paul's work has been published by Dumpster Fire Press, The Odd Magazine and Word Vomit Zine.  He has online galleries at Deviant Art and Instagram. He lives in Daventry, England.

You live in the town of Daventry, Northamptonshire, in England. What is the art scene like in England these days? What is the support for visual art? Is there a fair bit of regionalism?

I think the art scene in England is pretty staid these days. It only exist in most people’s lives when Banksy sprays something on a wall somewhere.  All of the big exhibitions are London-based, with a corporate sponsor. From time to time something interesting will pop up in an independent gallery away from the capital. I usually find out about these after the event. National media focus only on the big exhibitions: Monet or Hockney, for example. Living here these things easily pass you by! So yes, I think there is some regionalism. There have been attempts to revive the Art Lab idea in some areas, including Northampton. There are people creating art locally but few opportunities.

Thankfully I have a day job. I would never make a living out of art, wouldn’t want to, it’s far too precarious. I also have the freedom to produce what I want.

When did you first start making art? What artists inspired you when you started out, and what artists inspire you now?

I started making art as a child, drawing mainly. I do remember being obsessed with the Beatles’ Sgt Pepper album artwork. I spent virtually an entire school holiday producing Sgt Pepper-inspired drawings and paintings. It was the colour that amazed me. This was the late 70s, early 80s, in Northamptonshire ‒ there didn’t seem to be a lot of colour about then ! At about this time my eyes were opened to abstract art. The art teacher at my high school, I’d have been about 14 , sent me into a storeroom to collect some paintbrushes. On the wall there was a print of ‘Cossacks’ by Kandinsky. That blew me away. I didn’t know art could be like that. The most modern thing I’d seen up until then was a print of Seurat’s ‘Bathers at Asniéres’.

The Catch

My intention upon leaving school was to study art, but this didn’t work out and I became disillusioned with art and stopped painting and drawing as I didn’t see the point.

When I was about 19, though, I discovered a copy of Patrick Waldberg’s Surrealism. This had a massive impact on me. This led to discovering Dalí. Dalí was to me, then, the greatest artist ever. I couldn’t get enough of his work.

I started painting surreal landscapes featuring faceless ballerinas, elongated tables, jugglers on stilts, human faces buried in walls, mannequins and of course cypress trees.

This led to me collecting anything I could find on Surrealism. I was also taking an interest in Futurism and Impressionism at that time.

Another chance discovery was Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs. I couldn’t believe that book, staggering, full of these images that just threw themselves at you, written by someone who seemingly didn’t care. Major influence. Forty or fifty books in and he’s still having the same impact.  The cut-ups were a revelation. He was a genius with that. There is a richness and beauty to the prose that a lot of people just don’t get.

Through Burroughs I came to the work of Brion Gysin. Incredible talent and who’s heard of him, compared with Burroughs? Very few people.

Another artist whose work means a lot to me is Emmy Bridgwater, the British surrealist. She didn’t produce a huge amount of work but what she did produce was mesmerising. Her painting ‘Night work is about to commence’ is astounding.

Innocence Lost

An artist whom I’ve returned to recently is Stanley Donwood, best known for his work with Radiohead. The work he produced with Thom Yorke in the early 2000s is very inspiring.  It has a questioning, almost anarchic, edge to it. Very powerful work.

I’ve always been influenced by writers. A passage from a book or a lyric from a song often triggers something. Lately this has become more apparent.  For instance I’ve been collaborating with the writer Stephen Michael Whitter, producing the artwork for a new edition of his book Tales Deceptively Honest. The artwork combines images of mainly derelict buildings with Stephen’s text, incorporating drawings, collage and digital artwork.

The book is due to be published by Dumpster Fire Press in November.

And of course I’ve made a couple of pieces based on your work. One of these, ‘Each step backward erases each step taken’, was interesting as it led me on to do a small series of astronaut-based pictures. One of them, ‘Astronaut on a deserted Street’, was used by Ryan Quinn Flanagan for the cover of his recent book Fowler’s Revenge.

I produced a series of paintings heavily influenced by this period under a pseudonym The Watchman. I’d read the Djuna Barnes novel Nightwood and I got the name from the ‘Watchman, what of the night ?’ section of the book. The British surrealist artist Conroy Maddox also used that title for one of his most famous collages, which I later discovered.

The Watchman artwork had titles like ‘Mannequin Genocide’, ‘The Last museum’, ‘The Great Illusion’, ‘Radio Nudes’, ‘The Forgotten season’, and ‘Blood sports in the morning’. The choice of title was very important to me at that time.

You tend to work in collage, but what other mediums do you use? What is your approach to making art?

I am working mainly in collage at the moment, both hand cut and digital. It’s a time-constraint thing as well. For the work I’m producing at the moment collage is the only way to get these ideas out. It’s also allowing me to incorporate text into the artwork, something I’d been trying to do for years.

The purpose of luxury

I have a technique for layering the collages, which combines hand cutting and digital montage, which seems to work well.

I prefer to paint if I have the time. I use acrylic, watercolour, oil, as well as pastels and pencils. When I paint I use very traditional techniques. The ideas tend to come quick, so I tend to work quite fast. I rarely work from sketches, so what you see is, generally, the first idea put down. Not ideal, but I can’t do it any other way.

Some of your artworks comment on political issues, such as the invasion of Ukraine, or on UK politics. What do you see as the role of the artist in today’s society?

This is a fairly recent thing for me. I was appalled by the Ukraine war and initially produced an image of Putin with a clowns nose and hair, with something offensive written across his forehead in Russian. A few people liked this, so I had it made into a T-shirt design and tried to sell it through an online site. The intention was that anything I made would be donated to the Ukraine appeal. I sold a handful of these, then the site took them down. They were inappropriate, apparently.

Rouge

I posted about this on my Facebook page and Mike Zone, who is the editor for Dumpster Fire Press, got in touch. He’d brought one of these T-shirts and was shocked by the site’s action.

He was in the process of putting together a new anthology titled World on Fire and offered to use my Putin artwork. This opened the floodgates for me and I sent Mike god knows how much Putin/Ukraine/anti-monarchy/anti-capitalist artwork.

Most of which appears in the book. The book later became World on Fire: Propagandie ,with proceeds going to the Ukraine appeal. So, a big thanks to Mike for that.

I would hope that any artist is touched by world events such as the war in Ukraine. From my point of view, you’re absorbing the images through mass media, so how can they not filter into your work?

The big figures from the years of punk have either passed on or have gone very quiet. Do you think punk it still relevant today, if not more relevant than ever?

Yes, I think it is still relevant. The ability to shock has largely gone, owing to the fact the world moves on and we’ve seen it all before. But the punk attitude and aesthetic lives on. The music is very relevant, particularly in Britain at the moment. There is a Liverpool-based poetry zine called Word Vomit, which carries on the punk aesthetic. Kate Floss who runs it has been kind enough to accept some of my text-based work. It’s DIY publishing ‒ I love that sort of thing.

Unncessary Atrocities

They do a lot of open-mic nights too. It’s the punk thing of just getting out there and doing it.

The punk aesthetic is something that I looked to last summer, for a series of alternative Queen’s Jubilee ‘stamp’ designs. These were based on a portrait of the Queen, satirical in nature and incorporated cut-up text made from media coverage, song lyrics and TS Eliot, as well as a bit of social comment on my part!

Jamie Reid was the big influence for the idea. Also David King, who did a lot of the artwork for Crass.

I was impressed with your series about the murdered actress Sharon Tate. In a way it reminded me of Warhol’s Monroe portraits, as well as his Death and Disaster series. Was Warhol in any way an influence?

They do share some similarities, not intended though. I’ve been looking at a lot of Eastern European collage and photomontage, notably the Polish artist Janusz Maria Brzeski and his ‘Birth of a Robot’ series. I didn’t realise until I started researching Sharon Tate how iconic her image could be. I say ‘could be’, as it’s been overshadowed by Manson. He took that from her. The series was intended to redress that , to take back her image. There were meant to be 10 or 12 images in the series, but it’s spiralled a bit and at the last count I had 45 pieces.

What is your opinion of outsider art? I admire outsider art tremendously, but I can’t help but feel it is becoming a sort of style.

It’s becoming big business. The Tate had a big outsider art exhibition a while back. Scottie Wilson,  the surrealist, is a good example of an outsider being brought into the mainstream, setting him up with an exhibition in a gallery and while the show was going on he was selling his artwork outside a pub around the corner for the price of a pint! Wilson had been selling his art from the back of a van before that.

Roland Penrose tried to bring him into the surrealist fold, but Wilson was treading his own path. That’s often the case with outsider art ‒ by its nature it’s different, often idiosyncratic, and generally has little commercial appeal, well, at least at the time it’s being produced.

Awkward Continents

I believe you are working with Mike Zone on a collaborative novel. Can you tell us a bit about this?

Yes, it’s to be called Dead Star: Control.  The initial inspiration was the Sharon Tate artwork we discussed earlier.  Obviously I can’t say too much at this point about the plot except that it’s a Burroughsian /Philip K Dick sci-fi thing that explores a lot of the themes surrounding the Tate murder. Mk Ultra, conspiracy theories, that sort of thing. Some of the Tate artwork will be in the book. It’s interesting, as when this idea developed, the artwork was influenced by the plot and vice versa. That’s what I find exciting ‒ the role chance plays in the process. Having a loose idea and just seeing where it leads.

Dead Star should see the light of day later this year or 2024.

We’ve collaborated before on Mike’s chapbook Fuck You: A Fucking Poetry Chap. That was great fun. The illustrations weaved around Mike’s text. It seemed to work quite well.

I also provided the Cover artwork for Mike’s latest book, Wonderful Turbulence.

Another book project that I worked on was a collaboration with both Mike and the poet Shannon Lynette, titled Razorville.

It was really interesting to see how the words and images ‘collided’ as the book developed: text influencing artwork, artwork influencing text.

Razorville was published earlier this year by Dumpster Fire Press.

Milk and Honey

What do you see as the future of art in England?

Interesting question. I’m not seeing anything inspiring coming out of the mainstream art world. The problem is it’s all about sales and profit. Everything I see that is inspiring, a little bit different, is online. There are a lot of people like myself who need to create art ‒ it’s about searching for something different. I don’t really take an interest in contemporary art anymore. Everything is too commercial, too safe, too nice.

Where’s the fun in that?

This interview originally appeared in The Odd Magazine.

Armando Fragale: Completely autonomous

Armando Fragale is a multifaceted artist born in Brooklyn, New York, in 1985. He is a painter, illustrator, filmmaker, actor, musician, writer, poet, designer, and producer who works in various mediums. He developed the artistic technique called Drivage and founded the art movement Openism. He has shown his work all over the world and has also collaborated with a wide array of artists in various art forms. Notable exhibitions he has been involved in have been Cosmic Unity: Occult Art and Music in Latin America in New York, International Surrealism Exhibition in Cairo/Saint-Cirq-Lapopie and The Cabinet of the Solar Plexus: The Liminal and the Marvellous, in Dublin. He also runs a record label Wraith Productions, which he started in 2005.

DH: I believe you were already drawing when you were a child. Do you remember when you first started? Have you had any formal art training?

AF: It all came about so early on as a child, and it all started with drawing from the moment I picked up a pencil. I’ve had formal art training at university, but I chose my own path in all of this with what I do, so I consider myself a self-taught artist.

Astral Connection, 2013

You have a strong interest in pre-Colombian art, but I have also detected a similarity of imagery in your work to that of Voodoo glyphs. Do you feel an affinity with the idea of the artist as shaman?

These all come through in the imagery as an atavistic channel in my work, it gets pulled in from that state and is manifested. I have a real interest in the cultures you mention, including ancient Egypt, ancient Sumer, and so many other civilizations. I knew from day one that the artist works as a shaman.

Surrealism also seems to be an influence in your work, but more Mexican surrealism than European – particularly Leonora Carrington. Why does her work appeal to you?

I’ve been very much fond of Mexican Surrealism but it all started for me in the beginning with my introduction to European surrealism mostly, artists and visionary thinkers such as André Breton and Philippe Soupault, as well as Eileen Agar and Meret Oppenheim. Since the day I discovered her work, Leonora has been an inspiration to me. I constantly felt the energy transcending through her work and it magnetized me. This is something I also experienced at an early age when meeting Eartha Kitt.

Beyond the veil, 2020

Do you get inspiration from the natural world – such as rock or tree formations?

I especially find inspiration through the frequencies in the natural world. And my belief is it all works together, is interconnected whether it is a rock, a tree, a spring, the formations gathered, a complete morphology and it plays into the world of my work.

What medium do you generally work in? Your work tends to be either black and white, or coloured acrylics on black cardboard. What is your process when making art?

To manifest, I utilize anything and everything at the fingertips. It can be a pencil on canvas or paint on glass, I have free rein in the sense of what route I will take with the work. The black and white drawings were earlier incarnations that spanned through my whole career. The coloured acrylics on black cardboard are sort of a series of works called The Black Period. My process is completely autonomous. I am in a channelled state when I work and what is meant to come through will and gets manifested. It all gets pulled from an atavistic point and is alchemically aligned and by how that will be orchestrated to the voyeur.

You said you created a movement called Openism – please tell us about this.

Openism is based on the creative process and by how we manifest art through the mind and the spirit, how to keep everything open in every function of the creative processes and to have no limits or restraints on the one who the creator of that vision, it is totally a boundless way to create. And essentially, to never have a beautifully dreamed-up vision to be tainted by any means. 

Expanse of the amalgam, 2021

A good reference would be to think of Surrealism and how the Surrealists embraced the subconscious, how it was very free and open in the creational aspects for all the artists involved and how it opened doors and new views. One thought that always stuck with me was that Man Ray wanted to see artists take Surrealism but not follow it, but to understand it and opened new doors to take it further. I found that most inspirational and I believe he was right, we need more of these doors to open up in the arts and to take it to new heights. I also developed an artistic technique called Drivage, which is to create a work of art while the human body is in motion. To get a visual picture of its under-workings, think of someone attached to a car while they are holding a canvas and a paintbrush, wet with red paint, directly touching the canvas, as they move in motion with the force of the vehicle ‒ that is the magic of Drivage.

You also have a deep interest in experimental cinema, with filmmakers such as Kenneth Anger and Maya Deren. But you also like off-beat horror movies, such as those by Mexican film maker Juan López Moctezuma. Is it the magical or surrealist aspect of such movies that appeal to you? Have you yourself made films?

For me these artists were paving the way and creating very rich works of cinema, very realistic because they did what they purely wanted and didn’t follow anything else. They will forever inspire everyone who takes an interest in film or wants to be a filmmaker or even an artist in a general sense.

Still from the short from, 'Time', 2018

 For me both the magical and the surrealist aspects call me to those filmmakers and their works. I have made films, mostly shorts, I have a new short film in editing at the moment called Veiled Vision, which is based in shadows and features the architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright. There is also a feature film I am working on, based on a series of dreams I had and visions that came to me.

You also have a music production business – is this your ‘bread and butter’? For how long have you had the business and what kind of music do you produce?

I have been working in the music industry for over a decade now as one of my main gigs, so to say, yes, but it’s always been my passion and love, like cinema and art. I also run my own record label, Wraith Productions, which has seen a wide array of eclectic artists, and I’ve produced and collaborated with all these artists as well. Producing bands and also playing in them throughout the years has been a very fun and rewarding experience. Most of the music ranges from metal to rock to electronic and even hip-hop, and now I am dabbling in original motion picture soundtrack projects and have been working closely with an amazing Argentinian band called Farmacia.

You participated in an exhibition recently that was organised by The Cabinet of the Solar Plexus, called The Luminal and the Marvellous. There were some big names in that exhibition, such as Carrington, Toyen, Friedrich Schröder Sonnenstern and that curious occult artist, Austin Osman Spare. What was the response to the exhibition?

The response to that show was absolutely incredible! It’s monumental every time Dolorosa de la Cruz envisions and does one of them with The Cabinet of the Solar Plexus. I was truly honoured to be a part of it this year. One of the best exhibitions you’ll ever see not only for the esoteric or dark arts but for art’s sake as a whole.

The igneous one, 2021

Where do you see your work fitting in with contemporary US art as whole, or is it something you never think about?

I follow my own path in what I do, and it fits as it already is, it is never something that crosses my mind. What I do appreciate about the contemporary art realm as a whole is that it is so vast and wide open to the voyeur, you’ll find all kinds of art and artists that lie within it, and I’m referring to worldwide, not just in the US. My work is there for all the masses to experience.

What projects are you busy with at the moment?

My feature film is the largest project I am currently undertaking. I am also going to return to my Mirror and Astral series in a new way, I’m still exploring the realms of the Black Period as it goes. I have exhibitions of my works and screenings of my films planned throughout 2023. I am also working on a book collaboration with the artist Giorgia Pavlidou, so keep an eye out for that one. 

The voyeur, 2015

There’s been some meshing of worlds in the form of collaborations I’ve been doing over the last few years with other artists in painting and drawing, some of these will get published. One of the first notable ones is with the artist Brian Lucas, and I will be doing many more of these collaborations. I’ve been writing a concept on Surrealists for the modern day that entails the likes of Alejandro Jodorowsky, Fernando Arrabal, Pedro Freideberg, Kenneth Anger, Aube Elléouët Breton, Penelope Rosemont, Françoise Gilot, among others, the next stage would be to make it a documentary feature film at some point. 

The multifaceted artist P. Emerson Williams and I will be collaborating on some things in music and film, first will come the music projects and then he will be acting in my feature film, he is a visionary and I am looking forward to working closely with him. I’ve also been designing clothes and will soon launch my fashion clothing line which will feature my work.

I'm working on the first volume of a series of books called ATOM. It will be a monumental literary project once it's completed. It will feature creative minds of all forms within. It will truly be the first of its kind. There is also a project I am working on with the amazing artist jennifer jazz, who was a sister to Jean-Michel Basquiat.

Finally, a book of my writings will be published soon. 

This interview originally appeared in The Odd Magazine 24. 

Richard Fox: Engaging with language

Richard Fox was born in Cape Town in 1975. He lives in Johannesburg and runs the T-shirt company T-Shirt Terrorist. His first collection of poems, 876, was published in 2007, and his second collection, otherwise you well?, was published by deep south in 2021. He has had poems published in journals such as New Coin, Ons Klyntji, Carapace and donga, and in the anthologies it all begins and glass jars among trees.

otherwise you well? is your second collection. Your first, 876, came out in 2007. I remember you had stopped writing for a while, and it was around 2013 that you started up again. Was there any reason for that period of silence?

I did take a hiatus; I think it was around 2002 though, and it lasted until 2006/2007, just before the release of 876. This was a difficult period for me. I was ‘going through changes’. The poetry in 876 was written between 1997 and 2001, most of that body in the last six months of 2001. This was the year I cancelled my corporate subscription with the world – I resigned from my job and holed out in a garden cottage at the back on my parent’s property, stayed up late, did all kinds of weird stuff, and wrote.

And after that, 2002, the real world kind of caught up with me, and I got a new job, albeit in a calmer, more creatively sustaining environment – a bookshop. I moved in with my future wife, and things took me away from writing for a while. Being away from writing, I felt I couldn’t rightly publish 876, so I backburned that project. Creatively I went through something of a transformation, and it was a painful process; one I both embraced and fought against – I founded the online T-shirt company, T-Shirt Terrorist, which was later to become my full-time profession and focal creative outlet, but I kept hacking away at poetry, none of it really working, until somehow, in 2007, something in me calmed or shifted, and I found I was able to balance my focus between T-shirt design and poetry.

It was strange, both processes come from the same core, it seems, and I had to complete the build of the new form before being able to return to the previous, but once done I was then able to access both with the required intensity to produce decent work.

I don’t see any major change in the poetry contained in the two volumes – do you feel it has been a continuous flow? With 876, you dropped your first name, but with your new collection you have used it.

I build pieces around voice, and perhaps, despite the break in linear continuity between the two volumes, I’m still looking to address similar issues. I look within and without, and my voice is contemplative. I’m concerned on an emotional level with the poetic, artistic identity that forms around an expressive voice, constructing a cohesive simulacrum, a seeker of profundities, or even absurdities, but never generalisations. I want to know more about the person who writes. I don’t know entirely who that is yet. I think the person who writes creates himself anew with each word placed in arrangement, in collusion or in opposition to other words in the vicinity. So internally, poetry is a search for truth. Externally, poetry is a perhaps a search for beauty, and in opposition to that, in tension to that, is the world in which we live where beauty is often hard to find. I think I may take issue with our modern predicament, on this level, modes and modules of society that stand in the way of us achieving beauty. And by beauty I don’t mean a physical beauty, I’m referring to an outcome of consciousness – a desire to make sense and understand the reality we find ourselves immersed within, purposefully. I like the notion of Truth and Beauty as poetic absolutes and writing as a means of uncovering varied ways towards them. A philosophical hole that I am digging myself into, no doubt.

When I wrote 876 I was performing regularly, and I had a stage persona – Fox, which was whittled down from my full name, which is Richard Foxcroft. I also enjoyed the way the title and name thus became patterned and entwined. When I published my earlier work, I dropped the ‘croft’ to create a simple pseudonym – Richard Fox, which I have since kept. It has a nice ring to it, and hankers back to my performance days, my summer years, as it were.

I remember seeing you at a few poetry performances, and you performed at the Grahamstown Arts Festival on occasions. Did you start writing poetry with a view to ‘stage’ as opposed to ‘page’ poetry? Has your view on poetry performance changed since then?

Performance has always been core to my work – spoken word as focal intent, and yet my poetic voice only really works, comes alive, when the work presents itself accurately on the page at first, a written recipe. There is a very definite balance here. A performative piece needs to be perfectly presented on the page. I don’t simply string words together all over the place because they sound good in front of the mic, they sound good in front of the mic because the effort has been made to structure them on the page, so there’s that, that dualism as it were. I’m not sure how I feel about performance currently. I did some slam work, toured some fests and in Newtown, inner-city Johannesburg, I hooked up with some young poets and hip-hop artists, rap artists, and enjoyed the experience, and then I moved on. Now, I’m rusty, and I seldom hit the lights and when I do, I am reminded of how age creeps in from the shadows, how you slow over time, how your work becomes calmer perhaps, less intent to roar and shake the foundations. My performance was based soundly on how, when the poem is written as perfectly as you can manage it, the words come easily in front of the mic, and that is still the case, where I have recorded recent work for otherwise you well?. The best poems are easily vocalised because the voice is sure and true, but I don’t think I’ll be performing much moving forward – too much on my plate currently, but this is still how I write, as if I am addressing people, personally and collectively.

Your approach to language – written language – can be quite idiosyncratic: playing on words or joining words together, using title case in places where one would expect sentence case. It is as if your approach to language is irreverent – an assault on language?

There is an element of contention in my work often – a dynamic that comes from working with language to create novel forms. I don’t think too much about it when I write, but language, the physical presentation of words on a page, can be very patterned and I see relationships on a number of different levels, from the way stanzas arrange in relation to themselves, the poem as a single element on a page or across pages, down to the arrangement of letters in certain words, and those arrangements, across lines and linkages, between certain words in different parts of the poem. While I am using voice to construct meaning, I feel that I am using language in a physical construction to create concrete pieces, and when a poem ’works’ for me, when it comes together, and you know intrinsically that it has and that it does, that is when both the meaning and the physical construction of a poem align. I don’t set out to achieve this, but the outcomes work on numerous levels, where a poem, to go back to performance, hits a certain level of competency because of a series of interchangeable elements, which when correctly stacked effect a complete piece. Still, there is something to irreverence, isn’t there? To conduct your craft in a slightly different manner, and make the words perform in ways that aren’t expected of them. When you get it right, it looks good, feels good. It’s an instinctive drive, process, that creates poetry for me, and I enjoy working with language. Over the years this has developed in a certain way, I wouldn’t necessarily call it formulaic, but you set out from familiar ground as you seek to encounter new places in your work, with your craft, your art. Messing with words is a starting point for me, and when they mess back, well, that’s communion, isn’t it? That’s how we engage with language and evolve as writers, artists.

For the virtual launch of otherwise you well? you had organised two videos of you reading your poetry – is this a new way of presenting your poetry, and do you intend to explore video presentation further?

I wish to explore different mediums; in the same way I have explored T-shirt design as an expression of my creative drive. The video performance was a way in which I could use the performance aspect of my work to present sections of the book. And it was fun. I hadn’t recorded before, not purposefully, professionally, besides the odd video camera set-up at readings. I hired a production company, and we went to Fordsburg, downtown Johannesburg, this aging building refurbished as studios for artists and creatives, with a chicken rotisserie on the ground floor, and I performed a few of the pieces from the book. Then we went out on the streets and took long shots and footage of people and the general urban activity on a Sunday afternoon. Pigeons. I’m hoping to get a decent 15-minute film from the project, we’ll have to see, but yes, I would like to do this again. I am also exploring vocal recordings with several artists, musicians. I feel there may be a more pronounced spoken word angle somewhere and it might be the right time to see where this may take me.

In 876 there is a long poem about a train journey, and in your new collection there is a long poem about a road trip. Is travel – journeying, or movement, perhaps energy force – a focus? Are you concerned with the movement of language – of poetic language – itself?

When we move outside of our element, our comfort zones, it excites and activates a certain response in ourselves. I’d not want to think I am alone in this. When I travel my poet piques and I am willingly if not always easily inspired to write about my experiences. The energy here is change energy, isn’t it? Transformative, in the literate sense. Poetry comes from experience and what better way than to experience the world. It’s one thing to contemplate endlessly in a closed room late at night, in front of your PC, all the regular arrangements in place, but this can only take you so far. At some stage you’re going to have to feed the beast and what better way to do it than through travel. For me, even the simple notion of seeing different places, different settings, not to mention the interpersonal experiences, cross-cultural exposures, sets off a reaction and I can feel poetry coming on. So, I take notes, mentally, mostly. Of this, and of that. Feelings. And then I sit down, once I have returned, let it juice then, when the time is right, let it flow. If it does it’s beautiful, that search for beauty in extremity, so my travel pieces are sometimes longer than my other pieces. Epics? Not quite, but certainly different to my other work.

Several of your poems deal with sustainability issues around the environment, our dependence on technology, corporate capitalism and the obsession with status These issues are global, but at the same time your poetry is deeply rooted in  the South African experience.

There is an element to my work which transcends the local. An attempt at achieving an expression sounded in the collective unconscious, the prevailing Zeitgeist. I don’t always get here, I often fall very short, and such pieces come across as pretentious (I won’t publish these) but to hit on a nerve that jolts people, across spatial and geographic divides, as poets we’re speaking on issues that affect all of us, or none of us, surely. In this regard you wish to take your work to a level where it reflects the spirit and the transactions of the age. How you do this is up to the individual artist. It’s often best to keep it simple, root your voice in the immediate and the local, but if you want you can also ideate and fixate on real global concerns, or the metaphysical and transcendent. I like to concentrate on some of the issues we’re facing collectively as a society, because they mean something to me, personally. I take an interest, as a poet. I feel I can do something, something real and meaningful, even if it is only to highlight and expose the problems we’re facing as we evolve as an industrial civilisation.  

Do you think that poetry – or a poet – can change things? Can poetry change the world? Are poets unacknowledged legislators of the world, as Shelley thought?

Yes. But it’s complicated. And dangerous ‒ for the mind and the soul. You create the world, if not only in the constant of your image, then too through the collection and culmination of thoughts that spring from, grow and govern your consciousness, your single universal expression. Poets are often overlooked, we’re regarded as archaic, relegated to the side lines of commercial enterprise. With poetry I seldom write, I often create, and I feel that that creation moves out in waves, dynamic ripples that are not bound in linear motion and do not abide by temporal and spatial rules. But it is a slippery slope. Once you convince yourself of the power of your own metaphysical incantations, your magnanimous import, suzerain of all you behold, there is nothing that you cannot achieve, and nothing that you can. Your reality becomes guided by nuance, confluence and mounting synchronicity, the face of God in the clouds. Reality will bend to your will, but it will bounce back somewhere else, for someone else. What do we know of any of these things, really? I would advise caution, argue for temperance and balance, in all things poetic, as with all pursuits both intellectual and physical.

What is your opinion of South African poetry at the moment? Do you think we have enough publication outlets Do we have enough readers in South Africa?

There is no market for poetry in South Africa and this is reflected in the limited outlets for young and established poets to seek recognition and an audience for their work. Perhaps this is an outcome of education or policy, or an indication of wider issues. Either way, as a poet, when you publish in South Africa you realise that very few people will interact with your work on a local level. That is a bit disheartening, but you do it for other reasons too, if not only the poetry itself then for yourself; sometimes the sheer compulsion of it all. I applaud those individuals and institutions that still cater to and advance poetry in our society and I’m cautiously optimistic that the situation will maintain its present trajectory, and hopefully expand in the future, although it is likely to remain limited and niche.

 Richard Fox’s book, otherwise you well?, is available from Deep South via their distributor Blue Weaver in Southern Africa, and international distributor African Books Collective in all countries. The book can also be purchased or ordered in South Africa from all bookstores that sell poetry. An ebook version is available from African Books Collective.

This interview first appeared in The Odd Magazine 23.

Dimakatso Sedite: With poetry, there is nowhere to hide

Dimakatso Sedite was born in Bloemfontein, South Africa. Her poetry has appeared in Teesta Review, Brittle Paper, New Coin, Stanzas, Kalahari Review, BKO, Botsotso, Aerodrome, BNAP and elsewhere. She was the joint winner of the 2019 DALRO Prize. She holds an MA in Research Psychology from the University of the Witwatersrand. Yellow Shade (Deep South, 2021) is her first book of poems.

Yellow Shade is your first collection, but I am curious about how long you have been writing for.

I have been writing intermittently for myself since I was about 19 years old, or even earlier, if the short story I wrote when I was 10 is anything to go by. I would write mainly short stories and some poems, throughout my 20s and 30s, but did not see myself as a writer by any stretch. It was only in 2016, 27 years later, that I decided to submit my work for publication in journals. So, in that way, I’m a bit of an anomaly. All poems in this book were written between 2016 and 2020.

It has already been said that there is a strong physicality in your poems and you have said that writing a poem for you starts with an image rather than an idea. What is your process for writing poetry?

I find it easiest to write early in the morning, before the clutter of the day starts to clog my mind. That is the time I am least guarded, because I have not yet put on my coat of daily defences. I write a poem in bits and pieces, so a single poem can take me weeks or even months to write. When clichés start creeping between the lines, I pause the writing, to be resumed when new bits of the poem enter my head again. At times I struggle to find the right word(s) for the imagery I see in my head, and will not end the poem until I find that word. The self-editing usually starts with the sixth or seventh draft, and may be repeated six to seven times before the poem becomes ready. There are some poems that do not need to be worked this hard, but they are few.

I try to make the ordinary look strange, to surprise, to heighten the reader’s senses, all with the aim of trying to make the reader feel something. My poems have a hint of vulnerability about them, the kind that carries a surprising resilience within it.

I am very taken by your use of language; I thought I had detected some influence of Dylan Thomas.

I find your observation to be interesting because Dylan Thomas has not been one of the poets I have read. I write largely about the ordinary, and there is something about simple lives that I find exquisite, laden with feeling, and I try to express that in words. Dylan Thomas lived in socio-historical times and a socio-political context vastly different from mine. The only commonality I see is that, like me, he was perhaps not afraid to go where most people dare to tread, by confronting our own mortality. Writing about things we cannot control seems to loosen sand underneath people’s feet, and that can be quite unsettling.

I have always had a wild imagination. As a three-to four-year-old, I would often wonder how the words that were being spoken in daily language looked like even before I could read and write. I would create a story out of a picture emblazoned on a Rooibos tea box and the like. But then again, all children dwell in that fantasy world. I just never seemed to have lost that. I have been told quite a few times that I live in a dream world. During the time I was working for a child rights organisation, I was always drawn to direct work with children so that I could create that imaginary world that could be found only in play, and in a sense poetry is about a play of words. I grew up in a socio-cultural context where stories were being told and not read, this necessitating one to create an imagery in one’s head. I have a Sesotho and Setswana linguistic background, which is intrinsically visceral in its expression. The rhythm and arrangement of my words are influenced by my daily way of speaking, which is in my two mother tongues. 

Needless to say, township primary schools in apartheid South Africa had no textbooks, so we would complete the picture in our minds as a book was being read out loud in class. This deprivation got offset only by my father’s large collection of Reader’s Digest condensed books and magazines, which I read a lot of, as well as the convent education I received later when I started high school. Our little library had these post-Russian revolution novels that Sr Sighilde (one of our English teachers, who was originally from West Germany) would lend us to read for leisure (whose titles and authors now evade me). There was something about how they had been written that I had found fascinating and different.  I also read a lot as a pre-teen and teenager, and spent a lot of my pocket money on magazines (including Time magazine, to which I had a subscription) and newspapers. So my writing has largely been influenced by the ordinary, the not so obvious, and the distant past.

I think it was Siza Nkosi who said that thematically she saw parallels in your work with that of Isabella Motadinyane – was Isabella’s work an influence? What other poets have influenced you?

No, not at all. I got introduced to Isabella’s work only in 2019, and similarities between her writing and mine were not apparent to me. Stylistically, we also write differently from each other. Before 2016, my reading had been mostly fiction. What struck me about Isabella’s writing was how effortless it was, as if she did not try too hard. Even ‘Sink a shaft’, her most erotic poem, has that innocence about it, the kind that seems to be a cross-cutting tone  throughout her book. Siza (Nkosi) may need to explain why she made such a comparison, because I might be too close to see. Writers who I think may have had some influence on my writing may not even be poets, namely Gabriel Garcia Màrquez and Ben Okri (who I think is a much better novelist than poet, and whose poetry I do not even read). To a lesser extent, I could also mention Antjie Krog, James Matthews and Patrick Cullinan.

Some of your poems deal with domestic violence. It’s a harsh reality for many women and an issue from which you do not shy away. But overall, do you feel that poets have a duty to address socioeconomic or political issues?

I think it is important for the reader to experience the book as a whole, instead of singling out one or two poems. That would be making the body of work more (or less) than what it intended to be. In Yellow Shade, gender-based violence as a subject appears in three poems: ‘The day she disappeared’, ‘Soldier in a black dress’, and ‘Last words to my sister’, and the book comprises 44 poems in total. You will notice that my book follows a narrative arc. The poems start with a somewhat light innocence that slowly builds up into what is stark and dark, before lightness creeps in again towards the end. So each poem carries a different tone that connects it to the next one, offering waves of symbiotic variations. Throughout the book, there is a fracture that attempts to build itself somehow ‒ a paradox of fragility, strength, humour, and hope. The poems came into being within a cusp of magic unfolding within my head. Each poem carries a different mood all its own, and deserves to be read with a similar attitude. On its own, a subject would never be able to hold a poem together, one would still need to write a poem around it, and that takes a lot of hard work, intuition and practice.  

Some writers may write to erase reality, others may write to confront it. Either way, they are all taking a position. Poems that are devoid of social issues are still politically laden. The more one hides, the more glaring the hidden becomes. Writing poetry is the ultimate test of one’s vulnerability, without which a poem  may not be possible. With poetry, there is nowhere to hide.

Do you feel that poets should have a role at all?

A poet’s only role is to make the reader connect with the poem, and that can happen only if one is honest with one’s writing. British-American poet Denise Levertov once said: ‘Insofar as poetry has a social function, it is to awaken sleepers by other means than shock’. Unfortunately, the feelings being evoked by a poem are not always pleasant ones, neither should they be. Not all poems are meant to entertain. We write poetry so that we do not have to explain. Once a poem reaches the reader, the poet starts to disappear. The poet’s ultimate aim is to make herself useless, because a finished poem no longer needs its creator.

What is your opinion of poetry as therapy, as a means of ‘healing’?

It takes a lot more than a brush with poetry for one to heal emotionally, that is why we have mental health professionals to help with that. What a poem can do, however, is to help a reader, or at times, a writer, with the cathartic process of offloading some of the emotional burden, and the sense of lightness that one feels as a result, may be confused with therapy, which would be a dangerous thing to do. Poetry is an emotional experience, but to assert  that it could replace therapy would be a bit far-fetched.

What has your experience been of getting published in South Africa? Has it been difficult for you?

I started submitting my work for publication only in 2016, so it might be too early to have a well-informed opinion on that. However, so far, it has been fairly easy to get published locally in journals and a couple of anthologies. I have been writing for myself, on and off, for a very long time, so I might have unknowingly had a bit of practice. I have experienced rejections from some local journals as well. I find getting published overseas to be a lot harder, although some of my work has been accepted in a couple of international publications. However, rejections have given me an opportunity to look at my work with a critical eye, and to challenge myself more, as I explore new ways of approaching my writing. When I began doing that, some of the journals that had previously rejected my work started accepting it. I still get more rejections than acceptances, though, so the need to improve remains constant.

South Africa’s poetry journal landscape is quite small, because a lot of journals have inadequate human and financial resources to be sustainable, so a lot of them have shut down. Writers who have suffered the most have been those who write in indigenous languages, because there are such few publishing platforms for their work. However, in recent years, new, exciting journals have emerged locally, so that is encouraging.

There are currently only a handful traditional publishers of books of poetry in South Africa, all of which are small independent presses, with limited resources. Major local publishing houses are currently not prioritising poetry. This makes the poetry publishing environment quite competitive to prospective authors. So I took a risk and took time off work, so that I could focus solely on my writing, because I knew my manuscript would be competing with tons of others for a chance at being published. One also needs to be patient and willing to accept constructive criticism. For instance, my manuscript went through ten drafts before it was ready, after many rounds of many poems getting dropped and just as many new ones being written from scratch to replace the cancelled ones, as well as many rounds of editing. The whole process of putting this book together technically started in early 2018 and ended in early 2021.  

There are, of course, self-publishing and hybrid publishing options as well, but all publishing models have their own pros and cons.

What do you see as the challenges facing poets in South Africa?

I think there is an emerging trend of a collective identity, based on a particular aesthetic preference and/or social positions, which can also be complexly heterogeneous within itself. More than ever before, social media has made writers more aware of one another, making the writing experience less solitary. From an activism point of view, some of the writer allegiances play an important role as change agents, particularly those striving to redress inequities for historically disadvantaged writers, such as women, people of colour, LGBTQAI+ people, as well as writers living with disabilities and those who write in indigenous languages. Writer networks also make access to information and opportunities a lot easier. Within this dynamic writer context, a distinct writer identity is still a possibility for new writers, provided the writer can differentiate between the two. Usually, as one gains more experience, one becomes more aware of the kind of writer one is. 

There also appears to be an occasional intolerance of diversity in poetry. Oral poetry remains undervalued, as if a poem needs to be in written form, for it to be good. After 1994,there has been an increasing pressure on poets to remove a poem from its social context, to control certain emotions in a poem, to not stay true to what a poem wants to say, and how it wants to say it. What needs to be borne in mind is that there is more than one approach to writing poetry, and readers are a heterogeneous group with their own individually varied aesthetic preferences. This censoring may be symptomatic of a resistance to diversity and inclusivity. Such an environment may not be enabling, and may stifle efforts to explore fresh ways of producing new work. It is within the foundation of the old that exciting voices can emerge. Nothing happens within a void.

Creative writing programmes are often expensive and out of reach for most writers. Those being offered for free often happen as once-off sessions during annual book festivals. 

There is no culture of writer mentorship in South Africa (however, there are a few good exceptions), and local writer residencies rarely get awarded to those who need them the most: new writers, much less writers of poetry.

Lastly, we live in an era of instant gratification, and may, at times, rush to submit work that is not quite ready.

What has the reception to your book been like so far?

I may not be the best person to make such an assessment, so I will leave that to the reviewers and critics. In terms of sales, the book did fairly well during the month of the launch, particularly in direct sales, with in-store and online sales slowly picking up. Deep South has done a second print run of the book, in preparation for the second (minor) book launch which will happen either in the Free State or the Western Cape later this year.

What are you working on at the moment?

I am currently busy with a few new poems that I intend to submit to journals that have not published my work before. I am also exploring the possibility of acquiring translation skills through a learning programme, but have not made up my mind as yet.

Dimakatso Sedite’s book, Yellow Shade, is available from Deep South via their distributor Blue Weaver in Southern Africa, and international distributor African Books Collective in all countries. The book can also be purchased or ordered in South Africa from all bookstores that sell poetry. An ebook version is available from African Books Collective.

Michael Wilson: Putting the work together

Photo: Susan Christine Spencer

Michael Wilson is an assemblage artist who has always been heavy on techniques using artifacts and disassembled objects from an era long gone. He avoids plastics to make his assemblages look as though they were antiques themselves. Stuff from the dustbin, collected up and transformed. A solid piece needs to have electricity and some of them literally do. That's when a viewer’s responses can be very strong. Once in a while he puts away an art piece until he finds the right part or found object to give the assemblage that edge and  an 'outside the box' feel. He also makes castings of old parts of statues and adds them into the cohesion. The ultimate goal is to have depth and flow, which he oftentimes does, in hitting the 'mark' . He and his wife, artist Susan Spencer, open up their studios on occasion, so when in Northern California ring them up.

DH: How did you come to be an artist? How did you come to work in assemblage, and where do you find your materials?

MW: Growing up in the 1960s I was influenced by my father's art and love of jazz. He was a well- known animator and artist, so I grew up in an environment that proved a lifelong influence. Another big influence was André Breton. I took art classes at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena and we got to display our work at the college art gallery. I was also in a graphic arts class and made my first billboard ‒ a double-sided sign reading ‘Ground Floor Gallery’‒ for a space I rented in Old Towne Pasadena, California. We sold few works, but soon found out we weren't salespeople. At that time, before gentrification, there were 400 artists living in a four-block area of Old Towne, in 1977.  

With my training and family background in art I was handed a baton to carry forward a never-ending art project that allowed creative ideas to flourish. Through my collecting junk and antiques I found it inspiring to give old objects a 'new life'. What may look like a series of broken pieces in front of you would ultimately grow to become an assemblage.

Indian Trader

Why have you focused on assemblage?

In 1908 Apollinaire had moved ‘toward freedom in assembling a poem out of disparate parts’. In its structure, assemblage is like an abstract painting and constructivist sculpture but moves away from these art forms because its elements may be charged and identifiable. Thirty different components can compete in one assemblage to effect a fluid emotion. For the real artist, it is a liberating creative method, using untried variables in different sequencing in a state of randomness and disorder. Seemingly unfitting, these objects, articles and discards must be formed into a union of parts in the ensemble. These lost and found objects can never be preordained because the artist must 'play with' elements by placing objects around until the essence of the pieces and what transpires between them is discovered by the artist. What occurs after disorder is organization of dissimilar objects. The ultimate outcome is a sort of homogenous transformation. We as artists are never fully cognizant of our intentions until the 'magic' happens. Things fall into place. After that, it is time for adhesion, putting the work together. 

What the work communicates is up to the viewer. Sometimes the artist may have specific intent with regard to form and symbol. Mostly though it is free expression and abstraction of objects and ideas. 

As with much art there is a series of adjustments, while at other times there may be a simultaneous harmony where everything comes into play quite rapidly. Oftentimes mistakes can lead you on a new path and a new development. Common objects begin to form the dynamics of a certain cohesion with a new life for these discards and found objects much like a poetic development. 

Seance

What artists have had the most influence on you? Did you meet many people from Wallace Berman’s ‘Semina circle’ – you have previously mentioned the poet John Reed in particular?

The studios we rented for US$50 a month had many artists living there, including John Kelly Reed (Ramussen), who was the great friend of Ed Kienholz, George Herms, Cameron and Wallace Berman. John Reed was in three handmade editions of Wallace Berman’s Semina journal. John was also part of the historic Ferus Gallery and curator Walter Hopps. I was able to meet artists George Herms, Dean Stockwell, Ed Moses, Llyn Foulkes, Ed Kienholz, Billy Al Bengston and others.

These artists all touched me and helped me organize my thoughts around becoming an artist. John Reed would raid abandoned buildings and come back with bags of metal and other 'found objects' for art.

After moving north I became a US forest ranger in an isolated part of coastal California, known as Big Sur. This was time for reflective and inventiveness. Little did I know beat artist Bob Branaman was living up the coast with his family in Limekiln, only to know him later in life after I met my wife, Susan. We were madly in love in Boonville, California, and immediately began living on her 20-acre ranch in the redwoods where later we built our art studios and home. 

Here in Anderson Valley we met artist Stan Peskett, a UK artist who discovered Basquiat and introduced him to Andy Warhol at a party Stan had while living around the Chelsea Hotel, NYC. 

Speaking of Andy Warhol, The Ferus Gallery had the first display of Pop Art by an east coast artist in 1961. Irving Blum had taken over the gallery from Wally Hopps and Ed Keinholz and after displaying the soup cans show Irving had managed to sell three of Andy’s works. Realizing his mistake as curator, he managed to buy back those three of Andy’s works and then bought all the rest. A major score, for later on they became worth millions. He bought all for around US$900. One of the people Irving bought a soup can back from was Dennis Hopper. He was big on collecting art and went to many openings of The Ferus Gallery, as did actor Dean Stockwell.

Have you ever met any of the great jazz musicians?

We hung out and studied with the jazz greats. Our teachers were Gary Foster, Bobby Bradford, Alan Broadbent, Putter Smith and Warne Marsh. When a break occurred, we would all go out back and smoke pot in between sets with Art Pepper, Louie Bellson, and comedian Redd Fox. The clubs we had in LA were exciting. At the famous Lighthouse Cafe jazz club you could see Milt Jackson and the MJQ, Gabor Szabo, Sonny Rollins and Dizzy Gillespie. Other clubs were Concerts by the Sea, Donte's Jazz Club, Baked Potato and Memory Lane.  Once in a while you could see everyone together at a club, including the Ellington Big Band and at Hollywood Bowl the Beatles and then Benny Goodman and then later Count Basie and the Band. Jazz was a major influence and although I was classical trained I turned into a jazz bebop pianist at 14 years old. My band was Monster Wilson and the Quintet. We even a had a girl singer. Jazz was everywhere and we saw all the greats and later were trained by them. Part of art, as I see it, is besides what we do in the art studio. 

Techplotz

What was your experience as the late 1960s shifted to the 1970s? Did you notice any major changes in terms of an attitude or approach towards art? 

As an artist in the 1960s I was surrounded by art. My dad was a well-known artist in Hollywood and there were people like Stravinsky, Sonny and Cher, Jonathan Winters and Carol Burnett at his studios. Dad did the credits in the movies Irma la Duce and Grease. All his animations are at http://www.fineartsfilms.com/index.php.  

Moving into the 1970s, many artists were doing the first MTV video productions, using art as the medium to promote bands, and my dad was right in there working as the artist for songs like Jim Croce’s’ Bad, Bad Leroy Brown’ and  Joni Mitchell’s 'Put up a Parking Lot'. We were all as artists trying different mediums and as soon as spray plastic foams became available it was in use for unique molds. Many stayed non-political, but maybe the first in the 60s had been Kienholz, using anti-war art as a political statement. 

Later on, punk art started using bizarre effects, such as sheer stocking and pink spray paint as a way to reflect the times and using the theme of sexual exploitation as a way to cross the line. 

Artists I knew started using production lines in small warehouses to recreate an existing piece of art and manufacture more of the same with varying changes in the reproduction. We as artists were figuring out as well that larger was better, for small pieces of art were not what the wealthy were looking for. They needed to be big in scale to fill the walls of the huge mansions these people live in.  

By the 1990s some of us fell by wayside, took vacations for long periods to reflect or got out of the mainstream and created niche art that was predominantly just to barely scrape by, but holding on to our values and not selling out or doing kitsch art. If you eventually held on, you could have a gallery represent you and that would be something many artists would love but cannot get. 

In the 1990s I opened up my first gallery with another artist, which was our playground. But later in the 2000s my wife and I opened The Beat Gallery in Mendocino County in Northern California, which was much more serious. We finally brought the gallery home and are having showings by appointment. Before Covid19 hit us all we even had a salon where expressive people came to reunite. It's a good life. 

Working the Machine

You mentioned that you and your wife, the artist Susan Spencer, are putting a book together, with about eleven other artists – could you tell us more about that? 

In 2005 Tim Nye of Nyehaus Gallery, Soho NYC, reopened the Ferus Gallery exactly how it would look during its existence, 1957-66, and invited us all to the original gallery on La Cienega, LA. It featured many of the original artists and we had dinner afterwards at the famous Musso and Frank's Grill in Hollywood, sponsored by Nyehaus. It was a great reconnect and I was doing the Ferus Gallery website, which is currently being redone by myself to be interactive.  

Many of those artists and others influenced our group in the Northern California Redwoods. Those artists included Joseph Cornell, Man Ray, Bruce Connor, Jess, Bettye Saar, Kienholz, Max Ernst, George Herms, Kurt Schwitters and Wallace Berman. 

All these connections and friendships have come to a climax, as we are publishing a book with artists Spencer Brewer, Susan Spencer, Hans Bruhner, Larry Fuente (Smithsonian), Via Keller, Esther Siegel and myself. The book will be titled Mendocino Lost & Found ‒ Rebel Artists of Assemblage and Collage.

Unpublished Poet

Apart from the book, what are you busy with at the moment? 

Susan and I continue to work on our ranch in Philo, CA and I continue as a rancher, contractor, jazz pianist and assemblage artist. Recently Susan and I had a two-month show in Venice, California at Beyond Baroque in The Mike Kelley Gallery. It was an amazing exhibit of both our works visited by many artists, poets and friends. I ran into Bob Branaman and he wanted to buy a piece of art. Instead we went to his home and workshop and I traded him for one of his artworks. I wanted to also visit artist Robert Irwin, but he's in bad shape these days. 

In conclusion, I would like to say that by isolating and simplifying objects and their environments, an elemental nature can be revealed that exists in all things, real and imagined. This is the thread that connects us all. Through the particular, the universal can be attained. Revealing the universal, whether it is our physical universe, circumstance, object, emotion, or thought, permits us to see the elemental parts of each other and ourselves and thus a circular connection is complete. This connection leads to an illumination, not only of ourselves and toward each other, but also for and toward the whole world and what other worlds may exist beyond our consciousness. This is the power of art – the power of transcendence from beauty and the particular into the sublime and the universal and back again. 

I hope that in some way the results of my pursuit of art join the tradition of work that has provided a portal to those questions whose answers help us define and clarify our existence, our experience, and our purpose here on earth. 

Websites to explore:

http://www.chezbebedogmannequins.com

http://www.assemblageartists.wordpress.com

 This interview was originally published in The Odd Magazine.