Perhaps A sweet spot between photo and hyper-realism
RVA Magazine printed an abridged version of Jack's interview in their Fall 2015 publication. Here is the full article... more stories, more juice, enjoy. See RVAMag's web-version of the article here, or read the full issue of RVAMag 22 here. Editorial photos by Patrick Biedrycki
Jack and I sat down a few weeks after his May 2015 joint opening, And Suddenly Everything Was New Again, at the Eric Schindler Gallery with studio-mate, Julie Elkins. His large and small format oil paintings, along with her porcelain hand-built sculptures, pocketed the Schindler with intimate narratives within surreal environments. Jack Lawrence is a working painter, portraitist, wizard, guru of taste and spark—and has been in Richmond since the early 90’s. He was willing to discuss, unabashed, the three distinct periods of his career: 1997-2002, characterized by fine art, historic references, and what he calls “framework preciousness” when referring to process; 2002-2010, an obsessive period of portrait and drawing commissions; and 2010 to present, marked by changes in style, process, and iconography. I would hate to regiment his oeuvre to a timeline; our conversation represents a wider-ranging meditation on Jack’s personal relationship with the painting medium. Our chat got rolling over the Schindler show’s conception, which began around the time I met Jack in 2011.
JL: I had a show back in 2002 at Orange Door Gallery, and most of the work I was doing had gloss references to different eras of painting. It involved a lot of research, set building and casting ‘actors’ and I was doing it all on a shoestring budget.
I work from photographs that I wind up spending an inordinate amount of time setting up… building these huge sets. I built a barn set and deck replica out in the backyard of my friend’s houses… and organizing models there were nine models on one of the paintings, organizing schedules… I did this one shoot that had to be done right in the middle of winter so I had to find a kerosene heat cannon since most of the models were half naked. It was absolute chaos… it was great, but you get to the end of it and you get postpartum depression. It takes forever for me to paint anything. I had to do all this in a year and got really burned out.
Then, I got caught in a trap of doing portraits. It took eight years of me doing those until I finally realized that unless I’m making paintings that really mean something to me it’s like extracting teeth. I had obsessive-compulsived my technique into some sort of impossible to manage machine. A painting that would normally take me months now took years.
The large-scale portraits were killers because I have a bad habit of putting really complicated atmospheric elements in them without thinking about how long it will take to paint. There was one full-length portrait of a dude standing in front of a backdrop of crinkled tinfoil. Another giant portrait I had of three kids playing in a swamp in the woods. It’s one thing to paint a forest from the outside in… painting it from the inside out is lunacy. When I tried making drawings I had the same obsessiveness. At the end of the day I lost money on anything I did.
Jack’s large paintings connote film stills, or screen shots from a Google Glass lens. Such a trademark bolsters the realism and authenticity of these works, but also recalls the time issues he experienced with his earlier style.
AH: Could you give us an example of how you procure or happen across your subject matter?
JL: One time I was driving to New York… I go into one of the bathrooms on the New Jersey turnpike, and there’s this tall, attractive black dude. I notice him right away standing at a bank of urinals, and I know something’s up. He’s looking back over at me, and there’s only a couple other people in there. I say to myself, “Jack, don’t even look this guy’s way, just take a piss and do your business and get out of here.” I’m five urinals down from him doing my thing, and of course when I glance over he’s looking right at me… not even pissing, dick in his hand, and it’s then that you wish you had a camera in your eyeballs. It was such an obvious moment where I could tell he was a total hustler, you know… I can’t get messed up with this (laughing). He was definitely looking at me and showing off. I knew instantly that I had to paint this. I spent months driving around looking for the perfect bank of urinals to make the reference photo. I needed lots of glossy white tile everywhere and at least a bank of five well lit and maintained urinals. I drove around to all these rest stops along I-95 and I couldn’t find anything to use. So finally, I’m in a work truck driving up to Edison, New Jersey… it was one particular rest stop, I think the same one. I had to go in and somehow have a camera, somehow get it just in the right position, photograph the urinals… I had to wait for the perfect moment in the 10 minute time frame we were stopped. This one time it was absolutely perfect, and it only took me a second to do, but of course I never made this painting. That in itself was such a pain in the ass. That is case and point for why this shit takes forever.
Following the crux of the Orange Door opening, and given all of these limitations, Jack was driven to quit painting out of exhaustion, and for a commercial truck-driving job along the east coast. He needed a break, some sort of release, and money… but little did he know, this transitional period would come to influence his style change, and the foundational concepts he attributes to the Schindler opening.
AH: Can you elaborate on this diversion from painting?
JL: It was great, driving a truck, delivering furniture with a bunch of knuckleheads… (laughing) The dudes were awesome, just a totally different set of people than I normally hang out with, but we all grew really close. More than half of your day-to-day is spent with these guys, and it was entertaining, talking shit, and the shenanigans you get into out of boredom. It was a chance to get out of whatever rut I was in. After a couple years of that though, it was time to paint again. I have this pile of images saved up from the last twenty years… all the stuff that I love to look at. They wind up popping up throughout my work. It was so much easier for me to grab one of those images to take with me on the road, where I could bring a little painting set-up, sit in a hotel room and not give a damn. These small works freed me up to be a lot more loose…deciding what in the painting was important; what needed sexy detail and what didn’t.
AH: Would you say that driving saved your painting career?
JL: Yeah, totally! Because I had to re-learn how to paint, and in doing that, just to be able to dash something off where I didn’t have to worry about it paying the rent. One of the great things about using these clippings for the paintings is I don’t have to go out and find people, or deal with meeting new people. You have to experiment a little bit, and do something totally different. Even if it’s just goofy or completely different from what you’ve been doing because if you get locked into what you think you’re supposed to be doing, then it doesn’t give you any freedom to explore.
That was one great thing about painting the cutouts—it made me think about Hunter Thompson re-typing Hemingway to become a better writer. In a way it was kind of like that because I always wanted my paintings to move more towards some sort of visual place that I wasn’t getting to; and all of these images that I collected were more or less an exploded diagram of the inside of my brain, so in a way it was re-teaching me how to see or put together a scene.
AH: Did any of the stories that you heard from your driving friends influence situations that you thought about as subject matter for you paintings?
JL: Oh yeah. Not only their stories, but one of the series I was working on to try and get into this last show was called “Faded”. It was going to be small, intimate little paintings of people getting lit and watching TV in the dark. You get back to the hotel at the end of the night, and all you want to do is crack a six-pack open. Everyone is exhausted, watching anything but the news because it was terrible. In 2010 there were no jobs, the economy was tanking, so much sadness (laughs). And that’s when you get the stories. After you are about five beers deep the dude you’re sitting next to is going to tell some heart-wrenching story. It was going to be a reflection of what was going on at the time, at least between us. I got a couple of them done, but never got enough to put a series together to add to the one I just had at the Schindler, which would have really been great. My perfect idea would be to do a show with three mini shows within it, because you get a really rounded idea of the artist’s intent, or an overall theme. when you get a spark of an idea, you have to run after it… especially when it takes so long to get anything done… because usually if the spark is there, it is completed a lot faster.
Faded | oil on canvas, 2012
And Suddenly Everything was New Again included three of the large, filmic scenes, and four small-format clipping paintings. This group of work adds a number of new elements to Jack’s oeuvre. Besides relaxing his style, and departing from classical informants, he also began to include female players in his narratives.
JL: For the longest time I had this question of what masculinity was, or again going back to decisions; the decisions that young men make on their way to becoming a man. Somehow I always question that since a lot of the times the paintings wound end up involving some sort of moral dilemma, or potential physical harm. I don’t think I really knew how to paint women into that. Like a male writer trying to write for a female character. More recently now, I’ve lived with girls. I interact with them all day at work. I’ve had the privilege of knowing a few really beautiful and creative women this last bunch of years. It has just sort of filtered in… you know, I now feel like I can have some sort of believable voice. I also got rid of my old lighting, brought in more ambient and natural lighting…a lot of that came from hotel rooms and watching these dudes looking at their cellphones.
Imagine a setting illuminated by the chiaroscuro effect of a single cell phone's hazy, blue glow. His process and content reference classical attributes considering lighting, labor involved, and the pictorial realism of dramatic compositions. Jack puts a contemporary spin on classical devices, queuing viewers to epitomize the image and its message. Classical art portrays its characters through hyper-reality to validate ideology—visual truth that performs a telling of absolutes. Jack shifts this focus from guiding a common moral agenda, to showing how idiosyncratic life events shape personal perspective. He catches his players in the heat of “game changing” moments, hitting on the impending impact that they may or may not have. Jack categorizes decision making as the life motor-force, a perpetuator of progress.
JL: I’ve always loved the idea of making decisions. The moment a decision is made or the moment an urge is encountered and can’t be resisted or one is made for you by the human nature gremlin. It’s probably the most important thing that pops up in the work. By the time the decision is made, it’s just an end game that plays out. When you get to the actual violence and sex it’s boring.
Even the most benign situations—like in the spit painting, Are You Experienced. I like the idea of “you don’t get to choose”. It’s such a kid way, a teenagey way of one-upmanship. It’s always about, “Oh, well I’ve done this…” and I don’t think anyone gets over that sort of competitiveness. When you’re young you never predict what is going to hard-wire you for life. Your brains aren’t formed yet and something, especially sexually, that happens when you’re young sticks with you. In the painting I can’t tell whether you two are brother and sister, or just friends—I specifically wanted the girl to have the power in that painting because it totally opens windows… but just imagine the rest of your life you have a kink on being pinned! I can’t tell you how many people came up to me during the show and said, “Oh yeah, I’ve lived this.” I mean, a lot of people. And that’s what I’m looking for… something that seems so incidental but becomes ingrained in the rest of your life.
In the pipe bomb painting. They’re probably not old enough yet to really grasp the consequences of what they are doing. In that one moment I painted her completely falling in love with this guy—it completes this sort of fantasy. That’s a dangerous moment because they are two young, attractive kids with the world on a string who are engaging in something that’s really not a good idea. The emotional power behind finding love in that moment is probably going to create an even bigger problem for them later on when you know something like that has to escalate. Yeah, the unpredictability of it all. Who knows what’s going to hard-wire us to do anything.
The concept of decision making graces all of Jack’s painting, but this new work moves subtly toward a surreal play on themes established in his earlier pieces. The large compositions enable a three-fold approach to the work: the reaction to scene as an outsider to the painting, the response to the scene as a bystander within the setting, and self-identification with the players in the moment. This transfer of perspective connotes an out-of-body experience of sorts. Jack gentles his viewers out of their own reality by supplying them with multiple to decode. The clippings paintings prevent the larger works from being tabled to a moment in linear time. These seemingly collaged canvases act like magnifying glasses held to the minutia of past works, as well as his studio walls, and emphasize how Jack esteems these elements of latent or forgotten surroundings as equal in importance to his players. These compositions acknowledge visual information that’s often repressed in the wake of such climactic moments, and personify “environment” as an active catalyst to affect or influence our decisions.
AH: How did you select the images that went together for each composition? How does this series round out the themes carried in your large-scale works?
JL: I wind up collaging these images every now and again because there is a total, beautiful spark of life found in simple juxtaposition… especially for me with these images, that is unexpected. There’s never a set of images that I put together with a pre-conceived notion of what I’m going to get. But I like that the marriage that rises from it is so pure, if you get the right images that magically relate to each other. The spark exists on this. They weren’t supposed to be trompe l’oeil, really, but I like the tape marks. They’re there as sort of a Mondrian compositional element; also, it’s a cheap and quick way to show the images are appropriated. I pulled them from magazines and whatnot. It is not a story. It doesn’t involve the complication of actors. It’s nothing but intuition… the process is I just kind of turn my brain off and move stuff around until you feel the pulse of it starting to beat, and that’s when it get’s exciting.
AH: How would you say chaos presents itself in your work?
JL: You wouldn’t think it looking how I live or anything, but there’s a lot of impulse that needs lashing down. I like the magic of purity. Like if something is just purely evil or sexual, or a pure sweetness or darkness. Usually a lot of purity comes out of chaos. But considering chaos in terms of process—when I’m shooting a scene, neither one of these people have met each other. It’s so thrilling to get total strangers in on the high-pressure lunacy of getting this thing knocked out, and have them be in this totally fake, set up environment, have to get naked and deal with each other. There’s so much magic just in that one moment—THAT’S what makes it so exciting. By the time you make the painting, it’s more of a record of the moment.
It’s the tiny decisions in the painting that compel the narrative. I think the interesting thing about chaos is that since I wind up controlling my environment as much as possible because of the world’s inherent pull toward chaos. You’d have to be a fly on the wall inside of my brain to know the amount of control I have to hammer down with myself because I’m obsessive compulsive. I mean you wouldn’t think it looking how I live or anything, but there’s a lot of impulse that needs lashing down… but I like the magic of purity. Like if something is just purely evil or sexual, or a pure sweetness or darkness… and usually a lot of that comes out of chaos. But yeah, there’s always a push toward chaos…. and I think that for the longest time, that’s why I drank so much… because I know how hard it is to control your environment. Life is just fucking banana peels, so I think to skirt the whole weighty tension of control, knowing that the immanent chaos is probably going to be fantastic, is the way it goes… but if I have to go hunting for it, it usually involves drinking.
AH: So, what are you going to do next?
JL: If I’m going through all the hassle to create sets and props, and sculpt some kind of visual narrative to tell a story, and know that I wasn’t going to make any money, then I may as well make movies. I was really planning on getting a film camera and making these documentaries about decision making and art, called Adventures in Art, about the obsessiveness that goes into the artist’s decision making processes. It’s fascinating because you get down to the tiniest, micro-metered decisions… and there is comedy in that. Each episode is about the death of an idea—because I have on paper, what I think are these really ingenious sculpture-related ideas, and I think, “Oh, that’s going to be great.” Then, the more I start thinking about details, the more the idea just has to be put down like a half run-over dog… it sort of devolves into this vortex of unexpected quicksand.
JL: Also, the business side of art for me is this insidious iron glove that wants to smooth all the rough bits. Stream lining a creative process into a ‘clean’ format makes my brain itch. I can’t even keep up with all of the pieces I’ve done. Part of the problem was I’d never have money for film, before digital cameras were everywhere, to document my work. I would spend months and months on a painting, and someone would wind up getting it, and hand me a check—then the painting’s gone, out of sight out of mind. That, or I would feel so sick of looking at the damn thing… or I’d loose their contact information. So there are probably about 120 out of 230-odd paintings that I don’t have any record for. Painting itself is controlling chaos…taking all these diverse things that you have to do to create the art and wrestle it down to this one, specific image. Doing that takes up so much energy, that by the time I get to the business end of it I just want to crawl under a couch.
Wrestle | oil on canvas
AH: Would you appreciate if after seeing this interview, people who did have your paintings came forward to let you photograph them for your records?
JL: Yeah, that’d be great. But you know, I don’t even have a record of who’s got what a lot of the time, so a lot of the stuff I was showing you earlier… the little paintings you forget about… or just over the years people fade away and go somewhere else, and I don’t even know where half this stuff is... I wouldn’t even begin to know where any of it is.
Ultimately, the painting medium has proven itself a limiting factor for Jack--
JL: There is one thing that is hard to paint… you know wanting a movie camera with the desire to start making movies… I lived in Seattle for a while, I worked in the production part of it, I stapled tags on clothes, I emptied garbage, I bailed up ragged clothes… it was a quota job, I was like an octopus on crack. I remember there was a girl, lets call her Sophia. Sophia was young, she was Guatemalan, and her whole extended family worked in this processing area. She had a cousin, an aunt, two sisters... busting ass like crazy. But Sophia, she was only 18 or 19, and definitely the brains of the outfit for some reason… definitely the boss of the operation in that family, and she was the hanger. She hung all the clothes. There were different lines for men, women, and children… she didn’t take a lot of shit, and it was my job to supply her with hangers so she was always calling at me for hangers… and this one day, this beautiful, beautiful girl shows up. I mean gorgeous face, body…. really just demure, quiet, sweet-seeming girl, always smiling. It turned out to be Sophia’s cousin, Marilee. A fresh-faced 16-year-old girl who was obviously gorgeous, and every dude in that basement was a total wolf, we couldn’t help but look at her because she was so gorgeous, and also very sweet, so we felt like assholes. But Sophia, who was not the prettiest gal, didn’t like the attention that her cousin received, so she made sure to loudly and roundly call her by sort of a cruel nickname… she called her "La Guera", which means “the white girl”, since she was one of the lighter-skinned members of the family… my friend Rick who worked there was able to translate that whole idea to me. She always stayed quiet, didn’t talk to any of the other girls or anything. But one of the jobs that I had was chucking out grocery carts full of old glassware. Marilee, was onetime helping me process about 10 full-full carts of this glassware—cups, china, plates, knick-knacks, what have you—and we were chucking it all into this compactor that was outside on the dock. Of course, since we were on quota time, our hands move quick-like, in and out of the cart constantly, chucking the glass pieces hand over hand. It was really intimate because, you know, she was on one side of the cart, and I was on the other. The sound of all the different ceramics and glass breaking, one after another, it sounded like a 20th century composition, it was strangely beautiful, all that noise… with our hands barely touching as we were reaching in, and we’re chucking out all this stuff hand over hand.. then the cart would move and she’d pull up another one… and this cacophonous music would happen again. We did this silently, and didn’t really look at each other, and I looked up, during all this music, and she just looked so sweet, and I was imagining having this slight crush on this sweet-girl, just after she had been freshly yelled at by Sophia about something she’d done, and I wanted to tell her, “Fuck Sophia, don’t worry about it…” Its moments like that I remember so vividly, but I can’t paint, and that’s why I think I should pick up a movie camera.