Being an Artist

[Music] [Music] thank you [Music] [Music] [Music] foreign all these feathers from birds that were in my grandmother's yard and I had this notion that I could make a bird that would you know just fly away and so I got this Maxwell House Coffee can and this Mr Schultz helped me uh make all with an all make all these holes in the in the Maxwell House so I covered it with all these these these feathers and stuff but it's not really what it ended up looking like which I'm sure it didn't look like anything like some silly ass thing but it was the dream is very is like the dream of that it would become a bird and be alive it's very much what I think art making is like it was closer to what being an artist is than the fact that I could draw good you know it was transformation [Music] foreign [Music] come on I work construction and I come home at night in the dark and if the light is left on in the studio it's kind of striking the and and sort of dramatic the light that occurs there and then and it just occurred to me that looking from the outside in my Silhouette would be a dramatic thing [Music] I'm compelled to keep making marks and if you look at my drawings too they're covered head to toe um yeah I don't know it's uh I I get lost in this process and I keep going and hopefully at you know I step back enough to know when to stop but knowing when to stop is I think problematic [Music] [Music] [Music] I am an artist and I also do construction and renovate houses built houses to make uh hence meat okay [Applause] [Music] [Applause] well this is the first really hot week we've got foreign ER is an artist I met him in New York City in the early 1980s and I made a point of seeing his exhibitions in New York and was very um inspired by his painting I realized he was an artist that I needed to follow the rest of my life that he was making a genuine contribution to the United States art scene welcome to the to the green kill bathroom when people come to show us concerts here they often ask me where the bathroom is and I say I point to the back room and I say just keep in mind it looks like hell [Applause] [Music] we organized a show called The L show and I asked Gary if he'd like to paint the bathroom and he of course said yes [Music] and we discussed it for some time and it was decided that we would do Dante's Inferno [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] it's the nine spheres of The Inferno and on the floor is the three-headed devil so when anyone comes in this bathroom they're they're standing at the the bottom of hell and they're looking up and so they're getting ready for their Ascension the thing about being in the Arts is that um it's a money game and um artists need to survive and most of them Can't Survive by selling their art often artists have to work several jobs and paint at night or they're always ours are often hustling um to uh to make ends meet and it's a hard life for artists and but yet artists give so much to our society there I think they're crucial to the health of society [Music] kind of headed to do illustration I in high school I I did some things and I got some stuff published you know and Sports magazines and various things and I was kind of headed that way and then I kind of discovered uh Pollock and people like that in Picasso and then I was like whoa that's what that's what I want to do so uh I went that direction really forcefully pretty quick when I was in high school I would say the very the fact that I was pretty geeky and you know not too social pushed me deeper into the art and I do remember my like I they gave me the basement and I started filling it up with big paintings and they they were worried about me so like you need to be go out and be more social or whatever and once I got into college they definitely did that but you know I I was I was pretty deep into it pretty young I went to Wayne State and that's in Detroit and uh I think maybe it was the second semester I I moved downtown I got a space with a very good friend of mine Curt Novak um and you know because Detroit is is not as depressed now but in the 70s it was quite depressed which uh made for a lot of really cheap space it was a scary place you know being downtown and there's a lot of crazy ass violence and you know near near misses that I was involved in where I went to school was right next or not right next to but like a block away from the Detroit Institute of Arts there was one particular show there which was abstract expressionist work Pollock Gorky de kooning Etc uh Clifford still from the Albright Knox and they were gigantic paintings and like incredible and it completely blew me away and that was where I want to go there so I went there pretty pretty pretty pretty hard [Music] I think this is right is it yeah yeah okay this is called food chain and uh I wanted to do a painting with fish images in it and it's starts at the bottom with really large fish in other words they're all chasing one another to eat one another or consume one another and uh and it's got a you know a lot of energy and very painterly surface okay well uh there was a I I guess it was a group of people that were pretty cohesive and they were called the cast Corridor School of Art because it was on Cass Avenue A lot of them had their Studios and that was kind of equivalent of the Bowery I mean a lot of homeless people very poor but really cheap space and uh and it was a group of people that kind of adopted me I mean I was like 10 15 years younger than most of them but you know I was I think pretty strong artists and they recognize that and they helped me get shows and you know we partied and you know had a great time basically and uh and it was uh it was I think it was different than when I later in life moved to York was that there was some kind of support for each other I mean it was competition but you know they would people helped me out or and vice versa and uh it's definitely different than my experience in New York people that helped me the most would be uh uh Bob says stock Jim shotland and uh John egner I know Gary Mayer from Detroit maybe I met him about uh 45 years ago [Music] just doing collaborative things with this other artist uh Kurt Novak I'm sure Gary's talked about him they were pretty close I guess and friends and and they did these kind of installation things that maybe my generation didn't do so much so they were a little more freewheeling and also two guys working together in a collaborative way was not necessarily the norm so uh and we saw them separately but we also saw them in the beginning a lot together but I did learn how to be an artist in Detroit and I did learn and I used very the very same methods and practices in terms of how I approach it or have to have different approaches so and I think I really learned that all in Detroit what made it interesting or made it a great great place was the proximity of all these artists and kind of one spot really that had shared buildings with the studio spaces close spot shared bars and music venues and things like that and a kind of a community in a neighborhood that happened around Wayne State University and and in the fringes of that in the down Cass Avenue towards downtown and Bob stuff you know helped me get my first real one-man show which was at the Willis Gallery which was the cast court or Gallery kind of for a while and uh anyways they all these guys made work that was ambitious and aggressive and often employed uh lots of found materials or basically kind of junk and transformed that I had had a lot of success in Detroit the first one person show I had at the Gallery sold out so you know of course I was gonna take that Kick-Ass New York well I moved to uh New York City I think it was like 23 maybe and and I just always wanted to go to New York and the first few times I visited that just reinforced that and I love the energy of it and all the art and it's the insanity of it it was great very stimulating maybe too stimulating but very stimulating well I came in I came in the early 80s when the whole like Neo expressionism thing happened Julian Schnabel and David Sally and you know all those people and the job I had was I worked for this art supply place called Utrecht and I was their delivery guy for a while and so I got to meet a lot of these people Basquiat and I used to deliver to and he was my biggest Tipper Richard Sarah you know a lot of really huge big name artists and that was pretty interesting and I was really jealous of the vast amounts of Paint and Supplies they use you can't believe how much paint these guys would use at that time Soho was the center of the art world and I went to tons of openings you know as a regular and I hung out at the bars there finales and puffies and all those places particularly that point the East Village exploded and that was like a Bohemian kind of scene maybe the LA well one of the last ones there and uh they had all the graffiti guys that come into the art store and buy 30 canvases and paint them that night and have a shovel [Music] and uh it was pretty wild scene yeah it was really fun it really was uh well I I showed uh I showed at a gallery called harm bookard and Tribeca had a one-person show there I was in a show at the Bronx Museum about Young Artists and I was in another show that Ned Rifkin from the new Museum curated probably the best show I had in New York was at Exit art which was this vast space on Broadway and it got reviewed in art America so that was cool and but it was a two-person show I showed all my really big work it was a vast gallery and I you know dipped extriptics I had you know Greatest Hits out there so that was probably the best representation of me this one is called split and it's about Heaven and Hell and a person being caught right in the middle of those two things [Music] so there's angels on top and the demons blow and uh this guy doesn't know where he's where he's going he's either going up or down and he's stuck in the middle right now anyways as you see my life is mostly about making paintings but it's also I'm a huge uh book uh author enthusiast and I worked for a bookstore for a while and I frequent a lot of bookstores and buy books even though I have too many as it is art books and literature and Etc and uh you know they're all interspersed together there's no real order like most of my life oh here's one of my faves James ensor um who's uh from the late uh 19th century he lived into the 20th but I mean and there goes a lot of books on the floor anyways there's the entry of there's a print of the entry of Christ into Brussels and I made a painting called the entry into Brooklyn which is kind of homage to it and uh I don't know how like a guy like this they didn't stick him and mental institution like this stuff is so out there this this particular painting is one of my faves there's all this crazy motion but all this you know it's perspective but it's also like this these crazy shapes or dogs or whatever they are [Music] foreign [Music] I think a lot of people would describe Gary as obsessive especially people who really study his work he never stops painting he's always trying to create I just I feel like every week he's putting in a new empty canvas on the wall and attacking it with his brush thank you [Music] foreign [Music] thank you [Music] Gary is very happy to have openings anywhere anytime he loves openings he loves seeing his art on walls if you give him a whole Gallery he'll take it if you give him a little corner he'll take it if somebody drops out of a show and you need a painter he'll take it I'm there Gary would say I'm there having shows is a real I like the pressure like it really motivates you to work harder and focus and think about what it would look like would look like together if there's any connection um it makes you think harder and work harder and get really nervous and freak out and you know it's part of the whole thing I could put two on this wall this one's gonna be in for sure but you know I gotta see how they look together [Music] yeah you definitely like question like should I you know I should have worked harder or I should have this or that or like this particular show has got a real variety of work in it and I kind of wrestled in my head about that like because I make a lot of work and it evolves from abstract to more representational and uh that works for me they feed off each other but I don't know if that really works in a show it's going to look like two different artists or whatever and I'm a little nervous about that in terms of this on the other hand I you know I want to show who I am so [Music] oh yeah [Music] thank you [Music] that's how we know each other because he's very generous in this portrait right so and then I just follow I just follow his work but his portrait is self-portraits are really amazing too so where's animals it's roosters everything [Music] yes good afternoon [Music] I met Gary in 1990 I think it was in Brooklyn and Brentwood Brooklyn since I've known him he's just been this Furious painter so he's he's always been somebody who's a go-to Nexus of of the intersection of where uh artists and and art art people come together so I'm following him you know wherever he goes I'll follow and uh I'm just really impressed with his work here and I know he works under always not Optimum conditions and I respect that because I think that that's that's the challenge for an artist is to make your work regardless of whether you have a big white lit well-lit Studio or whether you're working in in a shack like Gary has or and so the that Gary has to adapt to his conditions whatever the conditions are is what it takes to uh to make an artist so he's he's a self-made man [Music] I just uh had my opening here at long ear and I was quite uh moved and surprised by a lot of people that came I think it was a real success it was great to see the work in a in a way I can't really see it in my poorly lit Studio anyways uh I think I look you know the colors work together I think it really worked this show is called a divided eye and I wanted to talk about the fact that I worked between more not realism but you know narrative and description descriptive work you know Landscapes people animals cows in particular and uh and more abstract things which are come from those places from drawing those animals and taking them apart and whatever and uh they do I think they look good together so I'm happy about that we're headed over there my new Venture with Patrice Lorenz and Ted Hanan and it's uh opening I gotta get over there foreign [Music] as you keep going with it you realize it's about it's just about making art it's about the work and you know of course it'd be nice to be massively successful but I still want to do it and the reality you know I I think it's a good thing to be you know making art I'm quite happy with that keeps my uh keeps me going keeps me excited and so uh being this old guy making all these paintings I don't know I'm okay with that [Music] some folks measure their success by the labels in their suits some folks let their family ties choke them like a noose but not me my friend no not me my friend no no not me not me we all got to die and when it's my time I'm gonna die living so give me wings and I can't talk hands show me show me to the stage let me lose it now we'll play I will yeah but hold me back or tie me down trap me under a Golden Crown and watch me blow this nothing town I will entire living die living [Music]

Channel: Bill Lynch Films

Views: 154,894

Keywords: #casscorridor

Id: rNy0BXC8aC0

Length: 29min 30sec (1770 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 15 2023