Massachusetts-based poet and artist Gordon Massman has transformed words into painting, maintaining the same expressive urgency that has guided his forty-five years of writing. His often monumental canvases emerge as unabashed confessions of the human psyche: instinctive, violent, yet lyrical gestures that combine vulnerability, irony, and sarcasm.
“I paint like a Kodiak bear attacking a fresh carcass”, says the artist, emphasizing the brutal and liberating physicality of his creative gesture. From pure abstraction to references to religion, politics, mythology, and contemporary superheroes, his work thrives on multiple imagery and an uncompromising urgency.
For the GRIT exhibition at the Alday Hunken Gallery in Atlanta, Massman presents new works that confirm his vocation for a radical, emotional art capable of transforming personal pain into a universal language.
In this conversation, Gordon Massman retraces the transition from poetry to painting, talks about the need to shamelessly “confess” the shadows of the human soul, and reflects on the role of irony, rebellion, and memory in his artistic imagination.
You started as a poet, and now you’re also a painter. How has writing poetry influenced your painting, and vice versa?
I ended my forty-five-year-long love affair with words when I realized that I could not arrange them more effectively than I already had. Words melted into paint, which I spun onto brushes to spread onto cloth. I now paint pictures with words exactly like I once wrote verse with paint: visually and primally.
Neither genre influences the other; one has merely shapeshifted into the next. Tarpon to condor, as it were. Whatever form it assumes, it’s the internal fire—the uncompromising passion within the beast–that creates the messages of art. I haul sunken ships from the depths regardless of the lifting machinery.
I am interested in those deepest sea-vines which unite human to human: fear, aggression, desperation, death, aloneness, vulnerability, endless hunger. That is my private obsession, and both words and paint are effective weapons.
In your works, you speak of “shameless confessions of the human psyche”. What does it mean to you to lay bare this intimate part of yourself before an audience?
This may be the ultimate question, and I haven’t had to field it until now. Thank you for having the perspicacity to ask. Why do I so casually bare my pinkish nakedness to a prurient world? What weird engine drives this compulsion?
The instant the fender slices its chest, the wounded dog squeals. The instant the fisher cat sinks fangs into its heart, the victim’s shrieks scarify the night. Somewhere in time and space, the hunter’s arrow pierced my gut, and I began to scream. I have been screaming since. I do not paint for glory or to win the temporary recognition of strangers.
I create to heal myself and, frankly, it doesn’t work. Think of Plath, Sexton, Berryman, Rothko, Gorky, and Jackson Pollock, who yanked out their mouths frayed clotheslines of personal laundry. All died by their hands. They, and I, bought the myth of religious exorcism, of sanctified cauterization. Yet it seems to be the only path.
The word “shameless”, which I am quoted to describe my “confessions of the human psyche”, I intend literally. We must extinguish the shame of who we most rightly are beneath the striations. Have no shame for painful lust; have no guilt for murderous flashes; never apologize for insecurity.
All quite normal subterranean denizens. Love these traits, and if you must, pry them open to the world. Religion and its social counterparts have built invisible electric prisons of shame around our perfectly normal fantasies. Celebrate, not supplicate. I’m a celebrant of my vertical stations.
You’ve described your painting as that of a “Kodiak bear attacking a fresh carcass”; can you tell us more about this physicality of the pictorial gesture?
In the Kodiak Peninsula of southern Alaska reside the biggest brown bears in the world. They can snatch the salmon from its ladder, as if it, the salmon, were standing still. This beast cares not a whit for chinaware; it splashes guts everywhere, scarlets its snout, and leaves a reeking slaughter zone.
Lumbers off for fresher uncivilized kill. Its gut growls through its swords. Each hind leg weighs fifteen hundred pounds, two stacks of cannonballs. I am he, symbolically. I crucify the massive canvas to my wall with staples, then unleash my primal instinct. Upon it, I describe twelve-foot-high bleeding arcs and scrawls and fat claw slashes and insatiable appetite.
I un-dignify it with my nightmare secrets—my grandeur delusions, my sexual appetite, my self-destruction, my base addictions. I am liberated and fear no incrimination.