HoboEye Art:
Interview with New York Painter Jonathan Twingley

By Mitchell McInnis

Editor’s Note: I’ve known Jonathan Twingley since we were both in college in Minnesota. He now lives in New York, his home for the past 11 years. For five of those 11, I lived in New York as well, making frequent visits to his studio apartment in Washington Heights. To one another, we refer to his workspace as “the cockpit.” A hyper-organized, densely packed corner. The skeleton of that space is an L-shaped desk, a sizeable easel and a high-backed, wheeled office chair. Phone, computer and stereo are all within a short roll of one another, the multi-component stereo sitting atop an antique flat-file, speakers scattered throughout the apartment. By New York standards, Twingley’s space isn’t small, it’s extremely livable. Most nights, he works until 3am or later, and he’ll usually pick up the phone to speak with an old friend during those sessions. This interview is the result of a couple such conversations. To find out more about Twingley, and to view more of his work, visit: www.twingley.com

HoboEye: Music has always been important to you and to your work as a visual artist, especially Blues and Jazz. In addition to doing portraits of musicians, "Bluesmen" have been characters in your work. Additionally, you have a very extensive collection of music, and it fuels you while you work. What is it that weds your passions for music and art?

Twingley: Well, Music is the most dynamic form of art we have, in a lot of ways. People hire a band when they get married, they choose hymns to be played at funerals.  Music has a substantial place in all parts of Human Life – Meditation, Relaxation, Drunkenness, Sexi-time and Everything In-Between.  Visual Art is an entirely different Animal all-together.  Paintings and Drawings are an inherently literal sort of thing.  Music taps into feelings and emotions in a different way.  Art gets at things tangibly, in a way different from music's abstract magic.  Music subverts specifics – transcends them – and creeps into our lives in a timeless way because of it.  My love for music goes way back...I found my first guitar in a garbage can when I was 9 years old. I was fooling around at the bottom of Hoover Avenue in Bismarck where I lived at the time, and there in the garbage can next to this run-down condominium was this gnarled chunk of a guitar – the neck was completely broken off and there was a big hole punched in the back of it.  Being the awfully innocent, good-natured boy that I was, I knocked on the door there at the condo – smashed guitar in hand – to ask if it was OK for me to have the guitar from the garbage can.  This guy comes to the door in a sweat-stained tank-top, a cigarette in his mouth and a can of Budweiser in his hand.  "I found this broken guitar in your garbage can," I said looking up at him through his screendoor.  "Do you mind if I have it?"  He grunted some sort of affirmative and I was rich for a day.  Luckily, my Dad and his Dad – my Grandfather – built several guitars from scratch, so my Dad fixed this thing up and that's how I learned to play.  Later, I played the French Horn and the Trumpet, too, but the guitar is still the simplest way to a song.




HoboEye: Zeroing in on the connection between music and your work... I own several of your original drawings, and spending time with them, I can't help but focus on the texture within a single moment. Their gestural qualities are unmistakable. Jazz, drawing, painting, poetry all unite in this pursuit. The pursuit of textures within a moment. I think of someone with whom we're both fascinated, Jack Kerouac. He pursued jazz maniacally, as you know, finding ways to work the rhythms and improvisations of this quintessential American form into his work. Most directly, it's evident in what he called "sketching" in his writing, and it was all about reacting in the moment. 

You have a very close connection to jazz, and are literally across the street from a wine bar that plays host to working jazz musicians of impressive repute. It's a place you frequent. You've sold portraits of jazz musicians off of the walls of that wine bar. 

In your work, I've observed these connections, once again, in your gestures. Studying the lines in your work, the movements in your hand, I see the connection to a jazz musician's fingers manipulating the valves of his horn.

What are your thoughts about this connection?

Twingley: Well, we probably shouldn't push this thing too far (the connection between my work and Music/Jazz) because let's face it, all of us Solitary Craftsman would love to be in a band.  But I HAVE always looked to Jazz as a sort of model for making pictures.  I picked up Miles Davis's KIND OF BLUE when I was in High School, and that really set me off.  First of all, we should note that Jazz is an incredibly romantic art form – Cool Cats in Zoot Suits, cigarette smoke and high-end cocktails, low lights and chicks.  But that's not the part that really hit me.  What hit me about the Form was it's two main components: High Craft and Wild Abandon.  Discipline and Loosey Goosey. Looking back now, this was the best thing an aspiring artist could recognize – an open eye for anything that might come along, but learn your scales.

HoboEye: Granted. It's a very romantic notion. At the same time, there's something quite purposeful in the comparison, regarding American artists in particular. Several have called jazz the quintessential American art form. I agree. And the nub of that, I think, lies in the components you mentioned: "High Craft and Wild Abandon." (Your capitalization, for affect, acknowledged.) "Wild Abandon," of course, is another term for improvisation. Jazz has made improvisation an essential element of American art. Improvisation is especially evident in your work, as you've always been attentive to gesture. Before we move on to the second component you mentioned, please address the importance of improvisation in your work.

Twingley: Well, Improvisation can lead to discovery.  But it's a Wild Animal. Improvisation, as we're talking about it, is an Educated Guess. Without a firm knowledge of the scales, you'll just drown in the wandering.  You've got to be able to control the wind in your own way.

HoboEye: That elucidates the point, and it gets at the notion of high craft as well. Give me a couple examples of painters who do a good job of controlling the wild animal of improvisation.

Twingley: Well, I think one thing we should acknowledge at this point is that Jazz and the whole idea of Improvisation in painting – as we're talking about it – are extremely young ideas.  The whole idea of "Modern Art" is just a baby.  How did Improvisation affect the work of Tintoretto in the 16th Century?  Or Masaccio in the 15th?  Or a Byzantine mosaic or an ancient Chinese scroll drawing?  Cimabue and Giotto were great revolutionary painters – Giotto was ahead of Science in his reliance on observation to gain knowledge! – but I'd imagine that they're idea of "pushing the envelope" was drastically different from painters of the last hundred years.  Jazz, again, provides a good metaphor.  Musically, one of Jazz's great inventions was setting the individual free within a group/orchestral setting.  And Art in the 20th Century was similarly set free from it's two traditional sponsors: The Church and the Aristocracy.  Artists were no longer required to practice their craft within the confines of those who sponsored them.  Along with a deconstruction of form, art experienced a deconstruction of protocol in the 20th Century, setting artists free to explore ideas from an individualistic point of view.  I was recently in Southern Utah/Northern Arizona and saw a number of incredible primitive rock paintings that have somehow endured, pictures of hunting trips and handprints and free-form geometrical designs.  These marks were made twelve- and thirteen-hundred years ago (or more)!  In a weird way, the 20th Century saw a re-birth of the Primitive Man in Art – that sole creator making marks on a modern cave wall, sometimes only to assert: I AM HERE.  This comparison brings up another interesting idea:  Those primitive wall paintings I saw in Utah, like the ancient paintings in the caves at Lascaux, were created as semi-literal accounts of what the author/people were experiencing at the time.  It was a crude journalism (one such site in Arizona was actually called "Newspaper Rock"!). Modern Art is more Free-Form Journalism, reporting both the seen and the unseen.

I'm rambling a bit here, but I want to try to build it to a Point:  The freedom Artists now find themselves with – freedom of form and freedom from the confines of traditional patronage – requires incredible Self Control.  When you have the power to do anything, can you do anything with it?

HoboEye: Your final notion, of being overwhelmed by choice, reminds me of Kierkegaard's Concept of Anxiety and the imagery of an individual standing at the edge of a precipice--choice as that overwhelming precipice before you: "Why jump? Why not jump? To jump is not to fly, ay there's the rub..." Given radical freedom, what the hell do you do with it? Like Francis Bacon talking about using "as it were" the back or the "wrong" side of the canvas, heightening the importance of every mark, and how he'd sometimes stare down the canvas for hours... Of course, that's, more than anything, Francis playing the character of Francis, I'm sure... but it's a wonderful notion. That pouty bulldog face of his staring down the void. That'll keep you goin'...

Back to the future. Art that allows for a a variety of choice, spontaneity, improvisation--not to mention art that isn't made to honor (G)od or the Mediccis--is concerned with moments and the experiences within those moments. I go this route to lead up to a definition of "high art" Brice Marden offered during a recent interview with Jeffrey Brown. Practitioners of so-called high art, according to Marden, think very deeply and carefully about the experience a viewer will have. As a sifting mechanism, this struck me as one through which boulders could fall. It sounded just as arbitrary as the term "high art" itself. 

Your training is in both the so-called fine arts and in illustration. Your images regularly appear in major publications as well as in galleries. When I look at your C.V., you could equally be described a fine artist as a commercial artist. Is the distinction between high/fine art and illustration/commercial art one that's going the way of Tintoretto's favorite dog?

Twingley:Ha.  Right –  "To jump is not to fly, and there's the rub..."  I guess it all requires wings first.

I've thought alot about the whole idea of Deconstruction – both in Art and in Culture – in the 20th Century.  On the Art side, nobody embodies the spirit of Art in the 20th Century like Picasso did and does.  He's the King, as far as I'm concerned, the top of the pyramid.  You can trace it back to Van Gogh, or Cezanne, ultimately, but I love the waPicasso embodied that explosion of styles and approaches that started late in the 19th Century.  Picasso was a Monster Chameleon – eyes wide open, sucking in all the changing rhythms of his times and making pictures, wholly of his time and totally Timeless, too.

Picasso's an interesting lever into understanding a true Revolutionary in Art.  There's no doubt that Picasso's Ego was fueled with kerosene from an early age, but thanks to his father, Picasso was well-versed in Art History, too, both Form and Content.  There's a painting called First Communion Picasso made when he was fourteen years old.  It's a
terrifying picture to look at, from a technical standpoint.  The virtuosity is incredible.  Or maybe it isn't.  Children are sponges and Picasso's father fed him a steady stream of water to soak up.  But he soaked it up, and that, I guess, is my point.  If you book-ended this painting of a First Communion with the last mad painting Picasso made before he died (92 years old – the paint still wet from working on it the night before he died) – you'd have to hit your head against a wall and just admit:  "My God, what scope and breadth.  How'd he get from there to there?"  I think the answer is this:  Picasso may have had all sorts of ambitions as an Artist, but he sought them out by studying the history of his craft.  Not only his contemporaries, but the Godfathers. Jack Levine told me one time:  "Never be too influenced by your contemporaries."  Picasso was always hyper-aware of what his fellow painters were up to (ask Georges Braque), but he always approached it with a keen eye on what had come before him.  And not just 20 or 30 years before he was born, but a hundred and five-hundred.

Culturally, the whole 20th Century notion of Deconstruction gave us some incredible flashes, but it ultimately makes me think of some lunatic running/laughing hysterically half-mad into the woods in the middle of the night, tearing his clothes off and prancing about underneath a full moon.  Then dawn breaks and he's cold, stumbling around in the half-light trying to find his pants.  I think alot of the blame for this mis-guided madness in America's Century falls on the revered shoulders of the Baby Boomers and their sacred 1960's. Rebellion for it's own sake is a short road.  I'll quote (with not a little bit of irony) Hunter Thompson:  "...No more of the Speed that fueled the '60's.  That was the fatal flaw in Tim Leary's Trip.  He crashed around America selling Consciousness Expansion without ever giving a thought to the grim, meat-hook realities that were lying in wait for all those people who took him seriously.  All those pathetically eager Acid Freaks who thought they could buy Peace and Understanding for three-bucks-a-hit.  But their loss and failure is ours, too.  What Leary took down with him was the essential elusion of a whole lifestyle that he helped create.  A generation of permanent cripples, failed seekers who never understood the essential old mystic fallacy of the Acid Culture, the desperate assumption that somebody, or at least some force, is tending the light at the end of the tunnel."

I don't know what to say about it all.  Maybe what I'm talking about here is Representational Art versus Abstract Expressionism.  But those terms don't even really mean anything anymore.  The entire collective vocabulary that Art had shared for so many hundreds of years was exploded in the 20th Century, and now, some days, I feel like I'm living in Babel without an interpreter.

As far as Brice Marden is concerned – who the hell is he to say that Fine Artists are defined by how much they consider the viewer's experience?  It's a disingenuous comment, and a defensive one too, I'd say.  The audience he so carefully considers when he makes his ribbony paintings is a generation of Art Students who are now paralegals and 7-11 attenDanielts, or rich guys who've been told by an Art Consultant what is Hot or a Good Investment.  And if that's who a person carefully considers when they make pictures, then I don't want to be an Artist. I make the majority of my living by making drawings and paintings for the printed page, so my edginess could easily be construed as some kind of Bitterness that the Fine Art World hasn't embraced me yet.  I would hope that's not the case, though.  I don't hate Brice Marden.  I'm sure he's a really nice guy, and his paintings are really colorful and squiggly.  He's probably the best Colorful Squiggler working today. It's the disproportionate praise that so many 20th Century Artists have gotten that bends me a little in the wrong direction.  Brice Marden belongs in a high-end gallery in Santa Fe, New Mexico, not at the Museum of Modern Art.

It's very possible that in the times in which we live the cart can be put in a position to pull the horses.  Look at the Pop Charts.  It very well may be true that Art reflects Life and Culture.  I wouldn't doubt that, but I certainly don't have to subscribe to it.

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