Barry Graham: Illusory Flowers in an Empty Sky

St. Ness Oil on canvas

The recent paintings of Phoenix-based artist Richard Bledsoe take the viewer by surprise.  When I saw a few of them at Deus Ex Machina gallery last week, I was simultaneously amused and chilled, and I was unsure which response was the stronger. I am still unsure, and I think this might be what gives Bledsoe’s work its power.

St. Ness depicts a Loch Ness Monster that is almost cartoonish, but not quite. While the monster is close to being cute, the detail of the water it inhabits is so convincing that the picture has the sinister, lonely beauty of the best of the American “creature feature” films of the 1940s and 1950s.

Among the Fortunate Oil on Canvas

Among the Fortunate is an urban fairytale, more Brothers Grimm than Hans Andersen. I change my mind as to whether “the fortunate” are the birds that surround the strange, birdlike human wading in a lake on the edge of an overcast city, or the denizens of that city who do not have to inhabit its edge.

And why is he/she surrounded by birds? And why is the stick he/she carries carved in the shape of a bird?

Bledsoe is actually a realistic painter, in that the more his work is examined, the fewer clear answers or statements are to be found. This is the life we live, in which everything is in plain sight, and yet everything is hidden, and the meanings we find are only inventions. Richard Bledsoe brings news of real life.

Public Eye by Peter Bugg

On Friday, I was at Willo North Gallery in Phoenix for the latest show curated by Robrt Pela.

On display was work by the always-excellent Michele Bledsoe, Jeff Falk, Steve Gompf, and a fine graffiti artist named DOSE, whom I hadn’t heard of before but whose combining of images of Bob Dobbs and a Day of the Dead skeleton I found beautiful and unsettling.

The standout for me, though, was the work of Peter Bugg. His collection of dinner plates, onto which he had stuck widely-published photographs (taken by paparazzi) of female celebrities such as Britney Spears inadvertently (or perhaps not) showing their naked genitals, said something surprising about our culture of emotional voyeurism. Unsurprisingly, it was also the most polarizing work on display, with some people (including me) finding it compelling while others claimed it wasn’t art at all. (I didn’t know people still made that claim, but can now testify that they do.)

With a Warholian understanding of context, Bugg artlessly and artfully succeeds in making a point about celebrity culture (what Debord called The Society of the Spectacle and Chris Hedges calls The Empire of Illusion) - nonevents turned into bread and circuses. I had looked at these photographs before, but Bugg made me actually see them for the first time.

I’ve been reading Robert Bresson’s Notes on the Cinematographer. He refers to the actors in his films not as “actors,” but as “models,” because he sees the art of acting as something that gets in the way of the truth that is being shown. He writes: It would not be ridiculous to say to your models: “I am inventing you as you are.”

This reminds me of an interview I read with the actor Ray Winstone, in which he said that his friend Gary Oldman had been helpful to him. As they rehearsed together, Oldman would sometimes tell him, “I can see you acting, Raymond.”

Bresson sees film-making, and every other art, as being separate and unique. I disagree with him on this, and as evidence that he’s wrong I offer that I find his book helpful in all of my writing. When I read books I’ve written and cringe, it’s not because the writing is bad (though it may be) - it’s because I can see the writing, see myself writing, see my own artifice.

This is the hand of the great French artist Vince Larue, with the books I wrote that he did the covers for. There will soon be our graphic novel, Dark Heat, and more books in the future.