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Art Notes
Magpies, Mushrooms & Found Steel July 19, 2007
By Fox & Larson
 It’s July, and the teen-aged magpies have grown their tails and learned how to fly. Their most passionate shaman is back in town as they swoop and yammer at him, wisecracking, “What’s the new work, Wags? Why the trains? Why not us?”
Jim Wagner loves Taos so much he lives in Colorado. Taos loved him back so much that he had to leave it, after becoming entwined in local artistic and social life for 33 years. Some folks confused his public image with his private life, due to his having sparked the painted furniture craze in 1980. Wagner was suffocated. “Our house was Grand Central Station,” said his wife. “I couldn’t get any work done,” said Wagner. So in the mid-90s he told his wife, “Find me a place with good fishing, and I’ll go.” She found Hotchkiss, Colorado, a town of 900 near the mouth of the Black Canyon of the Gunnison. Carved, painted fish are still a totem of Wagner’s creativity.
The current show opened July 7 at Parks Gallery, 127-A Bent St. in Taos, and will run through July 30. It’s a must-see. There are large oils with his rich colors and trademark droll titles: a woman with shocked eyes and pale skin is “200 Miles From a Mall;” a woman consoling a younger woman is “I Told You To Stay Away From the Mushrooms.” Hippie having a bad trip, or Alice? That’s Wagner’s sly charm.
Wagner furniture is displayed just west of the Parks Gallery in a room of the adjacent building called “Parks II.” New touches this July: more green sheen on the magpies; redwing blackbirds tumble through the sky; blue piñon jays race a train through the landscape; and fused-glass chickens adorn trasteros. “An older lady in Hotchkiss refurbished an old creamery into a million-dollar arts center,” says Wags, “so I can work in five kilns, a fused-glass studio, a blacksmith shop, a pottery studio, all for $10 a month.”
Sweet Baby James could’ve been talking about Wagner when he sang, “Deep greens and blues are the colors I choose/Won’t you let me go down with my dreams. . . .”
Jim first heard of Taos when he saw some Agnes Martin water colors in primary school at Los Gatos, California. Agnes was a friend of one of his teachers. “From the age of six on, I was just driven to paint,” he says. He came to Taos as a young man of 22 in 1962 because of that connection to Martin. While on an errand one day, he met her coming out of a store with some goods. He had just purchased a bottle of Campari. He introduced himself. She invited him to her studio. They shared the bottle of Campari. That night they joined Louis Ribak and Bea Mandelman at the Casa Cordova, where Godie Schuetz almost threw them out.
Wagner’s journey in Taos was rugged but rewarding, reflecting the ups and downs of this many-leveled small town during the years when the counterculture arrived in force and the community began to change. When he came here he wound up sleeping on floors and borrowing baths. He began courting a Talpa gal, Bertha Medina, the first day he arrived in Taos. She, like Jim, worked at the Taos Inn. He and Bertha had a son, Thomas, who was killed by gunshot on July 4, 1980, at the age of 15.
Jim and Bertha lived in Talpa, where he fell in love with the magpies, adobe buildings, blotchy blue skies, the color green, and the many-colored mountains behind. He painted in bursts of primal creativity on canvas or board, applying the paint with anything—cut-up cardboard, matchbook covers, sliced-up credit cards, and now, big cut-up For Sale signs. “They have just the right amount of give,” he told me. His favorite images—adobe churches with cupolas on them and a well in the yard with matching cupola, clouds and birds and clothes on the line all swooping in the wind—capture in a glance the nostalgia all of Taos has for “the old days.”
Wagner learned bartending at Los Conquistadores in back of La Fonda, then became a fixture behind the bar of La Cocina across the plaza. For most of the 60s and 70s writers, artists, hippies, hometown guys and gals, business folks and politicos hung out at the town’s favorite watering hole and restaurant. Wagner trained Steve Parks to succeed him at the bar in La Cocina. Parks’s 1993 book on Wagner, published by Ed and Trudy Healy, is well-written and gets under the surface of Wagner and his contemporaries. The book also contains the anguished paintings Wagner did in his most desperate moments, an aspect gallery-goers will never see.
It’s ironic that the two people who rocked Wagner’s world were named “Mother” and “Baby.” There was a pedophile who called himself Mother. Everybody knew about him but nobody would do anything. Mother told Wagner he would never know his son “until he f----- him.” So on a night when Wagner was fueled by drugs and whiskey, Mother walked into El Patio, now The Alley Cantina. Wagner left, got a funky pistol, came back and shot him. He did nine months at the State Pen, where the King of the Inmates, named Baby, protected him from the lethal guys because Wagner knew Baby’s Talpa relatives. Wagner got out of the Pen just in time, before the Hell of the 1980 riot, when over 30 inmates were gruesomely killed by other inmates.
The prison experience inspired him to start a Spanish Colonial furniture revival business with Tony Martinez and Tony Lopez, to help ex-cons by offering them a trade and moral support. He painted the chairs, trasteros, and chests, fusing his whimsical spirit with the vernacular wood-decorating motifs from centuries gone by. Wagner called his take on old Spanish style “an era in history that never happened.” In 1985 and ’86, furniture designed and painted by Wagner was given national exposure by Bloomingdale’s and Macy’s in 30 outlets nationwide, kicking off the “Santa Fe Style” craze.
Through it all, Wagner kept reinventing himself, entering rehab in 1990, struggling back, and redeeming the dark times with new joyous, color-filled paintings that bubbled from “that strange brain,” said Mary Alice Renison, “perfectly coordinated with that strange eye,” as quoted in Parks’s book. Few artists in their work or in person can match the mutual affection that Taos and Jim have for each other. To quote Parks once more, that reciprocal love flows from Wagner’s “full-chested embrace of the Taos landscape [and] his tender regard for all living things, women in particular.” “Wags, Wags, who’s the new woman, the new woman,” yammers the magpie overhead.
Friends gathered around Wagner at his opening July 7, and Jim (with his new lowers) seemed hale and hearty despite some close escapes. “My colon exploded, and they say I died twice on the table,” he says. “Then last year, my knee, which I lost the kneecap from when I was in high school, quit on me, and they put this thing that looks like a Polish trailer hitch in it, and I can hike again!”
Bruce Campbell seems poised for a breakout, with his painted totem images on salvaged steel drums featured at Bonnaroo in Tennessee, the country’s largest music festival; a number of pieces at the Taos Solar Fest; and with an exhibit through the end of July at Envision Gallery, behind Overland Sheepskin on Paseo del Pueblo Norte, three miles north of Taos Plaza.
Campbell paints Picasso-esque faces and dreamy human forms on the rusted and torn surfaces of found steel artifacts like hot-water tanks, tractor hoods, and other industrial-age castoffs.
“I use found objects as canvas,” Campbell told me in an interview at Envision Gallery. “Many, many others use found objects in their art, but mostly as-is. I love the functionality inherent in them—tanks, vehicle hoods, mufflers, ducting. The patina-ed surfaces are exquisite! The shapes are so unique and evocative!”
One hazard of painting on steel patinas is that “it eats brushes up so fast, I’ve learned to use brush stubs, rags, daubers, grinders to carve images into the surface—I can paint with anything.” The contrast in his art is between the worn, torn, abandoned look of the steel, and the ethereal gradations and blending of the paint in his elongated, asymmetrical faces with heavy-lidded eyes.
Campbell, 48, discovered found-steel surfaces when he moved to an old farmstead outside of Boulder. He had been doing commercial art for 15 years, from logos to ads, clothing to greeting cards. “At the farm,” he says, “the landlord had the fire department burn down all the wooden outbuildings for practice, and they bulldozed all the leftover metal stuff into a big hole. When I found it, I thought it was a treasure trove, like an archaeological dig! I walked away from my previous business and started painting metal fulltime.”
Some of his effective pieces include “Harvestress,” with lower body from a thrown-away mannekin and upper body made of an International Harvester tractor hood; a bent shovel handle-socket with a tear in the rusted metal that suggests a suspicious nose and mouth; a car hood with an eye-turned-vertical forming a sail for Ulysses’s boat sailing through archetypal wonders and hazards; and a 4 x 8 sheet of plywood he salvaged from his farmhouse roof decking and turned into a Tree of Life with knots for apples and metallic-green interference paint suggesting foliage.
Campbell wants to do art on salvaged material in various communities and leave the art there, truly recycled in its home area.
Contact Envision Gallery at 751-1344.
Teruko Wilde, one of the many artists living in the mesa area bounded by Millicent Rogers Rd., Blueberry Hill Rd., Eototo Rd., and Tranquilino Rd., will have a solo exhibition at Total Arts Gallery from August 11 through September 2. We talked in an interview in her “second generation” Mike Reynolds earthship that she has extensively remodeled.
“It was dark and low-ceilinged when I bought it twenty years ago,” she said. “I raised the ceilings first, then painted everything white. You can touch it and feel it’s cooler.” Wilde’s major renovation was a soaring studio on top of the original earthship roof, open continuously to the old living room a level below, “which I made bigger by straightening the slanted wall and raising its roof too.” The studio gets northern and southern light, which Wilde can regulate to suit her color needs. She’s planted many trees, and stone sculpture dots the property.
Wilde was born in Nagoya, Japan. “I was raised in the foothills of mountains there, and I think you keep those impressions of landscape from childhood. So, while I was successful with watercolor and pastels in Ohio, where I came as a teenager, I moved to Taos and fell in love again with mountains.”
Here, she has steadily progressed from representational to abstract, and from small to large. “I was in love with the skyscapes, such huge scope! I had to switch from pastel and watercolors, which I was known for in Ohio, to oils on big canvases. I didn’t do it to make more money, but for love of the big skies. But I wouldn’t have made it in Taos unless I went big.”
One of her latest discoveries is how heavy drips of paint, running parallel down the canvas from banks of foliage colors, represent tree trunks without the literal detail of painting each trunk. “I change often to challenge myself. Galleries want more representational work so I do it, but I feel so much more comfortable with more abstract. I like an emotional statement that’s not so clearly defined…or confined.”
Her work is a fusion of her Japanese heritage and American experiences. Her overlays of color create texture and intriguing shapes as past and present merge. She recreates both the emotional and physical elements of landscapes.
Wilde studied at the University of Cincinnati and at the Columbus College of Art and Design in Ohio. She has won awards and has participated in over thirty one-person and group shows.
An opening reception will be Saturday, August 11, 4:30 – 6:30 pm. Total Arts Gallery is at 122A Kit Carson Road. Regular hours are Monday—Saturday, 10 a.m. to 5 p.m., and Sunday, 11 a.m. to 5 p.m. (505) 758-4667 or www.totalartsgallery.com.—S.F.
Erin Currier and the America Below
Sitting in Erin Currier’s studio, surrounded by the penetrating eyes of her portraits, is intimidating—like being at a party in Hollywood. Except Hollywood parties never have such cool and confident guests. I got a sneak preview of the work she’s doing for her upcoming show at the Parks Gallery here in Taos.
Erin’s portraiture is breathtaking and unique. It also belongs to the oldest and proudest traditions of artistic breakthrough. The most important milestones in the history of western art were breaks from, first, church, and then, aristocracy. When commoners, peasants, and maids became the subjects of fine art, it represented defiance, freedom, and a revolution in the perception of ourselves.
Like Paul Gauguin’s work from Tahiti, both in scale and subject matter, Erin’s endless series of faces confronts us with the presence of rich diversity in the world. She uncovers and celebrates people and history, past and present, commonly neglected in popular culture.
There are beautiful Sandinistas, killed in the battle of Vera Cruz, and female leaders of the Black Panther movement. There’s an airport janitor, radiant as a Madonna, and a shoe-shiner who embodies more conflict and tragedy than Hamlet. “I try to let the viewer draw their own conclusion,” she tells me. But me? I am telling you this stuff is there.
And there was somebody I’d never heard of: Enrico Malatesta. When I noticed him, Erin explained that he was an Italian anarchist. “And if you asked me what an Italian anarchist was doing in a show called ‘America Below,’ I would tell you that he had a direct influence on Flores Magón, who had a direct influence on Augusto Sandino, and worked with Emiliano Zapata who’s inspiration of Che Guevara and Fidel Castro lead to the revolution in Cuba, which inspired Carlos Fonseca who went to Cuba to learn about Sandino and then went back to Nicaragua to found the Sandinistas, who’s revolution influenced the Venezuelans…but that’s only what I’d say if you asked me that question.”
Clever girl.
She works as we speak. The artistic process is a seamless flow from her everyday life. She takes photos and fills sketchbooks on her travels to develop subjects. She collects trash from around the world to compose background collages. The careful technique is an irresistible synthesis and a carefully honed craft. Layers of acrylic, latex and wax transform what was refuse by the side of the road into a translucent, transcendental patina.
The first time I saw Erin’s work I was struck by the trash collage motif. Knowing nothing about it at the time, and from a distance, I thought the artist was making a statement about graffiti. On closer examination, I recognized a variety of off-base-line typography elements. Then I imagined the artist was borrowing from the chaotic and jarring style of titles made popular by such movies as “Seven.” Further observation revealed the text itself was part of a continuous background, which reflected, for me, the dense context of the modern world, a universe of noisy visuals. The Japanese aptly call this barrage of Western advertising/cultural iconography “a cave of winds.”
Competition for our short attention span is tireless. You can not go to the mailbox or drive even to Rinconada without getting some public relations mote stuck in your eye. Erin’s ingenious weaving of this endless cacophony into the fabric of her work at once removes any hypnotic, Neural Linguistic Programming power it might have had, and simultaneously refreshes it. One comes away with a renewed appreciation, and a sharpened critical eye for the next wave of Madison Avenue garbage hurled in one’s face.
And it isn’t just about advertising. The new piece for her show depicting a shoe-shiner from Venezuela is inlaid with trash that includes a worker’s punch-card, found by the side of the road in Taos…an eviction notice, or “Bailiff Removal” notice from England…a newspaper headline asking if Marx is dead, “Carlos Marx Emurio?”…a meat guide from some recipe book or butcher’s instruction text…a political poster from Venezuela advising “Vote for Nobody” or “Manifesto del mas por el voto nulo…”
Every one of Erin’s portraits is infused with such multi-level statement. Deftly buried under color and sheen, the technique always takes a back seat to her subject, an individual carefully given her full attention and respect. Larger than life faces emerge with such power that you might not even notice any background at all. Truly given to fine art’s bravest and most influential traditions, Erin consistently chisels away at the incomprehensible stone of our befuddled world.
What do I know? Why trust these eyes? My childhood was filled with post-graduate art lectures, now that I think about it. The old man graduated summa cum laude from the Art and Design Center, and used to teach at the Art Institute of Chicago. He’s been dragging me through art museums my whole life, probably hoping I’d write an article like this about him someday. I think I know everything.
But Erin’s right. The viewer must draw their own conclusions. So go and see it for yourself at the Parks Gallery in Taos, August 11 to September 4. Her work may evoke something quite different for you. You won’t be able to shake the feeling—those paintings are looking right at you, sometimes through you and beyond.—J.L.
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