Archive for the ‘Studio Visits by Chase Martin’ Category

Studio Visit with J.T. Dockery

Studio Visit with J.T. Dockery
by Chase Martin

When I meet J.T. Dockery, he’s sitting in a coffee shop, wearing thick-framed glasses and a battered fedora, scribbling in a notebook as a barista fires up the blender. “I used to keep my own studio,” he chuckles over the noise, “but there’ve been some domestic troubles on the home front, lately.” So, since around last October, he’s been filling his sketchbooks in coffee shops–usually Third Street Stuff. “Luckily, most of my drawings are 11 x 14 or smaller, so they’re pretty portable,” Dockery explains, gesturing towards a crammed shoulder bag slumped against his chair. Unlike artists working in more restrictive mediums, he can take his studio just about anywhere.

Dockery creates surreal, intricately detailed works of ink on paper, often combined with text rendered in jittery lettering. Many of these illustrations are designed to work together like a graphic novel, but the stories he’s telling are rarely straightforward. “I work in narrative, but for me, the writer part of my brain and the visual part of my brain are always working together, even if it’s not a sequential story,” he says. A plot about a tough gumshoe detective may veer suddenly into a series of panels about oozing space creatures invading from above. Though the story lines in his art are often as labyrinthine as his crosshatching, they are consistently compelling.

Influenced by the hard-boiled characters of film noir, underground comics of the 1960s and ‘70s, and gritty photographers such as Weegee, one page of Dockery’s work may startle you with its stark beauty–another may make you wonder what prescriptions he’s taking. “Absurdity and surrealism just kind of come out of me,” he remarks. Dockery’s instantly recognizable style makes use of bizarre, erotic, sometimes repulsive imagery paired with text that can in turn be funny, philosophical, or frightening.

Many images that start out in his sketchbooks find their way into his finished work. “I definitely refer back to them. They’re a way to keep drawing: ideas come out that take different forms later on.” With his Rapidograph pen, he points to a finished drawing of a stylized heart holding a gun. “This came from a sketchbook I filled about 3 years ago. I opened it one day, and there was this subversively cute cartoon heart there, holding a gun, waiting for me.” His current notebook contains abstract compositions, an eerie portrait of a man’s face, and a detailed replica of a Master of Kung Fu comic book cover he loved in his childhood.

Dockery grew up in Jackson County, Kentucky, where he developed a love for comic books and began drawing at an early age. When he was around 20, he stopped drawing temporarily when he discovered he was developing arthritis. “The pain really bothered me at that age,” he recalls, “but when I started drawing again it really helped me get through a tough time.” He eventually attended UK and Morehead University, and at first wanted to pursue a career in academia before finally deciding to devote himself to artistic efforts, intrigued by the union of narrative and visual imagery. “At some point, hopefully I can make some money off my art, but that’s not the main concern right now.”

Currently, Dockery makes ends meet by working at the downtown restaurant Gumbo Ya Ya’s, which leaves him with time and energy to pursue his passion. And he has been busy. In 2008, he finished an oversized, fifty-page graphic novel, In Tongues Illustrated, a tour-de-force of hallucinatory illustration and interwoven narrative. He is also collaborating on a project titled Creekwater with a friend from his band, The Smacks!, that’s being serialized in the newspaper North of Center. “It’s very old school to have a story that’s developing from week to week, literally like chapters in a book. It’s been challenging, but fun.” He is also working on some drawings for a book that will be printed by Larkspur Press, and is slowly chipping away at The Organ Grinder, a new graphic novel of his own.

To take a peek into Dockery’s sketchbooks, check out his blog, Covertly And By Snatches. Click HERE to see his current works in progress.

Studio Visit with Robert Tharsing

Studio Visit with Robert Tharsing
by Chase Martin

When I arrive at Robert Tharsing’s house, he’s drinking a glass of orange juice in the backyard, a serene space almost entirely occupied by the studio compound he shares with his wife, Ann Tower, and their daughter, Lina. Three attractively-designed clapboard buildings (two separate studio spaces and a wood shop) are arranged around a gravel courtyard, where a fountain trickles into a pool teeming with mottled fish. From the sidewalk, you’d never know it was there.

Tharsing is calm and soft-spoken. His workspace, lit by three well-placed skylights, is cluttered with supplies and art books. A thin tendril of smoke rises from a cigar balanced on the edge of a table. Dexter, the dog, is lolling in the sunshine not far from a small portrait of himself. “We’ve had this space for about 8 years,” Tharsing tells me. “I visualized my studio as a compound like this, but when I was getting close to retirement [he worked at the University of Kentucky for 31 years], we had to decide whether to move or stay in Kentucky. Ann wanted to leave, but I said, if we stay, I can turn the backyard into Shangri-La, and she gave in.”

Canvases are everywhere—his own work and his daughter’s—and an overhead loft is crammed with more. Tharsing keeps a rigorous schedule, usually coming into the studio at 9 o’clock each day to paint in 5 hour stretches, pausing to rest in between. Diagnosed with cancer several years ago, his sickness may have decreased his stamina, but it hasn’t affected his enthusiasm, or his determination to produce art. For his current show, now on display at the Ann Tower Gallery, he made about 20 large paintings and about twice as many smaller works, and he is often working on several canvases at once.

His newest pieces are dominated by the theme of riotously colorful tree leaves. “Kentucky definitely informs my work,” he says, “It shows up literally in landscapes, of course, but also in more subtle ways. I looked down one day and realized just how many different kinds of leaves there are here. There must be a hundred species of trees just in my neighborhood—magnolia, gingko, maple. The diversity is really astounding, and that shows up in the paintings.”

Tharsing’s recent body of work is characterized by sylvan imagery, of course, but also a rich layering of colors and textures. He’s created naturalistic landscapes and vibrant abstractions in the backgrounds of these pieces, which peek out from behind the tapestries of brilliant leaves he’s painted over top. The results are canvases that pulsate with shifting, multifaceted energy. Some of the paintings are constructed over geometric grids, recalling his earlier abstract work; others retain only a vague grid structure, embellished with snippets of shadowy backdrop to form dazzling, quilt-like pictures. On the whole, they showcase a range of styles—a testament to Tharsing’s impressive productive energy—and owe a debt to the organic diversity of the Bluegrass State.

It’s not just Kentucky’s natural beauty that inspires him. “What I like most about living here,” he says, “is the people…the deeply rooted relationships people build. You don’t get that in most other parts of the country. That’s part of why it’s so nice to have the wood shop in the compound, we can offer it for friends to use…as a community type of thing.”

However, Tharsing also values his privacy. He and his family keep a home on an island in Nova Scotia (which he built himself), where he spends about 4 months out of the year. “You have to take a boat to get to the house, so if I don’t want you there, you’re not coming,” he chuckles. “It’s a totally different natural beauty from Kentucky, but it shows up a lot in my work too.”

Reminders of Nova Scotia are indeed everywhere: the house is full of furniture and sculptures Tharsing crafts from driftwood he finds on the beach there, vacation photos cover the refrigerator, and an unfinished canvas on the wall of his studio depicts his wife and daughter at a table, the Nova Scotia coastline curving behind them.

Maybe it’s just the perfect spring weather, but I don’t really want to leave the compound when the interview’s over. Tharsing really has created an isolated “Shangri-La” in his backyard. God knows Dexter is one lucky dog.

Studio Visit with Robert Morgan

Studio Visit with Robert Morgan
by Chase Martin

When I met Bob Morgan for the first time, he was spraying red liquid rubber onto the back of a doll’s head, where he’d also affixed what appeared to be bull horns. “I don’t normally use red for blood, so I can generally get away with the really diabolical stuff,” he chortled happily, giving the spray can one last blast. I laughed too, mostly because I didn’t know how else to react to a piece of art that looks like a deity for the kind of religion that practices human sacrifice. What sort of mad genius was I talking to?

Morgan is lively, quick to laugh, and was eager to show me more of the work he’s prepared for his upcoming show at Institute 193. Many of his pieces consist of found objects he’s collected, which he then cobbles together with wire or nails and sprays with garish, sparkling colors. The results are eerie, witty, and rich in religious symbolism.

He says that he’s always felt the impulse to accumulate and assemble, and has been saving items since he was a child. “I went to a parochial school, where we won little statues of saints for contests and spelling bees. Even then, I used to arrange my little figures with the shells I’d collected in my room. That’s always been my aesthetic, and some of what I’m doing now is similar to what I was doing when I was very young.” As if to illustrate his point, he gestures to another piece: a statue of the Buddha, a horse, and a multitude of small Catholic saint figurines all lashed together with electrical wire.

The rest of his studio is crammed with tinsel, pieces of tires, industrial scraps, and all manner of other odds and ends. “This is only scratching the surface,” Morgan laughs. “I’m very disorderly–I’ve also got a studio downtown and a storage unit full of this stuff. I’m 61 years old, so I’ve gathered a lot over the years.”

He’s not kidding. Walking into his house is like walking into the belly of the beast; every inch is covered with the things that inspire him. A lacquered ape skull made of cigarette butts rests on a table (“I bought that for just $40!” he exclaims), a collection of Haitian voodoo flags lies in a pile on a chair, and little skeleton bats hang from the ceiling of the graffitied bedroom. A desk in his study is cluttered with framed photos of young drug addicts, some in the act of shooting up, along with several intricate bags constructed from cigarette packages and sent to him by friends in prison.

From the house’s nondescript exterior, you’d never guess there was an entire mythology inside. Along one wall of the living room–impossible to miss–is a huge altar decorated with religious paraphernalia and covered with photos, notes, and ephemera. These are the remnants left behind by hundreds of friends wiped out by the AIDS epidemic in the early 1980s. “When people died, their families threw things away, they didn’t want anything to do with photo albums from their [the deceased’s] party years…their boyfriends. They would just throw it all in the gutter,” Morgan says. “I started stealing things out of houses. When I got sober, I started making art again, and I mingled all of their stories with the mythology of Hindu gods, Egyptian gods, Mayan religion, Byzantine icons…I wanted to turn all the drug addicts and people who died in the gutter with AIDS into the saints and martyrs of this incredible church that’s a lot more wonderful and true than all the other shit out there.”

The result is a work of thrilling complexity, raw sexuality, and shabby beauty played out on a massive scale. His altar is the center of the powerful mythology Morgan has created to apotheosize all of the people whose memory he promised to preserve even when society was turning its back on them. These are people he knew and loves and misses, and they are the impetus behind his art. Morgan’s work can be disconcerting, but once you understand the central place the AIDS tragedy holds for him, things make more sense. He’s employed the religious imagery of an array of cultures to create vital, challenging art, and to salvage some beauty from a decimating catastrophe someone of my generation can barely understand. Lexington is lucky to have him.

- Chase Martin