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.
But here’s the miracle, the unexpected metamorphosis: I give life to the thing I kill. The more I assault, the fresher it grows until at last it bawls its being into the world. I FINALLY AM AND AM DANG-ER-OUS! LOOK OUT WORLD!!! By eating prey, to my very victim I bestow life, a bizarre consequence.
Every one of my paintings breaks the sack, leaving messes everywhere—mountains of tubes, buckets of brushes, bloody rags, empty wrappers, bones of wood, empty shoes, paint-stiff, urine-stained discarded pants, thermal cups, all upon a slimy liquid floor.
I leave the studio at five o’clock with my back fur smoking. At home, I hit a joint and, satiated, lounge about. And it was good.
You speak to the painting, insult it, even throw brushes at it. What is the function of this aggressive dialogue with the work as it's being created?
I throw at it my favorite curses: “fuck you”, “go fuck yourself”, “go to hell”, speaking not to the innocent thing upon the wall but to the entire guilty world. Underlying these execrations, I am shouting to schools of art, critics, professors, the strictures and boundaries artists have been cautioned not to cross.
I also shout into the room: “Idiot”, “Nutcase”, “Piece of shit”, referring exclusively to myself. I self-abuse. I never curse the innocent, the baby, the fragile angel: the canvas itself. My painting is tender and sacrosanct. It’s the wrathful adults, including myself, whom I curse, red-faced, venous, sometimes trembling.
Religion, politics, ancient mythology, and even contemporary superheroes emerge in your paintings. How do these very different worlds intertwine in your artistic imagination?
I’m a frappe, my brain a billion thoughts and images blended into smooth consistency. I swallow nicely.
Ingredients range from a concentration camp, a woman’s foot, a starving kid, my sister’s hypochondria, my parents’ tongues, a chameleon lizard pasted upon a red brick wall cannonballed by a BB gun, hurricanes and pregnant surf, a dirty thumb, a severed beet, the whole bloody carousel of life upon this grizzled earth.
They whir into themselves: priests, Superman, Medusa’s head, everything I’ve seen or heard or think I know. How such tasty, fattening things influence my art, I cannot say.
A mythological or religious figure that inspires you the most?
Icarus for his damned rebellion, and Odysseus for his faithful quest.
Your subjects are often "psychologically disturbed", but always accompanied by a sense of irony and subtle humor. What is the role of laughter (bitter or sarcastic) in your art?
Think of a Maersk megaship gliding by a doomed, unseen man marooned on a wooden box in the dead center of the Atlantic Ocean. At such pitiless irony, he bursts out laughing. At some point after a disaster, some people get the joke.
I get the joke. I often inhale after some personal horror helium air and squeak into the universe my bitter, sarcastic laughter. Humor makes failure tolerable. So horrible are the guts I often smear on canvas, I sometimes become a sniggering jackal.
But I must ameliorate. I paint light subjects, too. And counterintuitively, they often make me cry.
Your canvases are monumental in scale, almost "unsuitable" for conventional spaces. Is this an aesthetic choice or an act of rebellion against the concept of art as a living room object?
Manic Depression OCD, lovelessness, and hatred, slicing through my childhood house, stuffed me into a tiny box. It was scary, suffocating, soul-annihilating. These big canvases cry, “I will no longer be confined,” and become the sails of my escape and the skies under which I fly.
You will be participating in the “GRIT” exhibition with Alday Hunken Gallery in Atlanta in October. What does this opportunity mean to you, and what new things will we find in the works on display?
Onto plywood planks and blocks of wood, I screwed, ripping, cutting, drilling, slicing, gouging, pressuring, smashing antique woodworking and farming implements along with chains, wire, sprockets, and nails, painted them black, and swirled them about Donald Trump’s diabolical head to symbolize his sadistic brain. I removed a screw from its hole to make his eye. An A-Frame scaffold painted blue on six steel wheels shoulders this into place.
Under no delusions of affecting political or social change, my personal catharsis created this piece. When has art ever stanched the flow of authoritarianism or won back freedoms lost? Not Picasso’s Guernica or Basquiat’s skulls or Ono’s bed-ins or Haring’s cartoons or even Francisco Goya’s Third of May have stopped the slaughter of ethnic cleansing, war, starvation, and iron-fisted dictatorialism. Art is reactive, not propulsive.
This piece will galvanize some and repulse others. I care not which. It merely represents my abhorrence of current affairs and concretizes my boiling catharsis.
Looking ahead, do you think your research will continue to evolve, or will it remain anchored to this dimension of spontaneity and emotional urgency?
I am always becoming but never become-d. Humans freeze frames of themselves from the film of life, which unfailingly end with death, and call it “I”. Today I make big emotional abstract paintings, but tomorrow, should the gods decree, spot me easel painting ascending hot air balloons or stacks of lobster traps. Only evolution knows. Anchored in spontaneity and emotional urgency, in likelihood I will remain, but I glide through life with arms wide open.
Interview by Fabio Pariante, X • Instagram • Website