Gordon Massman on painting without restraint
Gordon Massman
Gordon Massman is a painter and poet based in Rockport, Massachusetts, known for his unfiltered, emotional approach to art.
Working with thick oil paint on massive canvases, he paints from instinct—yelling, cursing, and sometimes throwing brushes in the process. His works are raw and physically large, capturing big feelings and ideas like fear, futility, power, and death.
A former literature professor, Massman has published five books of poetry and spent decades exploring the human condition through both words and paint. Today, he brings that same intensity to the canvas (and, it seems, to interviews!), translating emotion into color and motion…
FAULT: When you start with a new canvas, what’s usually going through your mind?
Gordon Massman: How does one describe a Category 5 hurricane’s deluge of rain shards, shredded tree branches, spears of straw, face-slaps of roof shingles, children’s flattening toys, pieces of cars, road signs, store awnings, blunderbusses of gravel, stunned lizards, frogs, snakes, and horned toads at the instant they smash into one’s house? As I stand before 144 square feet of blank cloth, this and more rips through my head. random, uncensored, indefensible filmic images zing through my head: childhood experiences; boyhood obsessions; teenage awakenings; college freneticism, adulthood’s marathon of office’s, conquests, traumas, marriages, flashing disconnected images, the entire electrically sparking live wire of experienced life. No guiding white-knight thought rescues me from this siren of chaos. Indeed, I try to focus my attention at this formative moment on my dominant feeling. What emotion sits in my gut: political outrage, libidinal fantasies, hopelessness, desperation, soaring confidence, crippling empathy?
Once understood, I focus upon this prominent feeling, dip my brush in its appropriate color, and with the most sympathetic energy apply the first stroke. My most complex symbolic visual stories arise from this. I build my artwork on feeling rather than thought. I find feeling more arousing, richer, and urgent than reflective thought. I want all my works to hit people in the solar plexus where no math, reason, or logic exists.
What role does physical movement play in your process?
My brain employs its Victorinox Swiss Champ XXL multitool body spontaneously. Corkscrew. Tweezers. Sawblade. Hook. My blades swing like arms. My legs cut like saws. I flash. I dance. A silver blur like kung-fu. I whir even when perfectly still, a brain whir. I rise from chair, yank a ladder into place, climb, paint twelve feet high, dismount ladder, kick it aside, back up, study the whole, rise from chair, yank ladder into place, climb, paint, dismount, back up, throw chair, kick ladder over, shout expletives –” “fuck, shit, damn, hell” – take a sip, upright ladder, climb, paint, etcetera etcetera…
Mind prays for a functional body. My body obeys. Without its blades of utility the mind would wreck itself clawing to get out, and no paintings would exist. Motility makes art. I love kinesis. What part do lungs play in a marathon runner, or fists to a rodeo bull rider? I spider across my giant canvases like Cocteau‘s Blood of the Poet. Like a wrestler’s body blow I paint with torso, toes, shoulders, thighs. My stout wrists deplore meticulousness. They want to throw hard, fast, urgently or slow. Mine are appendages to whip to a frenzied shred. Psyche fused to body is everything.
How has your background as a poet shaped the way you paint?
Like Alice entering Wonderland dragging a piano full of paint, I enter my poems. They dissolve into color forms. The word love morphs into a black lipstick streak. The word peach shifts into a crimson slash. My subject lies unchanged: what lies at the base of amygdala? Insecurity? Fear? Hubris? Cassiopeiae’s multiple blazing suns? Envy and bitterness. Anything and everything repressed, shamed, invisible, malignant.
For me no meaningful difference exists between words and paint. Before I versed paintings; now I paint verses. I’m after “the soul”, whatever the hell that means. Our longings, urges, fantasies, desires. Extracting these equals a bloody birth regardless the genre. I fail at this. Fifty years of psychotherapy hasn’t worked. Goya did it. Soutine did it. Pollock did it. Bacon, too. I create at best arresting messes. See for yourself. I have stripped my psyche bare, down to the nerve-threads, the filament, but create not a pulsing life, but rather dead paint on dead duck. I am neither painter nor poet, but rather the heart’s undertaker. I loved my poetic attempts, and I love my paintbrush crutches. Neither has shaped either. They’re one in the same quest. Perhaps one day I shall create a living baby.
What first pulled you toward painting, and what keeps you there?
The moment my maternal grandmother showed teen me her yardman’s self-published volume of poems, I knew my life path. Reverently, I held it, a slender girl, a jewel, a slim-jim frog blinking in my pretty hands. For forty-five years I wrote poetry like a struck kitchen match. I published much, then burned myself up. Suddenly, in my hands, I fondled my grandmother’s poetry book in the form of a brush. The same magic that glittered my path glitters it still. In her seventies this grandmother committed suicide in the complex pool. But I have not. What keeps me there? My parents wanted me to be invisible. I create to cry to the world, “I exist, God dammit!” “I am here!” “See this mighty man, whom my parents shrunk to a speck of dust!” I suspect this will never cease, even after death. It is a pulsing thing passed from life to life eternally.
You’ve said you paint in fear of worthlessness and death. How does fear fuel your creativity?
What are people but condemned biology? Locusts, crickets, houseflies with a penny’s worth of minerals. They feed us into wars. They jam us into trains. They kill us on the streets. They enslave us with jobs. With indifference, the living walk over the decomposed dead. Dust shoes kick up. Whoever doesn’t feel worthless, and fear death, can never love. Does white exist without black? Fears enlivens us. They make us lie about ourselves. They bestow heartful lust. They drive us to heights and lows.
I paint because I fear the inevitable crush. I paint love and joy and sex like a bonfire’s sparks. Fear freezes everyone’s bowels. Some build empires. Some become rich. Some kiss themselves. Some drive Formula 1. Some embrace conquest of the flesh. And some write poems or paint or act in plays or on-stage bellow song. I am 76 and whom the young will walk upon. Perhaps I will still speak to them at some critical point in life as they walk.
Why is it important to bring difficult feelings into the light?
Repressed difficult feelings destroy marriages, friendships, parent-child relationships. Unexpressed they murder their host. They blind with rage and burn with ulcers. They cut life short and maximize life’s grief. They make practitioners defend the indefensible. They cram life into a box. They’re psyche’s free radicals. Bringing these into light pours milk over wounds. Vengeance saith the Lord, that old arthritic old cat. But Freud birthed a second God, the road to Delphi’s Temple built on Mount Know Thyself. I disgust myself, said I to my wife. Let me heal thy wound, said wife back to me. And she rocked me in her arms. I’m terrified, again I spoke. She breathed warmth into my heart. And we were two merged as one.
You’ve called the artist’s psyche “the last frontier.” What have you learned by exploring yours?
That I am a wonderful man.
Looking back, what moment or experience first made you feel like an artist
I’m 24 years old, head full of hair, drunk with verse, married, father of a one-year-old, black Afghan Hound, rented house, stay-at-home wife, Austin, Texas. I’m standing in the boss’s office, purple knit tie, tweed sport jacket, Cole Haan lace-ups. I need the job, the money, the respect, the legitimacy. I have no savings. With burning cheeks this I speak, “I am a poet, I have no time for this. I resign from my post.” I give two weeks’ notice. I sacrifice stability, solvency, marriage, respect; damn well everything for a blood clot in my heart, for a knuckled-up dream of wingless flight. I gave up everything for impractical passion. While I lost much, I gained my pride.
What are you most proud of creating so far?
We hold money in our hands, but we have no money. We couple with a lover, but no lover exists. We stand solidly on the floor, but no house envelops. I paint my masterpiece which three years later, I obliterate. Pride fills my lungs, but my lungs hold none. I love what I’ve just created but see nothing but air. Over the years I’ve recalibrated myself. Now in joyful mid-flip, my lips sternly shut…
Look, certain pieces of mine fill me with pride: a political sculpture titled ‘The Devil’s Toolkit’ in which instruments of destruction fly out Donald Trump’s eyeless head, or ‘Bluebird Drowning’ which renders a fragile life in the form of a bluebird being sucked into a vortex of chaos, violence, and cruelty, or ‘The Wall They Clawed’ which is a rendition of a photograph of the gas chamber wall taken during the liberation of the Auschwitz Concentration Camp. I am most proud when I successfully dramatize the clash of opposites and when I’ve most abandoned myself to sheer emotional impulsivity. Yet, I now realize that pride of creation generally disintegrates into dust.
How do you spend your time when you’re not painting or writing?
I’m a 1950s sitcom husband: Harriet’s Ozzie, June’s Ward, Margie’s Vernon. I walk through back door, toss satchel onto couch, embrace wife, engage dog, smoke weed, cook dinner, watch news, check Instagram, watch movie, sometimes fuck, spoon and sleep. I’m routinized, dull, melancholic, predictable, dark, and heavy. A bear in a chair. Faces are inscrutable curtains behind which lurks the most terrifying glutton, rapist, adventurer, murderer, and megalomaniac.
Gordon Massman, what is your FAULT?
My reliance and compulsion for external approval.