10 Questions with Gordon Massman

Gordon Massman began his creative life as a poet, during which time he published seven volumes, primarily for The New York Quarterly Press. In 2013, his selected poem, 0.174: The Complete Numbers Cycle, was nominated for The Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. As his voice became increasingly primal and graphic, he metamorphosed into painting his voice exclusively in oil onto large-scale canvases. Poetry demands anachronistic cerebral interference from readers, while painting, as primitive expression, possesses the potential for immediate nonverbal impact. Unlike poetry, no layers of frustration exist between a painting and its audience.

“There’s the tube of paint, the canvas, and the sum-total of your life. That’s all.”

Massman explores with color and forms the underlying defenses, delusions, compulsions, and redirections within the human psyche. He sheds at the studio door, like the clothing he wears, inhibitions, censorship, and conventional civility, and paints with an animal elementalism. Metaphorically, he paints with his internal organs. Massman privileges roughness over fastidiousness. He paints raw and sometimes blind. He cultured imperfection-the slash, the swipe, the mess, the murder. He refuses to paint pretty. He craves the impossible—to produce a naked baby through the violence of birth.

Therefore, look elsewhere for the perfection of line, premeditation of style, or verisimilitude of the subject. But if you are looking for raw emotional honesty, catharsis, and exorcism, then you have found one volcanic primary source in Massman.

@gmassman52

ARTIST STATEMENT

“I paint exclusively in oil large-scale works in a 4000 square foot studio/gallery built on piers over the Atlantic Ocean as it meets the Gloucester, MA, commercial harbor. I infuse each paint stroke with a deep obedience to primality uninhibited by any stricture associated with artistic tradition. I say, “There is the paint, the canvas, and the sum-total of your life. Period.” My work prefers no meaningful censorship; I paint as an elemental man whose emotions have no chains. I do not believe in failure because I have no direct antecedents by which to judge. Most assuredly, Jackson Pollock, Lee Krasner, and the original abstract expressionists affected me deeply, but I am not derivative of this masterful work. I am a unique psyche that I launch onto the canvas, unduplicable by any other, just as they were. Because I am faithful to my darkest being, I am original and unashamed.

My visual art springs from a four-decade-long devotion to poetry. Having published seven volumes, one collected poems that were nominated for the 2013 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. During those decades, over two hundred journal editors selected my work for publication, including Harvard Review, Chelsea, The Georgia Review, The Literary Review, The Antioch Review, Fiddlehead, and Malahat Review, to name a few. I transferred my raw emotion to the visual realm after realizing that I had reached my peak as a poet and after realizing that visual art can be much more immediately impactful than literature. Visual art does not need elite literacy or cerebral processing; it requires a more immediate, unfiltered catharsis.

I wish to carry forward through my art the courage displayed by Pollock, Krasner, Rothko, Gorky, de Kooning, Still, Mitchell, Kline, and Lewis into the next generation. These painters fill my heart when I paint.”

— Gordon Massman

INTERVIEW

First of all, introduce yourself to our readers. Who are you, and how did you develop into the artist you are today?

I have no idea who I am. I am a human animal full of mechanical locomotion, and burning consciousness loosed upon a quasi-hospitable planet whirling through infinity. No center exists nor certainty. Once, I fell in love with a visiting stranger, dived—crazed and fully clothed—head-first into a dormitory swimming pool, dashed home dripping wet, and wrote her a love poem. My first act of conventional creativity. The next morning, I, like a stalker, delivered the folded missive into her hand minutes before she left town and my life forever. Uncontainable emotion shoved me off the perceived delusion of invincibility into the ethereal abyss of creative life. I wrote vapid, fossilized, derivative verse until, at age 34, married with a baby boy, I psychologically cracked up. My life exploded. Since that fault line, I have devoted my entire life to interiors. Nature interests but motivation transfixes me. My master and deity are a single vortex named “Who, Why & What”. All my poems and all my paintings exist as one single continuous work dedicated to comprehending the incomprehensible.

How did your journey as a poet influence your transition to painting?

Like The Terminator’s M134 Minigun, I wrote increasingly probing and disturbing poetry exhaustively until only empty clicks remained. I ran out of word-bullets. I realized that at some feverish point in life, language fails. Instinctively, I loaded my primality with paint. As I wrote poetry—fearlessly and without inhibition—I now paint, damn the consequences. The size of my emotion requires massive canvases, acres of paint, and a wildness papered over by quotidian civilization. Whereas poetry demands cerebral sophistication from its clientele, painting can even shock nonreaders to tears.

You’ve described painting as a more immediate and primal form of expression compared to poetry. What drew you to this medium?

I have often fantasized about cleaving open my torso, spreading with fists my two fleshy walls, and slamming myself onto a blank canvas. I’d paint with viscera. Of course, this is a metaphor. But my project is to tear away, savagely perhaps, veil after veil until unearthing the scream’s universal scarlet protoplasm. Mundanely expressed, I am a lifelong analysand searching for the holy grail of brutal self-knowledge. From where does my rage originate? What cataclysm created my vulnerability? My fragility? Where lies my genesis of insatiability? Am I capable of love? Who wounded me? Who brutalized? Who nurtured? “Know thyself” warned Socrates, “for that is the beginning of wisdom.” Ruthlessness, bravery, foolishness, courage. My definition of insanity is the unwillingness to see.

Your work explores deep aspects of the human psyche. What inspires you to delve into these raw and emotional themes?

Honesty with self may be the ultimate beauty. Not rocking sailboats or apples situated in a mahogany bowl or iridescent pheasants meandering in a field. These may be luminous, but self-knowledge blinds with luminosity, like the sun. Some French postmodernists said, “A thorn in the eye is the best magnifying glass.” Yes! How worthless does technique become without the depth of emotional catharsis? Where can talent take the willfully ignorant? I am sacrificial. I example myself in art like a self-immolating monk. I believe that if I were to dig hard enough, I would strike powerful universal truths that are buried deeply in everyone. Lust. Ruthlessness. Survival. Soul. That is why I delve so deeply.

Can you describe your creative process when working with oil on large-scale canvases?

Painting, for me, is warfare waged upon myself. Long ago, I threw off conventional standards of art and, with that, any semblance of comfort or herd security. Because no school taught me to handle a brush, I am an exquisite brushman. Because no institution taught me color theory, I am a magician of color. Because no virtuoso taught me composition, I create magical compositions. One unconscious brushstroke engenders another, which spontaneously avalanches. I paint with shoulders, back, elbows, legs, ladders, and King Crimson arrowing through my brain. I eat adrenaline, and wild animals instinctively stalk and sup. Eyes, muscle, and hydrochloric acid. For me, painting is not a refinement of skill, the meticulousness of the wrist, or the occupancy of the chair. It is not intended to please or elicit candy lozenges expressed under such terms as “beautiful,” “lovely,” or “wonderful.” Life’s messy mulligatawny of coupling, animal butchery, Machiavellian survival, love fever, frustration, ecstasy, exuberance, and spasticity mudslide my best works. My worst spectacularly fail. I love gigantic canvases—call them sails—because they swallow whole erupting emotion. Let us lament the containment of the heart’s fire by the temperance league. I love in others precious painstaking verisimilitude, that unattainable perfection of pupil or vein, but I prefer to paint in a beheaded fashion the sloppiness of raw desire.

You prioritize imperfection and rawness in your art. How do these elements contribute to the emotional impact of your work?

“If you dig deep enough, you’ll find the gold,” my wise friend said. My interpretation: where lies the subterranean network of roots to which all humans are connected? At what invaluable depth does the translucent universal vase reassemble from its scattered human fragments? If one can capture that, one finds the gold! And wouldn’t that gold profoundly impact others with the fundamental recognition? Upon gazing at such a painting, they will exclaim, “Yes, that is I! That is who I am!”. Regardless of the futility of seeking such grandiosity, that is my struggle. And perforce such is an earth-gouging endeavor. I want my art to reflect the gouge and the underlying gold and to impact others accordingly.

What do you mean by painting with “animal elementalism” and “internal organs,” and how does this manifest in your art?

I have already addressed this question inadvertently. A polite, civilized society constructed, as it is, by powerful charismatics—Popes, Judges, Emperors, Presidents--infuriates me. Lamination of intellect suffocating visceral directives. I strive to liberate these virtually irrepressible subconscious forces through art. I use the term “internal organs” to describe my predilections inaccurately. I believe the human species to be another form of animal life on Earth, like the platypus or anteater. I believe natural law is God. Therefore, through art, I prioritize those animal instincts over arbitrary intellectual scaffolds. “Internal organs,” when stripped of metaphor, means powerful elemental urges. Rather than paint the dinner table, I paint the hunger. Rather than paint the water pitcher, I paint the thirst.

Your statement rejects prettiness and perfection. What do you hope viewers experience when they see your work?

To see, yes, but more fundamentally, to feel the subterranean magmatic river flowing within me, which, when I paint effectively, infuses every stroke. I want every stroke to smoke like, after the kill, Cocteau’s Beast’s hands. Nobody covets cruel isolation. We require connection to others no matter how shocking the blow we deliver to achieve it. We want to be acknowledged—the deeper we suffer crushing insignificance, the greater the need. I want viewers to experience me and, in so doing, experience themselves.

How has your work evolved since your poetry days, and how do you see it developing in the future?

Every living creature evolves unconsciously: over time, the river changes course, the baby becomes a woman, the volcano dies, and the species grows extinct. A line in the brow. There is a fungus on the toenail. Heartbreak devours happiness. Little things, big things. Your father dies. Suddenly, you smile. I do not finesse evolution. One cannot tease it out with treats. After my nervous breakdown—or, more accurately, after my second birth—my poetry evolved from insipid to profound. I got better at expressing myself, climbing out of inhibitions, nailing the cadence and metaphor, and exposing demons. The poems became dangerous, sharp, risky, and authentic. Some radiated heat.
I only hope for such an evolution in painting. Who knows. May it accumulate a more clarified power to move both self and others. May it shock even me. May it become pure fact. I’m always everywhere, teetering on the brink. I may torch my studio. I may hire lobstermen to deep-six my pitiful efforts. I may tumble backward into celebrity. I may evolve into unique virtuosity. Who knows, or cares. I cannot push against the fates. Whatever I become, I am.

Two Monsters and Their KDZ © Gordon Massman

And lastly, what are your plans for 2025? Do you have any upcoming projects or exhibitions you would like to share with our readers?

Do you know how to make God laugh? Tell him your plans. I have no upcoming anything but only the thin thread of hope. Gallery doors, save for those attached to impregnable fortresses, the so-called “blue chippers,” haven’t the walls or entrances high enough to accommodate my behemoths. Museums give you the bum’s rush. All are welcome to visit my four-thousand-square-foot gallery built over the Gloucester, MA, piece of the Atlantic.

Postscript

I have intoned here heady ambitions approaching God-envy. I have expressed unreachable ideals that only Faust could achieve. Like all mortals, I am limited. My studio is full of water, and I am drowning in the ceiling. I have fallen short in my work hundreds of times. I occasionally Phoenix upward, only to fall into my feet of clay. Simply stated, I do my best to honor the soul of the artist within.

Artist’s Talk

Al-Tiba9 Interviews is a promotional platform for artists to articulate their vision and engage them with our diverse readership through a published art dialogue. The artists are interviewed by Mohamed Benhadj, the founder & curator of Al-Tiba9, to highlight their artistic careers and introduce them to the international contemporary art scene across our vast network of museums, galleries, art professionals, art dealers, collectors, and art lovers across the globe.

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