Jungle 2 Jungle

When I was young, I grew up in retail shops. My parents sold gifts and custom framing, and my grandfather sold antiques. I didn’t fully understand the cultural role of such businesses as a child. I didn’t understand the way conspicuous consumption belied income inequality in the south. To me my parents weren’t petit bourgeouisie, they were sincere and caring people serving in the community. When I was a teenager, my grandfather passed away and the business eventually passed on to me. I began to realize that the sense of community was a thin veneer, it was like the overpriced Chinese polyresin figurines that were sold as patriotic collectibles.

The retail environment I grew up in was a product of the Reagan Administration’s culture war. The same company which manufactured Nativity scenes of Jesus made collectible statuettes of police officers and soldiers with American flags and tiny polyresin service revolvers and M14s. That was the environment that made fortunes for regionalist artists like Jim Harrison and Bob Timberlake. I remember reading Jim Harrison’s account of how he drove his paintings to a show in NY and went home empty handed. I suspect his work was better than whatever modernists were being patronized by the young Donald Trump for his real estate investments.

Harrison and Timberlake painted saccharine kitsch images of a nostalgic old south that never existed in reality. I see them as having been a lot like my parents, perpetuating a corrupt system but with good intentions. I see no signs that Harrison or Timberlake relished in their fame or fortune. They seemed to live quiet and relatively humble lives, continuing to engage with their collectors directly. Granted, their collectors tended to be from a very homogenous and comfortable demographic, but still. They seem to have had conviction about the lives they depicted in their work. If they didn’t, I feel certain that they’d have gone completely insane.

For me, I tried to follow in their footsteps in some sense. Not because I like regionalism, and certainly not because I like Southern culture; I very much don’t. I chose to paint regionalism because I thought that’s what the market would accommodate. There remain strong regionalist markets in conservative cities like Greenville, Charleston, Wilmington, and Blowing Rock. But, most of America has moved on. There are no small family farmers anymore, aside from those who choose to adapt the aesthetic after retiring from the tech industry. In fact, there are very few small businesses of any kind left in the wake of the corporate takeover of this country.

The little country stores that Harrison painted are all gone. I remember going to a country store as a child that was owned by a distant relative. It was a tiny building, the size of a garage, and he burned coal in a cast iron stove in the winter. I doubt he had much business by that time, and I remember visiting with my uncle who would chat with him for an hour or so. The man passed away when I was young and I remember when a drunk driver crashed a pickup truck into the building around 2002. There are still a few old stores like that sitting empty along the roadsides, but the owners are all gone.

Racism and sexism are also evident in regionalist painting, or rather those things are part of the culture that regionalism represents. It’s the same unspoken force behind the socioeconomic disparity in plein air painting. Regionalist painters depict quaint country stores, historical architecture, or tranquil landscapes, not public housing or mobile home parks. There are a few novelty painters who depict gas stations, supermarkets, and commercial buildings, but that seems almost like a different genre. I even painted Walmart interiors a few times years ago.

I think the glaring issue is that regionalism isn’t only dead as a genre but as a concept. The boomer generation still had a sense of community and shared nostalgia for regional experiences. They had “third spaces”, soda shops, and even churches served as community centers. Millenials and Gen Z have no such nostalgia. My generation grew up with shopping malls which were already failing decades ago. Our shared experiences are video games and TV shows. Instead of tranquil landscapes, we have microplastics and global warming.

So, why did I try to be a regionalist painter? Mostly out of convention. When I was a teenager, I went to football games, not because I cared for the sport, I found it utterly absurd, but it was the conventional thing to do. I went to church for the same reason. I painted what I saw others painting and, more importantly, what I saw others buying. Then I was told by more sophisticated artists from New York and abroad that I shouldn’t paint kitsch. So I tried to learn about neo-expressionism, to keep up with the new conventions. Iggy Pop had an album called “New Values” that conveys the feeling well.

The end of all of this seems to be Nihilism or at least absurdity. That seems to be where Rothko took it. Of course, I’m not Rothko, and my reactions may as well be soliloquies for how little notice they garner. I try to rally my anger into meaningful work, but age and complacency conspire against me. To produce the sort of imagery I would like would take days of preparation and days more of work. Not mindless work such as can be done while listening to podcasts about conceptual art, but intently focused concentration. Time is money, and I’ve little to spare.

So, for now I continue to keep art on the back burner in favor of marketable kitsch. I’ve exhausted my capacity for regionalism; largely due to having run out of publicly licensed imagery of Charleston. I drove around taking reference photos locally last week. The drought has left all the creeks stagnant, the grass was beginning to die, and the few cultivated fields remaining are planted in soybeans. I spend as much time sourcing imagery as painting. Lately I’ve been trying to produce images of Paris and New York. I’ve never been, but I’ve not been to Charleston in twenty years, so it’s mostly the same. One of my favorite painters is Rousseau, and he never went to India, he painted from books of illustrations and trips to museums.

I paint plein air and often cityscapes when in fact I have been agoraphobic all my life. I have never felt comfortable in crowds, and I write about the loss of community because I truly never felt any sense of community at all. So, for me, I feel much like Rousseau. He painted jungles having never experienced them, and I paint human jungles in the same way. I tried for most of my life to appear conventional, and when I became an “artist” it presented an opportunity to defy convention. But the truth is, that defiance is strictly bounded and mostly performative. Artists have to act kooky but not actually be too outré. Those who genuinely break from convention, are only lauded once they’re safely deceased.

For me, I plan to paint kitsch as long as the market holds. I continue to develop more serious concepts when time permits, but painting for the market allows me to practice technique. In some ways the limitations are constructive. I am learning to use more expressive markmaking within the confines of representational painting verging at times on academic realism. Rousseau started at 40, so I may still have some time left for practice.