Meat Craig Larotonda
Craig Larotonda
It was late. Inside my loft studio surrounded by images of various circus freaks, a pair of war machines, blue organ meat, canvases and simian bones. I was delirious from the deprivation of sleep, jittery all over as if my blood was replaced with surging electricity. I put on my painting gear and dipped my brush into the viscous black paint when the doorbell rang. It was another artist; Banks from down the hall. He looked away as I opened the door wider. I guess he saw my painting of The Lovers just behind me on the wall. "I just wanted to say, I’m glad ya’ll moved in here." Noticing the painting in its entirety he said, "Well, I see you’re working…oh gosh look at that…I can see you’ve got the technical skill there but I gotta go now. I’m gunna go exercise my flimsy wrists. I’m milquetoast man, milquetoast. All right baby! See ya’ll." Banks was a chicken. What was the big deal, I thought. After all it was a surreal portrait of Adam and Eve shortly after their expulsion from paradise and they were missing their arms. I’m not exactly sure, I think I told him it was a portrait of me and my wife Kim.
The Lovers is one of the new paintings I’ve just finished for a solo show in LA at La Luz de Jesus Gallery. The show is titled "Tyranny of the Flesh." In this body of work, humanity is bound to earth and the body is ever seeking to quench the burning passions of the flesh. It’s about the struggle of the flesh and the dominance of carnal desire over the spirit. So there is a lot of meat and body parts in the new work. I love the image of meat in artwork. I know this idea is strange since I’m a vegetarian, but it’s been a theme now for a while and I know I will keep making more paintings that have meat in them. The image of flesh is striking to me. It provokes thoughts of consumption, violence, carnage, desire and compassion.
Most of the work from this show was made in New York. I’ve come almost full circle in a way since I’m from Buffalo. I was born on the East Coast and grow up there until 1997, when it became clear I had to move. It made sense to relocate from western New York to San Francisco to be able to function as a working artist. I soon opened a studio and gallery there and put together exhibitions. I grew to love the easy lifestyle the West Coast offered. California has its perks, I soon discovered. A mild climate all year round, the ocean, art culture and the redwood forest all made living there appealing. However, in the late 90s San Francisco’s image of brotherly love was being replaced by a more enterprising arrangement of high tech commerce.
The city’s dense population of neo-riche dot-comers, travelers and artists offered a lucrative art market. By 2001, after the dot-com bomb fell, the once copious art community dwindled. Around this time we thought that it was a good idea to head to New York or LA. We eventually chose New York.
With the dogs in the back seat, my wife and I drove across country in September 2005 from San Francisco where we lived for eight years to Brooklyn. I realized there was a world of difference between the two cities and nearly 3000 miles between. Kim and I share a studio in our new loft just east of Williamsburg in Bushwick, Brooklyn. It’s a gritty place with chicken and trash littering the streets. We’ve got a lot of space with access to the roof. Up there I can see the city skyline and a plentitude of planes flying all over. This old building is a virtual artist’s community, in a renovated knitting factory coined "The Country Club" with at least five artists, three musicians, a screen writer and a film maker. It’s a pretty interesting place.
Another theme in the show is human-machine symbiosis incorporating machine mind tools. In The Burden the male figure’s face is covered with a distinct series of black marks representing an illness. Even though he’s lucky enough to have a cyber mechanical lens, the intelligence augmentation apparatus mounted to his head, he is sick with the weight of collective (mass) karma. He’s looking to the past, unable to perceive a peaceful future. I keep thinking mankind ignores past mistakes and ridiculously repeats history, especially wars, a perpetual path of selective forgetfulness and violence. I have been making these machine people for a while now and I am going to make a few more paintings that communicate this idea. They’re humans transformed by the development of technology. They employ futuristic elements like a machine helmets, scopes to see the future as well as flying devices.
There is an undeniable energy inside me. It’s this motivation to create visual art. I love making both paintings and sculptures. The materials are varied but the substance is the same. Texture, color and shape are the elements of my construction. I find beauty in found objects as well. They have a hidden history, they show signs of some other life before they’re found by me. I put them in my work often. Bits of old paper documents or diagrams find their way into my paintings. They’re subtle elements and can really only be seen up close.
It is a mysterious thing to create something out of nothing. The process is a ritual. I will often think for days, even months, about an idea that I want to paint. The first thing I do is to create the environment by setting the lights and loading my stereo with painting music. (I have been listening to My Morning Jacket and The Brian Jonestown Massacre a lot while making this body of work.) Music sets the tone. Once the stage is set I can go for many hours at a time. It’s sometimes an effortless journey from the beginning idea to actually finishing the piece and other times I will struggle for days to work out a small detail. It did take a ton of concentration to produce this new work. I think partly because I was working on a lot of small details, and partly because I was still organizing the studio after the move.
I look at art all the time to get a visual hit. I like an image to give me a real kick in the eyeballs. Like when I hear the first few notes of some awesome song that’s what it’s like with the visual medium too. I want to be immediately captivated by it. The simpler the composition can be the better. As Einstein said: "Everything should be made as simple as possible, but not simpler."
I feel so fortunate that I can do what I really love to do. Paint is my favorite medium because of the versatility of effects that can be achieved with it. It can look like a pile of mud or a silky membrane. I work in oil or acrylic depending on the project. This show is almost all acrylic on wood. There are a few on canvas too. Constructing a painting is the thing I enjoy most. To complete the process from start to finish is extremely rewarding. It’s an amazing thing when the painting turns out well. By that I mean, it feels right to me. I will work on something until I feel it’s just right. How do I know? I just do. It’s about several different things coming together in a particular way. The composition, subject and color are the most important things for me. There’s a point where I perceive the painting is done and I don’t add anything else.
I was nervous about the birds starting to chirp already outside my window, so I finally went to bed. I had to rest my flesh before finishing, packing and shipping 21 paintings to LA for the opening. The Jet Blue flight I had taken landed at the Long Beach airport in southern California. The nail-biting drive from Long Beach to Hollywood put me on edge.
The gallery La Luz de Jesus is run by its owner Billy Shire. He recently opened his second gallery in Culver City in 2005. It’s a one of a kind place. I get vertigo looking at the merchandise he’s amassed in this 3000 sq. foot space that houses an impressive collection of art, pop culture and cult classic art books, as well as a whole bunch of weird toys and posters. I’ve been showing there for years and this is my first solo show at La Luz. I have had the opportunity to show my work there with some of the best art I have seen by living artists.
There is a tremendous pop surrealism scene happening in LA now. Artists like Chris Mars, Mark Ryden, Alex Gross, Todd Schorr, Marian Peck and others have pushed this edgy style to new heights. The West Coast sensibility in this school of art is smooth, defined, colorful if not exaggerated figurative paintings that range from quirky to foreboding.
It was a longtime coming and this was a seminal moment. The gallery was filling up with a well-groomed crowd of movers and shakers. I took a sip of my beer and I wondered when I would once again return to the West. I was nostalgic for the West Coast where international jet-setters, actors and film directors were buying art like it was candy.
