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DAN ATTOE: Paintings and Tents
June 14 through July 5, 2003Scott interviews Dan via email
Dan, when I look at your paintings I get lost in your paint handling. Then, I'm drawn to your imagery and, especially, the hilarious and painful passages of text. What is your painting process? Do you come up with the imagery and then the text?
I have frequent hallucinations. Luckily, they're usually related to the places I've lived, and I've lived in some beautiful places. They're also usually injected with other information I've picked up from friends, music, books or television. If I don't have a satisfactory hallucination by the time I sit down to paint then I just start pushing the paint around. No one thing precedes the other as a rule: sometimes it's one, sometimes the other. You know.
The Rest Stop
Bugs
GodExplain the differences between your small daily paintings and the larger pastiches. The smaller ones invariably depict a single scene or image. The larger paintings are accumulations of what could easily be a bunch of smaller paintings, yet there is a greater pictorial concern than just a jumble of images and texts.
I make myself paint a single image and add to the larger ones every day, and by virtue of the practice the images inform each other. The larger ones are kind of like games, because I'm often responding to something else on the canvas when I add something. A little like strategizing with yourself, or mapping ideas. They interact with different levels of relationships in the imagery while the space in the dailies is self-contained.
You alternate between sophisticated passages of paint and willfully clumsy globs of pigment. What motivates your use of various techniques? When I first fell in love with your work 6 years ago, the paint handling was much clumsier. I'd chalk your current mastery up to practice-makes-perfect, but weren't you a traditional figure painter devoted to craft and glazing when you were an undergraduate? I'm thinking that you make a conscious decision about when to wow the viewer with sumptuous paint passages and when to funk it up.
It's all about communication. I like playing with levels of information in my paintings. One example is the globs of paint that are more visceral or sculptural in nature, these are about the paint becoming something in our space that has properties like a flower has properties - the way the paint lays one color onto another, the pattern the brush makes, etc. The other example you use is about creating a fiction, inviting a viewer in for a visit, using a visual vocabulary rooted in painting and image making culture. In undergraduate I did my time with figurative painting and am now finding more dimensions in that realm than I ever did then, after taking off in a different direction for a while. I was trying to find things that really held my interest instead of things that I thought held my interest.
Cumulonimbus
oil on mdf board, 4"x6" 2003I see your work as self-portraits: young man communing with nature; young man releasing self from shackles of societal expectations; your punk rock past; your fascination with insects. What else are you revealing about yourself and/or society? How do the tents fit into this framework? A savvy viewer can make the leap from nature scenes to camping to the tents. I'm interested that you construct them by hand and that you present them fairly straightforwardly, with little or no deviation from the essential tent form.
I've come to the conclusion that drawing from my own story reveals the most nuances - I learn something about myself, and the audience is able to identify with these insights in a way that transcends biography. I see my work as similar to writing a short story, because I research things for it and think about character and believability and things like that, but ultimately end up making something that is about me. Sometimes I do it more directly than others. I feel that these paintings are packed with information like little insects indicating sociological, psychological, anthropological, historical, and philosophical things through a representative specimen (me). I don't want that information to be too didactic though. I want it to function a little like a Rorschach test, I want people to glean the information, but have their own experience with it. Did you know Herman Rorschach did his doctoral thesis on hallucinations?
Yeah, my tents are both functional and sculptural. I see them as the most logical three-dimensional experience of what I'm doing with paint. They compose the outside world with oddly placed windows, they are embroidered with things I've found to be revelatory or meditative in some form and they diffuse the outside light into an all over hazy glow, creating a visceral experience. There is also the thematic relationship to my paintings, which frequently are about pretending to be in the forest.
Welcome to the Darkside
rip-stop nylon, tent poles, embroidery, 8'x3'x3' (approx) 2003
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