Notes from the Nemenator

dispatching from brooklyn. more mouths. bigger now, 12 inches by 16. two cars, three oceans. i’ll be picking the pacific.

Between stories and editing I’ve kept on painting, this week was a handful (mouthful?) of John Deere tractors.

These pictures stood the test of Nebraska: my mother, my publisher, and two of my publisher’s sisters are from the Cornhusker state, and when they saw the paintings at my reading/open house, the reaction was along the lines of “what is THAT doing THERE?” While tractors get dirty, they are far from lewd, but people see what they want. It’s a bit ludicrous that as soon as something goes in your mouth it becomes obscene, especially considering that these paintings are exploring visual representations of speech and what comes out of your mouth more than vulgarity. In any case, seeing people’s reactions to the mouths, both good and bad, has been great. In addition to a couple sales, the work landed me a ride on a real tractor.

i’ve been painting, pucker up. each is 6″square, watercolor on white paper.
apologies for the color, taking pictures of things stuck onto my fridge makes everything look gray.

A while back, I put my old Nokia in my mouth, in bits and pieces. I got around to painting them this month.

The Fascination:
Speech is a pretty powerful thing. I mean, aside from the pelvic thrust and other body language, speaking is the most basic form of self-expression, and is the mouth is also equipped to be the paramount form. That’s some range.
All through my oral history stuff, and listening in general, I find myself staring at the actual mouth, and watching what comes out of it. It’s better than eye contact to get me focused on the words.
And then there’s the morbid facsination. Ever since the golden days of speech therapy, I’ve been thinking about mouths, how they work, why they are good (speakerbox, and aesthetic pleasure. For instance, people always always say that, as a saxophonist, I have “nice lips”, let’s take that at face value for now and avoid the sexual connotation discussion until later…) and why they are bad (I have a slightly deformed tongue, hence the lisp, and we all worry about dental care, bad breath, etc).

The Development:
I write, I make art. For a long while, I was putting text on my visual art as a way to bring the two together. This works sometimes. But the mouths seem to hit the idea a little more on the head, it’s the visual manifestation of someone expressing themselves. And as the artist manipulating and controlling the subject matter (essentially posing the mouth), I am broadcasting a message without being didactic, leaving the ambiguity that I love about visual art. There’s no doubt my mouths are saying something, but it’s up to the viewer to decide what. I’ve been working around with this idea in my work for about a year.

Compositionally, I’m taking a lot of cues from the tradition of New Mexico lady artists. A trip to the southwest this spring got me thinking about Georgia O’Keefe’s uber sensual flowers and Agnes Martin minimalists grids. What could I do that would be a contemporary homage? I want to discuss the sexual connotations of the work and it’s accidental role in feminist art, but it’s getting late. Let’s just say that I didn’t have any intention of being a lady artist… I spent a long time drawing boys and boxers, doing really physical painting with wood and carving and pouring lots of paint. But then the boys got to looking sentimental, and I started putting boxing helmets on babies, and now I’ve got these little watercolors that make most people think of phone sex. I wonder what will happen next.