Sitting in Julian Schnabel’s old crusty painting chair, I discussed art with Paul Manes in his Carbondale studio. Spacious and productively cluttered, the studio is active with supplies, works in progress and a delicious amount of debris. Turpentine vessels caked in substrate cling like lichen to rock, the groundwork for something new. There is a pulse animating the studio.
Manes’s work often repeats forms and gestures into worlds, looking and looking again at the same thing, so we began our discussion around drawing. The artist’s ethos reflects some old-school ideas regarding rigor as a fundamental aspect of drawing. In short, it’s a framework that believes revelations can be earned through attentive self-awareness. What’s exciting in these revelations is that they emerge—there is no precise plan when what you want is a surprise, which creates dynamic compositions.
In Manes’s words, “You back up, and then you start seeing it. After you get down the line a ways the piece starts to talk to you, communicates what it needs. That develops … and the longer you do it in a focused way it comes out of you — you become what it is. It’s a great process.”
How art “talks back” is always a thrilling discussion with artists; how artists learn to be mad, as their work begins to express its own agency. Perhaps out of the realization that the process can outperform premeditation, artists can start sounding like fanatics.
“Titian, when he was 90 years old, said, ‘If I could only live 10 more years, I could really learn how to draw.’ There is no end to it.” It’s running a marathon, but instead of 26 miles your focus is on running until your heart goes out like Pheidippides.
Manes came to art somewhat late, after first trying a traditional career track out of practical concern.
“In 1966, when I got out of high school, I heard somebody say that accountants made $35,000 a year … So I thought, ‘Well I’ll just go to business school,’ which was the most idiotic thing I’ve ever done.” Returning to school years later in his thirties, he dove into the art program. He recounts drawing until his fingers bled: “I was on fire back then.”
His career took off when he won a juried exhibition at the Beaumont Art Museum (Texas), which came with a solo exhibition opportunity. Today, the museum has a 25-foot painting from Manes on permanent display in its foyer, a culmination of a long relationship.
“I had worked in that museum, shining the floors, doing the lighting and hanging the shows, stuff like that … I made $4,000 from the sales in that show and my mother gave me $4,000, and off I went to New York.”
Manes landed in Williamsburg, which at the time was a rough district of artists and misfits, where he rubbed shoulders with legendary artists and pool hustlers alike.
Currently, his studio has three bodies of work in development. Manes’s most recognizable work may be a long running series on bowls. They function from repetition, a pared-down, slightly oblong platonic vessel often stacked aggressively and defying gravity or physics.
“I painted a little bowl on newspaper, put it on paper and put it in a show in the mid ‘80s. Somebody bought it, so I did another, and so on. Then I started stacking them up.”
He uses a template to draw the lines before painting them in. Eventually he commissioned someone to make him 100 little ceramic bowls to work from.
They are bizarre paintings. The bowls are essential in their design, perfect platonic shapes but completely devoid of ornamentation, which makes them unnervingly ordinary. They are painted with dramatic light, but roughly; the material scratches and pours, sometimes color feeling like a blemish or bruise on the surface of these paintings.
“Everybody on earth has a bowl — they all have different things in them. Some have nothing in them.” It seems to ask, “How do perfect shapes exist in the real world?”
Alongside these are paintings of poppy flower fields. They caught me off guard as more sentimental, more direct in the pursuit of making a pretty picture. The dissonance appears when Manes revealed they are paintings of the fields at Flanders, which shatters the idealism and turns the vivid red into a visceral memory of soldiers charging into the earth.
The last body of work depicted rain. Some are atmospheric, immersive and familiar; others were surfaces that seemed to be punctured by the rain — like bullets raining from the heavens in an indiscriminate spray. In all of them the rain functioned like a residue of individuality. Like the bowls, the repetition has rhythms and outliers but maintains a feeling of being a general record of struggle as an existential condition.
In our closing remarks, Manes reflected on the continuum of his practice and again, how it doesn’t end.
“I can’t imagine being an accountant or banker. You retire at 65, and then what do you do? Maybe you say ‘I’m going to become a fisherman,’ so you spend $15k on a boat and get the rods and hats, all the stuff. Then you go out in the stream someplace, you don’t catch anything, you get eaten by mosquitoes and you think, ‘God damn, I hate this shit.’”
To invite us into your studio, email Mike@SoprisSun.com