It may seem like I fell off the face of the Earth for a minute, and I kinda sorta did in a way due to more reasons than one. One such reason I can talk about is this:
A series of murals I painted at Rice University’s Baker Institute for Public Policy, which proved to be far more challenging that I anticipated. I’d originally scheduled three months for the project, but it ended up wrapping up at four, the entire time of which I was swallowed whole by the thing. Generally speaking, four months is actually ample time to work on pretty much any kind of mural. I recall painting 4-story high murals in a matter of days before. But… despite being much smaller than that, these aren’t your typical murals.
The way one might typically go about creating a mural:
1) Sketch it out.
2) Paint it on a much larger scale.
That’s pretty much it and it tends to be a rather straightforward process if you do it that way. For two of these murals in particular though, I felt like they needed to develop on the fly in the process of being painted. The reasons being:
The walls are in these really narrow hallways (which you might have noticed in the video above), which means you actually never really get the kind of vantage point that allows you to take in the entirety of the mural as a single piece. If you plan it out first on a smaller surface, you end up designing something that will never be experienced in its entirety that way. The only way in my mind to create something suitable for the space was to really create it experientially.
Because of the narrow hallways, the way one experiences the murals is by being up against them. Very unlike a usual mural, where the point is to really see it in its entirety from afar. This close proximity that the murals had to be rich in detail and textures that you can only experience up close, things you can get lost in and discover and rediscover every time you walk by. The richness of layers meant the painting process wasn’t just painting a single layer of an image very large. You find yourself painting over already painted surfaces and continuously doing so until you “feel” it’s just right. There’s no reference to when it’s done beyond that “feeling”.
Being situated at the Baker Institute where there a great many scholars whose expertise range across a wide variety of subject matter, I wanted their knowledge and energy to be infused into the work. So I invited them to inscribe directly onto the walls as I was painting them. This also allowed me to react to some of their input, the end result being a visual conversation of sorts, and something that could never ever be replicated in the comfort of my studio.
In addition to the need for texture and detail, there is also the need to tie all the varying minutia together through grand gestures, in particular relating to two vantage points, the extreme angles you can see the murals at when approaching from the either end of the hallway.
So basically, a lot of problem-solving related to the particular space these murals are located and painted in. Add to that the fact that I am rather claustrophobic and find it somewhat difficult to function in windowless spaces. 🙃
Sure, no one kept me from stepping out whenever I felt like it. But, you do that and you exit the particular art-making zone you’re in, and you sort of have to “reconnect” with the process whenever you come back to it. So there’s a balancing act you have to maneuver the entire time. All this by the way refers only to two of the murals. The other two were quite straightforward in execution, albeit with a bit more planning beforehand.
Anyway, in short, this mural project really sucked me in. Given the narrow hallways though, not the easiest murals to photograph (which you can tell from the above video). They really are more experiential. Still, a few photos and more info exist at the Baker Institute website. Will try to figure out some photographic solution for these soon.
Gave another interview the other day reminiscing about things that took place over a decade ago halfway across the world. I've been feeling some disconnect with reality lately, not as a direct result of this one single interview, but certainly compounded by it and other things like it. It's as if all the things that happened ten years ago—and my entire life before even—never really happened at all. Like they're false memory implants, or perhaps the memories of another me from a different dimension.
Matt Madden is a comix formalist. What that means is he really enjoys obsessing over the mechanics of comix, forever exploring the limits of what the medium is capable of. Much in the vein of, say, an Art Speigelman. The thing that propelled Art Speigelman to prominence though wasn't so much his formalism but his narrative work, in particular MAUS. Which is absolutely fair given that most of his formalist experiments were little more than single page comix in the pages of RAW magazine. What Speigelman might do on a page though, Madden does here in a hundred. This will either very much appeal to a reader or completely repel them. I fall in the appeal camp mainly because I'm a comix maker and enjoy looking at things that deconstruct the mechanics of the medium.
New shirt to match current mood.
My apologies for the radio silence. I’ll try my best to make this a regular thing again.
All my best,
Ganzeer
Houston, TX
An amazing amount of work there at Rice - beautifully done