BLUES
HEDGE Gallery, Cleveland OH, February - April 2020
John W. Carlson
Artist Statement
This exhibition is a very personal and spiritual connection to a genre of music that was born out of desperation and the will to survive. In my recent paintings and drawings, it is my intent to strip away the veneer and allow for a deep presence and timelessness to emerge. I chose specific images to convey emotion, energy, gesture and spirituality.
Blues music allowed me to grieve the death of my son in a very personal way. Through this music I felt I was given permission to moan and weep but also to embrace this burden and finally lay it down.
Recently, I took several trips to the Mississippi Delta Region where Blues music was born. I needed to be in and feel the space; the depth, the mystery and spirituality. The most profound visit was in July 2019, where I stood in vast cotton fields that seemed to go on forever and in the middle of lonely black top highways under the scorching southern sun. I experienced full sensory moments through the sound of insects, the unrelenting heat and the smell of the river. I stood at the crossroads of Highways 49 and 61 where the legendary Robert Johnson sold his soul to the devil to be the best bluesman.
The Blues is that place in the soul and space in the heart where the stories of survival, love, loss, joy and desperation come from. In a sense, that is where the subject matter and dialogue in this most recent work has been derived.
Song Drawings
BLUES: A Review by Joseph Clarke
In the critic’s hands, “raw” is a misleading word. The “rawness” which the metaphor points at is that of pain. The pain of an open wound, the throb of a scrape or burn. “Raw” art transports viewers into a scene of crisis, grief, or trauma that is present and ongoing.
But the production of art takes time. No matter how immediate the experience seems to viewers, it cannot be new to the artist. The experience of immediacy is a careful, time-intensive construction. For every “raw” painting hung, there might be two, three, four drafts in the studio, abandoned after they did not evoke the exact right state of consciousness in crisis. This is true even if the feelings the artist expresses are keenly remembered from her own life, or even if they are ongoing.
That “raw” art is actually carefully crafted does not make it insincere. It makes it art. John W. Carlson’s BLUES is raw. The exhibit takes its name and subject matter from the rustic musical tradition, the first—but by no means last—African American genre to be envied and adopted by the white majority. On a literal level, Carlson’s paintings depict the lands and customs of the southern Blacks who first sang the blues. On a metaphorical level, the wailing mouths and clenched eyes of blues singers are stand-in for universal experiences of pain and grief. Carlson said that his own experience of grief is informed by the death of his child. Blues provided him a way to process and express his grief:
Blues music allowed me to grieve the death of my son in a very personal way. Through this music I felt I was given permission to moan and weep but also to embrace this burden and finally lay it down.
Pain, and more specifically the pain of mourning, are given many forms in BLUES. “Blues Singer” shows a head thrown back with its mouth stretched as far as it will open, revealing a pitch-black interior. In “Secret Messages,” a man’s face contorts; he might be singing, or wincing in pain. Red slashes hover before his mouth, as if the air itself has been cut and left to bleed. Four faceless children stand at their parent’s deathbed in “Muerte de la Madre.” The mother’s wrists twist at unnatural angles, and dark figures hover over the bedroom. “My Grief” is a self-portrait of Carlson himself, staring ahead at nothing. He is numb to the blank world around him; his posture is loose and shaky, and he seems unaware his jaw has drifted open. He pays no mind to the black streaks of rain dripping down his face.
However, Carlson’s personal losses resonate most strongly in “Baptism.” An oil painting with charcoal and textile elements, it depicts two Black men lowering a third figure head-first into a calm, slow river. The figure’s face is smoothed, unlined, and found like a child’s. Their hairline is beneath the water. Their torso is wrapped in a white garment which resembles both a swaddling blanket and a burial shroud. As they are gently lowered below the water, they shut their eyes as if in peaceful sleep. The scene is a baptism, a celebratory initiation into a new religious life. But it could be seen as a riverside funeral. The wrapped figure is still, passive, shut-eyed. The two ministers have wrapped them in clean white garments, and handle their body with loving care. Whether the wrapped figure is being ushered into new life or into death, the paternal figures are there to support them. Love does not cease after the beloved person is gone.
In a departure from his usual fixation on the human figure, Carlson paints the Southern landscapes upon which blues emerged. “1,000 Miles from Nowhere” paints a scene with the sparest possible elements: A white sun; gold sky; brown, flat earth stretching to the horizon; and a black road that narrows as it stretches to a vanishing point. But atop the brown fields, he layers actual balls of raw cotton and leaves of dried grass picked by Carlson during his trips to the Mississippi River Delta. Parts of an environment are incorporated into their depiction.
The fields of cotton and prairie grass populate the plain to the right of the road. On the left, a trio of telephone poles stand. Each of the three vertical column is topped by a crossbar. No telephone lines lay between them. Neglected and left in disrepair, the poles have lost their function. Their cross-like appearance brings to mind crucifixion narrative as told in the gospel of John, in which Jesus was executed between two thieves. In this spot, “1,000 miles from nowhere,” no comforts—be they from the connectivity of community, or religion—can be found. So it is with depression, when familiar consolations do not bring relief from pain.
The pain Carlson explores is individual, the sadness of particular individuals coping with particular losses. Shari Wilkins, founder and executive director of the Cleveland Print Room, documents distress that is social in character. During BLUES run at HEDGE Gallery, Wilkins displayed images from her photo series of houses in her childhood home of Cairo, Illinois. Many of the houses are foreclosed, or simply abandoned and left to rot. Their owners are most likely victims of the economic downturn Cairo has undergone since its loss of industry. The lifeless houses are chilling representations of a dwindling community. But even without knowing the context of Cairo’s deindustrialization, the images are unnerving. They are the opposite of haunted houses—habitable spaces made unwelcoming not by the presence of specters, but the absence of human lives.