The Opening
Henryk Fantazos
Self-interview
Q - Let us talk about your painting “Travels with Tuba” included in your present exhibition. Where this idea originated?
A - I don’t paint ideas. I elect to paint visions. Ideas are products of reason. Visions have their origin in inspiration.
Q - So, what inspired this image?
A - It came to me, like all visions unbidden and only partial, occluded and elusive. It came at the time when I was daydreaming about traveling actors of commedia dell’arte and certain kind of wishful landscape that encourages meandering. Once a strong vision visits me I hurry to make a quick sketch of its essence. Then I set out for a more substantial embodiment of that vision by more daydreaming, musing, and filling out the missing parts. At that time my original vision is very vulnerable. My own doubts, corrosive reservations, ironic distance can burn and poison it when it makes its first wish to be. What wicked midwifery of rare visions! Over time I have learned to be the first believer of its right to come into being by feeding, abetting, fleshing it out. That stage of development calls for aiding my vision too spectral and ghostly with elements which reality wears. I gather props, fabricate costumes, and engage models. If my vision includes, say “brick-airplane” than I dedicate my attention both to entomological study of those oversized flying insects, called “airplanes” and to a search for most “real” instances of brickwork. Most “real” means that on a sliding scale away from plastic-looking and exuding still the smell of its abstract geometry to the opposite end where age, use and all consequences of existing made the brickwork into a triumph of individuation. Now I can put these two elements together into a convincing, engaging image.
Q - Is there a story behind it?
A - I think it is all there in the painting, not behind it or in any other extraneous source. What is important, pertinent is to be found in the painting itself. It is true however that many art lovers don’t have a strong contemplative habit and would rather learn about the content of a painting from a commentary or a user manual pasted to the back. Since I am in a business of communicating I feel I should perhaps provide it.
Q - Are you than admitting that the content of your work is often obscure or even bizarre?
A - No more obscure than a poem. As to “bizarre” I confess to have taste for strangeness but all my life as a painter I kept a strict self-censorship on an unbridled bizarreness, however much it sits on my chest and tempts me.
Q - And you say that you don’t yield to this temptation? Come on now...
A - Well… it should be said that this country does not have a substantial appetite for anything deviating too far from the Disneyland of the Obvious. No wonder that the two most popular painting styles in America are impressionism and abstraction. Impressionism which has the most placid, tepid commonplace imagery as if suggested by a mailman, or abstraction with no content, the ultimate in political correctness. Against that kind of background almost anything using imagination would seem “strange” if not “bizarre”.
Q - What are you going to paint now?
A - I am greatly moved by some crowd of visions demanding to be painted and the way to describe it without painting them would be to say that they emphasize “life” rather than “beauty”. Amongst all else every object appearing in a painting could be shown with a tendency toward refine taste, decorative qualities of its form or a tendency emphatically showing its rough tumble with time’s vicissitudes, raw biology of living. That is the pagan, life-worshiping commitment I take from now on. Let blood-shot eye and a runny nose be added to all those mythic nymphettes!
