Today on the site: Matt Seneca interviews Guy Colwell.
MS: Comics is such a natural refuge for figurative art that it’s makes sense you’d end up there. But Inner City Romance also incorporates a lot of abstraction, both in the visuals and the plots, such as they are. What appealed to you about the long dream/hallucination/fantasy sequences in the book?
GC: Well, down underneath the activist social surrealist there is still a dormant abstract expressionist lurking. For the twenty years I was into fine art painting before prison, I was primarily an abstract painter. I did many purely decorative explorations of form and color and if it had not been for the radicalizing processes of prison, that might have been my life work. It peeks out from time to time in groups of experimental drawings and paintings that usually do not get seen by anyone because the social surrealism is more prominent. The acid trip in Inner City Romance #1 was sort of a last gasp of the old abstract/fantasy vein I was in just before prison, based, as I said, on drawings I did in late ‘67 and early ‘68. Recently I did a series of small abstract oil paintings just because I can’t keep this tendency totally suppressed all the time. But, as I expected, this side trip got pushed aside by some new social surrealist painting ideas that took over, such as my new picture of an Ebola treatment center and one I’m working on now of a cute couple with a small child walking through what appears to be violent battle scene.
Of course another aspect of the dream sequences is to explore the inner life of a mind as inspired by the hallucinatory effects of LSD. The trips I took set off a lot of visual experiments because seeing the inner productions of the brain was so incredibly fascinating, colorful and visual that I felt I should attempt to capture some of it in drawings and paintings. There was an explosion of this kind of work in all creative fields in the ‘60s, as you know. Rock posters, rock and roll music, literature and fine art were all hugely moved by the psychedelic experience, just as I was.
Elsewhere:
More real estate news: Al Hirschfeld's home is for sale, insanely great mural included.
I didn't know that Ralph Bakshi was posting short vintage clips on Facebook, did you?
I normally ignore the superhero movie thing, but the general disorganization of the DC attempt to do a "universe" is interesting/funny. In a counterpoint to that, here is Gerry Conway (mentioned twice in one week -- a TCJ record) on the company's latest move to avoid paying creators.
