‘CRYING OVER KENNY ROGERS’
... AND OTHER PAINTINGS THAT BROUGHT ALEXANDER CHURCHILL THE BIG PRIZE AT SILVERMINE
The grand prize winner of the Silvermine Art Center’s 70th annual A-ONE exhibit is a young Norwalk painter named Alexander Churchill. He’s just 36 and has one solo show to his credit, at a gallery in Ventura, Calif.
“I would say this is pretty must the most prestigious thing in my career so far,” Churchill says evenly. “Professionally, it took me the better part of 10 or 12 years to figure out what I wanted to do, how I wanted to express myself.”
The A-ONE exhibit is an important one. It used to be called Art of the Northeast, but it has expanded its reach. This year’s edition has several artists from the midwest and beyond. Only a third of the 48 are from Connecticut.
The biggest and most expensive painting in the exhibit (at 9 feet wide and $80,000) is by Tian Hui, a Chinese-born and trained artist now based in New Jersey. Titled “Honeymoon in Pandemic,” it shows two gaunt, masked men sitting with knees pulled up on a beach. It won the Jinishian figurative award.
Churchill’s pair of grand prize paintings, in a corner opposite Tian’s, are figurative, too. But done in acrylic and oil, they look flatter and more cartoonish, filled with puzzling images that demand questioning. Overall they are nearer to satire than sorrow.
Most obviously, the characters who are the focus of both paintings have impossibly distended limbs. In “Crying Over Kenny Rogers,” a weeping young man, huddled child-like under a table, has elastic arms. One droops flaccidly from shoulder to floor and ends in an oversized hand. The other is a prop for the man’s under-sized head. His legs are elongated too, but end in a Hobbit’s bare, thickened feet.
In its partner painting, “The Pastry Eaters,” a fashionably thin hipster couple sits contorted on pink sugar cube stools in a coffee shop. Their faces are gray, more ashen than ghostly. They’re posed contemplating doughnuts, rather than their smartphones. Nevertheless, they still are on social media. Their images appear on phones held in someone else’s elastic arms that reach in from outside the canvas. In one phone’s screen, the face of the young man turns into that of a dog’s.
Both paintings are the latest in a series called “Love in the Time of Anxiety” that Churchill began before the COVID-19 pandemic, as a commentary on our current society and his own state of mind. They contain many references, some easier to spot than others.
The dog face in “The Pastry Eaters” is a common Snapchat filter, while the title might recall the poem “The Lotos-Eaters” by Alfred Lord Tennyson, which in turn is based on the episode in Homer’s Odyssey, where the mariners are drugged by lotus flowers. Likewise, the title for the series borrows from the novel “Love in the Time of Cholera,” by Gabriel Garcia-Marquez.
Buried in the subconscious
Churchill himself hasn’t read the novel and thinks the lotus eaters resided in his subconscious. “These are amorphous things that float around in our culture,” he says. “You can reference ‘Moby Dick,’ but how many people have read it.”
The painting’s larger message is that the hipsters have degraded aspirations. Instead of beautiful lotus flowers, their addiction is to doughnuts and to social media.
“These hipsters eat these doughnuts to be seen,” he says. “They’re feeding off attention at the expense of their own individual truth. They’re being devoured by the masses, while devouring doughnuts and devouring everybody’s likes on social media.”
“Crying over Kenny Rogers” is more personal. The label in the Silvermine gallery says it’s an expression of the artist’s anxieties. The weeping figure is a semi-comic self-portrait, remembered from what Churchill says is a true story.
“It was a moment, pre-corona. I had the flu. I hadn’t slept in three nights. I was a little delirious and just thinking, as an artist tends to, about failure and uncertainty. This Kenny Rogers song came on, ‘She Believes in Me.’ And I was thinking about my partner and how she’s always stuck by me. It got me emotional in my vulnerable, sick state.”
There are specific biographical references in the painting. The drawing of Mutant Ninja Turtles on a bookshelf replicates one Churchill drew over and over as a child. He was born in California, but grew up in Vermont. In a recent online interview, he said his family was like others, with little money, but little stigma, and described himself as a “nerd,” who liked sci-fi movies and comics art. Early in his career, he worked as a freelance concept artist, a job that involves making visual mock-ups for video games or movies.
Churchill, however, has formal art training (at Green Mountain College, where he met his wife whom he followed back to Norwalk) and says the style it took him years to discover is an amalgamation of the very new and very old. Those distended limbs that appear so cartoonish in his paintings? They are his exaggerated take on early Christian art.
Other-worldly
“When you look at some of the old religious paintings like from Fra Angelico, or from the Northern Renaissance, they have these strange alien-like bodies. They tried to attain this kind of hyper-perfection of an idealized human form, but it just ended up looking odd. I want to take what worked in those paintings and relate it to mine,” he says.
He says he positioned his characters in attitudes of reverence or importance as they might be in a religious painting. Their gray skin begs contemporary questions about whiteness. He envisioned the anxiety series as an overarching story, like stations of the cross.
Churchill, however, is not so much interested in Christianity as in what religion and art have in common.
“The purpose of art as I thought about it, when you go through a museum, was to show the sublime. That interested me greatly, how the purpose of art evolved. In the beginning art was just showing you the sublime. Now I think art can question the sublime and I think that’s what I’m trying to do.”
Besides “Love in the Time of Anxiety,” Churchill has done four other themed series of paintings. His California solo show, in 2016, featured paintings from a series called “Absurdist Futility” that explored another expression of the sublime.
These were more textured oil paintings, several of which were hyper-realistic close-ups of human faces. Some appear to have perfectly linear nose bleeds. In another, “Amylase of the Uncanny Valley,” the face is wideeyed, open-mouthed, drooling rigid ribbons. Amylase is an enzyme in saliva. Uncanny valley refers to the disturbing distortion that occurs when a digital image becomes too lifelike.
Churchill says the faces expression the awe and distress of trying to understand the mathematics, known or unknown, that rule biology, computers or the universe. “It’s overwhelming. Your brain starts to melt. You go into vapor lock,” he says.
The Silvermine A-ONE exhibit runs to Oct. 20. Among other local prize winners are June Ahrens of Stamford and Miller Opie of Norwalk. Ahrens got an award of excellence for a necklace-like sculpture made from blue glass. Opie won the Jacobson Sculpture Award for two pieces fashioned from moose bone.
“THESE HIPSTERS EAT THESE DOUGHNUTS TO BE SEEN. THEY’RE FEEDING OFF ATTENTION AT THE EXPENSE OF THEIR OWN INDIVIDUAL TRUTH. THEY’RE BEING DEVOURED BY THE MASSES, WHILE DEVOURING DOUGHNUTS AND DEVOURING EVERYBODY’S LIKES ON SOCIAL MEDIA.”