SIMPLE PLEASURES PRIMAL TERRORS: an interview with guy colwell
San Francisco’s SoMa neighborhood, like much of the city, is a picture of disparate details: luxury, innovation and fine dining, shadowed by rampant homelessness, substance abuse and human suffering.
It seems appropriate, then, that SoMa’s 111 Minna Gallery is no home to vacuous art.
Following a 2018 retrospective entitled “Walking, Talking, Stalking,” Bay Area artist Guy Colwell returned to 111 Minna with “Simple Pleasures Primal Terrors,” a collection of paintings that blister in their depictions of human crisis, chaos and malaise, rendered in his signature style of Social Realism skewed Surreal.
Paintings like “Encampment” and “Shift Change, ICU” are mirrors of a society in crisis, fatigued by growing wealth disparity and a global pandemic. Faces contort with concern and fear, or are otherwise slack with resigned unease.
It’s clear that Colwell’s history as an underground cartoonist serves his craft as a painter. In the ’70s, he rubbed shoulders with the likes of Robert Crumb and S. Clay Wilson, publishing a popular series of short stories called “Inner City Romance” with legendary counterculture publisher Last Gasp.
At the time, the underground comics scene in the Bay Area was heavily wrapped up in social commentary and satire, which Colwell was eager to participate in. A decade earlier, however, he was committed to Abstract Modernism, free of grand statements in the hippie era of peace and love.
That is, until 1968, when he refused the Vietnam War draft and spent 500 days in prison.
On the night of his gallery opening, Colwell took a moment to speak with me about moving away from "wall decorations" in favor of making a statement through art.
A gallery visitor at the opening night of “Simple Pleasures Primal Terrors” studies Colwell's 2020 painting "Encampment" at 111 Minna Gallery in San Francisco. (Photo courtesy Dirk Wyse)
You were imprisoned in 1968 for refusing the Vietnam War draft. How did that experience inform your outlook and your work?
Guy Colwell: I refused the draft and spent 500 days in prison. If I hadn’t gone to prison I probably would have continued painting colorful abstracts for many years. It was definitely prison that made me shift my focus.
By the time you left prison, most of your abstract aesthetic was becoming "eclipsed by a new commitment to do figurative social/political commentary more in the tradition of the American Social Realists." In your opinion, what is the utility of Social Realism in art?
GC: At some point I decided that art needed to say something, that visual art could be essays in the same sense that journalists or sociologists or philosophers or politicians have something to say about what’s happening in the world. An artist can say something, too, about the real world and what’s happening in it. We have as much of a duty, and when I embraced that approach, that idea, then it felt like all the abstract work I was doing was just wall decorations, just spots of color, maybe something that might harmonize with your furniture. I felt from about the year 1968 on that it had to be more meaningful to respond to what was happening in the world.
Guy Colwell's 2021 painting "Silent Music."
I’m curious about the ghastly elements featured in some of your works - Sagging skin, neon flesh, wayward eyes. There seems to be an element of horror there.
GC: [That element of horror] is a little bit new. I don’t think of it as horror. There came a point where I felt I was doing the same painting over and over again: Street scenes, groups of people on the street, poor people on the street, contrasts between poor people and rich people. Frankly, I started to get a little tired of it. I still felt it was important, but I didn’t want to be in a complete rut for the rest of my life so a lot of what you see here is breaking away a little bit and going into something that’s surrealistic.
I don’t know if it has as many messages, but “Old Sfumato Guy,” for instance, has a concern with mortality, with fear of danger and death. It’s gone into something surreal, but it’s still responding to what’s going on right now. We have a war going on in Europe, we have uncertainty about the future, we have a pandemic. Everybody’s a little nervous right now about where it’s all going, and I’m trying to get some of that feeling into that particular painting. I don’t how many people are gonna catch it, but there’s a Ukrainian flag in that picture. So it’s going into something with a fantasy edge to it, but it’s still about what’s happening. [“Sheer Woman”] is picking up on the war in Ukraine, too. I have a burning city in the background, which I added when the town of Mariupol was being bombed.
Can you tell me about your relationship with prominent members of the underground comics scene in the 60's and 70's?
GC: I knew them all. I know R. Crumb. We’ve written letters to each other a few times. He paid me a great compliment once when he came to a gathering of some kind. He said, “I’ve read your Inner City Romance #1several times and I think it’s a masterpiece.” From him, that’s very meaningful.
Internet platform policing has led to increasing levels of censorship. Do you have any hope for a resurgence of underground comics in light of this cultural shift?
GC: I don’t know, it was such a different time. It probably wouldn’t take the same form. It’d probably all be online now, unless we have some serious upheaval in society and the way things are functioning, to the extent that you can’t get your computer anymore. Then maybe we’d go back to printing newspapers or mimeographing. People will always be commenting on what’s happening. I don’t know if it could be anything like underground newspapers again. The underground comics were very influential for a while, but they pretty much died away, or they got blended into graphic novels.
Going forward, what are you interested in working on?
GC: Everything is very busy for me. I have two shows scheduled for 2023, one in LA and one in the East Bay. I would like to have a lot of new work for that. I have a long list of painting ideas that I would like to get to, continuing what I’ve been doing with a lot of this. I also have a graphic novel [about Hieronymous Bosch] in progress, which has been in progress for eight years now.
I’m trying to do a little retraining of myself now, to get back into color that’s pleasurable to see. I try to paint beautifully not to please the eye but to shake up your thoughts, to rattle your brain. To engage both the eye and the mind.
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