Interview with Jack Balas — Contemporary Art Curator Magazine

Your body of work has transitioned from landscape and constructed environments to a more central focus on figures since 2003. Could you discuss this evolution in your thematic concerns? How do you see your earlier themes of landscape resonating in your current focus on figurative subjects?

Your portfolio spans painting, photography, writing, and sculpture, often interweaving these media. How do you navigate the boundaries between these forms in your creative process, and how do they inform one another in the context of a single artwork or series?

Let me address both of these questions by sketching out my evolution or trajectory, that has always been more intuitive and dependent upon circumstance than something consciously mapped out. I began painting watercolors in high school, at first in an art club but then going off by myself for years painting. When it came time for college, however, instead of an art school I wound up studying architecture at the Illinois Institute of Technology. My casual interest in architecture didn’t last freshman year, though, but the Institute of Design was there and I spent my sophomore year learning photography and studying all sorts of graphic design.

When I transferred to the art school at Northern Illinois U. as a junior I wound up in the sculpture department eventually, learning welding and bronze casting and woodworking— elective skills I never would have encountered elsewhere. I did take one painting class and learned to use oils, but I never took another. I kept painting in my free time, but my interest in wood constructed sculpture led me to get a BFA and then MFA degrees in sculpture over the course of four years, all the while pursuing photo in my own darkroom that I’d set up in my apartment bathroom.

After grad school I moved to Los Angeles owning zero sculpture equipment, and wound up in a studio on Colorado Boulevard in Pasadena, where I went back almost exclusively to painting— big stuff, and with words. I got by doing carpentry work and as an assistant to several artists for a couple years, but then, since I’d been a city bus driver for four years while gong to NIU, wound up with an incredible job driving a truck cross-country, solo, as an art shipper, schlepping paintings and sculpture between artists and galleries and collectors and museums, on a route that began in San Francisco and went to Los Angeles, Phoenix, Santa Fe, Dallas, Chicago, D.C., and New York— and back. I spent so much time looking at landscape (my love) on these trips but staying in motels everywhere for weeks and thus unable to paint, that I found photography to be a good solution for how to remain an artist while on the road— to jump out of the cab for a few minutes to take photos, but not put me behind schedule. And then in evenings or at mealtime I began to write for no known reason— descriptions at first of where I was and what I was looking at, but often with the goal of making unusual connections between the realms. But my schedule was erratic, month-on and month-off, two weeks on and three weeks off, etc., and I was earning enough on these trips to go home and just be an artist painting in my studio! So, photo and painting and writing were all going on simultaneously for years, and I had little concern about traditional boundaries. Collage already appealed to me, maps, annotated photos, etc. So mixing it all together was natural.

The sidebar to all of this is that I’d met a boyfriend (who is now my husband, Wes Hempel), in Los Angeles, who was studying creative writing at the time. We decided to move to Boulder, Colorado, together where he could go to grad school, but I kept my trucking job and just flew back and forth to L.A. and elsewhere to pick up my truck and drive— it didn’t matter where I was living. Wes helped me introduce fiction into the descriptions I was writing, to really begin to animate them as narrative. My truck job ended, alas, and he was by then in grad school with an assistantship teaching freshman composition, and he introduced me to his writing department to whom I showed some of my writing I’d gotten published by an art journal, and I wound up with a job teaching freshman writing myself, having never taught and never having taken a writing class. Within a few years I developed a writing class for the art department there at CU, and started to teach studio as a sabbatical replacement at other local universities, in sculpture, painting, and photo, followed by long-term gigs as a visiting artist at a couple of large out-of-state universities, so I was involved with all the media simultaneously.

My longstanding interest in landscape turned on a dime in 1995 when a young man came walking past my house one day with his dog and no shirt. I went out and asked him to come by and pose for photos, which began a 30-year photo series of similar men incorporating text, which I later began to use as reference material for paintings as well, but only after I’d taught life-drawing for a year as a visiting artist at the University of Arizona in Tucson. With all these media (plus collage) going on, it was natural to make hybrid works, especially layered with texts that moved away from fiction to ones more personal. These days I still focus on the figure in paintings, but I still work with landscape occasionally. My goal always is to make an interesting image, something that will induce you to cross the room to look at it.

In your work, young men often appear as central figures and muses. You’ve mentioned their representation goes beyond mere idealization, touching on broader themes like truth and metaphor. Can you elaborate on how you choose these subjects and the narrative or symbolic roles they play within your broader artistic inquiry?

Sometimes the process of choice can be fairly random. For years I’ve hired models to come over for an hour or two for photographs, based on their appearance in a variety of gyms but also on the street. I look at this source material often, then, and feel that some images would make good candidates for a painting. So many artists satisfy themselves with a rendition of the figure and stop there, wherever it may lie on the representation-to-abstraction spectrum, but I constantly ask myself how to make the image interesting, and may shuffle through lots of ideas— wouldn’t it be interesting if the guy is doing this or that, or appears with some other visual element, or text? As soon as you’ve got these other things going on, metaphor or narrative or symbol are available for interpretation. The ideas come from looking, and juxtaposition.

You have a unique practice of numbering and dating your works, sometimes giving a single piece multiple numbers to mark different stages of its creation. How does this method reflect your views on time, memory, and the evolution of artistic intent?

The numbers are markers in a progression I started in 2002 with #2, like an inventory system. Everything gets a number in the sequence, and If I work on something and change or add to the piece significantly at a later date, it will get an extra number (I am currently up to #2690). I do like very much this evidence that a particular piece may have evolved over a long time, like thoughts themselves or life, but it’s not necessary for everything. I’m aware that time changes my ideas about things. And looking back through records I’m surprised at the extent to which I may have forgotten things. The act of remembering itself can put a new spin on past events.

Your interest in map-making and documenting experiences suggests a strong engagement with the notion of art as a document or archive. How do you balance the factual/documentary aspects with the fictional/metaphorical in your work?

The factual element may simply be the number in the progression, or some annotation about the date or day (eg. Thursday, or first day of summer, or my birthday, etc.) I gradually got away from fiction, since I feel one can be aware of and point out the extraordinary in so many daily events, but it still finds its way into an occasional piece, in order to make a story “move.”

You aim to create works that require active interpretation and participation from the viewer, likening your exhibitions to maps to be navigated. What do you believe is the viewer's role in completing the work of art, and how do you gauge the success of their engagement?

I don’t speculate as to the degree a viewer needs to wade into an image, but I hope there are varying paths from piece to piece. I do hope I’m giving them reason, visually, to spend time with every piece and think about it, gain something from it, enjoy it. When I hear someone’s interpretation that maybe I did not anticipate, I feel the piece is working in a good way — that you can find different ways in for yourself and surprise even me.

You’ve mentioned revisiting and reworking past completed pieces. What drives this process of continuous reappraisal? How does this practice affect your understanding of your own artistic trajectory?

I don’t do this with every piece all the time, just occasionally. But every new piece and every old reworked piece informs all the works that may follow. It’s a lot like life, LOL, and I’m aware that unanticipated things & events may turn out to be godsends visually and conceptually. Years ago on my truck job, I met a dealer who asked me where exactly I wanted to be five years hence as an artist, saying she only wanted to deal with artists who had a specific answer. I really don’t think like that, and a couple of years later there I was picking up everything from her storage room to take back to 20 or so of her artists, none of whom she had informed, because she decided to go out of business. Making art is not like running a business. There’s a business aspect to being an artist, but it’s not the art itself. The art comes first; the business later.

Given the cultural and political dimensions evident in your portrayals of young men, how do you address the potential for both critique and celebration of masculinity and beauty in contemporary society through your art?

Your work often challenges conventional representations of beauty and form. Can you discuss the challenges and rewards of deviating from traditional aesthetic norms and the reactions this has elicited within the art community and broader public?

Challenges and rewards: it’s certainly been an uphill battle over the years. On one hand I feel part of the resurgence of figuration in painting, not to mention the resurgence of painting itself, compared to the 70’s when I was in college and minimalism was rampant. But on another hand the depiction of men has been met with suspicion if not outright hostility. Politically speaking, our society is really very prejudiced in favor of female imagery. I look at it this way: the world is basically split between 50% men and 50% women, and much of the world (and the art world) is run by men, 90% of whom are straight and who enjoy looking at images of women. So, at every turn we are confronted with a flood of female imagery produced by men that raises few eyebrows. And, when it comes to feminism and women wanting to speak for themselves and be seen the way they want to be seen, the results are so often even more images of women— which are appreciated by the aforementioned men. Even when women who are lesbian depict lesbian sex, men could not be happier. Very few women try to subvert the “male gaze” by depicting men. Thus when men are depicted in certain ways, it’s assumed by many that the only possible audience for such works are gay men. As a result, men do not grow up thinking of themselves as worthy of aesthetic contemplation (except, these days, in a variety of gyms.) Images of men are still sort of taboo (not least among men themselves) and are easily overlaid with stereotypes of aggression and toxicity. And even among a gay audience, there can be accusations of male subjects being too beautiful, the guys only promoting a certain narrow slice of experience that becomes oppressive to those who feel they are not a member of that country club, nor ever will be. Gay curators and gallery owners are not immune to any of these thoughts, so there is still a reluctance to engage with the work for fear of not being politically correct. One reward I can share, however, is hearing from gay men who really appreciate the work, who feel they are being seen for the first time. And, in a more subtle way, my engagement with my models is also a reward. 99% of them are straight, but they see themselves as addressing this visual gender imbalance in a concrete, maybe fun way, collaborating in images of themselves that can be read by women (and other men) as open, honest, vulnerable.

Looking forward, how do you see your work evolving in the next decade, and what legacy do you hope to leave through your contributions to contemporary art? Are there new themes or media you are interested in exploring?

Ideas and experiences change from day to day, so I don’t spend much time speculating on where I might be ten years from now (see anecdote above). I may go back to more landscape ideas that deploy the figure in new ways (for me), and I’m interested in using abstraction in tandem with representation. Legacy: great question! My goal always is to make interesting, thoughtful, complex, layered and rewarding work across a variety of media— for everyone. I’m all for the work to be enjoyed by and widen the narrow minds of a select few, but whether it all (or any of it) makes a ripple in the broad ocean of art and history is not for me to say.

Jack Balas
December 4, 2024

https://www.jackbalas.com/