Interview Matthew Weinstein Photography Guzman
Published in No 16
Woodruff, in his plaid “gentleman’s” tracksuit, next to Aurora, 2022.
Artist Matthew Weinstein had known of Thomas Woodruff’s work for a long time, but they had never met. After he started seeing images on his Instagram feed of Woodruff’s paintings, depicting emotive dinosaurs awestruck by the cosmic forces of their doom, Weinstein kept hitting Like. He then introduced himself in a DM, saying that he needed to see those dinosaurs in person. According to Weinstein, he is predisposed to like people whose work he enjoys. But this doesn’t always work out. With Tom it did. He went to visit him at his studio upstate, Woodruff came to his in Brooklyn, and they had a lot to talk about. They still do.
MW We both cram a lot of life into apocalyptic imagery; representations of creatures living intensely until the end. Beauty that transcends doom. Which, I think, is the opposite of morbidity. What do you think about the distinction between apocalypticism and morbidity?
TW Spending most of my time in this idyllic setting in the Hudson Valley with my charming husband Fred, whom I have known for over four decades, with me in my sixties and him in his seventies, we have learned pretty well how to weather the storms. They blow in and leave debris, but we wait for the rainbows, I guess. There is a wisdom that comes when one recognizes one’s aging or one's placement on the gauge of the cosmic lifecycle. I go for walks in the two cemeteries near my house. They are filled with flowers, swallows and bunnies. I lived through the AIDS epidemic in my early adulthood, and it made me realize that morbidity and apocalypse can be swirled together like a horrific soft-swirl cone. But the survivor in me prefers to separate the light from the dark whenever I can.
The red-colored kitchen was inspired by two Art Deco tables gifted to the artist and his husband, Fred Moreno, by fellow artist Suzanne Joelson. The couple moved to the c.1862 former Lutheran church parsonage in 2001 .
MW And beauty, of course, helps.
TW Beauty has always been the balm to heal the wounds that life inflicts. It’s one of the noblest things that art can strive for.
MW You showed me an image of a painting of three dinosaurs doing the dance of life under a meteor shower. Yes, they are about to explode but they don’t have a sense of time. So, they are living large until the end. A cosmic joke, but also an enviable position.
TW The dinosaurs are a good armature for me right now. They are structures for contemplation and elaboration. Bare bones, just like your skeletons, to use as avatars to project illusive and disparate patches upon humanistic sentiments like striving, pathos, and longing. I love Winnie in Beckett’s “Happy Days,” buried to the neck and soldiering on, cheerily.
MW I love her too. Nature watches us and we watch it. Sometimes I think that every time we depict nature we step outside of it. Or do we enter it at our only access points, which include observation, love, and fear? It’s probably too tall an order to not name things.
In Woodruff ’s bright studio, the former barn, a table made from a tire; a collection of toy dinosaurs; and a neon sign that served as a prop on “Saturday Night Live” — for which he illustrated a segment titled “My Big Thick Novel.” To the left, Autumn from the Four Seasons, 2021.
TW I learn about nature from attempting to depict it. I look at atmospheric phenomena. I record the world with the right tone, shade and tint, the bend of the weed, the proportions of the clouds, the glint on the carapace, and the curve of the magnolia’s petal. I am always watching, respectfully. Whenever I have an artist’s block, I grab a branch or bloom and draw it, carefully. I love understanding how things grow, then I become truly engaged, and it makes me a better bloke.
MW So what does the depiction of nature, both real and speculative, mean to you? I’ve always been interested in the use of nature to depict nature, as in Ikebana or Japanese gardening.
TW To me, the depiction of nature is a suggestion, a mood, a chromatic chord. I like complex, specific, rich harmonies that use a full orchestra. So formal gardens often feel too barren or pristine for me. You don’t picture obstinate hungry critters in a highly disciplined rock and specimen garden. I’m more of a grotto kind of guy than a Karesansui kind of guy. Sometimes I like it messy, overgrown, crumbly, raggedy or stinky.
MW If a grape vine registers intense and unstoppable intention, then do we live in a world of complete sentience? I feel that we do. I think plants have plans and I’m at a loss to see how mine are more complex than theirs.
TW I might say that nature has rhythmic and time-based knowledge instead of sentience. So, yes, it is in the work, though I wish for it more than I actually believe it. But sunflowers always bend, all day, toward the light, skunks always search at night for snapping turtle eggs, magpies always like shiny things. It’s what they do.
MW I grow these rangy cactuses that only make flowers once a summer, during the evening. I have no idea why they would do such a thing, except a sense of destiny.
Woodruff in his studio, the original barn, next to Aurora, 2022; Autumn, 2021; and Euphrosyne, Aglaia, and Thalia, a work in progress, 2022.
TW We Neo-fabulists and Romantics somehow have to believe this. There are clues to stories everywhere.
MW Speaking of stories, we both engage in narrative and anthropomorphism. Anthropomorphism, for me, is about how we have erected boundaries between nature and ourselves, with terrible consequences. The vestiges of this more profound sense of belonging have been relegated to Disney. As if only a child would think that a tree or a goldfish thinks. I try to resurrect it to its pagan form, using technology to create animal idols who don’t like us. What is anthropomorphism for you?
TW Anthropomorphism does give one the weapons to tackle myriad environmental and social slip-ups and catastrophes with a veneer of surreality. The Pixar talking fish papa is really just a simple human dad, artfully disguised, which doesn’t really surprise and certainly doesn’t challenge… but if he had complex thoughts and emotions instead of those we expect… well, it’s being fish-slapped! Like you did in your anthropomorphized videos. By rendering restrained and delicate emotions onto the faces and postures of my beasties, I hope they give good performances, paleo-method acting. Combining this with figurative painting's ability to stop time, it allows the viewer to enter into the world of the impactful moments in the landscape.
Woodruff ’s handdrawn graphic novel, Francis Rothbart! The Tale of a Fastidious Feral, published by Fantagraphics.
MW What is allegory to you? For me it's a meaning puzzle whose gravity has dropped out. It does all the things that meaning does except, ultimately, have didactic meaning. So, it’s a free space for thought.
TW I am intrigued by the artistic potential of allegory. I love the willing extension of disbelief from normal reality, it’s extremely apparent in most theatrical forms: opera, ballet, puppetry, and folk theater from all cultures.
MW We both employ populist media outside of our painting practices; media that exist outside of the art world system of exchange. I was working in 3D animation when it was an entertainment tool (pre NFT), and you have this epic graphic novel, Francis Rothbart!, which has recently been published, as well as an in-depth knowledge of illustration and tattooing. Then these media circle back into our painting practices.
TW Academic art history doesn’t interest me much. Pictures and stories interest me, and often the academics have too many threads with agendas obscuring their eyes, and the modernists have made a lot of slick sided boxes for us to fold up to take to the recycling facility.
MW Well, modernism has been having its comeuppance in the face of a broader culture that it does not represent. But each medium has its own social origin story.
Always stylish Woodruff, wearing some bling with his western inspired three-piece suit by J. Mueser, in front of Euphrosyne, Aglaia, and Thalia (the Three Graces), a work in progress, 2022.
TW All genres are fair game to me. I have been lucky enough to dabble in different ones. Early in my career, I was very interested in illustration and the clarity of communication inherent in the artform. Some illustrator’s results can be too obvious, and so, I tended to specialize in more enigmatic imagery to convey the prescribed content. I saw much of the classic tattoo iconography, a lot of it adapted from heraldry, as apotropaic, and that aligned with the emotions I needed to express at the time. In Francis Rothbart! I used a children’s book-like genre of drawing, I wrote the text in tricky metered verse, and I graphically laid out the spreads like a twisty sorghum maze. Mixing disparate approaches from populist sources can be subversive beneath the surface because the viewer feels welcome at first, and then enters the terra incognita. I made my “graphic opera” because I knew the parameters of what cartooning was but didn’t know what it would be like when I was fully committed to it. Isn’t that the best reason to make anything? The first thing my publisher said to me about the work was, “you have really thrown it all down on these pages!”
MW I think we make the things we want to see or make them to define a problem that we have no solution for. Speaking of filling needs, I saw this article about a guy who has a crocodile as an emotional support animal. It made me think about your paintings for undefined reasons.
TW I’d like to see the pictures of him and the croc on an airplane. But I hear the tic-tic-tic of Hook’s nemesis, I must say (morbidity, again). I always had a musing that in my back acre of land I’d raise seeing-eye ponies. It’s such a lovely image. I saw a documentary on them once. It showed how good they are on planes. I think I’d only raise white ones though, and outfit their head harnesses with faux coral knobs to make them into seeing-eye unicorns… that would be a lot of work… but awfully pretty.
MW I would suggest that you get right on that.
Thomas Woodruff: The Dinosaur Variations opening Feb. 9, ‘24 6-8pm vitoschnabel.com @misterthomaswoodruff
Francis Rothbart! The Tale of a Fastidious Feral, is published by Fantagraphics
Mathew Weinstein is an artist who works in painting and 3D animation. matthewweinstein.com @matthewaweinstein
Guzman are regular contributors to UD and are represented by veronique-peresdomergue.net @lesguzman