Join – 2017

“So the guys in the paintings? Well, I am scratching them below the surface and putting them to work. And they are no strangers to it (the work, that is) given the many gyms I find them in. Often for the sake of sports, but just as often for the sake of picking up girls, they work out knowing the power of beauty. But I see them too as eminently malleable, waiting for instructions, stem cells in a way and eager to please. They are everyman and my muse, off and doing guy things in the paintings, political things, religious things, introspective things and full of stories and philosophy, and all the while not giving a crap that the world, let alone the art world, views them as suspect because of their beauty (in the same way that beautiful paintings, or even all paintings, are often viewed as suspect these days in some precincts of the art world.) I put them out there too to counter the prejudice many in the world have felt for centuries in favor of female beauty, still ubiquitous on all fronts in our daily lives. Almost always metaphoric in nature, I hope the images here are a far cry from those found in run-of-the-mill coffee-table books of hot guys lying oiled and naked among tattered factories and skeins of rope. As fun as that might be, I want my guys instead to go beyond objects of desire, to straddle the brawn vs. brains divide and do some heavy mental lifting at the same time that they muscle up. But I put them out there as a fait accompli, denizens of a post-gay world who take everyone’s gaze in stride, male or female, straight or otherwise, going about their business as testimony of a world that has changed and whose change, by being themselves, they have helped to bring about. Ultimately, thus, the work is political. It addresses that big question of what kind of world do you want to live in? I prefer one that is open and honest, where we can all live up to our potential. And if there’s work to be done, we, and hopefully these guys, are up to the job. Better yet, since I do think of them as everyman, they are, simultaneously, already part of us.”   Jack Balas

?When you take a look at ANNUNCIATION, make no mistake that I am positing a male nude in the role of the Virgin Mary – thus a painting that skirts the idea of what can constitute religion, belief, and the collision between ideas we have been brought up with, and ideas of an expanding universe and our roles in it. In no small part does the painting also offer a collision between figuration and today’s preference for non-committal, if eye-catching abstraction. 

.ANNUNCIATION began as a complete abstraction in mid-December, and while its resemblance to a stained glass window hit me immediately, it went through quite a few permutations as I tried out various figures within this colorful and chaotic environment. I was committed to the large figure with a halo from early on, but the subject– if it needed one– seesawed between this “saint” and Boy Scout camp circa 1967 (gotta save that for next time.) It’s strange indeed to make a painting today so closely aligned with religion, and yet thinking back over art history I am well aware that there were long times when it was strange if paintings did NOT align with religion in some way. 

But the male nude? Well, honestly, why not? There are so many artists producing mindless (and sometimes mindful) images of naked women out there that surround us on all fronts of contemporary society, who’s to say we don’t, or at least men don’t, need interesting images of men out there too? Anyone who’s read my WHERE’S THE BEEF essay would be familiar with my points on this issue, and if you need a more recent example of the female sexist imbalance out there, just look at this month’s Art in America (January 2014) in which six or eight decorative naked women splayed across various pages are “balanced” with a single image of a male sculpture who’s been castrated like a window mannequin. Maybe my painting is an antidote, LOL! But beyond all of this, however, you do come up against the traditional idea of the virgin birth, the sexless emanation of God through the literal guise of motherhood, a being apart from the rest of us all. Who’s to say, though, that such a feat cannot be accomplished, in a metaphoric way, through each and every one of us? Sounds like a job for art.”   Jack Balas