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steve elkins > Norton Wisdom Los Angeles, California 2003 http://www.nortonwisdom.com/
steve elkins > Norton Wisdom Los Angeles, California 2003 http://www.nortonwisdom.com/
steve elkins > Norton Wisdom Santa Monica, California 2004 http://www.nortonwisdom.com/
steve elkins > Norton Wisdom At home in Los Angeles 2004 http://www.nortonwisdom.com/
steve elkins > Norton Wisdom Santa Monica, California 2003 http://www.nortonwisdom.com/
steve elkins > ELKINS: I've noticed that something really unusual happens when you paint in front of an audience. When all the music stops, and you put down your brush, you sometimes grab a camera from the side of the stage and take a photograph of how your painting ended. What's unusual is that every time I've seen you do this, the audience laughs. What this says to me, is that in a single performance, you manage to subvert the entire audience's understanding of what the experience of a painting is generally understood to be: a finished image which is the product of unseen work. In other words, through the experience of watching you work, the audience ends up finding the idea of arriving at a finished image through painting to actually be funny, even though your paintings are not abstract...they are usually scenes of recognizable images. WISDOM: Well, no work of art is ever finished. The idea that a painting represents a finite point in one's experience, is not necessarily true. The paintings I do at home, are painted on over and over again, over the course of ten to fifteen years, so they are the layering of my experiences through that period of time. You can see my struggles, and my mistakes, and my answers to those mistakes, in the final image which remains on the canvas. In the performance painting, you see that same struggle in motion, rather than in a finished image. You see me in continual movement and change, without aiming for a finish line. So in the studio painting, I have to learn how the motion of my life relates to a still image. In the performance painting, I have to learn how the "fixed point" of me relates to the motion I find myself in.
steve elkins > I'm not interested in making paintings without mistakes. That's why I typically don't perform with musicians who play songs. I'm not up there to be a chained monkey, like an actor following a script. I'm up there to paint what I hear, and go somewhere new. If the musicians don't share that interest in going somewhere new, then I'm not interested. One of the important things about an audience when I paint live, is that we all go on the journey together. By that, I am not saying that the performers onstage just take the audience where they want to go. I've found that the musicians and I get a sense of the consciousness of the audience in the discovery that takes place on stage. So in a sense, the audience helps paint the paintings, and helps create the music. On the other hand, if I'm in my studio, and I think about an audience for the painting, the work crumbles. In that situation, an artist can't be looking over their shoulder, wondering what people are thinking. ELKINS: To what extent do you think painting is a musical activity, if at all? WISDOM: I think painting is a musical activity. When I'm on stage, what I'm doing is taking the themes, rhythms, colors, attitudes, and phrases that the musicians are playing, but I'm translating that linear progression of time into a two-dimensional image. I'm simply translating those ingredients of music, which depend on time, onto a physical surface, so that they can be experienced without the aspect of time. The musicians are reversing that simultaneously. They take the two dimensional image that is appearing on my canvas, and transform it back into something that unfolds in time.
steve elkins > WISDOM: Well, Nels has committed his life to this vision that he has. He's very focused on not compromising in what he believes is time well spent: creating something vital and relevant to our nature. And I think he's created something inextinguishable. It can't be undone. I think time will show that there's something priceless about what he has contributed to music. And he's paid the price for it. You know, you hear every so often of guitarists who have had to sell their guitars to pay their rent, but Nels has had to sell his guitar strings to feed himself. What an inspiration to know that kind of commitment exists, especially knowing how utterly non-exhibitionistic he is about it. To work in such close proximity to that kind of fire and sincerity...I'm honored. Nels and I recently performed at a big fund raiser at the Laguna Beach Art Museum. He showed them what music will sound like three centuries from now, and we were never invited back. That's what I like about him. ELKINS: I remember being on a hiking trip in rural Utah a year ago, and stopping at this bar in the middle of nowhere called "Bit and Spur," and discovered that the bartender and all the locals knew who you are, because you perform there. WISDOM: Oh yeah, I know Bit and Spur. Near Zion National Park. I play there a lot, actually. ELKINS: You've performed with a lot of unusual people in a lot of unusual places. What's the strangest gig that you've played? WISDOM: They're all strange. They all start out with, "No you're not going to paint in my club!" That's the first thing I hear when I walk in the door.
steve elkins > There was a Banyan gig at the Hammerstein Ballroom, which is an opera house in New York. I was painting in a pink chiffon nightgown. A little negligee. The head stage manager was a teamster, and the whole night he just rode me, and rode me. Finally, the gig was over, and I went to take a friend backstage, and he stopped me. I looked at him, and said: "The gig's over man, you don't have any authority over me," and I slapped him. The next thing I know, these two goons grabbed me. I said to them, "What are you going to do? Beat me up?" As I said it, I felt this really cold draft on my back. They had opened the back stage door and threw me outside into a snowstorm. I had to get on my hands and knees in the snow to beg as they shut the door. Now, being outside in a pink negligee in New York in the middle of a snowstorm, somebody's going to take you in, but whoever takes you in...your life is never be the same, let me just tell you. I managed to get around the block, and get back in the front door before security was alerted, and before my knight in shining armor could sweep me off my feet, and take me to wherever his castle was. The stage manager eventually won that night, because I got very drunk, and started vomiting on myself, and they had to carry me out by the armpits. I remember looking up at him with vomit all over me, as they dragged me by, and said, "If you ever want to get back at Norton, you just leave him alone." The funny thing is that, in my experience, the communities that you would think would be much more open to the dissolving of different artistic disciplines, like San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York, are actually much more rigid. People in those places seem much more concerned with protecting the status quo of the art world. But when you get out into places like northern Minnesota, you know, these frozen tundra Paul Bunyan sort of environments, or The Bit and Spur in rural Utah, like you mentioned, or in Turkey, where I just performed in Istanbul...I find that people in these places tend to be much more open to the creative experience, than people in the so-called art centers of the U.S. -Los Angeles, California 2003
Norton Wisdom

Los Angeles, California

2003

http://www.nortonwisdom.com/
steve elkins > Norton Wisdom Los Angeles, California 2003 http://www.nortonwisdom.com/
Norton Wisdom

Los Angeles, California

2003

http://www.nortonwisdom.com/
See photo in gallery
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