by Ernest Hogan
I’m an artist as well as
a writer. I started out wanting to be a cartoonist as a kid. People say my
writing is very visual, cinematic.
I draw a lot. I’ve even
painted. Recently, my mom texted me some pictures she took of one of my
paintings. They illustrate this post.
It’s a big one. The biggest I've ever done. It’s not a great
painting but has a helluva story behind it.
It was after the great
Vietnam/Watergate crash. Gerald Ford was president. America was in deep funk. I
was trying to find my way in world that didn’t seem to have a use for me.
I fell into the community
college thing. Me and school never got along so good, but I was trying to make
the student thing work because people kept telling me that education was the answer
to everything. If I tried really hard I could get good grades, and it threw me
into depression. I was a sad zombie student.
My art classes helped
save my sanity. I got paint and ink all over my clothes, face and hair. Instead
of dragging my easel into a corner to hide like everybody else, I would set up
in the middle of the studio and make a spectacle of myself.
I was an artist. There
was no doubt about that. But what could I do with it?
In a painting class the
teacher gave us an assignment of doing a totally abstract painting. The
teachers were all staunch modernists, who liked it when your art didn’t look
like anything, and thought “storytelling” was a dirty word. I always “got”
abstract art, and would even dabble in it as a kid, so I dove in.
The result is the
painting in the photos.
First, I threw up a bunch
of bright colors, knowing that my teachers didn’t like them. Then I splashed
turpentine on the oil paint because they told me that it would just wash it
off—note that the canvas still has paint on it.
Then I dribbled paint
mixed with turpentine and let it drip. The problem was it always dripped in one
direction—down. How monotonous. In my frustration, I turned the canvas on its
side, and kept turning it. The problem with that is that ended up creating a
vertical/horizontal, architectonic grid.
The problem was the
canvas itself. The rectangular shape. Those four corners. And gravity.
I had to come to limits
of abstract expression.
If only I could paint in
orbit . . . yeah, Jackson Pollock in space! That would be something!
Of course, I couldn’t do
that, but I could write about it.
And why not make the
artist a Chicano? No one had done that before. Why not test the limits of
science fiction while I was at it?
It was another long, hard
struggle, but eventually I came up my first published novel, Cortez on Jupiter.
My teachers weren’t that
impressed with the painting, which was okay, because I wasn’t very impressed
with them, or the fine art world. I don’t “get” these people who buy art, and
don’t quite believe that they’re real. To me they’re like UFOs, Bigfoot, or El
Chupacabras.
The question is now, what
should I do with it? Maybe its connection to the novel will make someone want
to buy it . . . My wife suggested we put it in the bigger house we may buy
someday.
Maybe I should sign all
four corners and scrawl instructions on the back to turn it regularly. Or it
could be mounted on slow motor that would turn it . . .
There I go, testing the
limits again.
Ernest Hogan, the Father
of Chicano Science Fiction is working on novel that he in composing like mural.
