interview / liz rice mccray
Clippings from newspapers and lost pictures of people found
in thrift stores, these imagesreflect perfectly in Gordon’spainted reality.
Gordon’s humor transcends through his paintings and in his words. Essentially Gordon becomes the same as his paintings and the paintings become the same as Gordon.
Layer upon layer the paintings transform. The evolution is incredible, each layer more detailed than the coat before but some days Gordon paints over hours and hours of work to his girlfriends dismay, ashe says, “a night eye can
see mistakes that a daytime workman is too proud to notice”. Objects under the size of a dime
are perfectly legible. Gordon only paints absolute detail on objects that are crucial to the story and sometimes every object is indispensable whichends up in “back aches and a lotof happy nights.” Gordon was introduced to me by PM Tenore about three years ago and ever since I have gotten to know the people, characters and objects in his paintings as if they were long lost friends, but never will I truly know the whole story.
While interviewing Gordon
I started looking through
his history of digital communications, texts, emails and verbal messages. Some months the communication is constant, his thoughts, ideas and extremely entertaining one- liners. The emails are almost a
foreign language, a language that he somehow has taught me to understand.
When communication goes quiet, I know Gordon’s thoughts have become fruition. But remember fruit goes bad which brings me back to a memory
of Gordon spending three
days painting Pete Rose giving himself a facial with tinfoil, adorned with A Fred Flint Stone chest tattoo in the expensivereal state of “Wodkamacheck.”Only for him to realize that wasn’t the solution and with this Gordon redirected his energy into painting a shrub that no longer exists in the piece.