Interview: Chuck Jones, PhD
Luca Curci talks with Chuck Jones, PhD during CONTEMPORARY VENICE 2022 – 10th Edition, at Palazzo Albrizzi-Capello.

Chuck Jones, PhD, is a Knoxville, Tennessee, USA-based, primarily self-trained acrylic painter with a long adjacent career in Clinical Psychology. Born in Minnesota and raised in the plains of the Midwest, space, lines of site, room to wander, and color patterns have a great impact on his work. In recent years, he has had more than 50 pieces in national and international exhibits. As an aside, he adds the degree designation to distinguish him from ‘Chuck Jones’ the famous Warner Brothers animation gentleman whose cartoons so many of us grew up with.

Luca Curci – What is art for you?
Chuck Jones, PhD – To me, Art is an outward manifestation of a personal inner vision; of an internal felt sense, to use Eugene Gendlin’s term. Alternatively, perhaps Art is a kind of Alan Touring Test for determining sentience. That is, Art provides a sign of one sentient being’s ability to perceive and transform perception so another similarly (or even dissimilarly) sentient being can seek to resonate with what has been produced. After all, artistic activity shows up at least 64,000 years ago with the Neanderthal cave paintings in Spain. I do wonder how the impulse to create and to look has changed since then. Whatever ‘THAT’ is … and whatever it has changed into, that’s Art.

LC – What are you currently working on?
CJP – You may have detected how our world increasingly seems steeped in a stew of overwhelming chaos I think, as an antidote, I’ve decided to explore Einstein’s aphorism: Make it as simple as possible … but no simpler. It allows for addressing ambiguity while requiring adequate complexity. In that vein, images and color combinations come to me in night. I’m inviting my dreams and that ‘internal felt sense’ I just mentioned to steer me toward what authentically wants to be said from within – either through paint or through words. And usually, through both. It’s interesting to me how often that simplifying focus emerges as just some clean juxtaposition of hue and shape – a point-counterpoint of concepts preceding words, that had never occurred to me before. As a variation on this theme, about 2 years ago, while trying to figure out what I meant by ‘abstract,’ I hit on the idea of holding two incompatible ideas in my mind simultaneously, seeking what they might have in common. And then painting from whatever I noticed emerging from that challenge. Inevitably such results will be abstractions. Coming full circle from Albert’s inspiration, I selected and engaged the concepts, SIMPLE and COMPLEX. I’m still working on that idea in a hundred guises. The oxymoronic conjunction fascinates me – like something as unencumbered as jarringly contrasted colors or a hard-edge geometric shape filled with texture.

LC – Which is the role the artist plays in society? And contemporary art?
CJP – This question, of course, requires a value statement. For context: Think of the Overton-Window concept, that continuum, calibrating the range of ideas acceptable to the general populace. It measures from positions advocating Less Freedom to advocating More Freedom, with a slider, informed by current social mores, anchored centrally in whatever is acceptable and popular according to conventional values. To simplify the range encompassed, think: Enlightenment conceived as Autocratic Control vs conceived as Imaginative Liberation. Returning to my definition of art -the outward manifestation of a personal inner vision – one can present anything humanly conceivable to measure against this scale, evaluated as society moves one way or the other along the continuum. So….value statement, here….an artist can be a propagandist for conventionality (or even some delusional longing for reversion – e.g., back to the perfect 1950’s) or an explorer venturing where no person has gone before (or venturing where someone has gone before but with one’s own personal stamp of individuality along the way).

In the end, it’s all really hand stencils on the wall…..whoever did those first images was way the hell out there beyond the current conventionality, inventing a human expressiveness that had never before existed, in the process, nudging the social group forward toward new possibilities of reflectivity. I hope it was appreciated. I hope we can continue doing that. In my mind, Contemporary Art refers to work that’s on or a bit beyond the edge of what conventionally can be imagined. Something that brings us to contemplate what hasn’t occurred to us before. Something that might benefit us if we expand our conceptual imagination. A while back for a solo exhibition, I was asked how I approach my work. I joked, “Whereof I think, I paint. And, whereof I paint, I think.” I later realized that’s a perfectly accurate statement. To which I would now add, at the end, “And, I seek language to accurately articulate both.” That’s how I think of at least MY version of contemporary art. Creating marks about which to think anew. Finding words to thoughtfully comment on what we discover.

LC – Where do you find your inspiration?
CJP – Some French friends, Francoise Davoine and the late Jean-Max Gaudilliere, wrote a harrowing but profound book titled, History Beyond Trauma. They appended this subtitle: “Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one cannot stay silent.” Their statement is a play on the idea there is much outside our internal awareness driving our external lives; some of it incessantly shaping our path despite residing in consciously unthought territory; some memory or realization or idea or sense that insists on being recognized despite our desire to ignore or even disown it. In keeping with their wisdom, I paint from a foundational question, asking the deeper quiet space (which sometimes happens to be more turbulent), “What wants to be said.” Or similarly but slightly differently stated, “What wants to reveal itself?” The results often show up in dreams – more and more often as a dream of an actual painting. I’ve woken up before, after wandering through one of my imaginary night-time galleries thinking, “Wow! If I could onlycreate like that!” Only to realize I just did. In short, I like what inspires me. You see, I’m searching for the internal felt sense that’s trying to find its way to the surface – in words or in paint. It’s a powerful orienting tool, challenging to wield, meaningful to explore, often revealing to discover.

LC – What is the most challenging part about creating your artworks?
CJP – Patiently trusting what’s unfolding when I don’t know where it’s going – and especially if it’s going in some counterintuitive direction (like mixing Teal and Yellow).

LC – In which way the artwork presented in our exhibition is connected with the exhibition’s theme?
CJP – My painting (Suggestion of a Field) plays on the idea of a landscape of the mind; an ambiguous allusion to the colors and shapes of memory (see below) counterposed against colors and shapes engaging me right now. (In which landscape would you locate Teal and Iridescent Pear – again – against Yellow)?

LC – Can you explain something about the artworks you have in our exhibition?
CJP – I commented a couple of times above about my being moved by the felt sense of what wants to be said. That oddly constructed sentence means a lot to me even though I can see where it could easily sound like nonsense to the reader. Unpacking it a bit, using the above painting from the exhibit as an illustration: I grew up on the rolling plains in the middle of the United States. Think miles of open fields of grasses or an ocean of wheat. In the autumn, of course, the fields would turn a golden color – yellows to browns. That’s the background of this painting; the mood of my experiences of Fall. And the foreground derives, partly, from the indelible imagery of that period simultaneously comingled with my selection of incompatible juxtapositions – in this case, back to Teal and Yellow.

LC – Would you suggest a collaboration with us? What do you think about our services?
CJP – I paint. And think. And paint. And write. And I’m a bit of a recluse. A reflective one but reclusive, nonetheless. By contrast, you folks appear to be creatively social. You introduce artwork and artists to people and to each other. That sounds like a synergy to me. Though there is the issue of you residing awfully far away from the United States. (Or my residing awfully far from Europe).

LC – What is your idea about ITSLIQUID GROUP?
CJP – It’s an elegant metaphor for a collaborative, emergent process (i.e., the creation of art and the sharing of it with others) in need of a flexible, fluid, adaptable responsive concept. After all, how can Contemporary Art progress, if it cannot reflectively and imaginatively and interactively shift its shape?

LC – What are your suggestions about our services? Is there something more we can provide to artists?
CJP – What’s the perennial question for people, let alone artists? How do we generate a welcoming, interested, playful, supportive community? The Bonobos can do it. We humans seem to have created some….challenges for achieving such a quality of relatedness. From the snapshots of ITSLIQUID events I’ve seen, you also appear to be striving in that community direction. Thoughts? Much more concretely, I haven’t been able to find current shots of the Contemporary Venice 2022 exhibit. Is there a brochure? Or a tour? So I could see my painting in situ?