Review of Exhibit of H. Joe Waldrum Paintings 2008

H. Joe Waldrum
By Kathleen Sloan
HERALD Reporter 2008

H. Joe Waldrum is recognized as an avatar of the Truth or Consequences art scene. He is no longer alive, in the mundane sense, but his presence is palpable in his art, which is always displayed at Rio Bravo Fine Arts, once owned by him. Waldrum, opened his gallery July 31, 2001; provided an ‘anchor’ gallery and his own iconoclast presence, drawing other artists to the area. His gallery is located in the former Ace Hardware building which he acquired in a trade for several pieces of his artwork.

Waldrum’s life and by extension, art, is complex and contradictory. He did not eschew normalcy as much as he tried it and then rejected it as not suitable for him. In his book Ando en Cueros (I Walk Stark-naked), Waldrum describes his break with his religious indoctrination, academia, abstract expressionism, and exclusionary attitudes towards art.

He describes his post-graduate work at Fort Hays Kansas State College: “I felt as though the faculty was joking when they used "art-speak" in their lectures…later as a faculty member I could no longer feign student naiveté…They felt I should be more respectful; after all, they had allowed me into their inner circle. I felt bamboozled and I wanted out of the circle.”

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Waldrum left academia in 1971 to live in Texas hill county, working in isolation. “…While working on my abstract expressionism in the barn on Johnson Creek, the epiphany occurred—I wasn’t an abstract expressionist!” Waldrum was so stunned by this revelation that he couldn’t paint or draw for three months. “My heroes were Adolph Gottlieb, Willem de Kooning, and Mark Rothko. The most influential teacher I had was William Bertrum Sharp. All four were abstract expressionists and I had become very good at performing stunts that looked similar to the work of all those four; I had galleries that believed in my abstract expressionism; I had earned a master’s degree and I had taught one semester of college as an abstract expressionist; I had been offered a one-man show at an “important” museum.” What horrified Waldrum was his unconscious appropriation of their signature touch which he defines as an “ordinary"–– the look of a piece of art by which it cannot be mistaken for work coming from another artist. This
definition of "ordinary" is based on the proposition that everybody makes marks differently, and that those marks (like a signature) are peculiar to himself or herself alone; that to imitate another’s marks is to perpetrate a fraud. He therefore eradicates touch in his next series of bare-bones abstract paintings he calls “tripartite forms”––flat rectangles of color placed within each other or stacked totem-pole fashion. “Nothing remains except the three color-weights, the relationship of each trio, and the feeling that something is right.”

In his isolation, Waldrum also re-thinks artists who have changed him other than his hero abstract expressionists. His descriptions of their art encapsulate the formal qualities of his own work to come.

“Chardin, Caravaggio, and Morandi. These three artists gave me guidance when I abandoned abstract expressionism.”

Caravaggio: “They contain people that look like illuminated still life's in which all the laces holding the shapes in place have been drawn tight and tied.”

Morandi: “With a few pencil marks, he filled a piece of paper with Mediterranean light…With amazing clarity and the deftest use of paint, he suffused his paintings with light.”

Chardin:“…the weight of the color reflects just the exact amount of light required; copper reflects the exact color-weight of copper….there are no questions. There is a refreshing quietude that tells us everything is in place.”

Waldrum’s ‘ordinary’ is full-blown in his world-famous paintings and prints of adobe churches. They are a masterful combination of the qualities he admires. The churches’ walls are color-weighted so that they fill with light, operating like wind-filled sails. Strongly demarcated black shadows, devoid of light, empty of air, operate like pinions holding the sails in suspension. The edges, where void and sail meet, operate like halyard and main lines pulled taut. His prior ‘tripartite’ works have given him mastery over the canvases’ edge—not cutting, or ending the composition, but like a ship, containing inner tensions while making an overall statement and movement.

These landmark paintings of churches were done in spite of their subject matter––as ideal forms. He says “I consider religious paintings to be scenes of psychosis…My paintings of the churches of northern New Mexico have nothing to do with my religious convictions.” He describes his childhood experience of church: “I was taken into a building where a man raved that if I did any of the things that seemed normal and pleasurable to me, I would burn in eternal hell-fire and damnation. And then came his incredible proposition—that if I was good and didn’t do any of the things that were pleasurable to me, I would get to spend eternity with all the Protestants sitting around me in that building, The Church of Christ in Savoy, Texas. I slowly looked around me at the people in the congregation and chose eternal hell-fire and damnation.”

In 1986 Waldrum was asked to judge a show at Fort Hays Kansas State University, and to write an essay for the exhibition brochure. Wary that he would be censored, as he was as a graduate student and teacher, he first made them promise to print what he wrote. In part he wrote: “Out of almost 500 slides submitted to this show, there was little that contained adventure, surprise or inspiration. But this is not a condition peculiar to Hays, Kansas.….If we could flush our minds of what we know, and forget our degrees, we might find ourselves teetering on the brink of what the mountebanks of the university system cannot understand…In reality, the art we are about to make contains the seeds of sanity for our time."

“Teetering on the brink will refresh you.”