The Rhythm That Moves

from The Looking Glass magazine
November 2000

With his hot selling paintings in galleries across the U.S., Justin Love has begun to secure a permanent niche in the art world. His style, which evokes a response from even the dispassionate, is at once precocious, daring and lyrical. Gordon James of Looking Glass Magazine welcomed the opportunity to talk with him of his beginnings, and of his current philosophy.
GJ: Tell me a bit about what brought you, an accomplished musician as well, to art, and where you've come since the early days.
JL: Well, I saw the Beatles on television in the 60's, and I said to myself. That's the kind of job I'd like. So, I learned to play electric guitar, I started writing songs---had a few bands in the city. I made some records. I then, later, decided to pick up art as a hobby.
GJ: Did you start out immediately in the abstract format?
JL: I would put down whatever came into my head. It started simply putting paint to canvas or paper. I let the pictures paint themselves. In the beginning, I was very abstract. I was in Arizona at one time and I did this series of abstract cactus and desert scenes. When I returned to New York soon after, I noticed that everything was getting more complex in my work. I decided to simplify it and I started doing faces and portraits. At the time I wasn't making much money from my art. I relied on a vintage clothing business I had to provide money. The fabrics and designs in the clothing really influenced me. I starting putting unusual costumes on my subjects. I really played with saturating the color. I was fascinated that they had this very ethereal look about them. I painted so much that I would even see these characters standing by the side of the road as I drove in my car. My father was in the Navy and used to bring back these exotic fabrics from the ports of call. There were silks from Japan and China that were so bright and striking. I was also very stimulated by the posters of the psychedelic 60's from California.
GJ: Those colors of the far east are evident in your work.
JL: So, I painted and painted on this subject. And soon, I had a collection which I thought was worth showing. People liked it and started to buy my work. I had a painting career.
GJ: Where were you showing them?
JL: At first I just took them down to Soho and showed them on the street. One day, a man came and looked for about twenty minutes, then bought all of the paintings at once. I knew then that I could make a living from art. I already had learned to do the business of vintage clothes, so I thought: If I work at it I can sell paintings. And it is more than that too. I love to paint. Even when my band really takes off, I will still paint. It's so exciting adding paint and color to canvas or paper. It's creating something from nothing. Since I have no formal schooling, whenever I paint, its like taking a lesson. It's as though I open to the collective consciousness of art. I'm also looking forward to mixing my painting with music in the form of stage sets, costumes and videos.
GJ: That bigger picture is evident in your work. It's not surface work. It's not working simply with shapes, color and value. There's an obvious message in your work.
JL: I think it's exciting to be alive. It's exciting to make something of your time.
GJ: I don't see a lot of depression or fear in your work.
JL: Oh, I could show you some depressing stuff. And I could show you how I evolved to go beyond the depressing. I did a show last year entitled Through A Hole To Heaven. When you're just painting. And painting. And painting. Everything comes up. Everything that people said. What you think about this or that. Sometimes, I found myself going into this darkness, I found that if I just kept painting, going over layers and layers, that often something really beautiful would come out. Not superficially pretty, but an innate beauty. So you're going through this hole, deeper and deeper into the darkness and finally, if you keep painting, you come out in heaven. When you get that really great picture---in the end---you feel like, wow, it's beautiful. Even if it started out in this unsettledness.
GJ: Where has your head been lately?
JL: The last few years, I moved away from the more 'pop' approach to art. I've always been a pop musician though. My early influence lyrically in painting was pop music.
GJ: Is that the complexity I see in your current work?
JL: Well, I do take life as a 'sticky soup.' It's very sticky sometimes. There's so much that we have to sort through. No one is going to share with you exactly what to do. You have to try yourself. After you paint for awhile you get more complex. You see more possibilities to play with. That doesn't mean that even now that I don't sometimes go back and do something very simple. But you also learn to leave the magic that you see in the painting whether its simple or complex. But, like writing a pop song, you look for a 'hook' that touches your heart. For me, it's much the same with painting. I know about music and the pop culture that has gone before, and I want to evolve to the next place. I find that usually, the paintings that I like the best are also the ones that others like the best.

You're welcome to visit Justin Love at his studio gallery 'Loveland' situated in a 103 year old country church on the outskirts of Woodstock, NY; Churchland Road, or by appointment at: 845-246-5520

• A Magical Landscape of Dreams
• By JOAN D'ARCY
• From SunStorm/Fine Art, Winter 1994

"the flat sound of my wooden clogs on the cobblestones, deep, hollow and powerful, is the note I seek in my painting." -Paul Gauguin

yyyIt is not surprising that Justin Love is a musician/composer as well as a visual artist. Many believe the meanings behind musical notes, and the meanings beyond colors, spring from a common source. The major difference is that with music there is no point where you can seize the experience and hold it. Music is on-going sound, and as such, continues to become. It can be said that an audible composition lives solely in the world of the imagination, yours and the composer's.

yyy In his art, Justin Love stills and holds such moments, trapping them within the perimeter of foursquare space and lulling them into submission with sensuous color. With a simplicity of form and plane, Love devises mysterious yet totally convincing images. He nails them down with the riveting presence of physical ecstasy and the hollowed-out spaces of loss.

yyhNow, when so much art is ironic and distanced, Justin Love cajoles the viewer into an intimate participation. Long before one is aware there is an emotional ransom to be extracted, one falls into his colors as though a lookingglass.

yyy "I choose color as the initital step in involving the viewer. It's emotional content precludes any intellectual process. Once inside the painting, the viewer will usually stay for the whole trip." Justin Love states. There is red beyond ordinary experience, and deep vermilions. Complex blues-cerulean, Ming, cobalt, Prussian, forget-me-not-blacks shadowed with purple and the exultant pyrotechnics of yellow and green. Some of Love's pastels have the theatrical vigor of rose-colored gels; pinks, terra cottas, blazing Iranian reds, the dazzle of gold, a fast streak of magenta. A Daighilev ballet of color; barbaric, exotic, decadent. Everyday hues have undergone some chemical process of intensification. An alchemy of distortion from which they emerge heightened and keyed-up. The viewer has gained admittance into a Commonwealth of Pleasure, a paradiso. Love feels that "each day has its owns colors. I imagine myself colorless, clear, lank...open to the geography and light of that special day. I am not a camera. I think like a prism.

yyy" He believes that color can be as evocative as words. That a pigment holds the exact counterpart of every emotion, every nuance of feeling. This is the visual interpretation of Mallarme's theory of the musicality of poetry where rhymes are structured like microscopic snowflakes, forming intricate constellations through affinity. Certain works are drawn together as iron filings are drawn to a magnet. So it seems that Love's colors are annealed in the magnetic field of his artist's eye into patterns of meaning. Love's paintings are naminally surreal, but voluptuous in their bold allure and seduction of the eye. The cobalts, pinks and purples, and the reverberant blacks are conceptions of a master colorist, without constraint. Love's colors express-they are not meant to describe. His drawing may be jiggly or weighty, but it is never irresolute. He forever eludes integration into reality by jolting, fractured perspectives and by his eccentric formats.

yyy"My studio is the painted world in which I work. I like my paintings stacked and hung and tilted around me. I feel excited by the Byzantine life that colors lead within their baroque and burnished frames" quotes the artist.

yyy Working in Sennelier pastels, some of Love's work has a comic book flavor with speed lines and zappen bullseyes. In his world of dreams and dreaming, these symbols work well. He also shows us the goofy instability of people and objects as they float, untethered, in the deep spaces of nighttime lives. Sometimes a void provokes anguish, and at others, it is a storybook sky where a smiley moon cradles some lost star to sleep. Love knows what we may not-that an ordered, perfectly aligned dream is no dream at all.

yyy "I use symbols as points of departure. Mozart, the Beatles, Lovers, mermaids...the vocabulary of pop culture. "A ticket to ride" says Love. Reassured by the toyland character of Love's fantasies, the viewer is disarmed. Then, with the clipped speech and vocabulary of pure color, he plunges us into a very adult melee with one tender, piercing line. Love can activate a maleficent animism, bloody of claw and lambent of eye; clownish...but exact as a knife.

yyyMost of Justin Love's pictures are as inviting as a skip down Lollipop Lane, yet there is something in his art that keeps its distance even as it engulfs. It miniaturizes the viewer, yet in another sense the viewer is the grown-up tolerant of such playfulness. so we are led on and on. It is a distillation of sentiment, the essence of experience, and we can contemplate it in safety even while we may be ravished by it. We persuade ourselves of our reason as we set off gaily across Lemonade Lake.

yyyWith Justin Love the viewer seems to be looking through the wrong end of a telescope at a brilliantly clear world with deep perspectives and sharp corners of hallucinatory shadow. The observer accepts this view knowing it is a magic landscape that cannot be verified, but longing to live there all the same.

Justin Love continues to be a musician as well as an artist. He is almost as bemused by the juxtaposition of musical notes as he is by his voyages into Prussian blue. A native of New York, he is self taught and has exhibited worldwide. He lives in Woodstock, the art colony, in upstate New York.