JONATHAN HARTSHORN . Interview with Hudson
.when and how did you begin making art?
This is a loaded question ---Usually I sound dumb/stoner/in interviews but since my family shot (himself/herself/grandpa coal miner) I feel I can play the role of stupid,
when I was a child I used to make pictures with paint, crayon, pencils, construction paper, etc. of haunted houses/trees/freddy Krueger and Jason/ghosts/butterflies but I also was nominated to draw the “get well soon” cards for classmates who had to be in the hospital for extended stays. It wasn’t until I was 23 that I started making paintings/drawings/sculptural installations in a studio type setting—this was very soon after I was court ordered to house arrest, sent to rehab, and put on probation for alcohol abuse/second dui.
It is all a little too cliché and h-Hallmark-y and pathetic--- after I got out of jail, I moved in with my dad whom I had not had a relationship with for many years. At the time I went to aa meetings with my dad. he was in AA(same with my mom)—---so I had given up at this point with trying to hide the shit pants kind of drunk I was and it was while I was ankle bracelet house arrest that I decided to start painting and drawing (again). and my father let me use his basement as a studio. While I was in rehab I had a counselor who saw my sketchbook and asked if she could show my work to her friend. Her friend turned out to be an art professor who( according to my counselor )said I had talent---not sure if I have talent but my counselor thought I should pursue art in college. After a year of sobriety I went to cleveland state university and studied art and art history. How I make art is me now trying to re-trace and be in brain I had when I was in dad’s basement—I am almost there.
.do you work everyday and /or have scheduled studio time?
I am very sporadic--- im sober but I still have very addictive and obsessive behavior issues. I go for days/2 weeks then I have this craving---I need to make/show work to feel balanced—like I need to “spell” things out--- to make room for more breathe and calm.
.when you begin making a drawing or a painting, do you have a plan and do you keep to it?
In the studio and with shows-I try to be as many people as possible—sometimes I am happy with how the work ends up-sometimes I wish I had never made it.-not necessarily multiple personality disorder but with art im trying to order the personalities and let everyone have a word. With my outside of art jobs, (working at libraries/teaching drawing at univ. of NM) I am pretty planned and ordered---but this is how I pay the bills. Art is more to me than a pay check I get nervous when I sell my work---I get nervous when I don’t…pretty fucked either way.
.are most works completed in one sitting or is it a lengthy process where things are worked and reworked over days or weeks?
I work both ways so both time frames apply. the actual object could be made over a short period with long winded technique---taking a year from reference to reach outcome where as a painting I have had for years is completed in a 10 minute tripped out session.
.for you, what is the most difficult thing about making art?
Showing it
.is it difficult for you to spend weeks or months with not making any art?
Not always.
.you send me lots of images so i know you make lots of stuff, do you edit? how do you edit?
I would have to know of specific work to tell you how I edited but I do edit in some kind of after thought pink eye crust. to be honest I feel there are a few people in my head at one time so I try to show everything in emails because I have not had in my eyes a successful time showing my work in any gallery or museum. This is my fault. however I feel it is my new goal to have a balance in the translation from studio to space shown. showing in an email is easy way out---so far the best way to show people for me is in email.
My emails are different than any other way I show art in a gallery/parking lot/museum/library. I use email as an experiment in desperation---i have sent emails to you (and everyone I could find in the art world) for years now but You have seen almost everything I have ever made-good, bad, very very bad. I intentionally did this to allow for noise and signal to exist at the same time—a noise-signal duality (term coined by Bart Kosko)—this might have been revealed over a course of a few years. But you are one of maybe five people from the huge list of contacts who still look at my emails. i burned bridges but to me this process has made my work better
.some of your works have titles that are poems, poems that you have written. are the poems written specifically as the titles for the art or are they written as poems and at a later date ascribed to the piece?
this poetic name placemat I think is a recent thing---There have been many times in the past when I named a piece too fast, very stupidly, or not at all and so what I make now-that has survived ends up with three titles applied over each other--- I still try to listen to the moment---but I try to keep titles separate until I have to show the work.
.is drawing your primary medium?
no-
.is it ideas or experiences that most influence your work?
I tend to be very autobiographical with my work- but to try and answer I say experience influences the ideas---I have to look at a specific work to know where the eggs
.you give a lot of work away to people, people you know but also people you don't know, especially by placing work anonymously in public places where it can be taken. what is that about?
the hardest thing for me has always been the depression and anxiety surrounded with showing my work. I see the act of placing the work in the outside as a ritual. for example I was moving and I left a framed painting on parking block type pole/leaning on a light pole in a parking lot behind my old place right before we moved as a means to have good energy moving my family into what is our first house. the painting actually fell off the next day—was reinstalled (placed on the gravel and leaning on the light pole) by someone and then it was gone the next day. this is a little boring ---I don’t believe or think im doing anything new but part of the concept behind sending the work away has been to have control over how my work or art in general is acquired.
i like the idea of a fancy collector in ny or la having one of my works while at the same time-I give a coworker’s 11 year old son a painting in exchange for a picture in the moments soon after of him holding the painting---in many ways the price of him giving me rights to the image of him holding the painting in exchange for the object is just as absurd as his paying a few thousand dollars for the painting in a gallery. both ideas are crazy but the image of him holding the painting comes across to me as showing energy beyond the human condition—the input matches the output—my altered sense of being during the making is transferred to my coworker and his son---i can see alteration of the object as catalyst in the images of their faces after giving them the painting. it’s the act of giving the catalyst (as you have spoke of) ----im not having the object play center stage.
.generally, which quality do you prefer: precise or blurred?
I think I need both but not at the same time.
Jonathan Hartshorn (b.1976) is a New Mexico based mixed-media artist. Hartshorn is a graduate of both The University of New Mexico (BFA), and The School of Visual Arts, New York (MFA). He has had solo exhibitions at Galerie Sébastien Bertrand, Geneva, Roberts & Tilton, Culver City, CA, Feature Inc., New York, Essex Flowers, New York, Samson Projects, Boston and MoMA P.S.1, among others.
