Thimble Theater of Cruelty
Artist Tom Neely stalks his inner werewolf
By Ron Garmon
Tom Neely is gaunt, friendly, and his light Texas accent jingles like coins in a mortician's pocket. We're pacing jagged oblong circles inside the Black Maria Gallery in Atwater, with two recent series of paintings ranged in ferocious symmetry around us. These form a show intriguingly titled Self Indulgent Werewolf. The artist talks earnestly of Egon Schiele and Lucian Freud while indicating the dangly bits of wasted cartoony flesh spaced tastefully along the walls.
"Werewolf Fugue" is a series of rampant-male Guigonal scenes featuring a lupine title character; his sexual conquest of various knobby maidens forming a disconnected narrative with surfaces burnished like spinner-rack Dario Argento. "Self-Indulgence" depicts a man busy at the dialectical process of eating himself and shitting out his double. This naked figure, goofily elongated and cherubic as a 1930s comic-strip bumpkin, is a nameless approximation too individuated to allow easy symbolic distance. He's every self-nagging, self-cribbing auto- cannibal who ever had to live by the proceeds of invention; the cud that chews us.
I throw out a smirk to haul myself from the abyss. "How much of what we see in Silver Lake or Hollywood are you lampooning?" I say, grinning. "Kind of all of it," he deadpans. "I think it's more directly talking about art in itself, the nature of the art world, and what we're expected to and continue to do - kind of devour ourselves and shit ourselves out. The narcissistic nature of art. This is to me more self-referential than satirical."
Back when I first met the sepulchral Mr. Neely, he and I were both fringe characters in the local zine underground. Impressed by his sly, sweet marginal drawings of anthropomorphic love-monkeys in places like Scram magazine, I had him to do the final cover of my own title, Worldly Remains. His feathery, Archie-inspired depiction of Bush and Cheney licking the boots of Ilsa, She-Wolf of the SS, provided a fine send-off when the title again proved ahead of its time by folding before all the others.
His subject matter became ever more bizarre, but the whimsical technique remained. "Stylistically," Neely allows, "I'm definitely influenced by comic-strip artists of the 1930s, like [Popeye creator] E.C. Segar and George Herriman [author of Krazy Kat], old stuff."
He smiles, and proudly upturns his slender forearms to show Segar-perfect replicas of Popeye's anchor tats. "Also Floyd Gottfredson, who did the Mickey Mouse comics from the 1930s to the '60s."
I think my ideas come more from a fine-arts background than comics," Neeley avers. "Lucian Freud influenced quite a few of these panels," he says, pointing out a particularly gawky posture, "while this one" - indicating a ghastly parody of Saturn - "is an obvious Goya reference. Even at a young age, I was interested in artists like Egon Schiele and Lucian Freud and there's something like the distortions of '30s comics artists that draws me. El Greco, kind of distorted and elongated."
Would he cop to a particularly disarming case of R. Crumb's "cuteness disease"? "I think I've been kinda struggling with that from my earliest stuff," he says, smiling ruefully. "I'm recovering from that a bit. My earlier work was definitely that, but I'm moving further and further away from cartooniness and more toward a hybrid of the cartoon style and the more naturalistic humanistic aspects."
Neely's new graphic novel, The Blot, marks a brilliant, blackly humorous milestone in this transition. A near-wordless fantasia about a man pursued by splatters of black ink through a comic panel Arcadia, the story plucks heartstrings like a sour Charlie Chaplin movie; all odd quirks and brief flutters of love warped by the menace of blotchy annihilation. The pages crawl with monstrously humorous loathing, lending Neely's flashes of compassion a pale illumination of charity. The narrative is fragmented into stand-alone stories, imparting something of the formal structure of an EC horror comic of the 1950s. This in turn lends further complexity and context to the rolling nightmare Neely sets loose upon the reader.
Compounded of chaos, Puritan guilt, anxiety, and other such deadweight anomie now rolling off our culture like flop sweat, the Blot is an ugly abstraction, but not a mysterious one. That Neely's main character first notices the cancerous thing splatted on a newspaper's front page is a significant clue, but the artist offers no further insight. "I like for the audience to make up its mind on that one," he demurs. "There are many different answers to that, but I try to keep them all ambiguous." The Blot has been nominated for an Ignatz Award (named after the cranky, brick-toting mouse in Krazy Kat), under the category "Promising New Talent," by the indie-minded SPX Convention. Neeley's imposingly-weird sculpture of the novel's sad-sack main character stands between us while we chat. The figure, naked but for the silly derby hat pulled over his head in comic affirmation of his own repugnance, is ungainly, slab-footed and vulnerable as a skinned lamb or any of one of us.
"How does one get to know his inner werewolf?" I smartass.
Neely looks abashed. "Grow a beard?" he shoots back, fingering his own hirsute adornment, bluntly cut in devil-fashion, like a 19th-century anarchist-of-the-deed. I had a Warren Zevon quote ready for him, but he still wanted to talk, Rasolnikov-like, of motive. "I'm really still trying to pinpoint the meaning of what I created," he begins. "While I'm working, it's more a free-form process of putting down raw ideas and emotions as they come into my head. I'm, at this point, still not fully aware of what I have to say, but this stream of raw consciousness is where I do my work. The Blot started out as individual paintings, and as I did more of them an individual story grew out of it. In early stages it was all an experiment. As these stories develop through the paintings, I start to better understand what I have to express. It's still a little bit ambiguous to myself."
Neely thrives in the porous region between fine and commercial art, gleefully characterizing today's art scene as "a mess."
"There's so much going on in so many different styles. Maybe it's easier to characterize things retrospectively. There's always been this division between high art and commercial art sensibilities. I've always been stuck between these extremes and I think a lot of us are now. There's more stuff hanging in galleries that has to do with illustrations than conceptual fine art."
Self Indulgent Werewolf continues at the Black Maria until October 15, with Neely doing a signing of The Blot on September 27. The graphic novel is available on his website (Iwilldestroyyou.com) along with several of its more daintily horrific images. Tom's ongoing Thimble Theater of Cruelty affirms the bleak wisdom of the late Al Hewetson, an influential horror comics writer whose 1970s titles Shock, Nightmare, and Psycho thrived on a single, simple catechism: "What is horror? Horror is you."
Published: 09/20/2007
DIGG | del.icio.us | REDDIT
