Seeing the Essentials

The Sacred and The Mundane, the new show by Jersey City Artist Ken Bastard opened last night at LITM, a bar and art gallery on Newark Avenue, where he is also known as the Artist in Residence.

The centerpiece of the show—at least it’s the picture featured on posters and other promotional materials as well as the picture with the highest profile placement; you can't helpd but notice it through the window when you pass by the on the sidewalk—is “The Nuns,” a piece depicting four religious, in full habit of their order, lighting cigarettes.

Ken’s style—he says he’s mostly a self-taught artist—seamlessly combines comic book illustration and impressionistic painters.

The nuns appear to be well into their middle age, maybe even elderly, and one gets the feeling their cigarettes are being sneaked. They are clearly enjoying a moment, perhaps that’s the essence of a smoke. The mundane part may be the nuns, the sacred part the moment shared and not the other, perhaps more obvious way around. The new collection prompts these sort of reconsiderations of perceptions.

Bastard comes out of Punk Rock, his real surname is Conlow. The guy’s a survivor, by default now an elder statesman of the local art scene. The considerable turnout for the opening reception is indicative of the respect for the man by the members of our town’s art circles.

It’s been a few decades since Punk was born. Punk is usually misunderstood as being all about Nihilism, thank you Sid & Rotten. The ethos is actually about honesty. In music, it was stripping away the celebrity and pointless jamming in order to expose that honesty and deliver the essence of the song. Punk music went back to the basics of Rock & Roll. Sure, there was cynicism, which was a justifiably honest response to the times, but it also contained hope and empowerment. More importantly, it was about the unadorned strength of the essential.

According to the Reception announcement: “Ken Bastard has put together a show that portrays the most simple aspects of everyday life. Paying bills, washing dishes, going to work as a reaction to the overload of Iconic imagery that abounds in the current Art Scene. No Tattoo influenced Art. No Comic Books. No Movies. No Nothing.”

The last line seemed most noteworthy: “Just Life at its most Sacred and Mundane.”

One might think, at its most ordinary, these precious and usually overlooked moments of life, are the most holy. It’s an observation expressed throughout history. Whitman and Ginsberg come immediately to mind, both well regarded by the Punks. What is more mundane than your daily bread, mentioned in a prayer written by the guy whose birthday is next month.

“I’m as guilty as any artist in town about using well known icons,” Ken told me. In his last LITM show, the Machine—the images inspiring the painting were recognizable, like protestors or rock stars. Another recent show— “Those Where the Days: Battered Bunnies & Ken Bastard Collaboration” a collaboration with illustrator Meeghan Glick, conveyed social satire by iconic images re-imagined with pink rabbits as the characters.

Ken seemed to suggest that the current show was a reaction to that those two previous showcases. The new work is less flippant, less in your face. But it seemed to me not a rejection but an evolution, another step forward in an artist’s pursuit of a vision. He never longer has to rely on our familiar popular culture on which to base his art. For the viewer, there are no obvious or immediately recognizable frames of reference in which to enter the painting. For instance, one of the Battered Bunnies parodied the famous photograph from the Jonestown tragedy. The viewer already had a ticket to entering the space of the art. We recognized the event. Here, the work is, well, more attuned to the essence of the individual painting.

One of my favorites was a man sitting on a bench within a stark urban environment, he seems to have a book but I’m not sure if he’s reading or for the moment has nodded off. His legs are crossed, pulling up the cuff of his pants, where you see his shiny black shoes and dark blue socks and the pale skin of his calf between the cuff and the edge of the socks. How often have we passed someone like this, how often have we been this person?

Bastard has eschewed the tabloid references—perhaps they distracted as much as they invited—and gone for the essence. The only reference for the viewer is the commonality of everyday life, and by the same token, our common humanity.

“I had to pick a whole new palette for these paintings,” he told me. Indeed, the colors are much warmer, which he does with shading, subtle shadows and soft light. The work has more emotion and a refreshing egalitarianism. It is not as frantic as The Machine. He achieves empathy for the people in the pictures. It’s a celebration of ordinary life, boredom without ennui. The muted tones and the simplicity of the images—a woman brushing her teeth, a guy carrying a trash can—suggest an internalized spirituality, and isn’t the internal the realm where the sacred truly resides? Isn’t the mundane only on the surface? The new work by Ken persuades us to answer in the positive, gives us another reason to realize that art is about seeing as much as it is about expression.

Ken seems to be in a very creative period currently, admirable for a middle aged artist. He has launched a new direction on the heels of two major shows. He told me the two weeks preceding the opening of “S&M,” he was painting day and night.

The process fascinated me. He mainly paints from a photographs or other found images. For his the work in the Machine (as well as the Battered Bunnies collaboration), he used pictures he found, mainly in magazines or the internet. This show he modified the approach. He and a friend took photographs, often candid, of just regular folks, and used those pictures as a starting point for the art. Some of the paintings were inspired by photographs taken in the very neighborhood of LITM.

“Where did you see sisters in habits smoking?”

His eyes twinkled.

“That one was from a magazine.”

Discovering the co-existence of the sacred and mundane might be not be about, where you look, but how you see.

I’m sorry about the blurriness of some of these shots. Go see the work yourself, I’m not sure when it closes. For more information click here