JOE HEAPS NELSON

Truck Stop

John LeKay: Can you please tell me about your painting "Truck Stop"?

Joe Heaps Nelson: "Truck Stop" is a big painting of 18-wheelers parked at a Flying J truck stop in Virginia in winter.  It's about trucks, and truck driving. It's also a landscape painting. It's about weight, momentum, weather, fuel, crummy food, America, and chrome.  Heavy clouds and heavy loads on slushy roads. Grunting diesel engines, metal squeaking. Everybody comes in and out real slow. Big wheels crunch ice. At 2:39 in the afternoon you're about halfway there. Maybe you need the men's room. There's coffee. Beef jerky is available. Pretty soon you'll be in another state. The truck stop is consistent and reliable. The oily hot dog rotates lethargically and untemptingly on the metal  rollers. It's eternal. The truck stop is an interesting place because it's a place that really isn't any place. It's a place on the way to another, more real  place, and everybody is just passing through.

 

Fucking Groundhog Must Die

JL: Can you please tell me what inspired "Fucking Groundhog Must Die"   The groundhog is an infidel, and God told me to kill him?

JHN: Man versus nature is the subject of Fucking Groundhog Must Die.

The painting depicts a cave man armed with a big rock squatting above a groundhog burrow. The groundhog is visible below, secure in his hole. One might reasonably infer that the cave man wants to kill the groundhog.

On a symbolic level, the man represents civilization and the groundhog unruly nature. The impulse to assert control, to dominate nature, is a defining characteristic of humanity. Our cities and highways are orderly grids superimposed upon an indifferent earth. From time to time the fury of nature erupts and we are obligated to rebuild what has been destroyed, and the uneasy truce between civilization and nature is re-established. The same thing occurs in the garden, where the groundhog subverts the genteel order which the gardener has created. The groundhog has no respect for private property!

Meanwhile, the conflict between civilization and nature exists within the cave man. (This is what Nietzche and Camille Paglia are talking about). The insufferable crimes of the villainous groundhog have reduced the man to a wild state. One can see grim determination
etched on his visage. Is he motivated by hunger, or revenge?

No doubt the groundhog is guilty, for the groundhog was born guilty. The groundhog is a relentless foe. He is the sworn enemy of man.

Though rivalry between man and nature is the rule, a special scorn is reserved for the creatures who tunnel into the earth. These denizens of Pluto are sneaky and hard to get. Recall Yosemite Sam's irrational hatred of varmints, or Bill Murrays existential struggle as the groundskeeper in Caddyshack. President George W. Bush invoked this contempt when threatening Osama Bin Laden and his followers. Bush's (as yet unfulfilled) promise to smoke em out of their holes equated terrorists with burrowing critters, effectively dehumanizing them. Lest one be tempted to disregard the potency of our subterranean enemies, consider that in 1702, King William III of Orange was killed when his horse stumbled on a molehill. Thus a surreptitious assassin changed the course of European history.

A secondary theme, one that runs through just about all of my work, is the ultimate futility of human effort.

My original inspiration was some research I was doing about prehistoric life and woolly mammoths. It occurred to me that although mammoth hunting is epic and fun and exciting, you can't do it every day, or the groundhog will sneak up on you.

Fucking Groundhog Must Die!

Thus it is and thus it shall ever be.
 

JL:  Who is the "General" in the painting? He looks like a nasty piece of work and very angry?

General

 

JHN: The General is Charles Day Palmer. He was a four star general who served in World War II and Korea. He died in 1999.

Some biographical information is available here: http://www.arlingtoncemetery.net/cdpalmer.htm

He does look like a tough guy.

Stewardesses

JL: "Stewardesses". Did you paint this from a photo and can you please tell me about your creative process?

JHN: Yes, the stewardesses are from a photo.

I painted that one back in 1999, so it is tough to remember. I know the photo came from some crazy fanzine I picked up in Chicago. I have no idea where they got it, but it looks like an advertisement from the early 1970s. I couldn't even tell you what airline it is, as the picture was printed in black and white about six inches long. With dots. So, in this case, the photo was just a starting point and I made up a lot of stuff.

My creative process pretty much consists of thinking of an idea, worrying about it for months or years, then making something. Of course at any one time I have many ideas, and not all of them become paintings. Sometimes I am inspired by deadlines, but generally I am pretty self-motivated.

Any painting has a million decisions in it. The first decision is the size of the canvas. Sometimes that's dictated by what's around, other times I prepare a canvas for a specific idea. Then I just go ahead and build the painting up until it looks okay, or until I am tired of working on it. It's nice to be able to work on more than one painting at a time. Sometimes a painting sits around and bothers me for months, and then I grab it and change it around.

When I was obsessively painting cheerleaders, I was more inspired by my source material. I thought these photographs were so funny, I wanted to stay true to the original photographs, but do the pictures in a painterly sort of way. It was almost a journalistic sort of approach. There was also a conceptual angle to it, like I was playing the role of a guy who's into painting cheerleaders. That amused me for a good long while.

These days I get an idea, and then look for source material if I need it. And sometimes I don't want to work on the gigantic epic stuff, and then I just paint bulldogs.

Also, when I paint, I like to listen to rock and roll. And then there are times when you are concentrating so hard on the little stuff, the record ends and you don't notice for a few hours, and then you realize, holy smoke, the record's over and it's dark out and I haven't eaten anything and I feel kind of light headed. Well, all of that stuff is part of the process too, I reckon.
 

Circle

 

JL: Who are the women in "Circle" and when did you begin making paintings of cheerleaders?

JHN:  The women in circle are high school cheerleaders from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. The year is 1957. I started panting cheerleaders in 1999, at my studio at 68 Jay Street, right after I finished painting stewardesses!

JL:   Cheerleaders seem to be a theme that you have paid quite a bit of attention to. You said earlier that you found these photographs funny and conceptually, you were playing at the role of a guy who's into painting cheerleaders.

Is there anything else about this subject that you find so interesting to paint like the formal compositions and aspects of these paintings? Some of them look like they could be performers in the circus. What I really like about them, and some of your other your work, is that it's hard to tell if your supposed to laugh or not. There's a mixed emotional humour.
 

 

Berserk Cheerleader

Collection of Oliver Sehgal, New York, N.Y.

 

JHN: Well, naturally these paintings are informed by a "Pop Art" sensibility. A deadpan approach underscores the supreme ridiculousness of the whole endeavor.

I had been engaged in glorifying the inconsequential, and a series of cheerleader paintings seemed like a way to take it to the next level. Action shots are fun because it's possible to immortalize a fleeting spaz-out moment, and I was fond of the squad portraits because of the way each cheerleader is self-consciously projecting an image for posterity, or at least for the yearbook! There is a "vanitas" quality to the squad portraits. Glory is fleeting. This may be as good as it gets!

Sometimes I found cheerleading profoundly analogous to art-making. After all, the vast majority of people don't give a damn about cheerleading or painting.

One more point about the cheerleaders; I was pretty much just discovering the internet when I began painting them. I was amazed and delighted by the amount of material out there, and the random way it was organized. I liked the idea that high school cheerleaders from Wyoming could pop up right next to the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders. It's all show biz!

USA Cheerleaders  2004, Oil on canvas, 71" x 56"  Good Ol' USA! Still Number One!

 

 

JL: What else are you working on?

JHN:  Right now I'm working on two big paintings. One is a patriotic cheerleader piece and the other one is a mammoth hunt gone bad. I'm also working on some silly stuff.

Thanks for interviewing me. I'm happy to share my ideas with your readership, and it has helped me to organize my brain.

 

 www.joeheaps.com