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Glory Days
Text: Joshua Rose : Photo: N/A
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We’re often told that Phoenix is the 6th biggest city in the United States. But for many people who have spent a good portion of their lives here, it often feels more like the 60th rather than the 6th.
Artist Fort Guerin can attest to this.
In 1999 Guerin, who grew up in Mesa, had an exhibition at the Peterson-- Hall gallery in North Scottsdale and chose to show a new painting entitled The People I Hated In High School. The painting featured pictures of twenty random photos Guerin cut out from his own yearbook on one side of the canvas with a large image of a homecoming king and queen on the other. Then, in the middle of the canvas Guerin drew twenty faces based on the photographs of the people he had cut from the yearbook, provided their real names underneath the images, making a sort of top twenty of his most detestable classmates (one being the artist himself).
During the show, Guerin said that a full hook and ladder fire truck pulled up in the middle of the day in front of the gallery and the entire crew, dressed from head to toe in fireman apparel, got down and marched through the doors of the gallery. The entourage continued walking through the gallery, then stopped in front of the painting and one pointed to the painting and said, “Yep, that’s me.” The group then left the gallery, piled onto the truck again and sped away.
“That was a great piece,” says Guerin who has recently relocated to Washington D.C. “Because people would invariably stand around it and then just start talking about their high school and the people they remembered and then would just start telling stories.”
The piece was inspired by a quote Guerin had read from the artist Chuck Close; “If you want to own somebody paint them.” And, for Guerin, the American high school experience, so much a part of popular culture, is an experience that is common for everyone.
“I went to my ten year reunion and it was just chock full of stereotypes,” says Guerin. “I mean who doesn’t look back; it was an ugly time for a lot of us. And this piece really conjures up those memories, good or bad.”
After attending Mountain View High School, Guerin went to Arizona State University for two years then ended up receiving his BFA from Northern Arizona University in sculpture and photography. After college, Guerin didn’t have access to a large enough studio for continuing sculpture so he started doing painting and life drawing.
“I didn’t like painting at first so I started doing collage-style work and journal keeping in the style of Peter Beard,” says Guerin. “I was living in San Diego at the time and my parents got me an easel for Christmas and I just started painting.”
From this, Guerin evolved a little more and soon started to paint directly on wood instead of using a canvas.
“I paint sitting down with my painting surface lying flat and that’s more conducive to wood than canvas. So, my work started to head into that direction as well.”
At first, Guerin concentrated on nostalgic images of Americana he would find in old magazines and newspapers, especially from the 40s and 50s. His work from this period held that muted, flat look of old advertisements which, to him, allowed him some sort of Proustian remembrance of past lives, a way to recreate the sort of images and experiences he would recollect from the time he spent as a child in his grandparent’s home.
“I like that idea of recollection, of this sense of Americana,” says Guerin. “And, when I paint, I enjoy listening to sports events, especially baseball games on the radio. I find that the whole history and feel of baseball on the radio is very conducive to my painting.”
Fort’s next body of work moved away from the advertising images and instead combined figurative drawing and text. Lots and lots of text. These pieces are done in only blue ink and usually depict the heads of people Guerin would observe on the street. Guerin would then envision this person’s entire life story and write, in minute cursive handwriting, the daily existence he would create for them, complete with loves, heartbreaks, hopes, desires, and, of course, sorrows.
“I think of them almost like little vignettes of these people’s lives,” says Guerin. “I know their whole scenario; a housewife, kids, I try to formulate a story from my thoughts on what I observe; how they are dressed, what they looked like. I start with the head and then go with the story and try to make a reproduction of a person.”
While the works are completely different than Guerin’s usual style, they still include his strong, graphic sensibility and his use of text and memory. The series originally started with small, almost letter-size works on paper with a single head near the bottom of the canvas that was surrounded and almost taken over by the line after line of text around it. Then, Guerin started doing multiple heads in works and they, naturally, started getting bigger. Some of the later ones in the series are quite large, almost two feet by three feet, yet the entire space is still almost obsessively immersed in Guerin’s small print.
“With the heads, I was kind of thinking like Clemente, figurative but also loose, and not as detailed,” says Guerin.
For his current exhibition at the G2 gallery, which Guerin originally opened along with his brother Trent, his work has gone away from the text-based images and now is focused again on graphic images from the past. However, this time his source isn’t old magazines but old comics. Western comics.
“I think it’s funny that now that Fort has moved away his work has this romantic yearning for the West,” says brother Trent, who has remained in Scottsdale to run the gallery. “He wears this big cowboy hat and boots and his work seems to now be related to his detachment from this area.”
One piece, entitled 101 Cowboys features tiny pen and ink renderings of cowboys from vintage comics set against a light green background. Another work, entitled Little Bastard, features the back of a small child dressed in cowboy attire, painted in bright primary colors onto a wood panel. Above the images in cut letters Guerin has written … To give the work an extra weathered look, Guerin also stains the panels with coffee and rubs it into the image.
Guerin recently moved to Washington D.C. where his wife works for a political think tank tied to senator John McCain. Guerin spends most of the day in his home painting but has found steady work with a company that cleans the carpets of some of the nicest homes and offices in Washington.
“We do the White House and Cheney’s house,” says Guerin. “It’s strange we’ll be in these fancy houses of famous people and I’ll be in their closets cleaning the carpet. Most times the art on the walls is like a museum, so it’s actually kind of an interesting job.”
Guerin has also found inspiration for his cowboy series from a little store near his house in suburban Virginia.
“It’s one of those crazy stores that just sells everything, with boxes of stuff lining the whole place and hardly areas to walk,” says Guerin. “He sells old comic books, baseball cards, antiques, just one of those really eccentric places.”
For Guerin, it’s become a repository of Americana, much like his work, a veritable treasure-trove of materials for his work.
“It was there where I found all the old Western comics, with all the heroes—people like The Outlaw Kid, Red Mask, Kid Colt, Red Rider, Roy Rogers and Hop Along Cassidy,” says Guerin.
The store has also allowed Guerin to pursue his other hobby—collecting taxidermy animals. But, as always, there is a twist; his favorites are not the types that you’d find in a hunting lodge or mounted on the walls of some wealthy hunter. No, Guerin is attracted to the strange and exotic animals, the ones that look like an amateur hobby-enthusiast completed in the garage somewhere in the Midwest.
“I have so many now because people give them to me as gifts,” says Guerin. “I have a six-foot Mako shark, a flying duck, a deer head, a red grouper..let’s see..a Caiman crocodile, a pheasant, several raccoons, a monkey and a rattle snake, to name a few.”
His favorite? That’s simple:
“I have this squirrel that I bought at an antique shop in Toledo, Ohio. And it’s a wreck. The teeth are yellow, some of the fur is missing, it looks like some home craft project that went awry. Obviously, my wife hates them, especially this one. So they are stuck in the basement with me.”
For brother Trent, though, it all adds up to a visual experience that gallery visitors always seem to relish in.
“People really like Fort’s work, it’s not something they can gloss over very easily,” says Trent. “It’s funny, people who see the text and head images relate its obsessive quality to outsider art, like Howard Finster. And the cowboy work, it really makes people feel nostalgic.”
As for the animals, Trent’s waiting for them to start making an appearance in the paintings as well.
“I guess that’s always a possibility. It might bring him back to his college 3-D work. But, really, I think those animals are just for his man-lair in the basement. He doesn’t hunt. I think it’s just that creepy nature about the idea of having something that was once alive and moving in the room with him.”
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