REPOSITIONS

2011-07-19T13:26:00.000-04:00

Human Hair & Co. is giving this other service a try.

2011-06-06T15:50:00.001-04:00

Poem in June 2011 issue of Inter|rupture

2011-05-11T10:55:00.000-04:00

subway poker 2010

2011-03-23T17:01:00.000-04:00

SO AND SO

Three new poems in the new

So and So Magazine #6

Welcome to My Showroom | an interview with artist Matt LaFleur

2011-03-09T12:46:00.001-05:00

WELCOME TO MY SHOWROOM

On Route 43, east of Albany, you will find yourself steadily entering a far different testament to the marbled politics near by. The road has many homes where the doorbells could be rung from your passenger window and a cane. A single flashing light negotiates an intersection with a general store. On this road you pass Kay’s Pizza, an establishment of buckling wood propped over Burden Lake, and after the post office you come upon a winding road to a lake called Big Bowman in Taborton, NY. This is where I have been coming to for the last eight years to visit friend and artist Matt Lafleur.

Lafleur is a man of routine, perfection and an unknowing weirdness. His work holds a palpable honesty, antiquity and a quizzical oddness I’ve greatly admired, as have a growing number of viewers. His work is genuine; and to realize that, one needs to hear about Lafleur’s influential surrounding area. These conversations took place in April, while Lafleur was preparing new work for the Mohawk Valley Invitational at the Arts Center Gallery in Downtown, Albany. The interview begins via email and then continues over the phone.

---- Eric Amling

Eric Amling: You know, driving up here, it’s easy to understand the influence the Hudson Valley has on your work. Perhaps to many it would seem a painter’s arena – a weathered barn in a field, a distant broken tractor. But you choose to use a collage assemblage and pencil technique. These same subjects take on their own personality as opposed to a tranquil scene merely without humans, or animals for that matter. It almost seems like when the lights go out, your surrounding world gets psychedelic. There is an anthropomorphic hum to the work especially in recurring subjects for you; a Bolen Tractor and wood stoves, particularly Shaker stoves.

Not to simply ask your process, but can you provide your thoughts on color and the significance in choosing the subject matter in your portraiture? Perhaps the aesthetic effect this creates by using paper as a medium?

Matt Lafleur: I'm not a very good painter. When I was a kid I tried to make a painting of a barber shop where I got my hair cut. My painting was of Mack's shop, but it didn't come out very good. The edges were fuzzy. I was always more attuned to drawing. I drew from comic books and Charles Schultz. We had some old teach-yourself-to-draw-cartoons books that were my great grandparents. I drew from them a lot. My mom did needle point and made hook rugs and quilts and cakes. She made a great hockey rink sheet cake. My dad and I made some drawings together of sprint cars and modifieds.

With paper, I can work on it and cut it out, and put the pieces in an envelope in a drawer and forget about it for some time. Some of my best drawings have been made out of scraps left over from other work. I've been working from piles of old construction paper I found in a dresser six years ago. I started drawing boards and cutting them out and making pictures of my families houses. The reoccurring parts of my work come from my family and my job, really. You mentioned the Shaker stoves and that comes from my living.

EA: You work as a chimney sweep, correct? I’d imagine people get chatty, something intimate happening to their home like that…trying to break the awkward silence.

ML: Some people do. Some people are expecting Dick Van Dyke. I probably go into about four hundred houses a year, more some years. I learned the trade at a family owned hearth shop and I've been working for them ever since. There are a lot of wood burners around this area. People who are willing to work for their heat are fine with me. I've gathered dozens of images and influences through homes I work in and people I work for. There are some customers I look forward to seeing every year. An old couple who heats their house with a hundred year old wood cook stove, they sit with me every time I'm there and we have a glass of Coke with ice. We sit in their kitchen when we're done working and we drink a soda with them. I've swept Andy Rooney’s chimneys. I've swept Richard Prince's chimneys, too. Mr. Rooney wasn't home, but Mr. Prince was. I cleaned the chimney in his studio. I didn't tell him I was an artist, just told him all his chimneys were in good working order. Frankly, when I look at a drawing I've made I value the people in their kitchen sharing a glass of soda with me.

EA: I know the winters are long and a pivotal part of your life. Your job enables people to keep their houses warm and in your art there seems to be this constant snowdrift. The work is real hibernating. But your colors are extremely vibrant, I was actually thinking of the similarity to Chris Ware’s seasons, no matter how bleak the temperature everything is very much rich in color….

ML: Winter is what to prepare for. I spend a lot of time in the spring and summer getting ready for the next winter. The landscape is simplified and frozen. There is a spectacular stillness standing on a frozen lake in the middle of the night. It's deafening. In a sense it is hibernation, I move into my shop during that time of year and make most of my work. I think it forces creativity out of me that I don't feel as strongly other seasons of the year.

EA: Looking at a piece like The Grand Union, I don’t know, I’m going to say that is a darker one. Not just because of the black but because of the negation. Remember the stage sets for Wild West films? The Bank all done up with a porch and shingles? But from behind it was just blank, plywood cut-outs. I imagine, here you are, on a trail, sneaking up to a cutout town from behind.

ML: The Grand Union is a quilt drawing. The white cut outs are scraps from a drawing of a town done over the past two years. The drawing never went anywhere, but the white paper scraps made a kind of ghost. I pieced them together from remnants. It has most of the normal buildings in a town; houses, a meeting hall, fire house, church, parsonage. But the black and white cut outs are more boiled down. There isn't the detail of my other current work; it's more open that way. It is kind of a set, that's interesting. I hadn't thought of it in that context. But it has an abandoned tone to it. It's like your arriving after the town and its residents have disappeared…

(One week later over the phone)

ML: (rustling) Hold on I’m opening a Butterfinger. Oh, great, it’s all crumbled.

EA: Ok. Do I sound funny?

ML: Not at all. So, are you coming up this weekend?

EA: I might have to. It might be written. What’s happening?

ML: It’s pizza night at the firehouse.

EA: They don’t make the pizza there…

ML: No, they do. They have an oven.

EA: What!? Is it free?

ML: No, it’s for fundraising. It’s a volunteer fire department.

EA: I was picturing monthly free pizza at the firehouse.

ML: No, but they do deliver.

EA: Really...In the fire truck?

ML: (laughs) I knew you’d ask that.

(pause)

ML: I’m making my way to the framers today. I have maybe twelve or fourteen pieces finished. The ones I’m working on now are all interiors. I’m working on one that is of a stove shop. Nice stoves and a big red room. And a white floor. Grey and black and greenish-grey stoves. I’m gonna put a bay window in with a nice outdoor scene. And the other one is of a Bolen showroom. I think these are all called “Welcome to Our Show Room.” Just a bunch of imagined showrooms. But I like them, I always wanted to do interiors but I never have. And I really got into it.

EA: I’m excited about that. I’ve never seen you do interiors.

ML: Yeah, I’m set up now for making some pieces out of wood. I moved a bunch of saws into the shop. A couple ban saws, scroll saws, stuff like that. So I can start moving back into the wood direction. That’s actually what I wanted to do, then a show in North Carolina came up and I needed something quick and that’s what got me into doing these drawings and it’s what I’ve been doing since.

(chewing)

I got a free basket of candy yesterday. There are Butterfingers, some M&M’s in there, some Golden Deluxe Trail Mix. It’s got pineapples in it. Gram got home from Florida yesterday and when I was helping her with her suitcases she opened up the fridge and a basket of Butterf—…

(recorder shuts off)

….it’s a little strange because it must have been near something minty because everything tastes like mint. So, the stove shop drawing. Kat (his fiancé) and I were looking at it last night and I was like ‘I know what this is! This is the scene in the Charlie Brown Christmas Special. Where Linus explains the meaning of Christmas. With the big red curtains and the red walls and a white spot light on him.’

EA: Yeah, I could picture that.

ML: Last weekend was the opening of the races but it got rained out. Tomorrow is supposed to be sunny, about forty at night, so I think we’re going to the races.

EA: Oh man, the vibe can be weird there. People camp out and live off of dollar pizza slices and Genesee beer.

ML: Yeah, at the end of the season, the camper they may be using is really old, and they’ll just leave it in the field and on the last night they’ll just set it on fire and just burn it.

EA: (laughs) I like that between races people go into the snack bar and put a quarter into the machine and play arcade racing. Which I always found to be a wonderful overindulgence.

ML: Whoa, there are so many new birds on the lake the last couple of years. I don’t even know what that was.

EA: It was a pigeon, Matt…I sent you one of our pigeons. It was a peace pigeon.

ML: There are no pigeons. Well, there are Mourning Doves, those are pigeons.

EA: Hey, does that guy who drowned all those swans still live there?

ML: Ah, yeah, he does. He lives down the road now. He lives in a barn and he painted faces all over the trees. All the trees have these faces painted on them.

EA: Oh, yeah? What kind of faces?

ML: Like, eyes and a smiley face, eyes and a frowny face. (laughs) It’s pretty weird.

EA: God, he’s got natural mirrors.

ML: Yeah, he’s an intense guy. He’s got amazing taste though. He’s built a couple houses up here.

EA: Why does he live in a barn then?

ML: That’s just what he’s doing…

EA: Mark Frost still coming up?

ML: Every once in a while.

EA: I just saw an interview with him about the 20^th anniversary of airing Twin Peaks.

ML: Well, you know there was a mystery, an unsolved disappearance, kinda folklore, but it happened up here in Taborton around the turn of the century. And he recently said that he based his writing of Twin Peaks on that story.

EA: What about that book with your dad in it?

ML: He names a character in one of his books after my dad. I just had coffee with him this morning and he had me rolling. He’s one of the funniest people you’ll ever meet.

EA: Yeah, he wouldn’t let me in his house until I said Mark Knoffler was the best guitar player in the world.

ML: (laughs) He kinda looks a little like Mark Knoffler.

--interview conducted March 2010

for more of Matt LaFleur’s work: www.woodandpaint.com

2011-03-07T11:59:00.000-05:00

BULL TONGUE by Byron Coley & Thurston Moore from Arthur No. 24 (Sept. 2006)

"The most interesting surprise poetry this time is Twin Vapor by Eric Amling. His writing is great. Long-lined poems are filled with gorgeous surrealist imagery, bleeding heart galore and plenty of yucks. This would include perhaps the best penis nickname I’ve yet had the pleasure to encounter—the Episcopal Hammer. Seek it for pleasure..."

2011-03-06T20:39:00.000-05:00

celebrity mash-up

2011-02-27T13:05:00.001-05:00

seducing the super

2011-02-23T16:46:00.000-05:00

reading on Sunday at the Cake Shop

2011-02-22T15:23:00.000-05:00

old poem in ARTHUR archives

2011-02-22T13:51:00.000-05:00

requisite author photo of Eric Amling by Michael Withers circa 2006

2011-02-15T13:41:00.000-05:00

a valentine

2011-02-15T13:38:00.000-05:00

cover art for Edmund II Floating Monk LP 2011

2011-02-11T11:12:00.000-05:00

Kooky Calendar: October not spelled right. 1966 wrong year. Sunday in wrong place. Monday in wrong place. Friday not spelled right. 5 left out. 9 not finished. 11 in place of 12. 4 in 14 written backward. 5 in 15 not finished. 23 used in place of 24. 6 in 26 not finished. October has 31 days.

- from children's magazine Wee Wisdoms

2011-02-09T23:25:00.001-05:00

super bowl 2011 richmond, va

2011-01-30T17:50:00.001-05:00

wild eggs/peace mist for Ben Fain

2011-01-30T17:47:00.000-05:00

study for philip guston in search of the mammoth tooth 2005

2011-01-30T17:27:00.001-05:00

Dr. Dog Easy Beat LP insert

2011-01-30T17:24:00.000-05:00

better soft

monolith demo

untitled

2011-01-30T17:15:00.000-05:00

cover for Bowerbirds LP Hymns for a Dark Horse

2011-01-29T15:23:00.000-05:00

the uncle

2011-01-28T14:55:00.000-05:00

cover for Garrett Burrell's chapbook The Plague Doctor

2011-01-28T14:52:00.002-05:00

skin cell of barnum & bailey

2011-01-28T14:51:00.000-05:00


birth of the bathing suit

2011-01-28T14:47:00.000-05:00

AM radio

i only need one

hold time

2011-01-28T14:44:00.000-05:00

cosmic hebrew

2011-01-28T10:52:00.000-05:00

self review of new chapbook:

Nine Live Two-Headed Animals

via We Who Are About to Die

2011-01-28T10:31:00.001-05:00

nine live two-headed animals promo video circa 2010

2011-01-28T10:06:00.001-05:00

split level igloo promo video circa 2008

2011-01-28T00:39:00.001-05:00

lotteryweds

2011-01-27T21:12:00.000-05:00

self portrait

Human Hair & Co | Eric Amling

REPOSITIONS

Welcome to My Showroom | an interview with artist Matt LaFleur