Alan Glicksman: Artist

It was there that I first met Alan Glicksman. He had taken over a rear corner of that old Brinks building and was painting an impressive number of large canvases while he debated and joked with his artist neighbor Howard Gerry. Howard's paintings were cool quiet and methodical, minimalist and geometrical. Alan's were bursting out with free gestural force, barely contained on the surface and populated by loosely figurative elements which resembled human beings, but often morphed into all-out abstract shapes.

I would wander away from my life drawing work, where I was trying to glean something of the genius of Graham Coughtry and stand before these senior art students who would let me ask dumb questions and just stare at their work.

Alan was always friendly. He often smiled and laughed while he painted and seemed not to want to take himself too seriously, or at least not let decision-making halt the joyful act of painting. I was vaguely aware that at that time, Glicksman was already starting to show his work around the neighborhood of Queen St. West and beyond. His paintings were different than the typical abstract expressionism going on around town then. I felt that beneath the jarring compositions and contorted figural interaction was a fundamental honest earthiness, which had the innocence of a child's art, telling emotional stories of human bondage.

Flash forward 27 years. Alan Glicksman has by this time been to New York City, then up to the country and back to Toronto and most recently up to Owen Sound. He is currently exhibiting his oil paintings at The Flesherton Art Gallery. We met again for the first time since those old days in Art College and he is unmistakably the same jovial and friendly character I'd remembered and the paintings continue to deal with the same issues of that interface of physical bodily existence with the realm of the imaginative and tribal.

His figures are totemic, mask-like. Roughly hewn and often thickly painted. Focusing on heads in many of the works, he can present the subject as human and animal at once. In one painting a red creature has the cautious birds eye on one side and the predators eye on the other. They remind us that we are sensitive to characterization towards the monstrous or distorted, but we also salute them as apt metaphorical representations of ourselves.

Another large canvas presents two adults and a child. There are suggestions of agriculture and the care and love of the child by the woman. They are familiar as primitive representations, defined by simplified and rough contours.

In another work, there are cave-like figures enmeshed in a limitless depth of levels and grounds. Alan's subject can be many things at the same time. They may be heavy, wooden and ceremonial or alive and engaged in sharing and they're always communicating.

In the 36x48" oil painting titled, "Man and Woman Head #1", clearly, there is a gap of origins between the male and female halves of this dual portrait. The man appears dapper, in bow tie and neat European styling, whereas the woman is wild and decorated with intricate facial tattoos. Her mouth appears as a mini stage set, allowing a view to her insides, as if words may appear as small performers at any moment. Her eyes are half closed in a trance. His eyes are bugged out wide, alertly monitoring her in a sideways glare, as if in shock over who he has wound up with. There are clues painted into her forehead, where we see suggestions of characters; or are they visible thoughts seen through her brow? In this painting, Glicksman presents the couple as an imbalanced pair. The woman has the connections to the sub-conscious world and the man is proper, pulling it straight and covering up. Something draws her to him, but he is perhaps admitting his fear that she is way more powerful.

In the back room on the far wall is the painting "The Weed Eaters". In this picture Glicksman shows us two closely related species of some four-legged creatures in a green field. Their bodies are a mass of sub-divided colours suggesting, as in many of Glicksman's works, contained other beings which may or may not fully belong to the main body. The animals, with their human like heads, stare out at us unhappily, grim at their lot in the food chain. One seems to have ingested more than just weeds; it's belly is swollen with another smaller critter. Or maybe this one is pregnant? As with other works, one is not sure whether the smaller inclusive figures held within Glicksman's large main characters are from the past, present or future, or if they exist on top of, or inside their host. These issues make the paintings more alluring. The viewer is invited to participate and has to invent a story to explain what everybody is doing and how all the elements in the composition fit together.

In "Two Girl's Heads # 1", the wholeness of one being has split apart, and a fallow strip occupies the centre portion. In conversation with gallery curator David Turner, I learn something of the mathematics of Alan Glicksman's sub-divided subjects: 1 + 1 = 3. Turner goes on to explain; the divided girl is one part the left half, one part the right half and one part the complete girl. This spins me out into questions and concerns for the girl, and what is going on with her psychologically and emotionally? Does this girl represent the product of one of our contemporary blended families? Her mouth is open and engaged in communication. Maybe she is trying to tell us what's happened; express who she is and how she got like that. My personal response harkens back to my parent's divorce, and how that essentially pulled me apart at age twelve.

One of Glicksman's most powerful works in this exhibition is the 48x48" painting "Silent Night". A holy couple, accompanied by a tall character-laden candle which burns at their side, are locked in parenthood; he reaches out for her with foreign, blue arms. Within their anatomies, we see suggestions of children, ancestors, and environments. A city skyline makes an appearance at his mid-body level. Are those genitals, or a totemic bird's head? Glicksman's exciting colour use saturates the painting with both weight and brilliance. So many different colour relationships are going on in various places, but the overall effect is a solidity of form. This painting seems to me to be the archetypal pair of King and Queen, or Mary and Joseph? It is interesting, and I'm not sure of the meaning for this, but the woman is set into a roughly rendered rectangular box context, and the man is free against the ground of colour around him and has a halo form about his head. Except, because this is Alan Glicksman's work, it could just as easily be a large knitted Rastafarian cap which he wears. His face is dark and ancient, reminding me of some of the more primitive faces of the ladies in Picasso's Les Demoiselles D'Avignon.

Curator David Turner expounds further on Glicksman's work; he says that whereas the paintings immediately invoke a child's attitude, they certainly could not have been painted by any child. He describes Glicksman as an authentic and progressive naive; explaining that many so-called naive painters, after about ten years, become over-practiced at their style and cause their work to go flat and uninteresting, whereas Alan Glicksman is still pushing a wild envelope, suggesting and presenting stories, myths, voodoo, tragedies, mistakes; everything that's out there that we may bump into unexpectedly in life, or hear about and shudder, weep or laugh. You have to take a good look at these rather mysterious paintings and you have to start by asking the basic questions of these paintings in order to begin to make sense of them. I tried to "explain" to Alan on the night of the opening what one painting was saying to me. I thought I had it all worked out; it was a same-sex couple, and their daughter, and their cats, and agriculture, and a keyboard of green buttons on which they would write their tale to the world, and... then I looked at him, asking "does that make any sense to you?" He paused for a second and answered, in his trademark friendly-guy tone, "Yeah, it makes some sense (pause). Some sense". Alan Glicksman knows better than to suppose that his work can be easily transcribed or translated into a word thing. These are after all paintings, and the best paintings just cannot be unravelled by talking. These are images which one must confront and search, then allow inside oneself to get their mystified meaning.

Presented with the two rooms of work, it is clear that Alan Glicksman is dealing with the range of human attitudes and fears, as well as joys. His stylizing changes in a range from piece to piece as well. He told me during the evening opening of the show that he had many times obliterated a previous painting and painted over it in arriving at some of the works. I immediately thought of the pain of being told to destroy all your first attempts at pottery – slicing them in half for even thickness etc. and how attachment so quickly forms between the artist and the work. In painting over his work, he leaves attachment behind for the enlightened journey towards discovering his subject. Do they push or control from beneath as they are covered, suppressed and concealed, I wonder?

Glicksman himself, seen against his work, strikes the expressions reminiscent of characters looking out from Chagall’s paintings. He is happy and kinetic, as in earlier times, chuckling about this one’s lot in life, one’s good or less than good fortune. He sees both good times and bad times for his beings. In this way he catches us in our own range and we fear one face because we know we’ve seen that demon before, and in another we recognize a happy fool or a fascinated kid. It is impossible not to take a relational position when you face his given characters, as they are distinctly intelligible in their intercommunication and candor.

The series of heads, mounted down the wall on the smaller square canvases 18x18”, appear either as a sequence or as a family. My psyche draws me to the cardinal, the red color, the unbalanced eyes. I want to understand how that one affects me. As I prepare that reflection, I think about our chance meeting and how the paintings look like children who have grown over a long absence. But, I think the paintings are on a different time-line. They are younger still. Funny, Alan still looks so young. Maybe that’s it.