Meanings to an End

 

Meanings to an End 

Untitled  (1991)

Outbound (detail)

Outbound (detail)

Outbound (2021)

By Tom Wachunas 

“…Now, you’re either on the bus or off the bus…”  - Ken Kesey, quoted in the Tom Wolfe novel, “The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test”

   Back on May 4, I received an email from curator Craig Joseph (remember Translations Art Gallery in downtown Canton?) with an invitation. Here’s most of the email content:

  “ Ladies and Gents... I am very likely going to be departing Canton this fall in pursuit of an MFA or some other new adventure, but before I go, I want to create with you one last time under the Translations banner.

To that end, I've poured over 10 years of files to pull together a list of most everyone who has ever exhibited in a Translations show before and I'm inviting you all to be part of one last hurrah…

The show is called THE LAST HURRAH and I'm inviting you to reflect artistically on some sort of ending, a last something, a finality. Might be the ending of a favorite book or movie, might be the ending of a relationship, might be a historical ending (the Titanic sinks or Marie Antoinette gets beheaded), might be getting your vaccine. It's entirely up to you what you choose…”

The exhibit is planned to open at the Main Branch of Stark Library on Friday evening, July 30, and run through August 28.

  I decided to make a piece about my troubled departure from New York City (after living there for fourteen years - ten of those in Brooklyn). The new piece is called “Outbound,” and it’s been 30 years in the making.

   It wouldn’t be accurate to say, however, that I’ve been actually working all that time on the painting itself. Better to say… it’s been working on me. The piece was originally a slap-dash acrylic self-portrait on a small scrap of unstretched canvas (11 ½” x 13”). It was the last painting I made in 1991, during my final days in Brooklyn -  homeless, jobless, divorced. In debt. And drunk. A few months after painting it, I left Brooklyn at night, a few days before Christmas, on a Greyhound bus – the last bus ride I’ve ever had - bound for my native Ohio, where I have remained ever since.

   I never thought of that untitled painting as a “last hurrah”  so much as a last, lurid harumph from a devastated New York dreamer. It seemed to me that nothing in it spoke enough about its generous measure of dark ugliness. In fact I always felt it prodding me through the years to do something more with it, not to make it somehow prettier, but rather to at least paint a hint or two of specific context or point of reference. The painting kept saying only, “You’re not finished with me yet.”

   And so for this exhibit, I finally got on board to finish the journey.