Caleb Weintraub Interview, part 1

 

“So because thou art lukewarm, and neither hot nor cold, I will spew thee out of my mouth.” –Book of Revelations 3:16

Caleb Weintraub is a younger painter living and working now in Bloomington, IN.  His most recent solo exhibit was in September 2007 at Peter Miller Gallery in Chicago.  Caleb, himself, in my limited experience, seems to be mild-mannered, easy-going and generous. His work is another story–and the story is apparently the Book of Revelations meets Lord of the Flies in keyed-up Technicolor (a few drips and splatters thrown in for added action). There’s no lukewarm here. The paintings are big. The paintings are many. The paintings are, well, just MORE.
He agreed to do this interview with us via email, and true to form, replied with several thousand words more than I had hoped for.  Here is the first part of the interview, the second to follow in a few days.  Thanks for reading.

MWC:  Please give people a little information about yourself.

CW:  I’m 30.  Grew up in a suburb of New York.  I currently live in Indiana where I make my paintings and teach at Indiana University.

MWC:  Many of us don’t grow up with painting and art as part of our daily life.  I’m always curious about people’s routes into it all.  How and when did you say “I’m going to do this?”

CW: My mother is a writer.  I grew up around novels and coffee table art books.  I always wanted to be an artist.  When I was five years old I was looking at a Hopper painting and turned to my mother and told her that he had the same heart as me.  I remember wanting to be a painter.  Also—-when I was five, I won a dollar art competition.  That was big. 

In kindergarten I was asked to join two sixth graders to do a painting on the wall of my school.  And then I put art aside until college.  But it was always my plan.  Once I was painting, I felt I had a lot of catching up to do but I couldn’t control myself.  I knew it would have to continue.

MWC: Talk about your creative mulch—that is your daily inspirations, Fine Art and Not Fine Art and Life in general.

CW:  I’m motivated by my surroundings.  I stare a lot.  At people.  At things.  Looking at the work of other artists motivates me.  I tend to get caught up with one or two artists at a time—for a week or a month, occassionally longer.  I am motivated by historical paintings, too.  They’re always floating in the back of my mind.

Music moves me.  I listen to music when I work—I make music when I can.  When I’m involved musically, my painting ideas tend to develop more rapidly.  It seems like it’s all part of the same muscle, flex one side and the whole thing gets a little stronger.  I like to read, or really, to have read.  Don’t have much time to read.  I listen to a lot of books on tape and online lectures…history, philosophy, language.  I like weird movies like all artists–movies that make me think.  I recently saw Jan Svenkmajaer’s Lunacy.  I like it a lot.  But I also like to watch TV when I have the chance.  It keeps me connected to the world.  I sometimes keep it on in the studio…last night I had Ghost Hunters on while I was painting.  I liked listening to them talk about what they were doing.  They were giddy.  Like kids.  Their enthusiasm made me enthusiastic about what I was painting.

MWC: Has fatherhood had an effect on your work?

CW: It’s made me more playful.  The content of my work has taken more of a backseat.  I free associate a lot more.  I like the way the kids think.  They think and talk and act without preconceptions.  It’s very organic.  I used to prescribe more.  Now I improvise a lot.

MWC: Is there any other art or artist that you feel is key to you, or that your work is in direct dialogue with?

CW:  Some of the painters I’m most interested in right now are Etiene Zack, Craig Kucia and Til Gerhard.  Each of them applies paint in a way that the substance of the paint is crucial to the success of the painting.  These couldn’t be photographs or sculptures or graphite drawings.  They are paintings.  I don’t know if I’m really in direct dialogue with any of them but I’ve made a lot of similar choices in terms of subject matter, composition and paint application.  Their imagery transports a viewer to a fabricated or fantastic place.  That’s something I try to do as well.

MWC:  I know you’ve discussed the impetus for your current work a number of times, but if you don’t mind doing it again for people who aren’t already familiar with what you do…

CW:  I make paintings of a disintegrating world where humanity has gone awry.  The children have taken over.  They exist in a moral void.  They are overstimulated and de-sensitized.  In the last batch of work, shown in Chicago in September [at Peter Miller Gallery], there were a number of paintings that were not so much about an apocalyptic moment but were more about the aftermath.  They’re much more fantastic.  More animals.  More sparkly things.

A lot of the children in my paintings wear plastic cartoon-character dinner plates as masks.  They venture into the forest in groups to pursue mustachioed adults in pink inflatable ballerina costumes or to commune with animals.  For me, these uniforms represent a dysfunctional society–a society whose repudiation of all institutions–social, religious or political–has led to a new ideology as rigid, dogmatic and confining as the ones it was conceived to eradicate.  Adults represent for me, on one level, the failed ideologies that rule the world; and children, our future.  Afraid of extremists on either end, my paintings of an absurd inverted world are meant to remind viewers not to throw the baby out with the bathwater.  That without social convention and maybe even without a sense of moral purpose our world will utterly collapse.  My paintings are meant to be visually pleasing, humorous, reproachful and tragic, in that order.

MWC:  Besides the general themes and allegorical content, the other thing I get from your work is a sense of fearlessness–regarding the theme, the subject and stories, the complexity of the spaces, the handling of the materials.  It’s like there’s nothing you won’t tackle and there is very little preciousness. I think a lot of our readers, especially younger artists, might get a lot out of any thoughts you might have on this subject.

CW:  Mainly, I try to keep in mind that painting is only painting.  Nobody is going to die from seeing a painting and the world won’t be saved by paintings either…so there really isn’t much risk involved in trying new things in the studio.  I work on more than one painting at a time.  When I’m stumped on one, I just move over to another to give myself time to think of solutions to the first.

I try to stick to a rule that nothing goes to waste.  Even a bad painting can be reconfigured and revived.  When I first walk into my studio, I imagine that the paintings in there aren’t mine–it makes it easier to decide what to do.

MWC:  Very Interesting….

Well, kids, that does it for today’s exciting installment of MW Capacity vs. Caleb Weintraub.  And Caleb hasn’t even broken a sweat.  Look for part two in a few days.  For those that need some further reading here is a review of Caleb’s 2007 show Cloudy with a Chance of Apocalypse at Jack the Pelican Gallery from the great Fallon and Rosof Artblog.  Here is the link to part 2.