“It’s definitely liberating. With all this stuff, you have to keep challenging yourself. I suppose that’s what this space is about as well, to some degree.” He casts an eye toward the bright center of MOMAR. “You put these things in front of yourself and through them you grow.”
Located at 25 Jay Street in Brooklyn, the gallery — with its polished, freshly mopped floors and a leggy woman of indeterminately posh accent manning the front desk — officially opened on July 13; the event was marked only by a press release a week later. They’re still figuring things out. The plan is for a big opening event on September 5. (You can track progress at museumofmodernarthur.com)
Arthur’s paintings are mostly dense and layered, on huge unframed canvases. The original of the work seen on the cover of Let’s Just Be, however, is smaller and starkly emotional, with black rivulets of paint radiating out from a figure like a peacock plume coated in club-girl mascara. Some see the figure as the Virgin Mary; others, as a bird. So it goes with Abstract Expressionism.
“I suppose it’s like Abstract Expressionism,” he says. “I’m not too familiar with the labels of it. I have no license to be doing this. It’s all internal. It’s about bringing out something you see in your mind and following the forms. There’s an aspect of meditation to it, some sort of communion with the spirit. As hoky as that sounds, I think it’s true. I feel that it’s a form of therapy meets church meets performance. It’s a funny reaction to life.”
He brushes slept-on hair away from a week and a half’s worth of beard and continues, “I have many days when I write and paint all day long. If you don’t watch TV or get connected into the Internet, it frees up a lot of time, man. But that’s the whole thing, keeping your human spirit alive and awake and unfearful of its explorations.”
He pauses to take a pull from a claret-colored natural energy drink, blinking into the late-afternoon summer sun. “Just being in the moment, being with yourself,” he says of his creative process, which could also be considered a philosophy, or simply life as he’s received it. “It’s kind of like playing.”
