“Ifeel like I`m an outsider artist,” says Verne Dawson

12
Outside In:
“I
The Days of the Week
(Tuesday)
2005
Oil on linen
86x70 in.
Opposite page
Gnome in the Vines
2007
Oil on canvas
72x84 in.
feel like I’m an outsider artist,” says Verne
Dawson (A’80), yet Dawson is deeply involved
in the New York art world. He has had dozens
of exhibits both in the United States and
abroad, and is represented by the gallery Gavin Brown’s
Enterprise, a big name in the Chelsea art world. He recently
returned from Paris, where he had a well-received show at the
Palais de Tokyo, and a major book about his work is coming
out this winter, called Precession of the Equinoxes. Verne Dawson,
Selected Paintings (Le Consortium’s Les Presses du Réel).
The living room of Dawson’s East Village home is cozy
and sun-lit. A garden can be seen through the window and
across the street. The way Dawson sees
himself—as an outsider who is, ironically, quite the insider—is well illustrated
here, in the apartment he shares with
his wife, Laura Hoptman, a curator of
contemporary art at the New Museum.
The art works along every wall indicate
just how much he belongs: almost all of
them are by art world notables whom
he numbers among his friends. One or
two are his—they are a bit separated
from the others, but still a definite part
of the group. Some of the images are
figurative, like the painting of a man on
a yellow bed by Elizabeth Peyton or the
study for a portrait of Pablo Picasso by Maurizio Cattelan.
Others are conceptual or abstract, like a pencil drawing by
Vietnam veteran Kim Jones, or the geometric painting by
an obscure Italian artist or the typed and framed poem.
The piece that he is currently working on is large enough
to reach from the floor almost to the ceiling. An idyllic
countryside has been sketched in, but the eye can’t help but
be drawn to the mushroom cloud from a nuclear bomb
that is a major part of the image.
Feeling a sense of alienation from something that is
profoundly rooted in him is not new to Dawson. Born and
raised in Alabama, Dawson feels that his work is deeply
influenced by the oral traditions of the South. But he left
the South because he was aware that the visual arts aren’t
as prominently supported there as, for example, music or
writing. This isn’t to say that Southerners aren’t interested
in the visual arts at all; in fact, Dawson’s earliest memory of
being exposed to art was as a child in Alabama. “We lived in
this not grand but not little house,” he explains, “and right
down the road there was an old man named George Malone
who had paintings in his house. I used to visit him and he’d
show me his paintings. He had one work by Albert
Pinkham Ryder, whom I love. There aren’t many of his
works in the world. It was really moving to see that, and it
meant a lot to me.” As an artist, Dawson took the oral traditions that were in his blood as a Southerner and translated
them into the visual. At the time, in the late 1970s, storytelling seemed to be at odds with the goals of the prevalent
movements in art, Modernism and nascent postModernism. But even if it relegated him to being excluded
from the mainstream, it was too important to Dawson for him to ignore: “I
wanted to have a means of expression. I
know a lot of artists who just do art for
themselves. I understand and respect
that. But,” he continues, “I was very much
interested in communicating—that’s
what motivates me. I was looking for a
very efficacious method of telling a story.”
After 11 months in the Navy, Dawson
decided to come to New York City, where
he lived for several months. It was during this time that he heard about The
Cooper Union, and decided he wanted
to apply. Getting in, he asserts, changed
his life. “It’s not just that it was a free education. It was a
really great education—I certainly wouldn’t have been able
to go to such a fine school otherwise,” he says. “But also, it
was a very dynamic and interesting atmosphere.”
At Cooper Union, he found kindred spirits. He took a
sculpture class with Arthur Corwin, who taught through
telling stories. “Arthur Corwin turned me on to a whole
world,” Dawson says. Corwin told stories about art and math,
about astronomy and how the remnants of Paleolithic cultures run through our contemporary world; its strands
came down through the generations in the form of spoken
stories, and can be found today in our holidays, our fairy
tales, our rituals and superstitions. This inspired Dawson to
look at prehistoric art, which became a lifelong love. His other
great inspiration at Cooper Union came from filmmaker
Robert Breer. Dawson says that Breer “opened things up for
me because he had a sense of play. He was very irreverent,
and didn’t respect any of the dogmas or strictures that were
The Art of Verne Dawson
All images courtesy of Verne Dawson/Gavin Brown’s Enterprise
14 | The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art
Massacre of the
Little People by the Big People
2002/2003
Oil on canvas
82x100 in.
Opposite page
French Vase
2002
Oil on canvas
18x15 in.
At Cooper Union
often being fought over. He was open to everything.” He continues, “I think Breer liberated me intellectually so I could
stop worrying so much about the rules and just focus on
what I needed to communicate.”
After graduation, Dawson took the ideas provided to him
by his mentors at Cooper Union, and went to the Dordogne
Valley in France, where he spent a good deal of time studying prehistoric art in the numerous caves for which the area
is renowned. He went there with Anne-Marie McIntyre
(A’83), who Dawson calls one of the finest ceramic artists
working today. “We stayed with this old lady who would drive
us to different caves everyday. She’d drop us off and sit in the
car and read the newspaper,” Dawson remembers. “We’d go
into these caves, most of which are closed now, to see these
magnificent etchings, drawings and paintings. We think of
the people who made these as brutes, but when you see
those things, just the great skill and the knowledge of anatomy, it becomes obvious that these were very sophisticated
minds at work. It had a profound effect on me.”
Such a profound effect, in fact, that it
resonates through most of his work to
this day. The story he’s telling is about the
transformation of humankind, through
the search for a balance between nature
and technology. However, behind the
serene façade, Dawson is a bit of a trickster—he is quick to note that at times the
most important thing is color: “Sometimes
when I work on paintings I just want to
get exquisite colors, I want to make dazzling, beautiful colors; and that’s all I want
to do. And other times I paint massacres.”
He’s referring to a painting from 2004
called Massacre. In the foreground, body
parts are strewn around, and corpses litter the ground. A
woman holds out a hand to what looks like a forlorn child,
his arms wrapped tightly around himself. It looks almost
prehistoric, until you notice that in the background, three
plumes of smoke are rising, while what seem to be helicopters
hover nearby. This is a theme reprised from an earlier piece
called The Massacre of the Little People by the Big People from
2003. “This painting tells the story of diminutive tribes of people throughout Great Britain,” explains Dawson, “and how they
were basically massacred by the Saxons, Franks and Vikings.
The theory goes that as these little people were threatened,
they had to go deeper and deeper into the woods and hide and
they had to become elusive. And as they did so, they became
smaller and smaller in the imagination of the people who were
taking over. So that could be the origins of the leprechaun and
fairies.” These stories are corroborated by archaeology: a report
on National Public Radio this past October discussed finding
skeletal remains of just such a people in Indonesia, who coexisted with Homo sapiens until at least 13,000 years ago.
Dawson’s visual vocabulary often includes small groupings of people dwarfed in wide landscapes, which reflect
influences from the Hudson River school of art, like the
work of painter Frederick Church. “I want to encourage people to see the beauty of nature as sacrosanct,” he says. But
other paintings depict the artifacts of the ultra-modern as
well. Airports, nuclear explosions and man-made domes
make their appearance on his canvasses, implying that technology has separated us from nature. The message seems to
be that in this age of high technology, oral traditions that
have come down to us from prehistoric times that teach people how to live in the natural world are still here to sustain
us. Dawson is fascinated by stories about nature, and by the
peoples who told them, and so they, too, often show up in his
paintings. These are stories we all know—fairy tales, for
example. Little Red Riding Hood, Dawson explains, depicts
an eclipse of the moon; Jack and the Beanstalk taught people
about the solstices and when to plant. Circuses, another subject that Dawson paints, are also about nature. “They’re the
most intact manifestation of Paleolithic
life,” he says. “There is a pole holding up
the Big Top and you have a ring. Within
that ring, animals come in and circle
around: it’s a model of the heavens and
the Zodiac. In a three-ring circus, you have
another pole for the moon, and another
one for Venus. So it’s basically a model of
Stone Age astronomy, being done as a
ballet. People take their children to circuses because we’re most receptive to
learning when we’re young. It’s one way
to make sure that the information keeps
getting imprinted for generations.”
If we did try to learn from the past, we
might see the echoes of the past not just in our rituals, but
also in our actions. “Massacre,” says Dawson, “is a metaphor
for the war in Iraq and the horrors that you hear about that
are happening around the world.”
Dawson’s work has been shown numerous times at
Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, as well as at the Whitney Museum
of American Art in New York, the Galerie Eva Presenhuber
in Zurich, the Victoria Miro Gallery and the Camden Arts
Centre in London, the Palais de Tokyo in Paris, and the
Venice Biennale. His art can be found in the collections of
the Museum of Modern Art and the Guggenheim Museum,
both in New York. His exhibits have been reviewed in publications such as The New York Times, Art in America, Time
Out, Artforum and Frieze, among many others.
Dawson’s art is only “outsider” in the sense that he
believes the vast majority of people living in the West today
have been cut off from a wider reality. His work can be seen
as an entreaty to return our awareness to the beauty of creation, as is encouraged in the stories of prehistoric peoples.
Winter 2008 | 15