sharon arnold | dimensions variable: Interview, Sean Hurley

Sean Michael Hurley is an artist who's gone through a lot of changes. His work is interesting because there's a hearkening back to distant mythology. It's a bit of dreamtime, a bit of psychedelic experience. His and Robert Hardgrave's work could be talking to each other in that world (but I have it on good authority that they're talking to each other in this world!). Sean also runs Floating Bridge Studio, where they hold workshops and create custom mural designs.

Here's my lively discussion with Sean:

I haven't submitted work to the SEAF in the past, largely because I never felt my work was A. thematically related to sex per se and B. actually very sexy. Bear in mind that I'm a recovering Altar Boy.

So when I was asked to contribute a piece this year, it came at a very serendipitous point, as I've recently experienced a fairly radical shift in my life and work, and things are somewhat cheerier for me now, and it shows. And frankly, I've come to see the visionary art-making experience and the essentially communicative act of lovemaking --- in whatever flavor you choose --- as minutely different aspects of the same basic force.

The painting I've submitted is called Shiva and Shakti, which seemed very appropriate on any number of counts, so I won't go on about it, except to same there is a big difference between depicting something and being it. The other thing is that the painting is not by me, but rather an entirely self-made alter-ego named Cormac Callahan, which again I'm not going to get into.

You mention the radical shift in your life and your work. I remember your paintings striking me as being images and memories from a dream. Soft edges, faces I couldn't recollect upon waking. Where does the change from the figurative to mythological world take place? Can you tell us a little about the process of that shift?

I guess you're asking about the difference between representing something and evoking something; and although that seems like an old question, it remains an important one. I like to do both of those things: I enjoy making an excellent drawing, like a really good life drawing; and I love rendering a picture with oil paints. It just thrills me to be able to make a very convincing picture, to use a set of learned skills and do that. But that picture is an inert thing, an object that has parameters that are concrete: There is a mountain. Here is a woman. Is she clothed? How so? Anybody can see these elements, and although one has some latitude in her or his interpretation of a picture like I'm describing, it is a comparatively small one. Mostly, A representation is precisely that: A re-presentation of a fact or facts already familiar to a viewer. When I was making a lot of blurry, dreamy-type pictures, I thought I could get around that axiom, that I could somehow hedge my deal by making things soft around the edges, and that would somehow free a representation from this tyranny of the already-known. And that was a flatly mistaken notion.

When you move into abstraction --- and I'll just use that term broadly here to mean a painting that looks like nothing so much as itself --- you're not really playing the same game at all. And I guess I mean a certain approach to abstraction; I have zero time or interest for straight up formalism, although I admire many painters who have devoted their entire working lives to the making of formalist paintings. You mentioned that word --- mythological --- and although I've always been deeply attracted to that stuff, it too draws a circle around a painting in which you make a literal or demonstrably pictorial association. Some folks will get it, and most will see a picture of something that doesn't mean a thing, nor will it ever. But if you've spent the same time and effort gathering up those formal skills --- the same skills formalist painters believe constitute actual art --- until those skills are ingrained in your muscles, and then you set yourself down and set those skills to work as an act of meditation or prayer or self-hypnosis or Process whatever you want to call it, then it seems to me you're getting to a place that I find very interesting, and it's not altogether different from a dream, or the reverie of something new learned, or a tantric orgasm. You know, it just takes a lot of work to get to something really simple, and once you've got there, most folks will be able to see it too.

Several artists have discussed a sort of conceptual presence of sensuality/sexuality in the artmaking process. How does that energy translate for you?

It strikes me as pretty obvious that people crave communion, and the more intense the person, the more intensely they'll crave it. And artists are generally pretty intense. So I don't see much difference, except for the window-dressing.

Well, I know you've just said you won't get into it but who is this Cormac Callahan anyway, and who does he think he is?

I guess this won't be such a mystical or romantic answer, and you can strike it out if it doesn't fit into your scheme here, but it's better if I just get it out of the way. Cormac Callahan is a manifestation of a psychotic episode I went through. To tell you the truth, I'm still in it, and this has been sort of a tough time, as I'm saying goodbye to a part of me I've really enjoyed. I'm a manic-depressive, and I haven't taken any meds to mange it for a really long time, but my family and I have been through a really, really fucked up period, through little fault of our own besides good intentions and poor judgement I should say, and I sort of lost my shit, as they say. And so this is the last time he'll be showing his face around these parts (and hopefully any other). Strictly speaking, he is my brtother, who only lived three months and was never known to me as I was adopted and met my Mom much later in life. And I thought I was possessed by him. It's a mysterious world, you know?

I don't know if this is like totally uncomfortably revealing, but I'm not ashamed, and anyway: What the fuck.

Give us one thing you think is unexpectedly sexy:

Self-invention is the sexiest thing ever. It is the essence of eroticism.

Thanks Sean for such a great interview!

I thought the introduction of Mr. Callahan was an interesting component, so I've included this bit from an earlier conversation. Sean describes Cormac Callahan in this way:

For this show, I've invented a character who looks like me but dresses much sexier than I ever would. His name is Cormac Callahan, and he has borrowed/stolen/been lent my painting style wholesale, on the condition that he doesn't show his face around these parts again. In this sense, Callahan is actually the important part of the artwork showing at the 2009 SEAF; the painting itself is simply a talisman, the cracker bearing the butter, and I'll be the one to whom the check gets written if I should be so fortunate as to sell it. Callahan is actually not someone we want around too much; he seems great at first, but soon grates with all his fucking ideas and personality. I'm letting him come to the artists' reception in my stead, simply because he enjoys that kind of thing much more than I do. After that, he's being handed his hat and shown the door, most likely for good. In fact, he's lucky I let him into this gig at all; he's unreliable, and if he didn't have me to lean on, he couldn't make a painting worth a damn. As it is, the picture I'm giving him rocks the house, such that I couldn't let him have all the credit and co-signed it anyway.

Is this confusing? Confusion can be very,very sexy.

That's awesome Sean; you've just made art-organizers around the world (but specifically a few in Seattle/that is to say, me) feel a lot better about themselves!

Ok so you know by now to visit SeattleErotic.Org to read up on the artists, Festival calendar, and performances. The Fesitival starts this Friday!