Joel Schapira
Wolfteeth Evermore
PAINTINGS AND STRUCTURES
Joel Schapira’s art reached its most authentic expression when he realized what it was he didn’t have to do. Years of wrestling with gigantic, thick-painted canvases—beautiful, impassioned work—had left Schapira with a need to regroup. The short break he anticipated stretched out to over a year without his picking up a brush, a time during which it came to be all right with him if it happened that he never made art again. Then an opening arrived, heralded by a pair of realizations: “I won’t keep doing what I’ve already done” and, “I don’t have to know what I am doing.”
With that, he put aside the will to mastery and reclaimed the ideals of emptiness, receptivity, and humility—states sought and cultivated by artists as diverse as the classical Chinese poets and painters, Franz Kafka, Allen Ginsberg, and Cy Twombly. In service to his reborn muse, Schapira replaced the ten-foot canvas with small pieces of cardboard torn or cut from discarded boxes. He augmented his “paint-box” with string, tacks, clippings, cigar box pieces, found objects, cutouts, and empty space. In his approach to art-making and life, he replaced doing with being.
This led him back to Wolfteeth Evermore, a totemic panel from before the hiatus, but one that had continued to intrigue him. Schapira donned the skin of “Wolfteeth” and re-entered its world, the way a shaman might enter into a dream space and access power through the agency of a totem animal. The wolf tooth (a cardboard triangle) became a versatile motif—able to both chew up the old ways and articulate the new. It was the mischievous Wolfteeth who came up with Painting and Painting of a Painting, the latter of which is essentially, but not quite, a copy of the first, and which humorously turns indolence into a virtue, the ultimate “I don’t have to.”
From the earliest self-portraits (“I was so surprised when they didn’t all look the same”), through the huge layered canvases, to the pieces which flowed from Wolfteeth Evermore, Schapira’s work has been true, the work of an artist willing to be drawn by whatever the world and his imagination present.
Schapira’s engagement with paradox and process now forms itself into what he terms “structures:” ornate and humble constructions strange as a shaman’s vision, but as teetery and fragile and complex as a human life.
(This essay originally appeared in conjunction with Schapira’s show, Paintings and Structures, at the Tremaine Gallery, Hotchkiss School, Lakeville, CT, 2008.)
Letter from Jack Kerouac to Allen Ginsberg: Not Just Colorful Characters, 14 feet x 8 feet, (permanently installed at Naropa University Student Center)
Letter from Jack Kerouac to Allen Ginsberg: Not Just Colorful Characters (detail)
Two Self Portraits
Painting and Painting of a Painting
Thank You, Dean Mary Richardson (detail)
Coney Island Plane
Wall o’ Planes (made with Eve Biddle; inspired by Leonard Ragouzeos)
Contraption to Clear the Air (detail)
Joel Schapira, standing with Contraption to Clear the Air
