Your Life In Art
Written By: Fred Camper (Art Critic)
Published in: Arte Al Limite (6 and 7/2007)
Some
are said to wear their hearts on their sleeves; in Craig Paul Nowak's
diptych Divided (2007), his heart literally floats above his sleeves, in
the form of two handwritten letters, one to his mother and the other to
his father, that fill the black space on either side of his sad-looking
face. The letters, full of conflicting emotions toward his parents,
describe a troubled family history that includes inattention to him, a
drug raid, his father's jail time, and finally divorce. His hand printed
words surround his bald head as he stares, directly, at the viewer.
While many artists incorporate their feelings about their families,
Nowak does it with such engaging and bold directness that it's hard not
to feel involved in his life story — and in the way this narrative
inscribes itself on his soul.
Nowak was born on April 5, 1983, in
Farmington Hills, Michigan; a few years later, his family moved to
Brighton, roughly equidistant from Detroit, Lansing, and Flint. He grew
up in a house on a dirt road, "on a lake with a beautiful backyard," in
an area he likes to call "the 'hood of Brighton." He was the first in
his family to attend college; his dad worked most of Craig's childhood
in a tool and die company, and his mom's jobs included factory and
retail work. His parents had met when his dad was 16 and his mom 13, and
had his older sister (and only sibling) when his mom was about 18.
In
childhood, Nowak was teased relentlessly on the school bus. "It was a
daily event," he recalls. "I couldn't figure out why I was picked on." A
nine-panel piece, Scream (2006), places an image of Nowak as an adult,
screaming, in the center of images of his childhood tormentors. He
became afraid to attend school, eventually was kicked out of eighth
grade, and later dropped out of ninth, working for a few years. "I felt I
was a bad kid," he says. "The teachers wouldn't make any effort toward
me." At home, he played videogames and watched a lot of TV with his dad.
But "the main memory throughout my childhood" is that after his dad
came home from work, his parents had friends over, and they all smoked
marijuana together. His dad also dealt, and some of these friends were
his customers. "They'd play scrabble and card games," Nowak says. "I
felt left out. I was introverted and isolated." Learning of the negative
health effects of smoking, he asked his parents to stop, to no avail.
He considered "divorcing" his parents. "I would scar up my arms," he
recalls, using various methods. While talking to a school counselor, he
pressed ridges into the tip of a plastic spoon with a fingernail and
used it to scratch himself — "I was bleeding and we were talking about
it while I was doing it." The way he surrounds his head with
autobiographical texts that include his confusion and pain in Divided
and some similar paintings can be taken as an aestheticized version of
this act of early adolescence — symbolically instead of literally
inscribing his feelings on his body.
By the time he left ninth
grade for home schooling, Nowak had found some friends that he would
skateboard and smoke cigarettes with, and with he made and recorded
music with friends — "hip hop, talking about my problems and stuff." But
also, "I wanted to have parents, wanted to be around them. I didn't
feel neglected; I did feel like no one was listening to me. I figured,
if you can't beat 'em, join 'em." And so when Nowak was about 16, his
parents, in response to his repeated requests, let him join their group
and smoke with them. He worked as a stock clerk, and eventually went
back to school, finally graduating from a community education high
school in 2001.
The way Nowak's paintings use his face and text
to address the viewer directly arguably reenact, on an aesthetic level,
the communication problems he had in his youth. "I was against
telephones. I wouldn't know how to go from one point in the conversation
to another if I couldn't see the person's face. One time I was talking
with a girlfriend and I went completely silent. She kept telling me,
'Say something,' and I didn't know what was wrong or what to say."
When
Nowak was 18, and living in the family basement, he was awakened by
knocking. Answering the front door, he was thrown against the wall by
officers in a narcotics raid. His dad was eventually sentenced to a
month in jail, his parents' marriage soon dissolved — and Nowak, who was
already planning to quit smoking ("it wasn't fun anymore"), now did.
After jail, his dad stopped dealing.
Nowak's parents sometimes
put up friends in their basement. When Nowak was around ten, a Native
American named Stonehorse stayed there. "He carved life-size portrait
busts out of stone, so lifelike. He'd do them in such a short amount of
time." Nowak, who had not yet been to a museum or gallery, was awed. He
had been drawing from early childhood, but started to take it more
seriously after he began smoking and hanging around with friends. His
friends were impressed by his drawings, "and I started to understand
that if you're good at something people would start to pay attention to
you, so I got these sketchbooks and everyone would be looking over my
shoulder. I was using my doodling to help me make friends, and wasn't
intending to have an art career." His dad took him to the Detroit
Institute of Arts for the first time, and "I was impressed by one of the
large lifelike European painting." At the Cranbrook Art Museum, he was
drawn to a hyper-realist Duane Hanson sculpture. In a community college
painting class, he did still-life drawings and a copy of a painting by
Van Gogh. A metal arts teacher in his last year of high school told him
that he could "go to college for art," something he hadn't realized
before, and he won an award for a necklace he made in her class. He
began making drawings for his application portfolio — "one of a guy
blowing his brains out" — and enrolled in Detroit's College for Creative
Studies in the fall of 2002.
Nowak didn't much care for the
foundation courses, but acquired an interest in Caravaggio and
chiaroscuro, and in summer 2003, he painted portraits of others, and two
self-portraits, "for fun." His second year he began a relationship with
his partner, LaKela Brown, and they moved in together. But "we weren't
exactly a perfect couple at first; there were communication issues that
put the relationship in jeopardy." He was "mostly trying to figure out
who I was, who was who, what was what." His art school work was "all
over the place," he says; it included Influence (2005), a room-sized
installation of wall portraits in laundry detergent of instructors who
had affected him, visible only in black light. "There was a desk to
symbolize me and a podium to symbolize the instructors; it was like
exposing my internal self. Without them I wouldn't have grown as an
artist and been able to do what I wanted to do."
LaKela broke up
with him at the end of his third year, precipitating a crisis. "There
was something wrong with me, and I had to figure it out. I started
looking inward, trying to find out what the deal is with me, and looking
at her and trying to find out what the deal is with her." That summer,
2005, while he was writing to her attempting to reconnect, he worked on
his "Who Am I?" series, 10 30"x40" blue and white paintings. "That's
where it all started," he says. Based on photos of his face from infancy
to high school graduation, it portrays someone whose look changes so
much that it's not always certain it's the same person. Seeking
acceptance in school, Nowak had tried out different "looks" in school ,
and now he was reflecting on the consequent instability of his identity,
and on who he really was. Having found so many judging him for
superficial reasons, he had started "turning inward — because I didn't
understand myself. Doing these paintings helped me understand more,
about how I grew up, why it was a good thing for me to go through the
mamma's boy phase, the drug phase, the jock phase, the goth phase, why
they're a part of me." Now he began to find his true subject — "the
relationship between inner and outer self," the outer self represented
by his face and the inner, sometimes, by his writing. For “Who Am I?” II
(2005), he wrote an autobiographical text over a painting of himself as
a baby. "I was also doing urban graffiti" — he wrote the word "Lost,"
in large letters, in several places near Brighton and Detroit. Identity
Crisis (2006) shows his face in abstracted drips — "because I couldn't
recognize myself." By then, he and LaKela were together again.
For
Things (2006), he installed prized possessions — comics, baseball
cards, Edgar Allen Poe books, awards he had won — in glass cases along
with silhouettes of himself, probing the nature of his identity in
relationship to objects. "People can be defined by their things," Nowak
says. A related series, "Prized Possessions," includes a nine-panel work
in progress, juxtaposing Nowak's face with the covers of comic books
from his childhood. For Alike and Part Of (2006), Nowak juxtaposes a
painting of his adult face with scans of the faces of 35 childhood
friends in a six-by-six panel grid. "It's about these poeple being a
part of me," he says, and they seem to function similarly to the way his
writing around his face does, surrounding and circumscribing him. For
Piece of Me (2006), he took the art market into account, doing a
self-portrait on 192 four-inch canvas squares. His idea was that if sold
individually, they would represent "the way that when you meet people,
they take away a piece of you, not physically but mentally" — but one
collector bought the whole piece. Different (2006) arranges 36 drip
paintings of his face in a grid, each with a different degree of
abstraction. Each of the ten self-portraits in You, Me, Everybody II
(2006) has a differently colored background, reflecting on how "we're
all made up of the same stuff; different backgrounds is one of the main
differences between people." For a current project, Envisioning My Self
Within... (Art Forum) (2007), Nowak paints his face into art works by
Lucien Freud, Andy Warhol, and others featured in Artforum ads.
Imagining a more famous future, he once again depicts his own identity
in terms of his visage, and implicitly asks how else he might be
defined. "I always figured that the reason I started looking inward was
that I didn't understand myself," but the terms of understanding that
his search has yielded thus far, with the free-floating relationships he
constructs between his face and its surroundings, might be described as
more questions. But "it's never only about me," Nowak writes. "My self
and my work are just catalysts for viewers to consider themselves as I
do in my work."
