Gordon Massman

Born in Corpus Christi, Texas, during the 1950s and ’60s, Gordon Massman grew up in a house stripped bare of art. “Our walls displayed no art, our shelves no books, and no music graced our souls,” he recalls. The only cultural presence was television, which fulfilled the role of entertainment. For Massman, that deprivation would become a kind of pressure chamber—one that eventually exploded into a life of relentless self-expression. “I believe extraordinary suffering, both psychological and physical, produces serious artists.”

He went on to earn an MFA in creative writing, though he dismisses academia as a maker of artists. Instead, he describes education as something that chisels away at the marble until the figure within emerges. For him, the true foundations have always been obsessive reading, obsessive writing, and obsessive psychotherapy.

Massman has devoted his life to two mediums—poetry and painting—approaching each not with breadth but depth. “I can burrow a hundred miles beneath the surface of one square inch,” he says. His recurring subjects are elemental human truths: urges, appetites, lusts, and the monsters behind the masks of civility. His influences are artists who crucified themselves on their work—Berryman, Sexton, Plath, Rothko, Pollock, Pasolini—figures who proved to him that “the richest frontiers for artists are the raw interiors.”

His studio, perched above the Atlantic, is less a source of inspiration than a battlefield. “I am my own landscape,” he insists. Six days a week, dressed in paint-stiffened clothes and clogs, he works before a 15-by-30-foot wall, moving through mountains of spent paint tubes. The sea rocks the tethered boats outside, but his canvases—hundreds of them—reflect no ocean, only the turbulence within. He recalls a 12-by-12-foot piece, Bluebird Drowning, as the work that taught him: “When I cut off my head, powerful unrestrained visceral madness paints great work.”

Massman’s vision is unapologetically primal. “My aim,” he says, “is to tear off masks of civility to expose the monsters that we are.” His measure of success is visceral: “When orgasm occurs.” He makes no secret of his ambition either, setting his sights on MoMA, the Whitney, and LA MOCA.

Personal history—five marriages, children, breakdowns, abuse, encounters, deaths—has shaped his practice as much as any formal influence. “One must release the demons after removing the internal false floor, and transform them into art.” For him, balance does not exist: “Decades ago, my right brain ate its left counterpart.”

Asked for advice, Massman is blunt: “Either be all in, or all out. And remember, if you want to find great artists, look to the gutters.”

Now in the thick of his career, surrounded by hundreds of canvases and years of writing, Massman insists he has no future. “I am only now.”