How Far We Have Come. New Paintings by Eric Stotic

Earlier today I went to go see new paintings by Eric Stotik at the Laura Russo gallery in Northwest Portland. I have not seen Eric’s work in about 30 years, but the time back then is worth a story. Then the neighborhood was affordable, and most of my friends were part of the vibrant and fertile, as well as destructive and drug addled post punk scene, and many of us lived there.

 One of my domiciles then was a storefront on NW 21^st. I remember sleeping in the display window the first night hoping someone would want to buy me. I lived there alone at first, and did not know what to do with the place, so I painted a question mark on the door, thinking that and an ‘open’ sign would speed up the ideas. A woman came in one day and asked if the space was a gallery, because she would love to do an installation there. I had no idea what an installation was, but said indeed it was a gallery and she was welcome to do such a thing, and my first show was on. I think it was Tammy (now Stotik) who arranged for Mike King and Eric to do the next show at the Question Mark Gallery. Mike hung paintings on glass, and Eric hung a few very intricate paintings.

 Back then there was a very strong current flowing between art and the Underground, and flowing through our young politics. I learned much about 20^th Century art back then in our minor utopia which we saw as standing against SO much; Reagan’s covert wars in Central America, AIDS (then still a ‘gay cancer’), and a never ending cold war. For myself, a 20 something gay boy, I really did not feel myself as having much of a future. Many of my friends were in bands, were performers, writers, poets and painters. Though I did not really know him then, Eric was among us young embattled underground utopians.

I soon left Portland for 30 years, returning now, finally as the artist I was sort of made to be. Clay has called it a disease, others have called it a ‘calling’, others still have called it a career. Art does a few things. It shows a person’s soul, and how they see their world. Art shows history from the side of the extremely personal, art is a synapse between individual and collective imagination. Art tells stories.

Eric Stotic has become a fine artist. All those things art does, he has learned to command with skill and grace. The large painting, maybe 50 feet long, was conceived as a circle, a painting with no beginning and no end. The slide from a barely maintained peaceful rural setting into hell is a very quick one, and the bodies strewn about, tortured and dismembered are the end of so many stories. The work is a staggering comment on the state of the world, a hymn to all those torn apart by largely western, capitalist interests. For all its violence, it remains a somehow tender thing as well. Shit, so may things come to mind, but the one that sticks out is a painting I saw by Hieronymus Bosch at the National Gallery in Berlin. On a black, wooden square, he painted a white circle. Very small, in the center of the circle is a fire. It seemed to me that all of his paintings were conceived in this tiny fire. It appears Eric has wandered into that fire and gives us the vision he had there.

Walking down 21^st as I left the wake of bodies hung on the gallery wall, I was looking at all those fine buildings we lived in back then when cities were not bought and sold by the rich, and I could not help but wonder what it meant to say something like, “Look how far we have come”

painting details were not uploaded with permission, just trying to get y'all out to the show