ARTIST SPOTLIGHT: FELDSOTT
Photo by Marc Olivier LeBlanc
Crushed Alabaster, plant material, handmade paints, and other medicinal elements are used by the artist to create spiritual and mythologically charged imagery.
After being one of the youngest artists to ever exhibit at SFMOMA in 1975, artist Feldsott all but disappeared from the art world. What transpired was a 25+ year journey through Central and South America and a whirlwind of environmental justice advocacy, political uprising, addiction, and learning traditional medicine and shamanism from Indigenous communities. Now based in the Bay Area, where he lives with rescued wolves in a secluded art studio, Feldsott continues to make paintings that trace not only his own personal journey throughout the decades but the “human journey.” His work is currently being exhibited at Paul Mahder Gallery in California featuring work from the BuDah Paintings series.
I’ve lived in the Bay area for most of my life. I came out here when I was quite young at 17. I was originally drawn to the Bay Area because I had been fortunate enough to make the acquaintance of William T. Wiley and Roy De Forest, some of the original Northern California funksters. The kinds of work they were doing and the kind attitude they brought to their work inspired me as a young artist. So not really having a clear plan, I felt that Northern California spoke to me and I came out here. Of course, a lot of artists out in Northern California are more reclusive, and it’s not like a big art social scene out here, but the spirit of the way art is made is conducive to my personality and attitude to spend long periods of time to make art and not necessarily be influenced or aware of the ever-changing trends and fashions of the art world.
I showed my work quite a bit when I was younger and still in my teens and had a couple of opportunities to be represented by SFMOMA and be included in a couple of shows out here. I had an opportunity to show my work in the gallery system and collectors were aware of my work. All of that was in my late teens, early twenties. Then I was distrubed by the commercialization and the pressure I felt as a young artist in terms of the commercial energetics the art world was trying to impose on my process. Being young, and not having a lot of ways to deal with that pressure, my attitude at the time was to remove myself from the art world. Looking back, there were other ways I could’ve handled those pressures and other kinds of choices I could’ve made, but back then it seemed that the only option was to not show my work publicly and to retire from the art world at a very young age.
I spent over twenty years making art in isolation and painting regularly and producing large bodies of work which were not for public consumption or to show. It wasn’t until 2000 or 2001, when I was approached by a curator from a museum in Quito, Ecuador, that I experienced a different feeling when I was exposed to Latin painters and saw the ways they participated in the societies they came from. Their work was quite engaging for people. The Latin painters are held in a different way than I would say the North American painters are held in their society. That kind of discourse and communication between them and their communities at the time was quite interesting to me. So when that opportunity was offered to me, I accepted it and the show at the museum in Quito was the first exhibition of my work in over twenty years.
People started to become aware of my work and different things started to happen. Those years of working in isolation and not being interested, motivated, or influenced by the art world and the dynamics contained therein kind of set me on a certain path of an individuated way of thinking and working. That has proven to be a pretty profound stamp on my work, and has allowed me to explore things and not care in terms of its commercialism or its monetary impact on things. That energy still serves me to this day.
What are your current artistic inspirations?
My deepest artistic inspirations come from the generation of poets that came before me and the extraordinary jazz musicians that emerged in the 50s and the 60s. Being a young adult at that time and actually being able to hear, meet, and witness some of those people before they passed and while they were making music and poetry—it inspired me as a certain kind of template for making art and living life as an artist. Those are the people that still inspire and influence me in terms of trying to maintain some kind of spontaneity and authenticity and trust in the process, and allowing whatever you’re making to make itself.
What is your studio and creative process like?
My studio is a large barn, where I’ve worked for over thirty years, and inside of it I tend to have a lot of projects that are unfolding. Any kind of inspiration or vision that comes to me I begin to work on it. Some pieces I work on straight through from start to finish, and other pieces I might work on for quite a while, and they might sit in my studio for two to five years before I circle back to them. If you come into my studio you experience the creative process and see the unfolding of a number of different things in a number of different directions. Some things closer to being finished, others things more raw and just kind of in their beginning. Some people find my studio inspirational and others find it overwhelming.
What do you hope to challenge or reveal for a viewer through your work?
I believe I am challenging the viewer to explore and investigate those energetics inside themselves that are, let's say, the energetics of the shadow to become more squared up to themselves and to be more honest and authentic. That’s my journey. I’m not a master of it or anything like that, but I’m challenging people to join me on my journey.
What can you tell us about your two recent exhibitions: Howls That Wake Us in the Night and the BuDah Paintings at Paul Mahder Gallery?
It wasn’t a planned thing. I was presented with the opportunity to show at SUNY College Old Westbury in Long Island a year ago by a relationship I was developing with the curator Hyewon Yi. Howls That Wake Us in the Night was developing and coming into some kind of concept around the same time as The BuDah Paintings at Paul Mahder Gallery. What was kind of interesting and spontaneous was that on the East Coast they are showing this range of my work that has to do with war, violence, and social justice—these kinds of energetics which have been part of my work for decades—and on the West Coast at the Paul Mahder Gallery they’re showing this project that took me over two and a half years. The work in The BuDah Paintings explores the energetics of the archetype of the Buddha, not the religious significance of the Buddha but the collective unconscious archetype. So you have these two shows that are very much demonstrating this kind of gigantic arc of exploration in my work over the years. To me, there’s no conflict there, it’s all part of the human journey.
Howls That Wake Us in the Night gathers a collection of works meditating “on postcolonial traumas, violence, and human redemption.” How do you balance confronting atrocity in some of your art while also leaving space for redemption?
I believe that if you want to heal a wound, you first must clean out the foreign bodies and any toxic materials inside that wound or else it will never heal properly. The excision of those toxic materials might be uncomfortable and painful but it’s an important precursor to healing. As it is with the physical body, I believe the human consciousness is no different. We have to explore and clean the parts of ourselves that are damaged and wounded and toxic. All of us have these kinds of things that are a part of us. Squaring up to and reckoning with something that someone might characterize as toxic, wounded, broken, or dark, is actually very much a part of any healing journey.
The practice of healing comes up a lot in your life and work. Can you speak more to its importance?
It has an importance to me personally because in my life I grew up in a complicated situation and had a lot of wounding to deal with during the earlier parts. The aspect of healing to me is not some intellectual idea; it’s been something that I’ve had to work on consistently through the majority of my life, and it’s not over, it’s not done. I don’t look at healing as some binary situation where you’re either healed or not. I believe that healing is just a process, and I choose to be committed to it in my life, and in my journey. It’s proven to be helpful to me, and helped me through remodeling some things that were debilitating to me when I was younger. I am somebody that has gone through significant bouts of substance abuse, I’ve suffered psychotic breaks of serious magnitudes. This idea of healing to me is not some kind of abstraction, it’s something that I’ve had to grapple with in my life in order to be functional and to show up in some kind of responsible way.
What is next for you?
Right now I still feel strong and energized. I’m grateful that I still feel incredibly passionate, curious, and interested in my work in the studio. From an artistic point of view, I hope the next years ahead allow me some time to continue painting and producing work. We’ll see how that unfolds. I’m also a father, a husband, a grandfather, and so there’s lots of lives around me, of which I am incredibly interested in and cheerleading for, and lots of people in my life that I’m hoping the best for. That is incredibly important to me at this point as well.
Website: www.feldsott.com
Instagram: @feldsott
