Expressionist painter, Spencer Eldridge's Pop(apocalyptic) paintings will be on view in the lobby at The Ridgefield Playhouse at a reception sponsored by Samuel Adams Beer prior to the Lucky Chops concert, October 11th.
It’s hard to know exactly what’s going on with, expressionist artist, Spencer Eldridge’s joyfully apocalyptic paintings. Images, shapes, appear and recede, the longer one looks, and with every set of new eyes. One begins to construct a narrative, despite the defiance of the paintings to let you, for long. There is not a shape that doesn’t turn out to be something else at next glance. I think about the Futurists when I look at them. So much speed. So much movement, but industrialization (embraced by the futurists) has given way, here, to nature; the force that cannot be stopped. The math gone awry.
The paintings, crafted in materials as anachronistic to the art world as the dead dinosaurs that made them: oil, oil stick, graphite and charcoal on canvas, have a handcrafted quality. A somewhat ancient quality. You can feel the oiliness of the canvas, appropriate to the subject matter (an earth at the end of its days due to fossil fuels) and the days spent, staining each one, bit by bit, until it becomes a world unto its own. Each canvas is a wholly different work of art, though there is a thread that connects this labyrinth-like series.
Eldridge is a Florida native and knows, first hand, the primal swamps that gurgle with gators and cotton mouth and, more recently, python. He is also a city boy, having ditched art school in his twenties to take his punk band, “The Panics” to L.A. where he spent much of the eighties playing gigs at the Roxy and the Whisky A-Go-Go and playing on bills in the LA Chinatown punk scene with such acts as the Bangles, Red Hot Chili Peppers and Adam Ant. Eldridge kept his visual art skills honed, being as outrageous as possible on stage and a fascist for style, dictating the band’s haircuts and Beatle boots as well as designing all the band’s posters and buttons, album covers and merch, while hosting music and art parties in downtown LA lofts. When I last checked, a Panic’s 45’ A side: "Kill It Before it Multiplies" and B side: a cover of Burt Bacharach’s "Little Red Book" was going for $145.00 on Ebay, while a single of Eldridge’s brief solo effort, another 45’ with “hard to find” hot pink picture sleeve of “Double Shot of My Baby’s Love” and “Bad Days of Our Love” goes right now on (popsike.com) for $50. I spoke to one collector, in Korea, who absolutely had to have the “Test Test” 45' in order to complete the early 80s Florida punk scene section of his collection.
Between gigs and bands (three in L.A.) Eldridge worked in graphic design and painted murals on restaurant walls. He had one notable solo show, works in chalk pastel on paper, while in L.A. at the famed Gorkey’s Restaurant, just before he quit the L.A. scene for good and hightailed it to New York City. Instantly feeling at home, and with forty dollars in his pocket, he never returned from what was to be a two-week vacation.
Finding more space in a DUMBO loft in ‘98, he began, for the first time, to work in oils on canvas. He hit the ball out of the park on his first try and his painting hung alongside Robert Rauschenberg and Jim Dine in the annual Arts For Act Auction in Naples Florida and sold for a goodly sum. But, beginners luck was something Eldridge was familiar with, and he wanted to be the real deal, so he began a twenty year self-study of oil painting, occasionally augmented by a guru or a class, but largely a lonely, self-taught trek.
His resulting paintings, Terrascapes 2017 combine his birthplace and his home place, and his years of experience (both lived and on canvas) in a phantasmagoria of Armageddon on a joy ride. They are completely original and totally him. Some of them, such as “Googoomuck,” are named after songs by the 70s swampbilly punk band, The Cramps (he still owns the gift of Lux Interior’s, boots, given him by the late great icon, one night in Hollywood, in the early eighties) others remain untitled
Movement is one constant, as is joy. Joy in painting them, clearly, and joy in beholding them. These aren’t the kind of paintings you see all in one take. Like Eldridge, they won’t be summed up, yet they resonate, making a case for painting (perpetually on its death bed) yet again. Eldridge’s use of color has always been commendable, but, here, in these paintings, the colors shimmer against one another tenuously, linking shapes in gelatinous chrysalises. Insects are a theme, as are fish, birds, reptiles, hearts and goblets_ as are skyscrapers, refuse and wonder. Worlds exist inside worlds, inside worlds. None of this is overtly stated, the viewer gets to decide. But, when queried, Eldridge admits to feeling that humans won’t stop destroying the planet, so mother nature will likely have to do away with us. I would hazard to say that nature wins in these paintings, and is celebrated. More than anything, these paintings imply the times. A hurtling towards an impossible future, with abandon.
Eldridge teaches fine arts in the Katonah-Lewisboro school district and paints in his Redding CT studio. www.spencereldridge.com