By Daniel Kraker
http://stream.publicbroadcasting.net/production/mp3/knau/local-knau-947567.mp3
Flagstaff, AZ –
Click here for a slideshow of Joe Sorren's work
If you've ever been to downtown Flagstaff's Heritage Square, then you know Joe Sorren's work. His giant mural "The Veridic Gardens of Effie Leroux" curves around the wall of the Old Town Shops. The title is as strange as the painting even Sorren admits his art is "kind of weird" for this area.
"When I made this mural, I heard everything from, well, I don't know what it is, but I know I don't like it, to, why are you painting aliens?"
While maybe not everyone appreciates it, Sorren painted the mural ten years ago as a big thank you note to Flagstaff, for the help he received when he was struggling to make a name for himself.
If you've ever been to downtown Flagstaff's Heritage Square, then you know Joe Sorren's work. His giant mural "The Veridic Gardens of Effie Leroux" curves around the wall of the Old Town Shops. The title is as strange as the painting even Sorren admits his art is "kind of weird" for this area.
"When I made this mural, I heard everything from, well, I don't know what it is, but I know I don't like it, to, why are you painting aliens?"
While maybe not everyone appreciates it, Sorren painted the mural ten years ago as a big thank you note to Flagstaff, for the help he received when he was struggling to make a name for himself.
Sorren didn't pre-plan the mural instead he'd paint one scene, which would lead to another. And the closer you get, the more tiny details emerge.
"This woman, her journal's open, and it says, I would be mortified if anyone ever read this journal."
Which of course is what we're doing right now.
Joe Sorren first arrived in Flagstaff as an NAU freshman who liked drawing cartoons. But he thought art was something "grown-ups" did he never dreamed he could make art into a career. But he says he fell in love with throwing colors around the canvas.
"I like the fact it doesn't need an on or off switch to exist, I really love that. And I love that I make a living taking some hair, a potato sack, dirt, egg, smear it all together, and I get to make a living doing that, in essence that's what painting is. I like that old fashionedness, trying to do modern with it "
Now he spends 8 to 16 hours a day creating very modern, fantastical characters in extravagant environments but he says when he starts, he literally has no idea what he's going to paint.
Take his painting "Astraea." It's based on an Italian masterpiece from the 1500s
"But I didn't set out to paint that, at one point I think there was a guy over here with a gun, he was shooting little suction cups at her, there was a banjo player, lots of things come and go in a piece, it's just staying open, letting it be open to all possibilities.."
So are those characters all buried under layers of oil, I ask?
"Yeah, still in there, buried in there, kind of fun to think that they're still in there."
" I do think they have an energy, when you put something in a piece, affects the brushstrokes on top of it, if you really break painting down to what it is, it's actually, painting is motion, a recording of motion in time "
And his paintings in particular record A LOT of brushstrokes. His new piece Interruption took over one thousand hours to complete that's a month and a half of actual painting time.
"I have this belief where if in don't make something that's truly outstanding, then I'm just kind of leaving debris on the planet, not only debris, but debris I'm asking people to carry and take with them, so if it's not truly exciting, it's trash."
And he means that literally, says Sorren's dealer Annie Adjchavanich.
"I probably shouldn't say this, but I know that he's destroyed paintings that he's spent literally months on, hours upon hours creating, it was so frustrating at first, I couldn't believe it, I would feel like they were almost done, he felt they were inferior to the total body of work he's already created."
Because of that intense perfectionism, Sorren has produced comparably few paintings for someone considered a mid-career artist. Adjchavanich says that while Sorren, like any artist, wants success
"He doesn't put himself on any strict timelines to achieve that success. He's unlike any artist I've ever met, he works at his own pace, for sure, he doesn't have any sort of measure that he needs to be as good as this person."
The artist, it seems, is as unusual as the art.