Art Exhibition Integrates Art History, Film Noir and Figurative Painting

Associate Professor of Art Joe Forkan has been the talk of websites in five different languages on three continents since the opening of “The Lebowski Cycle,” an exhibition of paintings and drawings at Costa Mesa's Orange Coast College on display since late September.

Caption: Associate Professor of Art Joe Forkan is the artist behind “The Lebowski Cycle,” an exhibition of paintings and drawings at Costa Mesa's Orange Coast College through Oct. 28.

Forkan, who joined the Art Department faculty in 2002 and lives in Santa Ana, began work on the project in 2006, when he first conceived of the idea of using masterpieces of European art and images suggested by the 1998 movie “The Big Lebowski” to explore his longstanding interest in narrative painting, particularly paintings from the Baroque and Neoclassical eras.

Juxtaposing the themes and titles of well-known works of art with scenes from the Coen brothers’ cult-favorite, Forkan’s cycle of paintings evoke multiple contexts and shifting points of view.

The artist has a B.F.A. in studio art from the University of Arizona and an M.F.A. from the University of Delaware. He spent two decades drawing comics and cartoons — most notably “Staggering Heights,” a weekly strip which started in the Tucson Weekly in 1995 and ran in a constantly changing number of alternative press papers until 2003. “After 20 years of cartooning — comic strips, cartoon panels, editorial cartoons, children’s books and editorial illustration — I put it aside to concentrate more on my painting, which I had also been pursuing at the same time,” Forkan explains.

Q: What was there about these celebrated examples of classical European art that prompted these unlikely pairings?

A: I love those complex figurative works that depict grand story arcs, and manage to compress a multitude of thoughts, ideas and emotions into a singular image. I wanted to explore human interactions and conflicts, formal structures and modes of depiction that are operating in these paintings as much as the specific stories that are being depicted.

Q. Why “The Big Lebowski”?

A: Well, first of all, I love the film, obviously. But I had been looking at a lot of narrative paintings and thinking about the grand seriousness of this kind of painting, looking for a way to build a more open narrative – one that would not get stuck in a single reading, or be too grim, as this type of painting often is. I started looking at “The Big Lebowski” as a possible source, trying to imagine how the great characters, playful humor and preposterous story arc of the film might be enlisted to build some more layered narratives; paintings with multiple points of view, moods and intentions. Layered genres and different archetypes were already at work in the movie as envisioned by the Coen brothers, who constructed the film as a labyrinthine narrative in the manner of a Raymond Chandler novel, with Lebowski, an aging pothead, given the hard-boiled detective role. This gave them great storytelling possibilities — at one point leading to a film noir dream sequence filmed as a Busby Berkeley musical in a bowling alley with a character costumed from a Wagnerian opera. If you get all the references, it's great; if not, it’s still rich storytelling.

Q: How exactly did the Lebowski Cycle paintings come together?

A: In either case, I wanted to use disparate sources and conventions to make hybrid images that reference art history, film and contemporary art, creating a lot of ways to enter the work. So I began to cobble together bits from different parts of the movie to compose the scenes that would become the paintings. I wanted to evoke the film without limiting myself to the scenes as the Coen brothers actually shot them. There are no frames in the film that look exactly like any of the paintings.

“The Oath of the Horatii” was the one that really inspired the series because I was looking at that David painting and thinking at how sincere and over-the-top serious it was. One of the problems with making art in the age of irony is that it’s really hard to get away with anything that’s sincere without having it come off as shrill or over the top.

Paintings have this kind of internal logic where time is stretched out in a different way than film. I figured the combination of images would give people a lot of ways to enter the work. That’s something that's really important to me, too — not to make a work that is opaque in the way art can be, where only a certain, select group is able to enter the work.

Q: How many times have you seen the film since its original release 13 years ago?

A: I’ve been working on this project for five years, so it wouldn’t surprise me if I’ve seen the movie 100 times at this point. In the beginning, I watched it over and over, looking for connections between images and ideas from the film and art history, and paying attention to the cinematography, environments, editing, etc. Then I had to build the images to paint from. None of the images are straight screen shots. I combined the characters from different frames, and either added or subtracted elements to change the compositions. Sometimes the film was just good company in the background while working in my studio. The fact that the characters in the film are dead serious about what is happening to them, and it is their actions that are funny, was another reason I liked it as a source. I wanted that collision in the reading of the paintings; I wanted the grand historical and the every day coming together in some way.

Q: What’s next?

A: I’m in the beginning stages of a couple of projects. I’m still really intrigued by the possibilities of working with layered images. Painting is really a strange and imprecise way of making images and conveying ideas, if you think about it. The paintings are oil on linen and all fairly large. The largest piece is 7 x 12 feet, but most are at least 6 feet in length. The scale was important. The source paintings were usually large scale, and I wanted the presence and impact that large paintings have. One of the things I love about living in this time is that there are so many ways of making images. “The Lebowski Cycle” is an attempt to navigate and explore many different approaches to making paintings and images, and that is also part of what the paintings are about.

What makes art dynamic and engaging is how ideas and aesthetics interact in a piece of art. So, it was important to me that “The Lebowski Cycle” paintings weren’t just illustrations of the idea, but were as visually rich and complex as I could make them. I used many different approaches from different eras in making the work.

“The Lebowski Cycle” is on view at the Frank M. Doyle Arts Pavilion at Orange Coast College in Costa Mesa through Oct. 28.

October 20, 2011