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Strange Beings and Self-Portraits: The Paintings and Drawings of Lawrence Quigley

By Graham Leggat

1. My early adulthood was spent in a haphazard search for certain classic sentimental ideals. Love, liberation, truth-those were the lofty names they went by. But what those names meant in practice, in my case, was any escape from the muddled young man that I was, and from the dread and anxiety that dogged me day and night.

I won't go into details but I will say I spent most of my time alone. I watched a lot of movies, read a lot of books, wrote a lot of crap. I took drugs and slept with and pined for girls. I was trying not to go crazy, I guess. Even so, slowly but surely, I rendered myself unfit for school or work. And thus, during one three-year stretch, I found myself sitting a good deal of zen meditation, first in a monastery in Carmel Valley, California, and after that in a temple in San Francisco.

None of this was what you would call gainful employment-though in fact it has proved surprisingly useful now that I am a more productive member of society-but anyway, here's the point.

During that haunted difficult time from ages sixteen to thirty-three, I came face to face with numerous inner selves. This was a wholly unwelcome thing, since what I was trying to do all along was get away from inner selves. Nonetheless, especially when I was propped up on a meditation cushion in a silent zendo, there they always were.

Demons, to be sure, and would-be princes, but mostly a motley collection of fools, misfits, pretenders, cretins, romantics, pathetic losers, bathetic drunks, desperate loveless idiots, greedy stupid ignorant whining jerkoffs, and so on.

In short, ordinary defectives of every stripe.

The same would have been true anywhere, but in the cold air of a California mountain dawn it was impossible to avoid the fact that all of these hapless characters were clearly recognizable. All of them were family. All of them were me.

This wasn't a pleasant realization. But it did help me begin to find a place for myself in the world. A place that I had thought would be forever denied to me.

2. It has been some years since those struggles. I won't say I had forgotten about all those psychic cornerboys and ne'er-do-wells, all the recidivists of the holding tank of the soul. But I had certainly not seen them in a while and they had faded from my mind. Until I saw Lawrence Quigley's paintings and drawings, that is, and there they were again in all their bumfucked glory.

I had a range of responses to seeing Quigley's work for the first time, as you might too when you look on his band of bastard things. And why not? Being essentially tragicomic, the work is rich with feeling and meaning and your looking brings forth these feelings and meanings in complicated ways.

There's discomfort. From being in the presence of disability, for starters. And from the fear of a degradation that has already come to pass. And from the growing suspicion that the hopeless or worthless face you are seeing may be your own.

There's sorrow-that all this should have come to pass and that such abject existences are possible. Even more, that they are commonplace, that they are all around us.

But there is also an undeniable glee at having stumbled across this little carnival. Freakish and tawdry and exciting and unsettling, Quigley's work is like a lost sideshow you were taken to as a child and which you never thought to visit again.

But most of all there is for me, when I look at these paintings and drawings, a deep and abiding affection for the resilience of the sad and beautiful creatures that inhabit them. The tragicomic innocents, the brokendown lumpen beings, the hungry ghosts and minor devils, the prideful turnips grown into the shape of men.

3. On this disk Quigley's work is organized into four categories: paintchip drawings, diptychs and triptychs, single-panel paintings, and drawings. Each of these provides different pleasures and shows the artist at work on a slightly different enterprise.

The clever format of the paintchip drawings lets the viewer's mind slide sideways to the idea of painting as a trade. Or to the idea of fragments of a film, of a series of frames too brief to do more than jolt the heart. Or to the nostalgia of the photobooth, which idea always whispers lovingly to me the name Woolworth's.

The paintchips gather Quigley's fallen family of man into something like a collection of artist's baseball cards or children's building blocks or police mug shots. But if so, they are baseball cards that record in quick and accomplished strokes careers of extraordinary failure or crushingly ordinary defeat. They are building blocks that picture orphaned boots and apelike humans in party hats instead of busy bees and apples and cats. And they are mug shots that capture, with lyrical variations from frame to frame, not hardened criminals and brutal crimes but the chronic makers of stupid mistakes, a line-up of all those with an insurmountable lack of fitness for the task at hand.

The paintchip drawings' seem to preserve the artist's honest modest impulse at its source. They are like a bucket of tadpoles pulled up from the pond and they ask no more of the viewer than to take a simple pleasure in their own small truths and giddy lives.

4. Though they repeat many of the same motifs, the diptychs and triptychs are clearly much more considered pieces. Part of this is a matter of scale, of course. Part of it is the works' engagement of more serious and more affecting subjects. Also, they are more wrought, more carefully measured. The serial form extends the elliptical narrative suggestiveness of the paintchips. But it deepens the viewer's response by means of a moody use of color and an elegiac brush treatment that seems to place their melancholy subjects somewhere between a postcard and a dream.

Take Complex Messiah, for example, with its forged and fiery surfaces. The stripped-down work-a straightforward offer of an iconic figure-is complicated by the degraded surface and by its Jesus' uncharacteristic smile. Then there is the confounding direct address in the last panel. Confounding, and unsettling, because, while clearly urgent, the precise demands of that address remain ungraspable and unclear.

Or take Untitled (Achondroplasia, hypochondroplasia), with its childlike figures in soothing planes of undersea green that only reinforce their heartbreaking aloneness and isolation. In this melancholy work, drawn from photographic plates in a medical text on dwarfism, so-called subnormals are drawn with great dignity in postures that recall classical figurative poses.

Or take the vibrant, almost jaunty Gratis, in which a minor devil or hungry ghost seems to have assumed responsibility for a child with Downs Syndrome.

These three works move toward a common theme, and perhaps to the core of Quigley's artistic impulse. The first sees an ideal image brought down while the second seeks to raise up the low. And in the third, one troubled being finds himself caring for another, through which task he finds meaning if not redemption.

In each of these cases, and in all these portraits and self-portraits, a profound experience of humility is at work. This depth of feeling and the work it gives birth to are highly unusual. They can arise only out of a deeply felt understanding of the alloyed nature of the human condition. Its hopelessness and its optimism, its ludicrous but somehow effective coping mechanisms in the face of the universe's cruelty or indifference.

5. The paintchips and combination paintings might be said to construct a community for their subjects. They certainly have that effect when viewed together, on this disk or in a studio or gallery. And it's either a disturbing or a consoling effect, depending on how you feel about the circus troupe it assembles.

The single-panel paintings and the drawings, for their part, have the opposite effect. They separate out painterly passages and archetypal figures. In so doing they allow the artist to move toward a greater simplicity, an essential purity of line or emotion. This serves to fix a single image or graphic gesture indelibly in the mind. At the same time it provides a more abstract pleasure, like an astringent liquor that clears the head at the end of a long and involved meal.

If you find yourself affected by the complexity of the serial works-the paintchips and diptychs and triptychs-the clarity and simplicity of the single-panel paintings and drawings is, like cool air in the lungs, a keen pleasure and relief. Before long, though, it's hard not to want to return to the teeming sideshows.

To a place where, as a song by Tom Waits has it, "a man with missing fingers plays a strange guitar/ And the German dwarf dances with the butcher's son/ And a little rain never hurt no one."
Graham Leggat lives in Brooklyn. He is the founding editor of The Journal of Temporary Art.

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