Patrick Fanning

Exhibits & Demonstrations

In 2006 I stopped exhibiting my paintings and I no longer do anything to market my work. I still paint for my own enjoyment. This page contains photos and text from two of my past exhibits in which I combined painting and writing in multi-media installations:

STRANGE ICONS

Stories & Paintings by Patrick Fanning

Shown at Graton Galley, November 8-December 1, 2003

For this show, I hung eight watercolor and oil paintings, illustrating four of my original short-short stories, the first of which is:

The Virgin of Winnemucca

Email to: His Holiness Pope Urban XI

From: Cardinal Allesandro D'Annuncio

Date: 23 Julio 2010

Cc: Officina Oscura di Inquisitione Nuovo

Subject: Honor Kowalski

Your Holiness:

In obedience to your urgent request, allow me to briefly summarize the key findings of my investigation of Honor Kowalski, known on the web as the Mormon Mary, the Virgin of Winnemucca, the Motorcycle Madonna, and so on.

I interviewed and observed the young lady on three different occasions: at her residence in the Desert Palms Trailer Court in Winnemucca, Nevada, USA; at CycleTown, her place of employment; and at the Ely County Public Health Medical Clinic.

Ms. Kowalski claims to be a virgin, and the clinic doctors confirm that her hymen is intact, although some radial scarring precludes certainty. Her pregnancy is confirmed--she did deliver a premature, mixed-race baby girl on December 25th of last year. The child weighed five pounds, four ounces, showed some sign of fetal alcohol syndrome, and shares her mother's HIV positive status. DNA scans establish Ms. Kowalski's maternity beyond a doubt.

The infant was named Jeza Christa Kowalski and remains unbaptized in any religion. Honor describes herself as a "fallen-away Jack Mormon," a "Goddess Grrrl," and "basically Christian in a Zen sort of way."

The so-called annunciation of her pregnancy was provided by Gabe Ricks, a roadie for Arrested Development, a local sludge rock band. He stayed in Honor's trailer for a few months early last year, and she claims they were not sexually intimate. She thought his ravings about the second coming were drug-induced, until she realized she was pregnant and the fetus started talking to her in her head, calling her the "Mother of Mothers" and referring to a "Mother Earth Reckoning."

Regarding the reported manifestations, I have observed that a faint aura surrounds mother and child in dim light, while nursing, and after eating garlic. Comparing Honor's tattoos to some rather graphic snapshots taken two years ago, it does appear that her tattoos have been moving and changing. A Hell's Angels logo is now a flaming Sacred Heart symbol with wings. Sludge rock and local gang grafix have morphed into a peculiar form of Celtic knot work. When she started nursing, tattoos on her breasts faded or moved away. Her breasts glow in the dark.

As for the rumors of miracles, it is true that Arrested Development obtained a recording contract and that the title cut of their recent CD is number one. That alone seems miraculous, as you would agree if you were unfortunate enough to hear the song. I was unable to confirm that the CycleTown computer is growing RAM, or that their website updates itself. I did view the blasphemous "Jesus H. Christ" page that uses the image of the Sacred Heart to sell motorcycles. Supposedly, this ad appeared on the website by divine intervention.

I did confirm that the website gets thousands of hits per hour and never crashes, even though the server is completely inadequate for the volume of traffic. The topics on the chat room strings are profound, disturbing, and much too mystical for a site that three months ago was a glorified motorcycle parts catalog. As to whether the site has become a "virtual Mecca for electronic pilgrims," I despair of even understanding the question.

The mysterious icon that appeared atop the CycleTown building is completely fraudulent. What appears from a distance to be gold leaf and egg tempera on a gessoed panel is actually gold lacquer and airbrushed acrylic on plywood. On the other hand, I can offer no explanation for Cardinal Vincente's observations that many of the Renaissance madonnas in the Vatican collection seem to be growing tattoos that match Honor Kowalski's.

The healing sessions involve as many motorcycles as they do sick people. I have seen lame men walk, blind women see, deaf children hear, and cracked engine blocks run sweet and smooth. Knowing as we do how easy it is to fake healings, I am most impressed by the engine repairs.

In answer to your questions:

Is something going on that we should worry about? Yes

What is it? I don't know.

Could it be the Second Coming? For the sake of the church as we know it, I hope not.

I will provide a detailed report with full documentation upon my return next week. I have one more opportunity to interview the Virgin tomorrow. She has granted me a private audience and claims that Jeza will cure the arthritis that has plagued me for twenty years. We shall see.

Yours in Christ,

Cardinal Allesandro D'Annuncio

(Penciled note from confidential secretary: "Cardinal D'Annuncio is three weeks overdue."

Plywood Princess

Dorcas hated the way Uncle Ted called her “Dork.” She hated how grumpy he got in the afternoon after a few drinks. She hated how he lurched around the backyard outside her trailer some nights.

Dorcas had been sleeping in the trailer for a couple of weeks. It felt safer.

It hadn’t always been like that. Before her mom died, Uncle Ted lived in the trailer and Dorcas lived with her mom and her dog Rex in the big house. But then her mom and Rex were killed by a drunk driver, and Uncle Ted moved into the big house and started bossing her around.

Uncle Ted was a bachelor who had never had children of his own. He didn’t shop, couldn’t cook, and never cleaned. He never called her “Princess” like her mom used to, or made jokes, or played board games. He never made waffles like her mom used to make. He just worked in the woodshop, drank beer, and went to flea markets to sell the whirligigs and bendover ladies they made out of plywood and welding rod.

Dorcas had to spend weekends alone, sanding and painting and gluing windmills and plywood cows or sheep. She actually liked to make things, so that part was okay, but it was lonely. She wanted to get another dog, but Uncle Ted said, “NO DOGS” in a really grumpy voice.

It wasn’t fair. Dorcas helped make the stuff they sold, but she didn’t get to buy anything she wanted. She could run the band saw and the jigsaw by herself. She could plan her cuts and follow the lines well. She could lay out patterns on plywood better than Uncle Ted, so that there was hardly any waste. She was more careful than Uncle Ted, too. He was missing the first joint of his forefinger from a band saw accident. Dorcas hated it when he lectured her because he poked her in the chest with that awful finger that had no nail.

Uncle Ted wasn’t all bad. He taught her how to do stuff. She liked knowing the secrets of power tools. The saws ate through stubborn wood smoothly, like magic. But Uncle Ted was awfully fussy. He never let her use the power tools when he was gone.

One Friday she came home from school and Uncle Ted was drinking already. She tried to stay out of his way. He was muttering and yelling at her by dinnertime. She ate leftover fried rice and went out to the trailer right after dinner, saying she was tired. She fell asleep and the next thing she knew she flew awake, heart pounding, not knowing why. Then she heard Uncle Ted outside.

She had forgotten to lock the door! He opened the door to the trailer and stood inside it, not saying anything, not turning on any lights. It made her very nervous.

She must have gasped or something, because Uncle Ted jerked like a startled dog. He turned away and left, leaving the door open. She ran to the door and locked it. She stayed awake for a long time, afraid he’d come back, unsure why she was so frightened.

The next day Uncle Ted made her stay home to paint bendover ladies while he went to a big Memorial Day flea market. As soon as he left, Dorcas took a piece of plywood from the scrap bin and drew a big strong dog like Rex on it. She took it to the bandsaw, held her breath, and flipped the switch. Humming power flooded the shop as she cut out the dog.

Dorcas sanded her dog, then painted it black and orange and white. She named it Rex the second and propped it up against the trailer to dry.

That night Uncle Ted came back late, after she had gone to bed. He rattled the knob on her trailer about 10:30, but she had double locked the door and he couldn’t get in.

The next morning she looked out the window and the plywood doggy was gone. Had Uncle Ted found it and thrown it away? She tiptoed into the house and there was Uncle Ted, petting a real live dog. It was black and white and orange and looked just like Rex.

“About time you got up,” he sneered. “Rex is waiting for you to feed him.”

Dorcas went to the cupboard in a daze. She found dog food where it had always been, and the dog dish on the floor by the sink where it had always been. It was like Rex had always been there. In fact, Dorcas sort remembered Rex always being there. But she also remembered Uncle Ted saying “NO DOGS!”

Uncle Ted left for the second day of the Memorial flea market. Dorcas played with Rex all morning, wondering what it all meant. Suddenly she got an idea. She went out to the shop and dragged out a really big piece of plywood. She got her picture of her real mother from under her mattress and studied it carefully.

She set up her plywood on saw horses and carefully drew her mother. She wore the erasers off two pencils getting it right. She cut her mother out carefully with the jig saw, using a fresh blade and working slowly.

She had to stop in the late afternoon and hide the plywood under a tarp. Uncle Ted came home drunk and skipped dinner. That night she took Rex inside the trailer with her and locked the door.

Uncle Ted came to the trailer door that night and opened it with a key. Rex started growling and barking. Uncle Ted slammed the door and trudged away, his steps heavy and unsteady.

The next morning was Monday, the third day of the fair. This would be her last chance. After Uncle Ted left, Dorcas uncovered her plywood mother and painted her blue slacks and white blouse. She didn’t paint the clothes jokey like a bendover lady, but really tried to make it look real, like the photograph. She used the natural color of the wood for the skin color and painted her mother’s mouth in a smile and her eyes with two dots of white paint for the sparkle. When she was finished she propped the plywood figure against the trailer.

Dorcas and Rex ate early and retired to the trailer. They took Uncle Ted’s favorite power tool, the Makita power screwdriver. Dorcas used it to drive long black drywall screws through the trailer door and into the soft aluminum doorframe. She did the same to the door to the bedroom, sealing herself and Rex up with screws.

“I hope there’s not a fire,” she thought. “We’ll fry.”

Dorcas was so excited and scared, she could hardly get to sleep. But she did doze off, and had strange dreams. She dreamed that she saw her mom’s car flip over and catch on fire. Dorcas ran to save the driver, but it was Uncle Ted behind the wheel, with fire in his eyes. She tossed and turned all night, half awake, feverish.

In the morning she jumped out of bed and ran to the kitchen before she realized that she was in the house, not the trailer. A figure dressed in blue and white turned from the waffle iron.

“You’re sure up early, Princess,” her mother said. “Want a waffle?”

Dorcas smiled shyly. She drifted over and hugged her mom gently. She fed Rex and sat down at the table and dreamily ate the best waffle ever.

After breakfast she looked out the window--no trailer. She went to Ted’s room--it was full of sewing stuff and old toys.

She asked her mom, “What ever happened to Uncle Ted’s old trailer?”

“Don’t you remember? We just had it hauled away. After he died I nearly wrecked it trying to get the door open. I still wonder how he managed to screw it shut from the inside.”

“Mom, do we have a picture of my Dad?”

“Sure, there’s one around somewhere.”

“I’d like to see it.”

Voodoo Moose

This horse? My sister Jackie sent it to me. I just got back from three weeks taking care of her, and I’m so grateful to be back in my own house, among my own things and friends and husband and all. She had a burst appendix and a bad infection and it was a close thing there for a while.

I stayed at her house. Mess? Let me tell you! When you first walk into Jackie’s house, you think, “Oh my god--OCD.” I mean full-blown obsessive-compulsive disorder with the piles of newspapers and the balls of string and the cat pee and everything. Dolls and knickknacks and catalogs and balls of yarn totally covering every surface. And everything coated with dust. She never cleans, never throws anything away.

Jackie has a bad case of collectionitis. It’s a Midwest disease that makes you fill your house with the tackiest, crappiest kitsch you can find. My kids call Aunt Jackie the collection Gestapo because she not only collects dolls and little figurines, but she also insists that every kid should collect something. See, she never had any kids of her own, so whenever a new niece or nephew is born, she takes it upon herself to decide what kind of doll or animal that kid should collect, and sends one on every birthday and Christmas thereafter. I’m not kidding; she’s relentless. My son David got two frogs a year until he was 21, plus extras at confirmation, graduation, when he broke his legs. My daughter Karen got nutcrackers. Our sister Jill’s kids got kitty cats and Barbies. Amy’s kids got skunks, angels, and Raggedy Anns. When we were kids Jackie wanted me to collect horses, but I put a stop to that.

The weird thing is how our kids put up with it. I mean, they complain and groan when the aunt Jackie package is opened, but they all still have their collections. Karen has still got an army of nutcrackers. Even when they go off to college, they take at least a couple, and god knows they won’t let you throw away the ones left at home. Even Amy’s daughter Katie, who has two kids of her own, she still has Raggedy Anns all over her bed. Drives her husband crazy.

The kids are so funny about Jackie. They say if you don’t take care of your Aunt Jackie collection, the Voodoo Queen will put a curse on you or something. I remember when David was 16 we moved to Santa Rosa and he packed all his frogs into a box for Goodwill. Karen was like 13 then, and she screamed bloody murder, put the box with her stuff and wouldn’t let me give it away. When David fell off the roof at the new house and broke both his legs, Jackie sent him this gross Mexican stuffed frog. I mean a real frog, like taxidermied, standing up with crutches and a cast on its leg. It was gruesome, but he kept it. Plus all the other frogs gradually migrated from Karen’s room back into David’s.

Jackie’s house is a mess, but she knows where everything is. The second day I’m there, she’s in the recovery room, still sleepy from the anesthetic, and she tells me, “Next week is Anna’s birthday.” That’s Jill’s youngest. So she says, “take the Surfer Ken doll from the top of my bookcase, and pack it up in the orange box in the hall closet. Her card is already in the box. Wrap it in the balloon paper and mail it tomorrow.”

So I have to find the damn Ken doll, and of course she’s got three different bookcases, all full of more dolls than books. And I notice the weirdest thing yet. She’s got all the frogs and angels and Raggedy Ann’s that the cousins’ will need for the next two or three years, already bought. Some of them boxed up, some out of the box and displayed all around her living room. So I ask her the next day, what’s the deal, and she gets all excited. “Don’t touch them!” She says. “Leave them all where they are. I’ve got them just where I want them.”

I don’t know if it was the surgery and the infection, or if she was always like this, but she’s seriously nuts about the dolls. Listen to this. I told her that I got an email from Ann saying that Katie and Bill went to Hawaii for their anniversary, and Jackie asks me, serious as can be, to take the Raggedy Ann off the television and put it on the hall table until they get back. She wants the dolls in her house moved around whenever the real people go somewhere. Weirdest thing I every heard from her, and she’s always been the weird sister.

It all started with the mooses. She’s collected moose stuff since she’s a baby, and she still has moose number one, I’m sure of it. Moose dolls, moose statues, a moose clock, a Bullwinkle lunchbox—all mixed up with the cousin dolls and the cats and the dirt and the clutter. The boss moose is Minnie Moose. It’s a three foot tall pink stuffed moose in a tutu. She got it from her husband for their 25^th wedding anniversary, how weird is that? Then he died and Minnie Moose has been her sidekick ever since. She takes it everywhere with her. Well, that’s cute for a little girl, but she’s sixty for chrissakes. And she’s not a cute sixty either. Jackie’s always been kind of a moose herself, big and awkward, never fitting in very well. Minnie Moose was the last straw as far as any social life for Jackie was concerned.

In the last few years Jackie’s been bringing Minnie to family reunions and weddings and stuff. I think she got the idea from some magazine article or somebody at work that Minnie could become a wacky tradition in our family. At every big event she wants to take a picture of Minnie with the wedding cake, Minnie at graduation wearing the mortarboard, Minnie in front of Mount Rushmore. Like we were the Kennedys or Franny and Zooey—some kind of sophisticated family that reads the New Yorker, plays practical jokes, makes puns and stuff. But Jackie’s way too Midwest to pull it off. She’s the only one who thinks it’s cute. Everyone else feels put upon and embarrassed for her.

See, if Jackie was really witty or ironic enough, she might get away with a running gag like Minnie. But she’s too clueless about other people to ever get Minnie to catch on. When Jill and Jerry were going to New Orleans for their second honeymoon, Jackie sent them Minnie, wanting them to take it and send her a picture of Minnie at Chez Paul. Well, no way Jill was going to drag a three foot moose around New Orleans. She left it behind, and their house sitter gave it away to Goodwill with a bunch of their kids’ old stuff they had left out for pick up. That was last spring, and Jackie hasn’t spoken to Jill since. It really hurt Jackie’s feelings.

When Jackie was coming out of the anesthesia, she said, “Where’s Minnie?” several times. It took her forever to pull out of the anesthetics. Then the infection took over and she was out of it a lot. She didn’t make sense or she wouldn’t answer when you talked to her. She kept asking for Minnie and being confused, thinking I was Amy or Jill or our mom. They tried different antibiotics but she kept going downhill. I was really worried.

I’m critical about my sister, you know? For sure her ways aren’t my ways. But I’m not stupid. I know that when it comes down to life and death, you have to give people what they want. Even if it’s crazy or embarrassing, you give them what they want. So I went to WalMart and bought the biggest stuffed moose I could find. I sewed some giant stitches on its stomach, right where Jackie’s were. Put it on the windowsill of Jackie’s room where she could see it.

The new Minnie seemed to do the trick. Jackie rallied and her color was better. We spent a fun afternoon with my digital camera, taking pictures of Minnie in bed with Jackie, Jackie feeding Minnie some Jello, Minnie on the bedpan. I printed them up on her computer at home. Jackie started making sense, and her fever went down, but not all the way.

I thought I’d bring in some of her photo albums to cheer her up. Back at Jackie’s house, I got out her photo albums, looking for those family shots with Minnie. There were very few. Mostly we declined, kicked Minnie out of the frame. I got out my digital camera and my laptop and fired up Photoshop and Jackie’s scanner. I put Minnie into my wedding, Dad’s funeral, everyone’s graduation and birthday and christening. I wove that damn moose into the fabric of our family’s life like she was a favorite youngest daughter.

I took the doctored album to the hospital, showed it to Jackie, and the strangest thing happened. She paged through the album, getting more and more animated, her color improving. But she didn’t laugh at what I had done. She accepted each photograph as the truth. She remembered taking or receiving the pictures of Minnie next to the wedding cake, Minnie in front of Diamond Head, Minnie at Dad’s funeral with a black arm band. She accepted Minnie with Jill and Jerry in a carriage in New Orleans, and that was just last March that Jill turned her down.

So her memory is still screwy, but physically she pulled through. The infection was licked and her incision was healing, so they kicked her out of the hospital. I got her back into her house and ran back home as soon as I decently could.

Two days later this horse shows up. No letter, just a note: “You need to start collecting collect horses again.” It’s tacky, but I can’t bring myself to throw it away.

Palimpset

I was crazy to trust my precious eyes to radial keratotomy. Computer guided lasers slashed my cornea, nipping and tucking that frragile membrane to perfect the curve.

And it worked, as far as that goes. My eyesight is 20/20 now. Better than 20/20, in a way, since I can see things I could never see before. But worse, too, in that I see things I never wanted to see. Frightening things, things others can't see or won't admit to seeing.

It started the day after my eye surgery. Walking the dog in the park, I saw the chalk outline of a woman on the path, right where a jogger had been raped and murdered last year.

"That's in poor taste," I thought, "re-drawing the detectives' outline like that."

But the next day I saw another dead body outline, downtown by the bank where there was a driveby shooting once. This time I remarked to a passerby, "That's the second chalk outline I've seen in two days."

The guy stared at me like I was nuts. "I don't see any outline, he said, peering at the ground and then up at me.

Then I started seeing them everywhere. Not just at murder sites--wherever someone had died. Near an ofrenda shrine on the shoulder of the highway, in an elevator, on my mom's livingroom rug where dad collapsed with his last heart attack.

Soon it was not just people. The roads became lined with outlines of cats and dogs and raccoons and possums. I had to avoid certain places like churches and mortuaries and hospitals where too many bodies had left too many outlines, overlapping and intermingling in a gray charnel scrawl.

The lines began to glow and I started to hear a sizzling sound, as if the eye surgery lasers were burning the outlines of the dead into my eyes.

I see death everywhere. The constant, ongoing death of insects and microbes fills the air with a hissing, pale mist that is increasingly hard to see through. the real world is overlaid for me with a ghostly palimpset of all the deaths on which our lives float.

My own body has a chalky white aura now. My sight fills up with radial white lines, more and more of them, until I can see nothing real and I gray out.

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Journey

A Mixed Media Installation of Paintings and Their Context by Patrick Fanning

Shown Franklin Art & Frame, 2002

When you buy a piece of art, you also buy an invisible

slice of the artist's life. This show makes that slice of life visible.

Every painting begins in the artist's creative process, a hidden substrate that the public seldom sees. This creative substrate is laid down over time like geological strata, in the form of sketchbooks, journals, studies, conversations, fantasies, dreams, thoughts, and feelings. It’s a thicket of private meaning from which a few paintings emerge to be signed, matted, framed and hung on a white wall under track lighting. In the normal course of an artist’s life and common gallery practice, finished art is about as far from the context and process of its creation as a stuffed deer head is from a herd of live deer.

Patrick Fanning’s installation "Journey" lets the deer loose in the gallery, showing his paintings within their context and process. Eight plein air watercolors are hung over a continuous frieze of mixed media collage containing value sketches, notes, journal entries, anecdotes, compositional ideas, poems, scraps of dialog, reference snapshots, studies for paintings never painted, and photos of earlier stages of the finished paintings.

The first couple of watercolor paintings float above the contextual collage, serene and unrelated in color or style. As you move into the story, the painting colors begin to enter the collage, and collage elements begin to show up in the paintings. Boundaries become permeable, suggesting those magic moments when life approaches art and vice versa.

The installation completely covers 32 feet of wall, chronicling a journey of artistic discovery and exploration that feels more like a movie storyboard or illustrated novel than a conventional art exhibit. Here is the installation, broken into eight chunks:

Fanning uses the metaphor of Multiple Personality Disorder to explain some of his artistic conflicts. Three distinct alternative personalities emerge to dramatize different approaches to art:

· Slick Johnny, spiritual heir to John Singer Sargent’s dark side, pander to popular taste, too glib for his own good, substituting flashy brushwork for sincerity, willing to say or do anything to make the sale.

• The Idea Man, part Picasso, part Dali, boiling over with innovation, too inspired for taste or humility, too stubborn to compromise “the truth,” which he wields like a club to intimidate others.
• Artemisia Magalena, aka Art Mad or Amnesia Lane, hedonistic slut of art, patron saint of pleasure, more heart than taste, more impulse than judgment, painting the world because it’s pretty and turns her on.

As you watch Fanning try to corral and integrate his rowdy crew of alternate personalities, you begin to realize that the "process and context" part of the show is not really the Ding an sich, not really the creative process itself. When Fanning attempts to reveal his underlying creative process, he actually ends up creating another intervening layer of artifice (presumably with another more "real" process and context hidden below it). But isn't life like that? The real, moment-to-moment context of life is boring, repetitive, messy and elusive. As soon as you try to reveal it, it morphs into story and art.

At 1:30PM on Monday April 29^th Patrick Fanning will speak in the gallery on “The Creative Process” and Gallery Director Matthew Muth will speak on “Appreciating and Collecting Art.” This will be a chance to ask questions and discuss some of the issues raised by this unique exhibit.

The framed watercolors are luminous and masterful landscapes that can stand quite easily on their own. What makes them especially noteworthy is the opportunity to see them juxtaposed against their creative context. Each painting is available for sale individually, as you would expect in a conventional gallery exhibit. Or collectors with ample wall space can also purchase the 4x4-foot segment of context collage that relates to their chosen painting. In addition, each buyer will receive a framed photograph of the entire installation, so that collectors with limited wall space can have a visual reminder of the event that documents their painting’s unique provenance.

For those who enjoy “meta” phenomena such as art about art, learning about learning, thinking about thinking, this is a must-see. The exhibit raises questions about the sources, purposes, intentions and uses of art in an engaging, humorous, thought-provoking way. Plan to stick around the gallery for at least an hour. It takes that long just to read the text, compare the source material to the finished paintings, and explore the possible connections between inspiration and art.

Last updated 12/1/06

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