Art Lives
Gary Hudson
1936-2009

I was still not showing my art, I still had not gained sufficient confidence to venture into the art shooting gallery. At this time '66, '67,'68, I was living near the great watering hole and gathering place for artists, Max's Kansas City. After finishing work, since i was single and since it was the only place close by. i would spend the late part of the evenings there eating my dinner and schmoozing the art business. I was often seated at a table with Andy Warhol and his entourage because it was
convenient to my wheelchair and other parts of the restaurant were so jammed. I became quite familiar with him and through knowing him and his group, realized that there were some things in art that I did not want to be any part of. Like . Like things in art that I did not want to be any part of. Like the study of Duchamp, this was a great lesson in what one does not want to accept as something that one wants to participate in. I can without much hesitation say that a great portion of what Warhol has been credited with was, on the whole, the ideas and creations of his hangers on This is something that to his promoters is not considered germane since the idea of art being made as a commodity is something that is embraced by that sector of the art business. As time goes by, the notion that Warhol created all the things that one sees attributed to his thought and to his hand will become stronger and stronger but at the time the entire art community knew that he was a manipulator of young creative minds and used them for his own purposes. It was an idea that I find very unattractive. So this is the process of learning, not only what one wants to embrace as an artist in his work, but what one wants to reject.

I am struggling here. I keep trying to express myself in terms of what it is I want to achieve in my work but it is so difficult. I am much clearer on the new work than I am on earlier things. But CONTENT is difficult to express. I am an extremely intuitive painter. I have been out of the mainstream of the art world for so long that I haven t been forced up against definitions and it has been a long time since there has been any conversation about my work among the cognoscenti. I do remember in this period from 66 to 68 that I was very serene about making things and took a lot of interest in the making of them as a craft. It may well be that the craft was what kept me doing these types of paintings until 1970. Passion was not the impetus here. It was a very cerebral time in the discussion of art; lots of formal considerations. There was among the discussions the idea of the frame of a painting. That the rectangle of a painting's space was controlled by how the various elements lined up to the edge in order to keep the illusions of deep space from occurring. This was a post-Cubist notion based on utter nonsense as I now know. At the time however, any depth of illusion in a picture was somewhat verboten as was atmosphere and accidental images. These elements of formalism are eventually what I bridled against when I began the color fields and drawing of my recent work. Space was the credo; one had to be in complete control of the picture The question was to what end? This party line is what I think eventually blew abstraction out of the most valuable player status on the art market. People in the business end of things tired of the absolutism of it all.

I [was becoming] unsatisfied with the idea of what I was painting. It seemed too much like making a product. I had a one man show at the La Jolla Museum [then The Art Center in La Jolla, now the Museum of Contemporary Art San Diego] and after the show was mounted I decided to make a change in my work. I was painting incessantly when I was not teaching. I was possessed by the idea that I could not teach for the rest of my life but had to be a painter with the autonomy of a painter. Haunted I guess by those years of not being comfortable in the institution. But I was painting like crazy and it was quite wonderful.
I had decided that I wanted to break with all that I knew and had done and move into an area of the unknown. I began to let the paint determine the direction of where I would go. I would drag paint-soaked cloth over the canvas and then work back into it with spray. I was drawing with tools that I invented. I wanted to incorporate more accident into my work and not worry about the illusions that were created or the images that might be suggestive. I wanted to allow the color to work on an emotional level with all its connotations and just basically blow out all the formal rules as I had known them. I was finally trying to learn what I had but sensed about the great Pollocks that I had seen many years [before] at the beginning of my idea that I wanted to be a painter. Pollock invented the rules and now I had to find a way to invent my own rules using him as a example of the way one goes about such a task. Artists like Pollock give these things to the artists that follow. They are gifts to artists of the next generations but the bar is terribly high. I must caveat you to not think that I am comparing myself to Pollock. It doesn t even enter my head. It is only that when I work and struggle to make images I want to try to make them on the highest level that is possible & Painters need an audience to reach those last few rungs on the ladder of quality & I think that what finally came over me when I changed the paintings was that the world was chaos. Not only the world we live in but the world of exploding art one somehow had to find some Èlan, Èclat or some way to deal with that chaos. I think that I arrived at a point that I wanted to give the paintings that sense but to show, despite that chaos and fracturing of our world, there had to be a way of some grace to survive within that world; some way to move within it with grace and confidence.

At this time I was accepted into the [1970] Whitney Biennial. The painting was a success and after showing my work to various galleries I had a show in NY. Larry Aldrich bought paintings as did the Whitney and the checks and attention began at an incredible pace. I was invited to show all over the place. Newsweek Magazine did a full color repro in the magazine and Peter Schjeldahl reviewed my work in the New York Times. People were calling me at home making offers on my paintings. I was covered up with all kinds of attention and I was trying to paint my second one man show for New York. I was flying back and forth between San Diego and New York at a dizzying pace and I was lecturing at schools everywhere on a visiting basis. It was very exhilarating and exciting and much fun. It was also disconcerting because in no way was I prepared for the onslaught. I was grouped with some other painters into what was called Lyrical Abstraction. The name was thought up by Ivan Karp who owned the OK Harris a very loose bunch who did not know each other at the time. They are mentioned in the Newsweek article.

I sent out about 500 applications and resumes while I was living on 22nd St. since I was fast running out of any funds whatsoever. Finally, [in 1968] I got an interview in California at a small college, [Southwestern College] in San Diego. I was interviewed by John Baldassari who was leaving the position and was offered the job. I also decided to get married again, to Helene Marcil from Montreal. I was still doing the shaped and sprayed canvases. I very much liked the people at the [college], the students that is, and had no trouble entering into that arena. Except that I had to revisit all the things that I had learned as a beginner and try to put myself in the place of the young people. I really hated to leave New York and so I kept a studio there the entire time I was in California. I nearly commuted back and forth. The following year I was offered an Assistant Professor [position] at the University of California at La Jolla where I worked with Mike Todd the sculptor, Manny Farber artist and film critic, British painter Harold Cohen and numerous others. We are talking here of the late 60s and it was the time of the student protests both regarding Viet Nam and Black pPower. I was instrumental in helping to acquire a Ford Foundation Grant to begin a graduate program. I was on the committee to create a new campus for Chicanos and blacks called the Lumumba-Zapata College. I sat on the committee with Angela Davis and others and my job was to help create a black-Chicano art program. It was scary and difficult to put it mildly.

In 1974 I took a one year contract at Yale School of Art. That was the last of the teaching when it was finished. I made a very good friend when I was there however and it added a lot to my life. Walker Evans who was using only a Polaroid pocket camera at the time saw me with mine in my pocket. He was teaching photography at the time and was very old. He pestered me and pestered me to show him the things I had taken. I of course was devastated to show him anything at all. We had some great and wonderful conversations about things and because we were both depressives got along really well. We had a friend in common Mia Agee the widow of James Agee and I guess because I was so intimate with James work we had something in common.
[In 1975 Gary moved to Kingston, north of New York City. His studio was in a large old building right on the banks of the Hudson River that was built originally for commercial steamboats that plied the river. That off times gray and turbulent water became an important motif in Gary s work. John Walker moved into a studio space there that had been vacated by Gary s friend Kaare Rafoss.]

John Walker, the British painter and I had become best friends and I had remained great friends with Al Held & The painting was beginnininning to deteriorate but I continued to work. I couldn t decide which way to move with the painting. I began to study Picasso a lot and the Renaissance masters more, as well as Courbet. I began to think that I had used too much of a reductivist idea in the art and so I decided to put everything back into the paintings that I had left out. Drawing, line, dark and light, outside light sources, etc., etc. It was a mess to the mind but I continued and for almost 5 years until about 1980. I was getting nowhere fast but I sure was learning fast also. I took in enormous amounts of material and information on painting from all directions. The paintings from this period are not terribly exciting today but they are very close to my heart and it was a very unhappy period. I went into analysis in 1978 because of crippling depression and it was a godsend. The analyst was Leslie Farber a very prominent analyst and writer and for two years we worked and he saved my bacon. He was very erudite and directed me to written material that was enlightening and inspirational, like Martin Buber and once again back to the Zen writings of D. T. Suzuki.

[While living in Kingston Gary went through some emotional peaks and valleys, struggling with bouts of depression. He and Helene were divorced. Gary received a fellowship from the state of New York in 1980-81. He also became good friends with clothing designer Christie Youngman Ferro and her son Shaun. In 1983 they traveled to Melbourne, Australia where Gary taught at the Victoria and Albert School of Art. After returning to Kingston, they were devastated when, in 1984, Shaun was hit by a truck as he crossed a road near their home. Shaun suffered serious brain damage and has needed special care ever since. Gary and Christie married in 1986 while staying in a house on Cape Cod Bay south of Boston where Shaun was then receiving treatment. In 1988, Shaun was moved to a facility in Lilburn, Georgia. To be closer to him the Hudsons moved to Jefferson, Georgia. There they renovated a large Victorian house and set up their studios. Gary s depression gradually lifted and he began painting again: works with delicately delineated Cubist and wave motifs floating on vibrant colors; a series inspired by his favorite jazz performers; and large vivid mainly red and blue works with vigorous brushwork.

Later, in 2002, missing loft life , the Hudsons moved to Madison, Georgia, where they purchased an old brick hardware store. They divided the first floor into studio spaces for themselves and a business space to rent. The second floor they transformed into a spacious loft apartment. Here Gary s work changed again. He was always a voracious reader. His fascination with scientific discoveries in physics and astronomy is reflected in his last series of paintings he referred to as Quarks. The Hudsons enlivened and enriched the lives of many people in both the Georgia communities where they lived and became well acquainted with artists and the art scenes in Athens and Atlanta.]