GORDON MASSMAN's shameless confessions of the human psyche

Photo by Charles Carroll

Gordon Massman (b. 1949) is a self-taught painter and poet based in Rockport, MA. Massman paints with oils in fear of worthlessness, meaningless, futility and death. He works on impractically large canvases to capture equally large emotions, honing paint’s ability to communicate broader, vaguer ideas than language alone. In his subject matter, nothing is taboo. Using thickly layered paint and abstracted imagery, his works tell stories of survival, dominance, procreation, power, security, ego, and vanity. 

Massman’s subjects, while usually psychologically distressed, are offset by a subtle sense of humor, either on the canvas itself or in witty titles. Parodying his own angst and that of the human race with poetic sincerity, Massman’s paintings are shameless confessions of the human psyche, unfolded in graphic, chaotic detail. “I paint like a Kodiak bear attacking fresh carrion,” he says. “I yell at the painting. I often talk to it, in a lewd and loud fashion. I curse at it. Occasionally, I throw a brush at it.”

He approaches the canvas as a raconteur, striving to haul from the depths into the light of day the urges, fantasies, and delusions that most of us repress—or control—to keep us acceptable to civilized society. From crazy joy to amok destruction, Massman seeks to expose it all.

Massman studied literature and creative writing at the University of Texas-Austin and the University of Alaska Fairbanks. He taught writing and literature at The Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts in North Adams, MA, and is the published author of five poetry volumes, having composed thousands of poems over a span of forty-five years. Massman has exhibited in the United States, and his work is in the collection of the deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum.

Interview by Tyler Nesler

You initially studied and taught literature and creative writing, and you've written seven volumes of poetry. Were you also working on visual art from the start? Or did you reach a point where language wasn't adequate enough to fully express your impulses and ideas?

I do not remember the grit and knot of my transition from literature to painting. It just happened, as if my raging fire exhausted my cordwood of words and demanded new fuel. I flipped to paint. I discovered a new alphabet of colors. In this infinite new language, I smudged arms and face like a half-naked mud-covered wild man peering through thorn bushes at clockwork civilization. Who needs it? Paint is direct, primal, requiring no translation. I discovered a medium free of constriction, as if breaking out of jail. A leopard sees impala as survival. A poet sees impala as a word. Now, free of words, I am a leopard. Now, I rip the meat of my canvas with paint, without the necessity of refinement. What new joy! What liberation!

Silent Scream, 2026, oil on canvas, 4x4 ft

Your process of creating paintings is very kinetic. You've said that “I yell at the painting. I often talk to it, in a lewd and loud fashion. I curse at it. Occasionally, I throw a brush at it.” Did this approach develop over time, or have you always been so propulsive when you create? And do the paintings ever “yell back” at you, fight you, resist your demands?

I have grown comfortable in vulgarity, in filth. I am a guilty criminal whom my paintings bludgeon into cathartic confession. I cry. I curse. I explode with rage. I throw incriminating tantrums of self-exoneration. I have attacked and torn my interrogator-canvases in uncontrollable lies to exonerate myself until, invariably beaten, I roar the truth. I am guilty. Then the painting rests, eternally engraved with my deepest self. At that point, I collapse in catharsis, lit by a sudden shaft of sun.

With the intensity of your creative acts, what happens to you in the aftermath of creation, once you've finished a work? Your process seems almost analogous to sexual passion, and I wonder if, after the completion of a piece, you are buzzed, in an afterglow, or feeling shameful/regretful, or sometimes just stewing in a swirling mix of emotion?

To follow your sexual analogy, after climaxing the painting, I cleave open, like a split watermelon, roll onto our backs, and stare at infinitude. We feel complete, connected, satisfied. It’s perfect tranquility. But soon thereafter the insulting world intercedes, and we are back to transmissions, steering wheels, and vengeful forgetfulness. It’s a cycle of exquisite orgasm and grinding industry. Shame and regret I never feel. My paintings collectively comprise a beautiful woman whom I always love before and aft, though we have our occasional internecine quarrels.

When Men Undress Before Their Lover, oil on canvas, 8x8 feet

Apollo and Aphrodite Naked and High, 2024, oil on canvas, 6x10 feet

Do you work to any music accompaniment? I can imagine hardcore punk or metal blasting in the background as you attack a piece, but maybe that's too obvious. Working to Gregorian chants, Kenny G, or just the ambient room tone all seem like they could be idiosyncratic possibilities...

Bulky paint-besmudged black headphones cocoon me when I paint, blaring on volume ten the best musicians known to the world: Horowitz, Van Cliburn, Rachmaninoff, Gould; Davis, Parker, Coltrane, Armstrong; Hendrix, Clapton, Page, Young; Lennox, Fitzgerald, Nyro, Franklin; and everyone in-between. Music transports and electrifies. It sets nerves on edge. It quickens the cortex. I often slash paint to tempo, letting the music drive the speed. I think my paintings wear  their music, like trees wear pieces of straw hurricanes drive into them. 

Photo by Charles Carroll

You're known for working on massive-scale pieces. But are you ever tempted to scale down, as a kind of new challenge? Or do you consider that an impossibility? Would working in a more miniaturized fashion be fundamentally incompatible with your creative drives? 

I love that I can run through large canvases into a Sound of Music field or a limitless human psyche. I’ve flown forever within them on recaptured painless legs. Big canvases, Zorba emotions. Faces large as zebras, dirigible hands. I’ve painted Volkswagen woman lips.

But recently—organically—I’ve discovered the intensity of small. I’ve realized, like a spontaneous revelation, that I can wrap it all up, like a ball of raw twine, and wedge it into small. Small can handle packed gunpowder as well as large--and sometimes better. Before I blew the tuba like a one-note elephant; now I can finger the valves of the whole blasted instrument. I have unexpected choice. My potential now exists in a wider repertoire.

You're exhibiting work, namely from your Mirror Series, at a group exhibition (Landscape & Power) by Wienholt Projects and Museum of Contemporary Art Santa Barbara, which opens Feb 28th at The Culver Hotel in Los Angeles, during Frieze LA. Could you talk about your mirror paintings, what they symbolize for you in particular, and the ways they might impact or implicate the viewer via their "mirror framework"?

I obliterate myself in the mirror pieces. Two brushes meet my face in the glass and together distort my image. Incrementally, with each stroke, I paint a new internal self-portrait. Soon I resemble the emotion I felt when painting. My worldly features disappear as I become a storm, gale, or placid lake. These mirrors side by side present images of myself after I take off my face.

All Things Push Upward Toward Life, 2025, Oil on framed mirror, 66 x 18 in

You'll also be exhibiting some work in an upcoming exhibition at 812 Royal Gallery, opening March 20th during the French Film Festival in New Orleans. Can you talk about what works might be on display there? Does the film festival impact the types of your works that have been curated for the show? 

I once taught a university course titled World Cinema. I devoted fifty years to watching almost the entire oeuvre of every important director in the world, up, perhaps, to the nineties. I’m an armadillo dragging my armor of movies. Yet, I can’t imagine how this New Orleans French Film Festival will influence the curators at 812 Royal Gallery. The only film which has influenced my work is Carl Theodor Dryer’s 1928 masterpiece The Passion of Joan of Arc, in which I incorporated Joan’s torture wheel. Unquestionably, however, the millions of filmic images sequestered in my cells subconsciously influence my work. I am essentially a visual being. I must see to comprehend. Abstract thought such as mathematics, philosophy, linguistics, formal systems stupefy me. My semester grade in high school trigonometry was 2 out of 100. I made 0 on the midterm and 4 on the final. But I love the physical.  

Tyler Nesler is a New York City-based writer, editor, and podcaster. He is the Founder and Editorial Director of INTERLOCUTOR Magazine.