Gordon Massman
- Anna Lilli Garai
- Jan 27
- 3 min read
Gordon Massman is a painter based in Gloucester, Massachusetts, who works in oil on canvas. He spent decades as a poet before turning fully to painting, looking for a more direct and physical way to work. He paints in a large studio by the harbor, using strong color and heavy brushstrokes. The work comes from instinct and emotion, built quickly and without planning.
Q: What led you from decades of writing poetry to working with large-scale oil painting?
A: I think that I took words as far as I could and turned quite naturally to painting. I was writing the same poem repeatedly and needed a fresh mode of expression, one dependent not on the elitism of language, but rather on the universality of feeling. Words become a prison of precision, while color releases the prisoner. Free from the confines of literature, I now bound through the universe. Such explosive liberation requires massive canvases upon which to play. Art is the freedom of expression lawfully constrained by nothing.
Q: You describe painting as an uncensored, primal act. What does that feel like when you first face a blank canvas?
A: I feel like a lion leaping onto a wildebeest. Terror of the one confronted by the power of the other. The blank canvas is mine to devour with whatever savagery I must. It’s brutal. Halfway through, the painting resembles a field of viscera. It is an intoxicating moment, that feeling of omnipotence. Unlike poetry, painting requires no educated intermediary. I can paint instinctively without civilized filters. The only limit in painting is ignorance of self.
Q: Your works often confront difficult emotional or psychological states. What makes a subject urgent enough for you to paint it?
A: In today’s shrunken world of multinational corporations, the only profitable journey is the one into oneself. Every acre of one’s psychological terrain represents a profound painting. I find richness in my fantasies, motives, urges, and desires, no matter how “incriminating,” because only I can paint them. Every painter can paint to some degree of competence the external world. It stands solidly before one to be interpreted. I prefer cracking repression and expressing the unearthed amorphous magma discovered there. Every emotional and psychological state is urgent enough to paint. Painting for me is exorcism.
Q: In “The Dubious Angel” and “Bluebird Drowning,” your figures hold doubt and pressure. How do you decide how that shows up on the canvas?
A: My poor angel and bluebird find themselves meshed into a callous world. The vortices of war, poverty, abuse, and swindle suck down my fragile bluebird, while my beleaguered angel cannot fulfill her mission to save the world. Pressure and doubt perforce swirl within them.
I did not deliberately paint these beings or their perilous predicaments. Instinct painted them through interludes and blind rages. If I decide how this shows up on canvas, it is subconscious decision making. I rarely approach a blank canvas with a clue of subject matter. That eventually emerges after the two of us, canvas and I, withstand punches to the face.
Q: How does your physical approach to paint influence the energy of a finished piece?
A: I believe in refinement only after animal spontaneity. When painting, I blurt Tourette’s-like curses at critics, myself, institutions, and the world. I yowl my freedom from authority and inhibition. I am a remorseless terrorist who captures emotion in every brushstroke, regardless of the thickness or composition. Only in the aftermath of such physical exercise do I attempt refinements necessary to a finished work. When I am successful, the finished piece retains the pure raw energy of its inception.
Q: Your studio sits directly over the Atlantic. How does that environment feed the intensity of your work?
A: The famous Gloucester, MA working wharf (as seen in The Perfect Storm) outstretches from my four-thousand-square-foot studio. Lobstermen with thick ropes tether their boats to three sides. In the distance beyond these boats lie concrete sea walls, rock barriers, multicolored warehouses, fisheries, restaurants, and hundreds of boats swaying on a sparkling harbor. If I stand on my back landing, I can see a resplendent, psychedelic watery horizon punctuated by the occasional barking sea lion. None of this natural beauty matters. My vision tunnels to my painting, whose vision tunnels back to me. When I paint, the world ceases to exist. Intensity flows from the inside out, not from the outside in.
