The following is a paper written by Robert Hickey as part of a course on Outsider Art at The Folk Art Institute, NY. Reproduced by kind permission of the author.

April 22,2003
Robert Hickey
Class: Outsider Art
Instructor: Lee Kogan

Chris Hipkiss and Wilderness

Introduction

The Work
     Materials and Style
     Imagery
     Organization of the Image
     Inclusion of Text

The Artist
     About the Artist
     Exhibition History
     Where Does He Fit In Among Contemporary Artists?
     What Does Chris Hipkiss Say About His Work?

My Impression of The Work
     Methods
     Sources
     Sexual Imagery
     Subject Matter
     Contemporary Wilderness

Conclusion

Footnotes

Chris Hipkiss and Wilderness

Introduction

"It seems, whether or not people take an immediate liking to Hipkiss's style, it is impossible for most not to have a look."
     - Alpha Mason¹

Chris Hipkiss creates large, fantastic pencil drawings of an imaginary world with landscapes full of strange plants, war-like female figures, and ruinous structures.

Their effect is, according to Ken Johnson, a "powerful psychological tension" with an "illustrative quality that could suggest the hand of a trained graphic artist mimicking the look of visionary Outsider Art."

The first time I saw his drawings was in the Cavin-Morris booth at the l999 Outsider Art Fair. After that I saw another at the Galerie St. Etienne, and most recently at a show of eight or nine drawings at Cavin-Morris. So I have not seen hundreds of them. They weren't the type of art I would have told you I liked.

     •At exhibitions I spend my time with paintings and as a rule skip the drawings.
     •I like work that demonstrates a high level of skill. Hipkiss's technique, while competent, is not on the level of nineteenth-century academic artists.
     •And, the subject matter appears to be directed at heavy metal music fans, sadomasochists, or science fiction devotees, more aptly for those who have an interest in all three.

However, I was arrested by the intensify of illustration, mysterious atmosphere, serious intent, and artistic quality of the drawings. When I brought a friend (a quite serious, folk-art collector friend) back to see them, his reaction was just as strong: he hated them.

What is going on in these crazy drawings?

Why was I responding to the work as strongly as I do to some of my favorite paintings? It wasn't the medium or the artist's mastery of technical skills. The content was dark. The style had some similarities to comic books; but there is something more going on. The works were more mysterious than weird: they are strange in the same way Magritte's or de Chirico's paintings are familiar, but unexplainable. However, they were not just reworked surrealism.

They depicted what I saw as a vision of what is a fear for many: the earth after an environmental catastrophe and the destruction of culture as we know it.

Scary gothic scenes are hardly unique. Just look at rap imagery, pierced and tattooed students on St. Marks Place, or even an issue of Vogue.

I propose Hipkiss creates compelling images using centuries-old techniques. I think I am responding to the same things that draw me to Giotto, Grunwald, or van der Weyden. He uses techniques such as:

     • Exotic, visceral, and provocative imagery
     • An easy-to-read drawing style, that includes obsessive detail
     • Symmetric, emblematic compositions which invite metaphorical interpretation

And I propose Hipkiss creates a contemporary vision of wilderness:

     • Landscapes that are the antithesis of a popular view of the natural realm as a tranquil, safe, and pure refuge
     • Chaotic scenes which resonate in our chaotic lives and, to paraphrase Elizabeth Cowing³, have a convulsive beauty, with an air of frenzied sensuality that mingles with the intimations of death

The Work

Materials and Style

Hipkiss is quoted to say, "4B pencils are the only thing to use." ⁴

With his pencil, he achieves deep blacks and amazing gradations of tone. Very rarely using color, he uses silver-ink pens in places creating a mid-tone gray with luminous effect. There is some red in a few drawings, but rarely, and when present, not so strongly you notice at first.

Every area of every drawing is very finished. His larger drawings, which measure about 5 to 10 feet wide, are inch-by-inch as finished as his small 5 by 7 inch drawings. This relentless detail invites the viewer to inspect every area, as you could in a painting by Van Eyck, where every weedy leaf at the foot of the Virgin is perfectly rendered or one by Paul Cademus who renders every detail in his sailor's uniforms with great attention too.

However unlike academic artists, Hipkiss is not creating flawlessly realistic renderings. He delights in patterning: creating trees out of endless repetitions of a leaf pattern; an ocean out of one-eighth inch tiny waves; or a skyscraper with of hundreds of identical windows. Most elements are somewhat flat and outlined. Areas within the outline are crosshatched, stippled, solidly blackened, filled with elegant gradations, or left completely untouched.

Imagery

Hipkiss's subject matter is relentlessly consistent. The setting of his most frequent scene is of an open, flat landscape, with a strong horizon.

Every Hipkiss drawing generally contains both elements unique to the composition, and his signature elements.

     • There are buildings coming directly out of the flat ground, like the cathedral and tower in Pisa rise from their grassy podium. The buildings include skyscrapers, prisons, windmills, factories, communication and observation towers, and fortresses.
     • He includes a variety of plants such as palm trees, small plants, bundles of branches, rolled hay, tiny flowers, and scrubby trees. Human eyes peer from growing vines. The flora often has another portentous trait: they burst with seed, like a spawning shad whose belly splits from too much row.
     • There are electrified fences, electrified guide wires for growing plants, and even plants hooked up to transformers and power lines. One can only guess if the electricity is going in our coming out.
     • In the air are soaring and swooping birds, whose extended wings leave vapor trails like jet aircraft. Also flying, swarming in formation, are mosquitoes, bees, and flies.
     • Most of the larger compositions feature willowy women, but no men. These women are typically dressed in black tight miniskirts and halter tops, with dramatic eye makeup applied. If not based on black leather sadomasochistic costumes or the evil characters in comic; books, these figures are reminiscent of performers like Metallica or Black Sabbath.
     • Figures are posed suggesting they are in frenzied motion. The poses are not graceful like those from ballet; rather they are angular and harsh, like ones captured in freeze-frame photos of hard rock or rap dancers. He may be posing the figures based on such imagery, even using the same technique Henry Darger used of lifting poses from another source and repeating them.
     • The figures (sometimes multi-limbed like Hindu goddesses) nearly always wear black armbands with a symbol: a white triangle with a black dot in its center. It is not drawn exactly like the civil-defense radioactive materials symbol: the triangle with a circle in it, but it is similar and the association seems appropriate given his overall imagery.
     • A hand-drawn UPC code and his signature.

The unique element of individual drawing is repeated again and again. For example:

     • Giant pea pods popping open with caviar
     • Hand grenades floating down a stream
     • Tombstones
     • Rats swimming or walking-upright, some winged, some crowned
     • Cats in pairs, black and white, of standing on their hind legs

One drawing includes: figures holding miniatures of the World Trade Center on raised palms; rows of cypress trees, each one named in white letters in its dark foliage: Genevieve, Odeon, Edouard, Raymond, Lucien, etc.; and human hearts (vascular systems attached) arranged in neat rows, individually named in script.

Organization of the Image

Repetition (figures, trees, fence posts, etc.) is one way Hipkiss organizes his drawings. Another is the use of dramatically receding linear perspective. Not perfect by sixteenth-century Italian standards, but its execution is strong. Hipkiss's mid- and foregrounds are organized; fences and crops are planted in rows; rivers and paths zigzag as far as the eye can see. Aerial perspective is absent: distant objects are as detailed as he can manage in their small sizes.

Inclusion of Text

Hipkiss uses text in his drawings, presented in a panel across the top, side, or bottom and sometimes includes signs, posters and banners integrated into the drawing. Typically the text in the work becomes the work's name.

Sometimes the text is seemingly random:

     IL SALVAGGIO SOUTHING GRAB
     MONGREL GLOBAL 37
     IN A TRANFIXE

Or, snatched phrases taken out of context:

     I'VE FALLEN IN LOVE WITH POPPIES
     MY SEA INDUCED CRIME
     CUCKOO ACROSS MY LOSS
     WEEPY IN HIM
     MY DARLING ABSCONDER TO A LITTLE W'WIND

Or expressing of anger:

     MONGREL FIST 12041L
     EMPTY 256: LITTLE DIE CHOKE
     EUROPA / AN OPEN WOUND

Frequent use of curses and expletives:

     SHIT SHAME
     FUCK YOU, FUCK THIS WORLD, FUCK EVERYTHING YOU STAND FOR

And, with a twisted repetition:

     LONELY EUROPE ARM YOURSELF LONELY EUROPEAN ARM YOURSELF LONELY EUROPA ARM YOURSELF
     LIVE NATION OLIVE NATION OLIVE NATIONAL 0

The Artist

About the Artist⁵

Some basic facts about Chris Hipkiss include:

     • He was born in the United Kingdom in 1964;
     • He was raised in the middle-class western suburbs of London;
     • His father owned a joinery (cabinetmaking) company, and he worked there from 16 to 21 years of age;
     • He is married. His wife works as a computer analyst and he draws;
     • He wrote a book on Utopian world titled XOY; and
     • He draws on roll paper that he cuts off. He does not always do this very well.

Exhibition History⁶

He has been featured in many exhibitions:

     • Has been showing since 1992, when he was 28. His first show was at the Sweet Water Gallery, London, England.
     • His first appearance in New York group shows was in 1995 at the Galerie St. Etienne and Cavin-Morris Gallery.
     • His first appearance at the Fourth Outsider Art Fair in 1996 was in the Cavin-Morris Gallery booth.
     • Subsequently, he has been exhibited every year in New York, at the Cavin-Morris Gallery in both group and solo shows.
     • He has been exhibited at (among others) the New Museum of Contemporary Art in New York, The American Museum of Visionary Art in Baltimore, and Public Space Galleries in Birmingham, England.

Where Does He Fit in Among Contemporary Artists?

He has been exhibited in shows⁷ under a variety of category names:

     • Visionary Drawings
     • European Self-taught Artists
     • 30 Outsiders And, he has been exhibited in shows under several thematic names:
     • Transcendentally Material, Mystically Objective
     • Science and Science Fiction
     • Places of Passion
     • The End Is Near

His work would fit in just as well in any contemporary gallery in Chelsea or on 57th Street. Because of his consistent imagery and high level of drawing skill, he is an apt candidate for notice among other areas of contemporary art. He could become widely recognized because he is creating a sizable body of recognizable art, which would allow the art cognoscenti to have the satisfaction of walking into a gallery and saying "Oh, that's a Hipkiss." Further, just as the over-forty crowd has an immediate grasp of impressionism, the Generation X mass market (the art-buyer of tomorrow) has an immediate grasp of surrealism and dark imagery. A few minutes watching MTV or looking at CD's cases will confirm this.

What Does Chris Hipkiss Says About His Work?

Hipkiss says, "In my pictures, femininity is taking over. The anger in my pictures is all to do with that idea."⁸

The willowy figures dressed in black I referred to as women or female, are not considered to be female by Hipkiss. According to Shari Cavin, of Cavin-Morris, Hipkiss says the figures are androgynous, or his term "androgens," sentinels of nature, there to care for and save the wasted land.

Martine Lusardy⁹ says, "His hybrid humans radiate empowerment and strength. In his view, an optimistic forecast of the species currently in need of salvation."

Of his work, Hipkiss says, "because it is on paper, people don't immediately see it as having as much value as something on canvas — even though it may have taken ten times as long to produce... I like Bosch and Klimt, but only started to learn about them quite recently. I used to go to the Tate Gallery a lot when I was younger, but there wasn't much there to interest me. I don't often get ideas from what other people do: mostly, it's seeing something on the television, seeing a new country or just stray thoughts." ¹¹

My Impression of The Work

I have an ambivalent relationship with Hipkiss's work. I am attracted to:

     • His skill with simple materials
     • The careful attention he pays to all parts of the picture, foreground and background
     • His sincerity: the work seems devoid of ironic or cynical content
     • The consistent style of his output

However, I am kept at arm's length from his work because of:

     • The angry content and ominous atmosphere of decline and decay
     • The vulgar text and imagery in many of the drawings

Methods

Perhaps the most appealing aspects of his work are the clarity with which each element is depicted and the formal composition.

His drawing style is a bit stilted, but the quality is high. While there is some overlapping, most elements are drawn against a white background. As intensely drawn as his work is, this white space around the elements adds up to a considerable amount of open space in his drawings.

When a composition includes a group of figures, he often presents the group using an old formula. One figure is larger and central, while the others are smaller. Whether you see this as similar to an Assumption of the Virgin (surrounded by a chorus of angels) or an all-girl rock band (star .and backup singers) this composition recalls associations both sacred and secular.

His use of linear perspective is also appealing. A plane flat to the horizon and sky above is a scenic device used by countless painters eager to create a convincing three-dimensional space. It's also a device used by theatrical designers. He borders each drawing with a frame, creating a proscenium. In some drawings, the foreground bows out toward the viewer like the front of a stage, another result of his use of linear perspective.

As in the theater, or devotional painting, Hipkiss's formal compositions emphasize the fact that the setting has been created for your extended viewing or contemplation. No matter how naturalist the style of a Broadway play, it is never mistaken for real life. No matter how realistic a painting by Carlo Crivelli, we do not mistake it for a photograph. A formal composition suggests the message is of a higher realm.

Sources

What are his sources? He doesn't mention comic books anywhere I have seen him quoted, but the similarity is too obvious to be overlooked.

Hipkiss mentions Hieronymus Bosch and Gustave Klimt, and there are affinities with each, although I don't think either is a kindred spirit. The similarities are in style and composition, not subject matter.

His and Bosch's works are buzzing with detailed activity, some quirky. Both create grotesque creatures. However, Bosch belongs to a popular tradition of medieval painting, which focuses on moralizing. Bosch focuses on the struggle between man and his inner nature, and the depiction of everyday life in a realistic way.¹⁰

Both Hipkiss's and Klimt's works demonstrate great interest in surface detail and the decorative effects of patterning. However, Klimt's work is romantic and notable for his exuberant use of color. Like Klimt, he uses sexual images, but is he using sexually imagery to be provocative or because he is interested in restoration through sexual reproduction like he says?

Sexual Imagery

The boldest sexual imagery is displayed in the plants. Trees, vines and bundles of hops are wholly transformed into fruit; so ripe they burst with seed. This proliferation of so much seed is unnerving. Further, the micro detail in black and white portrays none of the reassurance we find in traditional images of fruitfulness, e.g., a bountiful harvest or motherhood.

Hipkiss's figures suggest sexual activity in their similarity to fetish imagery, but are more ominous than sexy. That the scenes are populated totally by (what I see as) female figures adds a reference to Amazons. Without men there is none of the sexual tension ubiquitous in western imagery. However, if a male artist presents bevies of semi-clothed women, don't you have to discuss whether he is making exploitive images? Since his are a little kinky, I think you do.

Hipkiss says femininity taking over is an important theme. Martine Lusardy says, "Hipkiss believes a past dominated by patriarchal development and destruction has resulted in the depletion of the earth's resources, placing the best hope for the future in the hands of humanity's feminine side and blurring the traditional power of the traditional gender roles." ¹¹

The combination of the female sentinels and fruitfulness support his assertion that the subject of the drawings is the power of nature to restore itself. All writers seem to agree that the drawings depict a post-apocalypse landscape caused by the actions of mankind.

I think he sees his inhabitants being just as victimized and mutated as the landscape. So, while such images might be exploitive in a pornographic context, in these drawings they are not.

Subject Matter

In these images he presents a compelling (or disturbing) scene — his visualization of a common contemporary fear: the aftermath of the destruction of our world. His portrayal is striking in two ways.

     • First is his portrayal of nature (the environment) not as a passive victim, but as a powerful force, which will survive us and take revenge.
     • Second is his presentation of this new, post-human environment not as peaceful, but as unsettling and chaotic as our present world.

I find his twice-twisted vision a powerful invention. We love to look at scenery and to look at Hipkiss's scary scenery stirs up our emotions. These pictures of the decimated remnants of civilization in a carefully pruned and weeded landscape are unsettling and memorable.

His imagery is not docile, but neither is that of Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Frieda Kahio or Joel-Peter Witkin. I believe most objections would be to the exposed genitalia and profane text. The occasional stylized vomiting, urinating, and defecating of the figures is none too pleasant either. (Let me point out, however, none of these actions is realistically drawn. Most of the voiding seems to be of sonic booms, sparks and smoke!)

I think we are "out of shape" for looking at difficult imagery. We may be so accustomed to the polished imagery of the mass media, the cool of abstraction, or the sweetness of impressionism, we can't or don't see past the creepy stuff. Art hasn't always been so cheery. Last month, while visiting a museum with a collection of fifteenth-century European works (a real favorite of mine), I jotted down the subjects of some of the paintings I thought were wonderful:

     • A lamb bleeds arterially, the stream of blood is caught in a goblet
     • A beautiful young mother holds in her lap her dead son's body
     • An exceedingly curvaceous woman twirls a platter holding a human head while dancing
     • An exceptionally fit young man, skewered by dozens of arrows and wearing just a tiny towel, gazes at the viewer

These artists knew how to choose a moment to grab the viewer's attention. Painting a terrible situation where youthful physiques are placed in a convincingly drawn three-dimensional space is a good start. Hipkiss is doing the same thing, except he has a new image of what is a fearful situation.

And, there is the vulgar text.

Leslie Umberger, curator of an exhibit featuring Hipkiss, describes the text's effect better than I ever could. She writes, "Hipkiss's use of language is evocative rather than explicit. He enjoys what he refers to as the 'poetic-styled ramblings of words and phrases collected during day-to-day dealings in the world.' In some images alliterative words are camouflaged throughout, in others isolated letters float in the air or grow in bushes. Most frequently words and phrases run along the borders in uniformly shaped capital letters, seemingly moving on electronic message boards, scrolling cryptic revelations. His words and fragments conjure images in the mind rather than concrete statements. The message is never completely clear— we glean what we can and imagine the rest."¹²

The inclusion of this disjointed text is another technique Hipkiss uses to create his compelling images. As you are less able to understand familiar modes of communication, the more you are disconnected from the norm. For us, the norm is information overload.

For example, during a normal day, we can be exhausted from the information we encounter. When you travel abroad there is another experience. There is one level of disorientation, e.g. in London, where you can read the signs even though the idiomatic phrasing can be a bit strange. Then there is a greater level of disorientation in countries where the alphabet is the same, but you don't know the language. And yet a greater disorientation, in Athens or Tokyo, where you can't even read the letters.

Hipkiss thus connects with our feeling of being in-touch and out-of-touch when he used disjointed text. Evoking these emotions is another important aspect of his creation of an image of wilderness.

Contemporary Wilderness

So what is today's wilderness? It isn't what it used to be. For example, when a biblical character went into the wilderness, he or she did not have to go far. Wilderness was anything outside the city walls. The natural world was full of danger and your only security was from family and tribe. Today, we see nature as a calm refuge from everyday life. Many people think their major problem is stress, so being in solitude in nature away from society, i.e. napping on a deserted beach, is likely to be their idea of a refuge.

"Once upon a time, the city served as a collective shield or plate of armor, an extension of our skins," Marshall McLuhan wrote in 1964. But "with the coming of the electronic age, we put our whole nervous system outside ourselves."¹³

"The world," as Laurie Anderson said in the McLuhan movie, "is like a buzzing forest, stirring all around you."¹⁴

Hipkiss's landscape is a wild, buzzing forest. It is dangerous and frantic with unsettling activity. I believe the wilderness we face today is the chaos of our modern lives. So when we see our refuge (nature) presented as a frantic place, we find it upsetting.

Conclusion

The key to the power in his drawings could be:

     • His use of traditional compositions to give the same importance to his images we give to other information we receive in formal ways. By doing so, he emphasizes that his message is not idle fantasy;
     • He takes a standard comforting subject, vast open space with distant horizons, and turns it into a nightmare of mutants and vulgarity;
     • He takes away one of our common fantasies: nature is not our peaceful friend, but an angry force out for revenge; and
     • There is no escape: the future is just and frenzied and stressful as our current lives.

I don't know how he figured out how to do all this, but his use of all these means to create these arresting works, attests to his knowledge.

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