36,486 and Counting—Artist Bernard Mattox
by Stephen Faure
“If you work every day, you’d be surprised at what you get out,” observes Bernard Mattox, this issue’s prolific cover artist. For someone whose work reflects an idyllic life in the woods, he’s been a very busy man lately. With shows in New Orleans, Monroe and Texas—“make that two in Texas”—he’s completed more work this past fall than ever before.
Through most of his career, Bernard concentrated on sculpture, mainly in ceramics; he has a master’s degree in sculpture from Tulane. Since 1979, he’s taught sculpture and ceramics to students ranging from Xavier, Newcomb and Tulane graduate students to 6-, 7- and 8-year-olds at the St. Tammany Art Association. He finds teaching kids especially enjoyable.
Painting came to him late in life. “I never took a structured painting class,” he says, “just the required drawing courses. [Painting] came about 10 years ago when I needed a break from sculpture.” There is a similarity between the images in his paintings and the shapes of his ceramic sculptures. His techniques on both, however, are the opposite of what one might expect. “I do matt ceramics, but I gloss my paintings,” he explains. He creates ceramics and fires them unglazed, painting them later to add color. His paintings, on the other hand, are on wood panels, not canvas. Oil paints, pencil and collage populate the panel with imagery. Some of his paintings are “quiet,” as he describes it, with a bit of breathing room between individual elements. Others are crowded with images, many of “organic” or plant forms. After drying, the entire painting is coated with a glossy varnish, giving it a “wet” look.
Bernard’s technique has evolved over time. “I’m getting better with color,” he says. He approaches sculpture and painting in different ways. “In painting, I have a specific space to fill, and I don’t plan on what’s going to fill it. Sculpture, I have to plan the dimensions, the forms, how it’s going to be constructed—there’s an element of carpentry to it.” While his paintings and sculpture are different, he hopes viewers can see some common elements tying them together.
Although he doesn’t like titles, gallery owners want a name to attach to his shows. He says that when he obliges, “I like it to have some meaning.” So when it came time to name his latest series of paintings and ceramic sculptures, he called it the Sans Souci Chronicles, in homage to the forest where he lives north of Covington.
Living there since 1991, in the forest and next to the Bogue Falaya River, has been a big influence on his work. Bernard guesses he has walked through the forest of Sans Souci at least two hours a day since he settled there—a total of about 36,486 miles. And the number keeps growing. These days, he is accompanied on his travels by his Labrador, Cale (after musician J.J.), and golden retriever, Maizy. Cats Bella and Cecil hold down the fort while they’re gone. They probably don’t know it, but the bowls the menagerie eats and drinks from are pretty high class. Handthrown and painted by Bernard, they wouldn’t be out of place in a gallery or a museum.
The Bogue Falaya is close to his home and his studio—too close, in fact. The property is gradually being lost to the river, the bank having been eaten away to within a few yards of the house. Big rains upstream in Folsom have caused more flooding heartache in the past than hurricanes. The river flooded several times, sometimes with up to three feet of water in the house and studio. There’s a canoe tied to a tree on the driveway for insurance. “That’s for when I need to escape,” he says.
“The Corps of Engineers has come out here. It’s classified as a scenic river and you can’t put up bulkheads. But...,” he says, as he points to a small plant clinging 12 feet up on a nearby magnolia tree, “that’s an endangered native orchid.” It could help save the property, if saving the orchid means an exemption to allow shoring up the eroding bank a few feet away.
The threat of surprise floods has caused Bernard to store his completed works upstairs in a neighbor’s barn for years now. That’s not always worked out great, either. A thunderstorm blew down a large pine tree onto the barn one year, causing some major losses. After he hauled piece after piece of sculpture to the barn in anticipation of heavy rains, Katrina sent two trees into it, again shattering much of his work. “It’s absurd that the river didn’t get it, and trees did.”
He’s worked some of that into his paintings. “I didn’t set out to do a body of work based on the storm.” But in his first visit to the studio after a month of storm cleanup, he found himself producing painting with new imagery: a tornado and a tree stump, a broken barn and a collage element of a house in water. Asked to title a showing in Houston afterwards, he called it Vortext, combining vortex, “the center of power, the eye of anything,” and text, “a body of work.”
In the contest between Bernard and nature, nature may seem, at times, determined to destroy his work, but more often, it’s what inspires it. There is a bit of the forest in all that he does. It may be a subtle effect, “... not based directly, but this forest is in every bone in my body.” Sometimes it’s overt. Birds, leaves and tree branches appear that are “obvious if you know I live in a forest.
“I don’t consider myself an abstract painter. There are plenty of objective images in there.” Horses are common, as are birds, airplanes, human figures and sometimes mythic-looking creatures. Crucifixes and chalices emerge in some paintings, reflecting his Catholic upbringing and the theological discussions he enjoys.
Sometimes he sees something in a book or magazine he thinks will fit in. He cuts it out and incorporates it into the work as a collage element. “My imagery you can call this or that, but I’m really a brush-in-hand painter—old school.”
Bernard’s not lying about being “old school.” He has yet to succumb to the spell of the internet and doesn’t even own a cell phone or computer, for that matter. “At least once a week someone asks for my e-mail.” It’s become a running joke with his friends.
His curiosity hasn’t abated in later life. He’s followed up a bachelor’s in anthropology and master’s degrees by taking classes at nearby St. Joseph Abbey Seminary, mostly in philosophy and theology. “A lot of titles from past shows come from these courses.” The series he named Noumenon Circus, Lethea Puzzles and The Problem of the Bridge have titles rooted in philosophical exercises.
Now he’s looking forward to taking a break after a busy autumn, retreating into the forest. But he probably won’t be out of the studio for long. Surrounded by natural inspiration, and full of ideas from classes, books and conversations with friends and colleagues, Bernard’s bound to be in the studio, keeping his skills sharp. “It’s a matter of seeing what you can conjure up when you know what your craft is.”
Bernard Mattox’s work is featured at The Factory, 508 N. Columbia St., Covington, 809-0032; the Carol Robinson Gallery, 840 Napoleon Ave., New Orleans, 504-895-6130 or carolrobinsongallery.com; the Inside Indigo Gallery in Monroe; and the Hooks-Epstein Gallery in Houston.
