Let’s Go to the Library!

My highbrow sensibilities being well known throughout the Grande Ronde Valley, the folks at Cook Memorial Library asked me to class up the joint with some much-needed elegant works of art. From November 2022 through January 2023, authors like Kurt Vonnegut and Sappho had the honor of sharing space with paintings by me, Matt Fagan.

As a native Oregonian, I always seek inspiration by walking around in nature while surrounded by autumn leaves. So I went for a walk in the woods, and I happened upon a man dressed like a wizard.

I stole his soul using the modern invention called photography, then took it home and painted a copy to hang in the library. This was merely the first in a series of seventeen paintings so unequivocally fancy, bursting with so much culture and dignity, that the very library itself - the repository of all human knowledge! - could barely contain them.

That all began to change when I was working on a painting of Hobbeson & Chives. For those unfamiliar, or unwilling to follow the link, Hobbeson and Chives are a pair of super-powered crimefighting butlers whose exploits I have occasionally chronicled for more than thirty years. My favorite way to use these characters is to show only the ‘good parts’ of a story - the climax, or the twist, or the big splash-page.

When I decided to paint them, I wanted to make it epic, and I spent a lot of time working out the composition of the canvas. As it grew more complex, I spent more time inside of it, where I thought deeply about what attracted me to this process and why I made these specific design choices.

What is the creature (or creatures) with the green tentacles, invading this unspecified home? I don’t know! Why does that toucan have a bowtie? Does it mean he’s a butler? What are the other creatures, with the faces of vintage Beistle Co. paper cat Halloween decorations, who seem to be assisting Hobbeson and Chives as they fend off the tentacles?

I don’t have the answers to these questions, and I realized that not having those answers is what I love. This painting invites you to try putting the pieces together. I think the pictures are fun, and funny, but for me the extra joy comes from imagining the implied narrative that’s suggested by the painting. That was the magic of Hobbeson and Chives, and I wanted to bring more of that to the other work I painted for the library show.

Going forward from there, I always tried to consider the possibilities of the implied narrative, to bring a little something extra to the paintings.

Nobody is Here for Your Art

The library is not an art gallery. People weren’t going there to look at paintings, they were using the internet or picking out books. Most patrons probably didn’t notice my canvases at all, but I made them bright and weird so that maybe people would be distracted by them. And hopefully in that vulnerable moment, with their attention on the canvas, they were forced to ask ‘What the heck is going on in that painting?’ Then they’re stuck trying to figure out the answer.

If they lingered, they were snared in my other trap! I played a little game where I created odd, possibly-significant visual connections. Characters, costumes, and even locations may recur on multiple canvases - in obvious or unexpected ways. My hope was that viewers would not only imagine the stories taking place in the paintings, but also ponder the relationships between them! It’s a lot to ask of people who just went into the library because it started raining outside.