Suzanne Tswei
Special to the Star-BulletinTHIS is the story of how John Wisnosky, respected painter, professor, dapper dresser, charismatic raconteur and chairman of the University of Hawaii's Manoa art department, became SAM redspoon, upcoming artist in the Seinfeldesque genre of it's-about-nothing paintings.
The story is not about a 59-year-old man having a mid-life crisis. Rather, it is about an artist, known for his air-brush paintings of ethereal landscapes and clouds, reinventing not himself, but his art, with a lighthearted twist.
The result is far from nothingness. Under the pseudonym of SAM redspoon, the paintings at The Contemporary Museum at First Hawaiian Center -- some soft and romantic, some bold and cartoonlike -- leave no doubt that Wisnosky has a way with paint.
The exhibit also features two other artists, Ron Kent and his wafer-thin bowls of Norfolk Island Pine, and Geoffrey Fricker and his black-and-white photographs of Hawaii's sugar mills.Wisnosky's metamorphosis involves a plastic spoon, a cup of red paint, the family cat, his wife Mimi the dancer, his thirtysomething daughter Mimi the artist, an $11 camera from Longs Drugs and the magic of photocopy machines.
The name change took place one afternoon a few years ago in Wisnosky's studio as he was mixing red paint with a plastic spoon. He isn't sure about this, but he thinks his reaction to his wife yelling something at him caused him to fling the paint-covered spoon at a window.
"The spoon stuck -- a red spoon on the window -- and it looked quite beautiful there, so I left it. Ever since then, my studio became known as the redspoon studio," Wisnosky said. The family cat, Such a Mess, provided inspiration for the first name of SAM.
The new moniker seemed perfect for a series of paintings that were a departure from his large air-brush work. Wisnosky had no intention of fooling people, but he thought the new name was a better fit for his new work, which involves deliberately distorted versions of family vacation snapshots taken by his daughter with an inexpensive camera.
"If you look at the photographs, they are sort of about nothing --kind of like a 'Seinfeld' episode --it's all about nothing. I picked the pictures for their ordinariness," Wisnosky said.The pictures were of his family and friends, occasional strangers, restaurants and parks, all the usual quick vacation mementos snapped without giving much thought to artistic merit.
Wisnosky distorted the images by making enlarged copies of the photographs, which weakened the three-dimensional quality and gave the images a flat, surreal look.
His wife, in a snapshot at a restaurant, became a billboard character. Flowers lost their details and formed blobs of colors. Floors, walls and sky turned into fields of subtly changing colors.
"I liked that sort of weirdness," Wisnosky said. And he liked the challenge of painting people and urban scenes that were not part of his repertoire.
The only rule he employed in his new artistic direction was to copy everything in the enlarged pictures faithfully onto paintings. That meant leaving in a big, ugly hairy arm in one picture, an umbrella pole that almost cuts another picture in half, and a number of other artistic blights. But everything worked.
"These paintings are my poems. They are my attempt to communicate with paint and a stick with hair on it," Wisnosky said, emphasizing he had no intention of making statements that are profound, profane or political, the three tenets of contemporary art.
For his next round of experiments, Wisnosky -- or is it redspoon? -- is working on a new medium, dead ants. They are the little black dots that form Wisnosky's new self-portrait, which he has tentatively shown to a select group, being careful to point out it is still in a state of artistic investigation.
"I can't wait to see what I am going to do with this," he said.
EXHIBIT
Paintings SAM redspoon: On view, along with "Translucent Wood: Norfolk Island Pine Vessels by Ron Kent" and "Merging Destinies: Photographs by Geoffrey Fricker"
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