From
Reading Room/7:
David Newman: Standing
in the Shadow
—Alan Kaufman
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He is short but not small, powerfully built
and as agile as a monkey. He blasts through the streets of San Francisco on
a BMX bicycle and dresses like a hoodlum in a British gangster flick (think
Snatch or Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels). With his large, clean shaven
head, handsome face, winning smile, and big, mobile hands, he reminds one,
uncannily, of a young prematurely bald Picasso who can charm you off your feet.
But unlike the ferociously ambitious Spaniard, San Francisco painter David
Newman, 41, has not had a solo show in his more then twenty years of painting,
is currently unaffiliated with any gallery or museum in the entire United States,
and apart from hanging in a few group shows with other local unknowns, he passes
virtually unremarked by the mainstream art world or even its underground alternatives.
Much of this is by Newman’s own design. He is, like Willem DeKooning
in the pioneer days of Abstract Expressionism, an exemplar of purist integrity
who shuns the commercial art establishment. DeKooning adamantly refused to
show until late in his career and until then was known to but a small handful
of fellow painters who clustered around Tompkins Square Park in the East Village.
Similarly, Newman is known to and admired by a select circle of creatives on
the East and West coasts that includes actor Jack Nicholson, painter Tim Wicks,
Lars Frederickson of the band Rancid, Erik Macfadden of P-Funk and Mike Watt
of the Minutemen, as well as a sprinkling of literary types such as Gregory
Maguire, author of Wicked, and, well, myself, for instance. And like DeKooning,
Newman is a stark anomaly at a time in our culture when the celebrity urge
goads even the most high-minded of painters to grab their ring on the money-go-round
(think, say, of self-proclaimed avant-garde artists like Shepard Fairy or Odd
Nordrum, who shrewdly ply the business end for every dime they can get).
Newman, who only on rare occasion paints a privately commissioned
portrait ( about 100 to date), does not regard himself as belonging to any
garde, old, new, or avant, and is driven to paint neither by money or fame
but rather, by a visceral love for the act of painting itself.
Painting may also provide him with a hedge against something
darker: existential leverage in a ferocious struggle to fend off depression. “Life’s
all just bleak anyway,” he says. “ So it can be all Gothic and
you can do nothing, or you can paint. I choose to paint. It’s fun. Sometimes.
and that’s why I started doing it. I just have to paint.”
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