“Coming to Terms: The Art and Practice of Dougie Padilla since his 60s”
By Karen Mary Davalos
Born in Iowa in 1948, Dougie Padilla is a “self-taught artist of Norwegian/Mexican roots.” This identity is enigmatic, not because Padilla is bicultural, since few of us are monocultural. It is mysterious because the term “self-taught” is loaded with meanings, some of which are contradictory. The term is often used to describe artists who are institutionalized, folkloric, naïve, vernacular, and primitive. Some of these terms echo the racist logic of European explorers who deemed anyone not like them—in skin color, religion, language—as inferior. The art world continues to function through a colonial lens that ranks certain artists above others, and self-taught artists are at the bottom of that aesthetic hierarchy. Sometimes the connotations of “self-taught” align with the cruel anachronism, “idiot savant,” a term that betrays the user’s arrogance, and conceptions of mind/body that favor a specific form of intellect. While “self-taught” may not overtly suggest the artist’s mental capacities, it does connote that the rest of us are superior to those artists.
However, the term “self-taught” also implies something exceptional or remarkable about the artist. The designation “self-taught” can explain the sources of inspiration, media, style, or compositional strategies of the artist; for example, a self-taught artist might ignore the fundamentals of art school, such as Western perspective, human proportion, and technique. Artists Grandma Moses (1860 – 1961), Bill Traylor (1853 – 1949), and Patrocinio Barela (1900 – 1964), a Taos woodcarver, come to mind. Within this connotation is a romantic view of the artist, whose lack of formal training in schools of art does not negatively impact the aesthetic value of the work but somehow makes it different. They are an aesthetic genius even without formal training and work outside of art market trends. Thus, the term assumes formal arts training itself is effective in teaching perspective, proportion, color theory, and other presumed fundamentals.
The term “self-taught” obscures Padilla’s work, creative process, technique, and activism in the arts. Padilla completed less than two years of college, and during this brief period, he was focused on sociology, psychology, and history, not studio arts. Nevertheless, the artist grew up in a home with a deep appreciation of the arts. The Lutheran church of his mother provided considerable artistic development, and Padilla was singing and recording Bach cantatas in a choir by age eleven. His great grandfather, Ole, who was born in 1861, would carve dogs out of wood for Padilla. His father, an arts advocate and collector who focused on regional visual artists, including Cameron Booth and Aldo Moroni, also stimulated his attention to the arts. Dozens of works with which Padilla grew up are part of the permanent collection at Augsburg College. Furthermore, in the 1980s, his father provided him with a job hanging art exhibits in a bank lobby. More to the point, Padilla’s technical training developed through his employment as a construction worker, house painter, farmer, carpenter, and welder, and each of these trades has informed his ability to successfully create sculpture, mixed media assemblage, collage, and large-format paintings on plywood. Call it on-the-job training or public education, but Padilla’s technical skills are extraordinary because of his breadth and depth in a variety of media, much more than the typical art school student required to focus on one discipline or media. Padilla commands a broad range of the visual arts.
Furthermore, Padilla has been immersed in and a creator of the arts scene in the Twin Cities. Widely recognized as a leading arts advocate and trend-setter, Padilla is founder or co-founder of numerous non-profit organizations, such as the Northeast Minneapolis Arts Association, salons, and pop-up galleries, including Art Jones Gallery. He also helped found city-wide arts events, most notably, Art-A-Whirl, the annual three-day open-studio tour in Northeast Minneapolis which showcases over 600 artists and is arguably one of the largest open-studio tours in the country. Embedded in the arts world, Padilla is connected to a network of instructors and students of the visual arts.
Padilla is an iconoclast, which I propose is informed by his nomadic lifestyle as a young man who “hitchhiked across the country” a dozen times over a period of four years, living no longer than three months in any given place. A self-identified hippie, Padilla follows no one, and this approach to life has produced an aesthetic practice deeply original, self-sustaining, and unconventional. More importantly, his freedom from art school ways of thinking, doing, and creating has meant that he can effortlessly join art and life. Unlike the art school students of the 1970s who wanted to merge art and life as a challenge to their formal training or the Fluxus artists’ institutional critique of museums, his countercultural practice and aesthetic is organic. It is not a reaction to art school disciplines or institutions of art. It emerges from his lived reality.
Padilla seamlessly merges art and life because his path to an identity as “artist” was developed through spiritual explorations in meditation and yoga. Self-reflection was the inspiration for Padilla’s career in the visual arts. At the age of thirty-two, Padilla created a mask during a Mythopoetic Men’s Movement retreat and became fascinated by its self-generating energy and the window it opened to other dimensions. He studied masks of ancient civilizations and the contemporary use of masks among non-Western societies. He was intrigued by how masks outside of the Western traditions reveal truths rather than conceal personhood. Consider two examples from the Western tradition: Halloween and the masquerade ball. Both contexts allow the mask wearer to become someone or something else—to hide under the illusion of freedom and autonomy. On the other hand, non-Western masks are most often a conduit to other dimensions, strengthening the wearer’s social networks and connections to the cosmos.
Since the 1990s, Padilla has emphatically expressed the impossibility of disentangling art and life. This essay examines four series, Calavera, Azucar, Prayer Tree, and Telenovela, to document a fully integrated art with life. Organized thematically, the essay begins with the obvious spiritual content—the Calavera and Azucar series—which is followed by a discussion of the sculpture series of Prayer Trees to trace a more conceptual and processual linkage of life with art. It concludes with what local art critic Gregory J. Scott identified in 2009 as the “carnival freneticism” of the Telenovela series, which merges creative and spiritual practices and becomes instructive for the viewer.
Calavera series in ceramics (2016 – 2019)
In Padilla’s hands, the calavera, widely recognized for its connection to Día de los Muertos, is intensely spiritual. Composed with large, cavernous eyes and a four- or six-toothed mouth, Padilla’s composition of the calavera finds its way into multiple media and suites, including the Calavera series in ceramics (2016 – 2019). These small, glazed ceramics may evoke the iconic skull of Day of the Dead, the Chicanx and Mexican commemorations for the dead that are joyous, playful, satirical, and critical, but for Padilla, the embrace of the calavera, and Día de los Muertos, more generally, is deeply reverent. Through the Calavera series, he engages with his Mexican American father, Donald Gabino Padilla, who died in 1992 at the age of 71, but also with his Mexican grandfather, José de Jesús Padilla Torres, who migrated to the Midwest from Ciudad Chihuahua, Mexico after the Mexican Revolution. As the artist explains, when his father passed away, he “started participating in muertos celebrations at CreArte Chicano and Latino Arts Center Museum and … “I have not missed a year since [then].” His father’s passing opened another channel for Padilla to deepen both his spirituality and his Mexican and Chicano roots.
It is this spiritual and cultural sensibility that animates the Calavera series. Padilla honors the joyous celebrations for Día de los Muertos, but he is more attuned to the psychic gateways opened by the festivities. Working with ceramic glazes, the series visually records the blurring he experiences between this life and the afterlife. The media supports mingling via the bleeding of colors, the fusing of shapes by the melting glazes. Gestural qualities emerge by squeezing ketchup bottles filled with the glazing medium which, in turn, resists the formation of hard, firm, and solid lines or compositions. As the artists explains, “the glazes eat each other.” The ceramic glazes visually create the amalgamation of spiritual and aesthetic worlds, and in the moment of creation, notes Padilla, the “spirit world [is] entering into the art making process.” In his words, these works are “half art, half spirit,” a sentiment found in much of his work since the artist turned 60 in 2008.
Although the pop-cultural appropriations of the skull might encourage some viewers to misread the images as gothic, punk, or heavy metal, Padilla’s use of color lightens and enlivens the playful qualities of Mexican and Chicano spirituality. Red, chromium blue, salmon pink, purple, and cadmium orange find their way into his calavera creations. Informed by the color palette of the handmade clay tile factory, Clay Squared To Infinity, where the artist holds an ongoing residency, the Calavera series does not duplicate the combinations we expect for Días de los Muertos: magenta, kelly green, fuchsia, or turquoise. Padilla’s color combinations reinforce a jubilant and somber tone.
In addition to unique calavera coloration, Padilla does not emphasize the flower-eyes, hearts, and fleur-de-lis of Chicanx calaveras because he is not exclusively focused on this annual communion with the dead. At the age of 70, he deliberately lives his life with daily reminders of death and freely explores other dimensions of existence. As Padilla proclaims in a recent poem entitled, “its four below out there”, “i want to talk to angels now./ i’m tired of talking about demons/ and crazies and hungry ghosts/ (there are so honkin’ many)./ anyways, at 70 years old,/ angels are the more interesting subject.” The visual expression of “the hallelujah chorus/ in multiple dimensions” comes with experience of his own mortality (the artist has had two heart failures, one before the age of 21), his own spiritual journey (he lived in India to study with Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh and also worked for three years in nursing homes and “sat with the old while they left this world”), and the deaths of over forty friends and family. The series is part of that process which honors the cycle and also the gateway between the here and hereafter.
Make no mistake, Padilla contemplates the “multiple dimensions”, but not without wit. The artist enjoys a visual or textual tickle, a sense of humor that relies on a light touch or an unsuspected sensation. The works of the Calavera series are titled for Cesareo Moreno, a curator of the National Museum of Mexican Art (Chicago), who placed Padilla’s tiles in the exhibit, “#30 Día de los Muertos: Journey of the Soul” in 2016. Cesareo 13 is merely the title that followed Cesareo 12; no magic here, just easy documentation.
Azucar Series (2018 – present), linocut prints [this font is different than previous header]
The same carefree sensibility is found in the Azucar prints initiated in 2018. This suite of linocut calavera images with text are produced in pink or black or white on repurposed or plain paper of approximately nine by eleven inches. They are unnumbered and circulate as gifts to guests and friends. The skulls and the word “azucar” (sugar) partially cover the surfaces of pages from fashion magazines, maps from National Geographic, advertisements for luxury items, and images from arts magazines, a referential technique that is intentionally somewhat snarky. Similar to the illustrator who brought the calavera to public attention, José Guadalupe Posada (1852 – 1913), Padilla makes clear that nothing and no one escapes death as calavera and the text cover a wide range of repurposed images. Similarly, the sheer volume of the series—the artist has produced hundreds—tacitly implies our shared fate. Yet, the candied pink calavera and text form a visual pun—the sugar skull—as a wholesome sweetness that offers a toothy smile over our cosmopolitan consumerism, life-of-plenty, cartographies of North America, and creative arts.
Prayer Trees Series
The pedagogy of his practice became deliberate when the artist reached 60 and endeavored to see his aesthetic and spiritual practices as one. “I’m working hard now to overtly combine my spiritual practices with my art,” he stated in a 2009 interview by Gregory J. Scott. The Prayer Tree Series composed from nails and wood is one of the most potent examples of this intermingling of art and life. These sculptures are created from found branches or repurposed timber and “thousands of nails hammered at different lengths and intervals into … the wood,” observed Scott. From a distance, the nail heads look like organic matter, such as moss, fungus, or rough bark, particularly since Padilla sprays the nails with water to enhance their rusting. The variations in oxidation create a natural palette and the varied heights of the nail heads form an undulating surface reminiscent of the growth or decay found along the forest floor. Organic matter—tree branches—and a foundational tool of technological advancement—the nail—are joined into seemingly self-referential organic forms to expand our understanding of life and death.
The force of these powerful constructions comes from their aesthetic composition and Padilla’s creative process. Inspired by African fetish art, Padilla offers a prayer with each nail and each blow of the hammer. The process is an intensely meditative practice, and one wonders about the embodied and generative spiritual effect of a work created from thousands of nails and prayers. Conceptually, the sculptures provoke an awareness of our hurried, unanchored life. Each nail reminds us to be mindful of our presence, our breath, and the attention we should provide to each of life’s moments. Each nail also conveys Padilla’s craft; he understands the qualities of metal, he deftly controls the force of the hammer, and he successfully provokes organic forms through texture, height, and color. To live with one of these sculptures is to live with a talisman or visual mantra.
Telenovela Series (2006 – 2019)
Padilla’s Telenovela Series produces a similar effect in dramatically different media. Drawings on watercolor paper, this series also conveys Padilla’s interior meditations. Largely figurative images with text, Padilla typically covers the entire surface with anthropomorphic speaking beings with sharp toothed open mouths, numbered lists, prayers, and bejeweled figures, such as angels and demons in high heels. Although a few drawings in the series have large portions of negative or white space, the overwhelming majority of the works occupy the whole surface with beautifully composed yet staggeringly, complex imagery.
Concentric lines and circular forms, embellishments upon neo-rococo ornamentation, symbols along with text, and anthropomorphized and human figures animate the images. The dynamic structure of the composition is heightened by the lack of a horizon line, orientation, or single scale. The artist must have turned the paper as he worked, as texts and images offer little clue as to the image’s top and bottom. Figures float among script and invented writing forms that symbolically gesture to communication, and each require a reorientation of the eye and its focus. Several details and texts require the viewer to come within inches of the surface. Yet, the composition is exquisitely satisfying.
Telenovelas are the strongest example of Padilla’s draftsmanship. His artistry is easily expressed through well-balanced and dynamic compositions. Working spontaneously, Padilla approaches the series to stretch “his art muscle,” as he proclaims. It’s an aesthetic workout because there are no do-overs; the paper and ink are unforgiving, which is why the artist embraces the media. He allows his thoughts to flow freely from mind/body to paper, and this openness is similar to the meditative quality of the Prayer Tree series. In this case, each stroke of the pen or pencil is an unfiltered thought-meditation, hence the title “telenovelas” to convey the everyday dramas of life. The viewer is given intimate, autobiographic details, and the images include lists of activities (1: move prayer tree to front yard? 2: finish ‘milagro’ ex-voto 3: bring up new log for ‘prayer tree project,’ …”), mantras (“ram ram ram ram…”), and names of friends, among the many narrative expressions. But do not mistake these works for doodles, a term that cannot convey the potent compositional quality that emerges from the artist’s stream of consciousness.
Like a mandala, unifying elements include color, decorative borders, and anchoring figures, but so much more. The tension between the artist’s emotional vulnerability—a willingness to commit to art every thought that comes to mind without regard for the viewer—and the artist’s confidence in autobiographic exposure as the vehicle to aesthetic meaning is profound. That is, it might be difficult to describe what makes the series aesthetically beautiful, but it is easy to experience the internal connections to the works that make them extremely satisfying. They open windows we did not know were shut. Furthermore, the unconscious revelations are generative; the works require a mindfulness that produces a type of meditative quiet, which can be accessed again and again if one truly looks at every aspect of the drawing. The series is a book of knowledge. They almost make time stop, or reverse, as we can hear the artist’s audible rhythmic, slow chant that embraces life with art: ram, ram, ram, ram …
Karen Mary Davalos, Ph.D.
Karen Mary Davalos, Professor of Chicano and Latino Studies at the University of Minnesota, has published four books on Chicana/o art, including Chicana/o Remix: Art and Errata since the Sixties (NYU Press 2017).Her research and teaching interests in Chicana feminist scholarship, spirituality, art, exhibition practices, and oral history are reflected in her book, Yolanda M. López (the recipient of two book awards). She is the only scholar to have written two books on Chicanx museums. She was a contributor to “L.A. Xicano”, which produced six Chicana/o art exhibitions as a part of the Getty Foundation “Pacific Standard Time” series in Los Angeles. Since 2012, she has served on the Board of Directors of Self Help Graphics, the oldest Chicana/o - Latina/o arts organization in Southern California. In 2012 she recieved the President’s Award for Art and Activism from the Women’s Caucus for Art.
Coming to Terms: The Art and Practice of Dougie Padilla since his 60s. Davalos, K. M. (2019) Lucky 70 (suerte) new work by Dougie Padilla Rogue Buddha Gallery [Exhibition Catalog) copyright 2019,2021, by Douglas Padilla, LUNA BRAVA PRESS, PEPIN WI