Studio Visit: Thomas Christopher Haag

In conjunction with my studio practice, I have developed a passion for producing events and organizing exhibitions of my fellow contemporary artists.  I love to curate a show because it's like mixing records for a dance floor, you take discreet elements' energies and turn them into a new thing.
 
My latest project as a curator will be a group show called The New Mystics: West Coast Painters.  It will run Nov 1-Dec 7th at Jellyfish Gallery in San Francisco.

Thomas Christopher Haag is preparing to pull up stakes.
I recently caught up with Thomas Christopher Haag, one of the New Mystics and talked a little about his process, the art hustle, and the mystical experience we call life.  He had informed me via email that he was preparing to enter a new phase in his life and wanted to meet to talk about his participation this fall.  Thomas has been a working artist for the past ten years, living and showing in Seattle, Alberquerque, and Oakland, and is planning to take a sabbatical (something I can totally relate to) from the urban environment and constant grind, retreating to a friend's property in the wilds of Washington State to meditate, commune with nature, and create work for the New Mystics show (!)




JQ-Living in East Oakland, right down the street from here, I felt there was a certain amount of doom that began to inform my work, an anxiety about our day and age, and I see it in the work of a lot of the New Mystics....

TCH-I dont really see "doom" in my work.  I think of myself as basically an optimist. It's important to have honesty in artwork, and be able to address conflict and sadness and such, but I see my work as being more about and emotional clicking, a turning on, a sort of mystical unifying event.

JQ-Ok, yeah, I see that.  The figures are usually going through some sort of transformation.  You feel that is what we are going through as a society?

TCH-I feel we are heading towards more unity, evolution is leading us there.  We fight against it, because of our egos, but all of the work is about that moment, the moment of unification, more or less.  Either being there, or getting there, preparing for that...it is not all good.  There is good and bad.

JQ-And the ego's fear is understandable.

TCH-Yes, of course.  We are having a hard time in the world.  People want to blame things, instead of taking responsibility, and realizing how much they can actually effect things.  Once we start doing that, things will start to make more sense to us.

JQ-All of your characters are so fantastic.  They seem both familiar and bizarre. Are there traditions and cultural systems that you are drawing them from?

TCH-Yes, definitely. All of them.  I studied comparative religions for a long time and found that all the characters are different names for the same concepts.

JQ-Your work seems to be so process driven.  Does the process drive the content?

TCH-Completely.  I start with building up a ground of collage elements from publications, old books, newspapers, all this information.  And then it gets covered up and shaped into a picture.







JQ-I made series of work about movement and meditation, and layers of experience building up a surface.  It seemed that the surface of a picture can hold so much energy.

TCH-That's what I see myself as doing.  Building a battery of presence.  All the attention and love that goes into creating a picture, that is what the viewer can tap into when they spend time with it.  The art is almost incidental, it is just a bye-product of the life lived.




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