Fred Tomaselli

Photo courtesy James Cohan Gallery

Fred Tomaselli, "Generator" (2006)

Photo courtesy James Cohan Gallery

Fred Tomaselli, "Halo of Flies" (2006)

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He uses a range of techniques, including collage, painting and glazing, to make his highly decorative pictures that are often described as psychedelic—particularly since he has infamously included pills and marijuana leaves among his collage materials (which once led to his works being detained by customs officials in France).

Indeed, Tomaselli—who has said his involvement with “stoner” culture in his youth has been an important influence on his art—creates works that act very much like a drug, but one that alters a viewer’s consciousness via the eyes rather than chemistry.

Today, the outdoor-loving Tomaselli, who says he hasn’t used LSD in over 25 years, incorporates pressed leaves from his Brooklyn garden in his works, in addition to his signature elements—images of flora, fauna and human body parts cut out of magazines, field guides and catalogues (in addition to actual insects and flowers).

His newest show of paintings is at the James Cohan Gallery in New York until Nov. 11. Though his work has evolved a long way since his debut in the early 1980s, when he was an installation artist and part of the southern Californian punk-rock and performance-art scene, he explains how many of those same, early-career concerns still inform his art.

Tomaselli spoke to ArtInfo in his Brooklyn studio in the days before the show opened—and while he was still putting the finishing touches on some of the pictures.

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Fred, let’s begin by talking about how you make these beautifully crafted pictures. I’m fascinated by the tiny elements cut out from magazine illustrations. Are they your starting point?

Yes. Here [in Lark (2006)] I’m working with white flowers, for example. I have a studio assistant who cuts them out for me, so I can put them down where I want them, and then I glue them. I have drawers full of them. It’s my little cabinet of wonders. There are orange, blue and white flowers … then animal, vegetable, mineral … there are body parts: hands, mouths … This is pretty much the DNA of my work.

Do you know precisely how the picture’s going to turn out when you begin?

No. Increasingly the work is involved with intuition and micro-decision making. I sometimes don’t know at all how these things are going to evolve over time. I try to be open to intuition and the “expressive moment,” if you will.

So you seal these collaged elements in resin after gluing them down?

Yes, basically I glue these things down, then I go over them with different varnishes. I lay the picture down on the ground, pour resin, leave it overnight, sand it, and then I get it back up on the wall. But mostly I work on the floor.

How many coats of resin are there?

Enough to cover whatever it is that I’m trying to encapsulate. Migrant Fruit Thugs (2006), for example, is one of the thinner works. It only has flat leaves on it, so it only has four or five coats of resin. I paint between the layers of resin, and I like that, because I like the slight three dimensionality that comes into the work—and having slightly different focal points and the shadow play. It makes the viewer a little off-balance as to the nature of the reality of the things that they’re seeing.

Yes, not being quite sure what you’re looking at seems a fundamental aspect of these paintings.

I want people to get lost in the work. I want to seduce people into it and I want people to escape inside the world of the work. In that way the work is pre-Modernist. I throw all of my obsessions and loves into the work, and I try not to be too embarrassed about any of it. I love nature, I love gardening, I love watching birds, and all of that gets into the work. I just try to be true to who I am and make the work I want to see. I don’t have a radical agenda.

Don’t you? For a lot of people your work is associated with psychedelia and hallucinogenic drugs.

I don’t consider myself a psychedelic artist. I’m not trying to depict a trip or depict what it’s like to be stoned on LSD. That’s an impossibility, so I don’t even try to go there. But psychedelic drugs directed me toward art-historical objects that have informed my work. I got involved in the culture around psychedelics and started looking at bad psychedelic black-light posters and Op-Art. But that led into my love of Tibetan art and Indian miniatures and Persian miniatures—so there are these core interests that came from psychedelics.

Well, if you’re not a psychedelic artist, what was it that made you feel that these psychedelic influences belonged in your art?

During the 1980s I was making installations about escapism. Back then, you weren’t supposed to make art that was escapist—that was the worst thing you could do as an avant-garde artist—but to me it seemed escapism was the dominant theme of our culture at the time. Ronald Reagan was president and all kinds of things were going to hell because our culture didn’t have a very good grip on reality. Plus I was coming out of the stoned-out, drugged-out world of stonerism and punk rock, and I was utilizing that reality in my work.

When I started making pictures, I was thinking about this idea of a picture as a window on to another reality—and the idea of losing yourself in the sublime and the transcendent. I thought that dovetailed with some of the rhetoric around psychedelic drugs, so I started inserting pills and hemp leaves into the work.

I wanted people to have an escapist experience but also to think about the mechanics of escapism. I wanted the work to be beautiful and seductive, but I also wanted to talk about what that meant. That led to what I’m doing now.

You said that you don’t have a radical agenda for your work. What sort of agenda do you have?

I don’t propose to make any conclusions with the work. I don’t think that good art usually does. If anything, this is anti-manifesto art. Or not even anti-manifesto—it’s not that it’s against manifestos, it just doesn’t have one. It can take all the contradictions and still be a healthy object.

What sort of contradictions do you mean?

I started out more or less illustrating the ideas that I had, and then as the work expanded and evolved, I started heaping all these [images] that people thought were antithetical to one another into the work. I started adding more and more of the decorative, and more landscape, and more nature, and more folk-art influences. I don’t mind those contradictions being in the work. They reflect my reality.

It’s also true, isn’t it, that a lot of those issues have sometimes been thought inappropriate to ambitious contemporary art?

There was a short period in the late 1980s when the art world was involved with a very in-your-face political aesthetic. It seemed that there was a total disdain for beauty and seduction and desire, although there were a lot of people talking about it—especially the sexualized politics that came out of AIDS. But for a while my art seemed to be antithetical to the zeitgeist that was operating in the art world.

But since then, I think the art world has caught up with all of that and embraced it, and now I find myself in the funny position of being one of those guys who makes pretty pictures, in the context of an art world that’s full of that sort of thing.