Renaissance & Rebellion - Flipbook - Page 19
NORTON
WISDOM
NORTON WISDOM calls himself an anti-war activist before an artist or
performer, and following his studies at Berkeley, he also had a whole career as a
decorated and legendary coastal lifeguard. Despite being a student and lifelong
practitioner of painting, he’s spent the last decade or so focusing on his performance
art, taking his live-painting improv act on the road in collaborations with musicians
like Banyan, Lili Haydn, Nels Cline and Llyn Foulkes. But the political and frequently
sexed-up pictures resulting from the live shows are just the most public part of
Wisdom’s story. He’s dedicated his career to exploring the infinite possibilities of an
abstract structure, the proscenium/rectangle and the way its five-part shape yields
endless variations. Since the late 1960s, Wisdom has been tirelessly, unendingly
rendering this shape in pure color, expressively distressed surfaces, and collages made
with images both found and cannibalized from his own canvases. This is in pursuit
of a practice he first undertook way back up in the Bay Area, when he experienced
an epiphany in which he envisioned a solo, steady, private studio practice as a form of
peaceful, Buddhist-inflected social protest. He still paints every day.
CALIFORNIA
32
LOCOS
