More than 10 years after his last solo exhibition, Gordon Jennings says his new one-man show makes him feel a bit like Luke Skywalker in ‘Return of the Jedi.’ Still, the Saint John artist says he hasn’t been deterred from his passion. ‘It’s always just been what I do.’

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Story by Kate Wallace

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It’s rare to encounter an artist wearing a suit in his studio, especially a well-cut, dark pin-striped two-piece stylishly set off by a purple dress shirt and a sharp black-and-white-striped silk tie.

That is what painter Gordon Jennings was sporting Monday, as he squeezed in an interview between meetings and other demands of his day job in the human resources department for the City of Saint John.

Don’t let the suit and the career fool you, though – Jennings is an artist through and through, although he doesn’t like to refer to himself as such, preferring to leave it to the viewer to decide if his work is art.

“I’m a painter. It’s not up to me to say if it’s successful.”

His latest solo show, 4X4: New Paintings, opened at Peter Buckland Gallery on Friday and will be displayed until April 11.

Billed as“The Return of Gordon Jennings,”it is his first solo exhibition They range from figurative work and pop art line drawings to a cartoonish domestic scene and a new series inspired by Jennings’ nostalgia for the TV culture of his youth.

“It is a chance to show the different ways that I think and work.”

Jennings first had the idea for the show in 1997, but a slew of misfortunes in that year, including losing his job, seriously injuring his knee and the end of his marriage, pushed that to the side.

Two years ago, he revisited the idea.

“This is a first step to say,‘I’m still here.’” Turning 50 next week, with his kids grown, the time was right for his return.

Leading up to the show’s opening, a number of people had told him, “I’m so glad to hear you’re painting again.”

There seems to be “this idea that in ’97 I put my brushes down and picked them up again two years ago,”he says.

“I never stopped painting. I have painted every year since I was 10.”

Art has always been his passion.

“My mother said I was drawing as soon as I could hold a crayon,” he says. “It’s always just been what I do.”

But life – including two kids and two marriages – has a funny way of modifying even the most fervent dreams, and Jennings put providing for his family ahead of painting full-time.

“If you look at the statistics, artists are usually the most highly educated people who make the least money.”

He has always juggled a day job and his art.

He remembers telling the late Fredericton critic Christina Sabat in the ’90s,“People think I’m a longshoreman who happens to paint.

I’m a painter who happens to work as a longshoreman.”

“Would I like to paint full-time? If I could afford it, I’d love to give it a crack.”

He scoffs at what he calls the myth of artist as bohemian, the idea “that you’ve got to be willing live in a cabin in the woods and be poor if you’re serious.”

Even though this show is at a commercial gallery, he is more excited at the prospect of feedback than sales.

“I don’t do this for therapy,”he says, gesturing around his cramped uptown studio, the walls busy with drawings and canvases.“I want this stuff to be seen.”

When he works, he usually has an image in his head that he tries to replicate on canvas.

He plays around with different materials, including plywood as a canvas and tar as paint.

“I love the plasticity of painting. I love the physicality of painting,” he says. “And then there is that sense of production, which I think is really deeply rooted in human beings. It’s a tangible result. I like that.”

While there have been periods when he found it hard to find time to get to his studio, “there’s a real beauty to being in this situation,” he says.“I am so free to paint what I want to paint.”

Jennings grew up in a hard-working, blue collar Saint John family.

Even as a young man, he says he knew that art was more than mere decoration.

“I understood there was this other space to get to,”he says.

“As I got older, it was a way to communicate ideas and to provoke ideas.”

As a kid, his family had the art auction board game Masterpiece. The playing cards were printed on one side with images of masterworks and the flip side had details about the works.

Long after the game was gone, he carried one of those cards with him that depicted a work by Leonardo da Vinci.

In 1991, in England for the World Open Taekwondo Championships, Jennings happened to be in London on the opening day of the National Gallery’s Sainsbury Wing, where a collection of Renaissance paintings are housed.

“Little did I know that’s where that work is.”

When Jennings came across the darkened room that housed Virgin and Child with St. Anne and St. John the Baptist, which da Vinci painted in 1508, “it was almost a religious experience,” he says.

“That image in London was so connected to my inner personal dream.”

When Jennings graduated from high school in the ’70s, “you could quit a job in the morning and get a job in the afternoon.”

He married young and had two children in quick succession. He has made a living a number of ways, from running his own business to laying bricks to working in human resources.

When he has 30, following the breakdown of his first marriage, he enrolled in the fine arts department at Mount Allison University.

He says the rhetoric of that time was very contemporary. He recalls some of his peers sniffing at the ability to paint or draw well as “mere skill.”

“I went to Mount A with that skill, and ran into that very conceptual way of thinking.”

He does not think conceptualists have cornered the intellectual market.

“Just because I draw well doesn’t mean I don’t think.”

And despite its theoretical leanings, the school still offered the rigorous, traditional fine arts education he wanted.

After graduation, Jennings’ work was well received in New Brunswick. He showed at the Saint John City Gallery; The Space, a defunct artist-run centre; and the art gallery at the Université de Moncton, in a show curated by Lt.-Gov. Herménégilde Chiasson.

In 1996, he was the youngest Saint John artist selected for a travelling show curated by the Beaverbrook Art Gallery.

“I came out of the gate pretty good.”

But he also had two growing boys to provide for. In 1998, he took a computer course and got a job in human resources soon after.

He imagines some early supporters would look at his art career and ruefully think, “He had so much promise.”

Jennings says he has never so much as applied for an art grant. Before he does, he wants to increase his exposure.

“This is the start of my trying to do that,” he says, referring to the 4x4 exhibition.

“When you don’t have shows, you lose a certain amount of credibility.”

In the eclectic mix of works that comprise 4X4, “I’m talking about these different camps of art,” he says. “I don’t believe in formulas. I really don’t believe there’s much difference between what Picasso was doing and Michelangelo’s work.”

All artists are looking for a “visual language,” he says.

“Seeing is a different way of communicating.

It’s different from talking, it’s different from writing,”he says.

“People don’t train us in how we see, but we are very structured in how we speak and how we write.”

He is interested in everything from pop art to abstract expressionism.

“I still pride myself on being able to draw well,” he says, adding he regularly makes life drawings.

“I did martial arts for 30 years, so I understand the importance of practice.”

He mentions drawings he admires by Matisse and Picasso.

“I was always amazed at the power of a line.”

But you don’t need a fine arts degree to engage with his work.

“It’s not really important that everyone understands the inner workings of my mind to relate to it.”

That said, every element of the canvas represents a decision, he says.

“It’s just like in a movie – everything happens for a reason.”

In Domestic Series # 7, for instance, the pieces on the chessboard are laid out in the formation of a famous match.

“What this guy here doesn’t understand is that he’s already lost.”

The bleak sense of defeat and isolation is broken by a touch of humour, a painting within a painting of the classic American Gothic, which Jennings has recreated in the image of his characters.

Jennings began the Domestic series in the early ’90s. The couple in these works are always nude, always bald. It wasn’t intentional, but when he made the first one, of a couple in the bathroom, the man on the toilet, the woman brushing her teeth, he didn’t want to date the scene with hairstyles.

Although they are sharing intimate space, they are obviously distant.

“They could be worlds away.”

It’s not the only work in the show that has a painting within a painting.

In Self Portrait With Unfinished Painting of Jennifer, Jennings confronts the viewer while an unfinished portrait of a family friend, a painting he has been fussing over for years, rests on the easel behind him.

“I thought, maybe I can make it forever an unpainted painting of Jennifer. For me it was a little victory. It was saving a painting.”

Other figurative works include a portrait of his son and a quick oil sketch of a friend.

There are four works that continue his earlier Target series, and four from his new Test Pattern series.

“For a long time I just saw it as an iconic image of my time,”he says.“When I went to make the first work, I got thinking about my first experience with the test pattern.”

That was on Saturday mornings, waiting for the station to begin broadcasting and start airing cartoons.

Jennings remembers the day his family’s first TV was delivered. He was four or five, and recalls that they had trouble getting a signal.

“It was all snow,” he says.“I really remember when that picture came into view.” His nieces were shocked when he told them there was just one channel then, and that the station stopped broadcasting at midnight and didn’t resume programming until the next morning.

“There’s the warm TV nostalgia, there the iconic image aspect and there’s the advertising side, with the Cap’n Crunch,”he says.

“Really underlying it is how TV has changed us.”

He just started the series last year, and has made four so far, but has more ideas he wants to explore.

Jennings has anticipated the aspects of the show that might offend: the Indian head in the test pattern series and the headless female bodies in the bright pop-art Torso series.

While Jennings thinks some people may see the headless women as misogynist, he simply wanted to avoid being specific.

“If the head’s there, it is more of a portrait.

This could be anybody.”

In the end though, the work has to speak for itself, he says. Jennings doesn’t agree with those artists “who believe their intent is paramount.”

Whether Jennings will trade his suit for a painter’s smock full-time remains to be seen (although he does mention that Willem de Kooning was a carpenter into his 50s, before he found fame as an artist).

What is clear is that, while his latest show is billed as a return, he’s been here all along, and he’s going to keep doing what he’s always done: making work.“This show’s not going to stop. There’s a lot more work to do.”

Kate Wallace covers the arts for the Telegraph- Journal.