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Gordon Carlisle

The Good Shepherd by Gordon Carlisle

SITE OF THE WEEK
GordonCarlisle.com

Each time a great artist gets a great web site an angel earns its wings. Too many top talents look like chopped liver online. Or the artist entrusts his or her reputation to some gallery that also has a web site glued together with Scotch tape. Not here. This site works.

VISIT GordonCarlisle.com

Like photography, the web loves paintings. They are flat and colorful and can look compelling on the glaring computer screen. So artist web sites should be ninety percent visual. Gordon Carlisle’s new site is. The trick with visual sites is that they need to be extremely simple to navigate – Fisher-Price simple. I pick a category. I see a thumbnail. I click – and the bigger version of the picture should appear quickly. Nothing else works.

So Ronald Gehrman, an artistic web designer, has done it again. Working with local painter and illustrator (and guitar player and actor and writer) Gordon Carlisle, he has built a clickable visual portfolio. Nothing more, nothing less.

I’ve been a Carlisle fan since the days of the great mural in Market Square when he and others painted the entire surface of a four story building on plywood while the real building was being repaired behind it. The trick was that they painted the scene 100 years in the past. Since then, while searching for that fine line between commercial success and fine art, Carlisle has created an impressive body of painting and illustration.

I’m a sucker for painters who can paint photorealistic scenes and people and textures. I don’t know how they do that. Carlisle is, for my money, a modern Titian or Raphael Tiepolo, a skilled technician in search of a patron. He has just installed an enormous set of murals – four of them each 8 x 22 feet – in an Italian church in Portland, Maine. He worked on the project solo in his Portsmouth Button Factory studio for two years.

But there’s more than craft here. There is craftiness too. Carlisle has a wry sense of humor, a deep understanding of human behavior and a sharp political punch. He can, upon request, play it straight. But when painting for his own pleasure, the gloves come off.

My favorite Carlisle is a large canvas of the USS Albacore, the beached historic submarine that is a popular Portsmouth tourist attraction. The image has a photographic reality, but in Carlisle’s mind, the Albacore was painted all over with large pink polka dots. In his mind, the artist had vandalized the hulking black shape. And from the frame of the painting hung a perfectly round cut-out stencil, splattered in pink spray paint. The prop, combined with the painting, always made my head spin – as if the graffiti artist had actually done the deed. When a painter yanks me out of my world and into his own, even for a second, I want to see more.

Below is an image called "Icon with Indigestion" taken from GordonCarlisle.com. You’ll have to visit the site to see the rest. This self portrait of the artist as dyspeptic saint says it all. But even in the artist’s monumental work, like the 3,384'square foot mural honoring mill workers in Manchester, viewers can see Carlisle’s elegant blend of the sublime and the slightly strange. The massive scene of the industrial town peels away to reveal the warm inner core of workers who lived and died in a tough working-class world.

Webmaster Gehrmann has packaged it all into bite-sized sections in the way that a museum curator places paintings on a wall. There are just enough, not too many, and little to distract us from the message. The primary message is – look at what Mr. Carlisle can do. The subtext is – see the work, enjoy the work, buy the work.

Gordon Carlisle