Stephen Perkins, Norton Wisdom, Flea --- Spaceland, LA, 2005

Ship Merman Mermaid --- Norton Wisdom, 2008

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The Performance Painting of Norton Wisdom

published in The Wire (London), July 2005


Audiences seldom know what to expect: alongside the instruments on stage stands a large backlit screen, ringed by paint cans, pots, brushes, squeegees, and rags. At once, a man in a white jumpsuit, with dark blond curls, bounds out to take up his tools, listening to the first sounds emerge, and begins to paint. Thick wavy lines gather as a patch of sea, to spring up like a jet of wild hair on a bare-bosomed goddess, and as the pulse of the music quickens she is embracing a man, both astride a horse, beneath a small winged cupid who hovers with his arrow. The painter prowls about to pull images from inside his images---snakes, dragons, angels, gods, monkeys, and alligators---until the music flies without him and he stops to reconsider; applying his hands directly to the surface he erases the picture to prepare a new ground, or with his squeegees parts the waves of paint, wiping the screen clean. The tension rising, a Mr. Moneybags appears atop an oil well amid ravenous creatures sporting various religious symbols, until those too change like a bad dream, into other images more playful, or sexy, or poetic. Such are the transformative lines of Norton Wisdom when he paints live with musicians that it is anyone’s guess where he will end up when the set is over.

“The screen is translucent, usually fiberglass,” he explains. “If fiberglass is unavailable, I use windows and glass doors, whatever is on hand. The idea is to create a stained-glass window effect. The paint is water-based, operative word is cheap and safe and can be cleaned up without evidence that there was ever a painter on stage. Since art supplies on tour in the backwaters of places like Minnesota and North Dakota are questionable at best, I have learned to be able to go into a gas station and a drugstore and come out with materials to do a gig.”

Painting and music, of course, share a common impulse, as close as the eye and the ear: both organize elements of line, color, rhythm. But only in the mid-20th century did the disciplines begin to really overlap, due to the rise of abstraction in one and improvisation in the other. The action painters (Pollock, Kline, de Kooning) who frequented New York jazz clubs drew on the same uncompromising spontaneity as Thelonious Monk did in executing their own work. In France, Yves Klein unified the performance of both with models producing his monochrome body-print paintings while an orchestra played his one chord “Monotone Symphony.” Elsewhere, Fluxus artist Nam June Paik was abandoning early efforts as a composer to incorporate music performance as a foundation in his video installations. When musician and artist were the same person, usually the roles alternated. Painter Larry Rivers began as a jazz saxophonist, but only performed occasionally after becoming an art star. For forty years, Michael Snow has carried on two mostly parallel careers as improvising pianist and visual artist. Likewise, the Swiss drummer Daniel Humair has long enjoyed a flourishing career as an abstract painter, as has Brazilian saxophonist Ivo Perelman most recently. But the act of painting as performance while musicians improvise before an audience ends up far less common. At 57, Norton Wisdom has remained unique in the nature of his practice and his constancy in such adventure for 25 years.

“The first time I painted with live music was in 1964,” he says, “at my high school when the Doors were playing at our junior dance.  I was going to the Chouinard Art Institute at night then and was very much into the Beat scene, which was all about freedom from old academic ideas.”

A native of Los Angeles and lifelong surfer, before finishing art school he secured an ideal civil service job:  as a lifeguard on the beaches of Malibu, retiring just a year ago (he was among the real-life inspirations for the popular television series Baywatch). Being involved in body recovery there for three-plus decades, like a paramedic, he learned all about anatomy. During that time, he also developed an obsessive abstract format in his studio painting that has proved fruitful to this day: four trapezoids framing a door-like center provided a sculptural visual support for endless possibilities of expression. But on a trip to Berlin in 1980 he took that obsession outside when he decided, in protest, to paint his trapezoids on a section of the Berlin Wall; he was detained and then deported. Looking to maintain that sense of risk in his art, he soon joined keyboard/synthesizer player Zam Johnson and saxophonist Eddie “Snakepit” Edwards to do live painting performances as the group Panic in punk clubs and jazz bars around L.A.

It was at one such gig, at a biker bar in Venice, that improvising guitarist Nels Cline first saw Wisdom, leading to many eventual collaborations. This line of practice before an audience evolved differently from his studio work, in what might be termed a figurative expressionism, as he built up his own iconography with a fluid capacity for constant metamorphoses. Panic performed often until it disbanded in 1985, though after Johnson moved to Berlin he and Wisdom formed the duo Science and Industry which still plays there several times a year.  Meanwhile, Wisdom and Cline first performed together in the early 1990s, and when Cline was directing the New Music Mondays series at the Alligator Lounge in Santa Monica during the mid-1990s, Wisdom painted with various musicians, including Cline’s trio. Later, Cline brought him to paint with Banyan, the post-punk instrumental quartet led by drummer Stephen Perkins (Jane’s Addiction) that also includes bassist Mike Watt (Minutemen) and trumpeter Willie Waldman, where Wisdom became a frequent collaborator, performing all over the United States (their latest CD includes a cover by Wisdom).  They will appear together at this year’s Monterey Jazz Festival in September.

Maybe his decades as a lifeguard prepared him, but the fact remains that Wisdom is fearless, and his painting in both modes (live and studio) wins admirers at every turn---even galleries and museums have occasionally taken interest in him, though he resists the courtship dance of the art market.  Among his more unusual collaborators over the years:  the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Butoh dancers in Japan, at a limestone grotto in Bali with the National Bamboo Orchestra, opening premieres for Cirque du Soleil in Las Vegas, in addition to such varied musicians as Charles Owens, Badal Roy, Rob Wasserman, Daniel Lanois, Ivan Neville, George Clinton, Beck, Jaguares, Lili Haydn.  Lately he has been appearing weekly as part of the ambient surf music trio Magic Box (alternate weeks at the Dume Room in Malibu and at the Nova Café in Hollywood; their CD on Pascal Records, Bliss of a Madman, shows several of Wisdom’s trapezoid paintings in the booklet).

Though Wisdom somehow thrives in nearly every musical setting, Cline prefers to take matters further, to work one on one in a way that is fully collaborative.  They formed a duo, Stained Radiance, as a more unified project, which continues to perform around L.A. (when Cline is not too busy as a member of Wilco or with his own band The Nels Cline Singers).  “What he does,” says Cline, “is simultaneously on his own track and in the moment, and it all works together.”  Precisely because he draws forth his own store of images, for the untrained viewer Wisdom’s performance painting is “both readable and apprehensible at a distance, it’s not abstract.”  Curiously, for a long time these paintings shared an essential quality of improvised music, in that they were ephemeral; they existed only for that evening, and he would wash them down after the gig.  A few years ago, he started photographing them to document the work, many of which can be seen on his website (www.nortonwisdom.com).  He has even been known to rework them for a gallery show.

Regarding their performances as a duo, Cline has occasionally tried to direct him in tone or mood, but mostly he tends to work off what emerges in the painting.  Wisdom for his part appreciates Cline’s suppleness and adaptability as especially suited to the overall dynamic of such work:  “The nature of the music directs the outcome of my painting.  I stay out of the way and let the music paint my pictures, and I am very fortunate to work with this level of musicians.  So once the event starts, it has a life of its own.”