Gordon Massman’s Confessional Abstractions

Gordon Massman, studio. Photographer: Charles Carroll 

By CARLOTA GAMBOA, February 25, 2025

“I pronounce all serious art to be one singular monolith,” Gordon Massman declared during our conversation. It can be difficult to pin down someone as raw as this speaker. Someone whose creative spirit is subject to the primal urges of an open subconscious, both self-reflective and uninhibited by convention’s expectations. Though Massman’s trajectory as an art-maker began with the written word having published seven collections of poetry, the East Coast creative has redefined the physicality of his expression.

For Massman, the leap from page to canvas wasn’t a matter of choice or an off-hand exploration. Art for him is a necessity. “Gordon Massman with a scientist's objectivity has mapped over twenty-one hundred slices of his psyche of which these are a few,” reads one of his online bios when he was still writing poetry. So it must come as no surprise that the transition from poet to painter was something more like “the locomotive engineer who, upon registering danger, slams on the brakes-----to the instant of stoppage,” rather than anything else. “It occurred in a pulsating blur of entropy,” he says, “from the engine room of [his] seventh volume [he] spied ahead the collapsed trestles of [his] verbal capacity and slammed on the brakes.” 

Gordon Massman, Orbiting Neptune, oil on canvas, 12x12 ft

The essence of Massman’s practice is something contingent on purging, born from an impetus to dislodge and examine a bug that infects a host’s attention. Using movements that converge confessionalism with abstract expressionism, Massman pulls from the base depths of his psyche to render his paintings. It is work done not to convey a calculated message, but to soothe a roving part of the self. “I retained my raging creative fire,” he explains. “When I came to a halt, paint brushes, like light beams, radiated from ten fingers.” 

When asked about his relationship to writing in comparison to his painting, Massman says that, “I strive always to make primitivism, primality, rawness, and pain graphically beautiful without internal censors or inhibition in the name of brutal honesty and universal origins. After all one's profoundness of ecstasy correlates precisely to one's acknowledgement of suffering. What is light without dark? My thought process within both genres plunges its implements into my massive reservoir of suffering and joy.” This unadulterated impulse to create makes him an insatiable artist whose work reflects the struggle of what it means to pry open the cell bars from somewhere deep and untenable. “I have had my ashes and Phoenix-wild resurrections,” he explains. “I now approach canvas with the same disguised angels— yes, angels populate life-shattering disasters— with which I, years ago, approached a sheet of paper.”

Gordon Massman, Bluebird Drowning in Absolute Hell, oil on canvas, 11.5x11.5 ft

Though his work swings between vibrant and figurative pieces and those more interested in the examination of neutral abstraction, like the Leviathan Triptych he completed last year, everything Massman produces bursts forth with complex texture and activity. Like a restless mind or body, his larger-than-life canvases, often spanning the entirety of walls, seem to transcend the essence of contemporary work created for a white-cube gallery space, and entrap the viewer's full attention and point of view. “I create decapitated. Reflect creates. Instinct creates. Biology creates. Midway through the finished work, however, conscious mind takes control of the miasma before it. Then my full faculties alter, shape, transform, sometimes literally obliterate the entirety. I paint, metaphorically speaking, with the bloody entrails of a sliced open torso,” he says. “That luscious thickness of Red Deep. That heavy rope of Hansa Yellow. That knobby branch of Mars Black. I experiment, I play, I devil-dare. Materials alone are intrinsically dead. Only fascination births them to life. Anything palpable to human touch employed to express elementalism I consider material and the choices limitless. I began working with materials when the Silver Bullet stopped inside me.”

“I make no distinction between my verse and my painting,” he continues in reference to the genre switch. “Both productions invade the participant’s optic nerve through eyes, swirl about the brain, crawl to the gut, infuse the fingers and toes, finally spreading throughout the soul its multitudinous beauty. My most affecting poems merge into the body of my most effective paintings. Imagination throws onto the inner screen everything written or painted. Letters are tiny brushstrokes; brushstrokes are massive letters. They differ in form but not in essence. Transmission is transmission be ink or pigment.”

Gordon Massman, Red Riding Hood Gazes Through Night Vision Goggles, oil on canvas, 10x14 ft

Massman’s work may be influenced by artists like Hans Hofferman, Arshile Gorky, William de Kooning, Norman Lewis, and Joan Mitchell, but he doesn’t “draw on past instruction no matter how honorable its intentions.” He names the aforementioned artists and others “among the many self-sacrificial lambs who sought within the dark ultimate illumination.” However, Massman draws inspiration from his predecessors with the awareness that one should not use the water that washes over them to drink. That even though water may cleanse, it’s still within the destiny of the creative to be sullied; that despite being nourished, it’s according to nature to be slaked. 

“As an artist I am a dazzled toddler every day,” and this kind of constant novelty is alive and teeming in his work. He approaches each project with new eyes, with the obsessive knowledge that “the moment I approach a blank canvas I paint who I am, fearlessly and accurately. No equivocations. No obfuscations. No pretty embellishments. The direct candid line,” and does away with any external motivations which would poison the earnestness of his arrival. “I create thrillingly and willingly, unburdened by any psychological shackle, like thirst to oasis,” as he describes it. 

To learn more about Gordon Massman, visit his website and follow him on Instagram @gordon.massman