By Jeff Stimmel, director of The Art of Failure
(from the 2008 Los Angeles Film Festival)
When I first decided to do a film about Chuck Connelly, I remember thinking as I drove to his home how great it must be to sit at home all day and paint - rocking gently in his (rocking) chair and picking at all those lush, thick colors of oil paint coming out of their tubes. And to think, he made his living doing this! Amazing! What I had thought would be a perfect life turned out to be not so. As I walked into his huge Victorian house (think "Grey Gardens" or an Edgar Allen Poe story), I was stunned. There were hundreds of paintings - big, small, minute, massive, figurative, abstract. Artwork filled the bedrooms, the bathrooms, the attic, the basement, the kitchen. The man clearly painted too much, had too much time on his hands. I had heard of Chuck, for he had a myth-like status among a certain segment of the art world. It was, frankly, not a particularly magnanimous myth, but one of evil; he was seen as a malefactor. But I was really attracted to his story because, although his professional situation was horrible, his dogged creating and ceaseless painting soon convinced me he was a hero. At least some sort of hero stuck with some kind of myth. Here was a middle-aged man who had been a rising star in the 1980s art world alongside Julian Schnabel and Jean-Michel Basquiat. Now he was holed up in a run-down mansion living with his unsold paintings. What the hell had happened?! Actually, when I met him he still had a wife, a gallery (though a modest one), an art patron (though a modest one) and a few friends. As I started to film him and tried to piece together what happened to his once-thriving career, the rest of his life fall apart. In front of the camera, his wife left him, the gallery dumped him, his patron fired him and his bird died. Through it all he still kept his sense of humor and an almost otherworldly sense of purpose, like he was on a mission. And it was inspiring, I must admit. It took me almost six years to finish the film. And Chuck's sense of purpose, his strange vision of painting for posterity (or God) forced me to keep going as well. In six years, I was told, no one would want a film about an artist, no one would care about Chuck Connelly; I was threatened with a law suit, assaulted, arrested, bankrupted and injured. And this was just what Chuck said would happen! But, you see, I couldn't surrender because my subject wouldn't surrender. He knew someday the film would see the light of day. He also knew that someday the world would rediscover him and appreciate his genius. I hope they do. Chuck Connelly is the Larry David of the art world. He goes on drunken tirades; offends art dealers; loathes critics; is distrustful, paranoid, shameless, angry, selfish and a general menace. But I started to feel for him anyway. He is really a kid who just wants to paint and be left alone (although he craves attention). He could never be "professional"; he was a working-class guy from Pittsburgh who never fit into the art world or any part of the world; he's never even had a driver's license! He is the one true original I have ever met. He is honest, upfront, confrontational, insightful, daring and always unpredictable. And at some point, even for a few moments in connection with experiencing his artwork, everyone loves him for it. I, the filmmaker, both love and hate the subject, as does the subject love and hate himself. This, I think, is why my film has a strange undercurrent of intensity no matter what the scene. On the last visit, after all of the wars, riots, rebellions, abandonments and celebrations, I finally came back to his house not to film but to see how he was doing. He was, as always, rocking in his (rocking) chair, calmly smoking, looking off into space as if looking at a horizon only he can ever see. Next to him was a very large painting of a violent, fiery red monster of immense proportions jolting the mournful, dirty, hard ground (think of the soil in T.S. Eliot's "Wasteland") with an evil, cartoonish shovel that is bending from the awful force coming from the monster's hands. I asked him what the title of the painting was, and he said, with a sly smile, barely turning his head, "Digging My Own Grave." (The second half of the film deals with Chuck hiring an actor to play Chuck's alter ego. Imagine how weird that was.) -MPM
Photo courtesy of the filmmaker.
Visit the film's website at www.theartoffailure.com |
