This morning I chatted with Jason Baldwin about the Left Field exhibit that opens TONIGHT at the Echo Park art/music collective, L’Keg Gallery. A soft-spoken professor  at Vermont’s Norwich University, nothing about Jason’s attire or demeanor suggests counter-cultural affiliation but growing up as a skate-punk in central Louisiana, he was a rarity. His first art lessons came from board designs and comic books. Now he makes collages that manage to exploit the graphic archetypes of Nuevo-Americana (think adolescent Rauschenberg) while communicating highly personal narratives from his own life.

Cheree: You’re from Mississippi?

Jason: I just ended up at grad school at the University of Mississippi, but I grew up in Louisiana. But it’s still the rural south. My only introduction to art was skateboard graphics and punk posters and LPs—I didn’t go to a museum till college. I was getting a Bachelor of Fine Arts at the University of Louisiana in Lafeyette, and we took a trip to Houston to see the Menil museum, the Cy Twombly gallery and the Rothko Chapel. So that was my first introduction, oh this is art.

C: Did you have a concept of those board graphics as art? Were you conscious of a person behind the work?

J: For me that was art, that was just mind-boggling, it was so good. So that’s what drove me as far as wanting to do stuff like that.  But I never wanted to find out who was behind the images until art school.

 C: Is that why you paint on skateboards now?

J: Well this series [in the show], all the background collage is from my childhood books, graphic novels, I may even have a few report cards…from preschool through my senior year, just about every homework assignment, report card, any kind of paperwork I got from school, my mom kept in a box, which she gave to me when I moved out. So I had this box full of random mementos from my childhood, and I had my childhood books that were beginning to fall apart.

C: When did you start working in your current style?

J: About 3 years after grad school. You don’t really know what you’re going to do because that thesis show is such a huge mental experience. And I was like, man, I really need to do something different, because these huge abstract pieces don’t really relate to who I am anymore. I was in the process of moving from Mississippi to Indiana, so it was like, what stuff do I really need to take?  I lugged that box with me and started going through it and actually taking those little pieces of paper out and applying them to canvas and wood, and they started to bring back old childhood memories and create their own narrative. So a lot of the artwork that I do now is somewhat fictional and somewhat biographical, depending on what images are conjured by that random paperwork.

C: Where do you get the prominent female faces in some of the pieces? Are they autobiographical or fiction?

J: Before doing this series I was doing large self-portraits, and I wanted to continue doing portraits, but I was like, why do I want to draw myself over and over? But I didn’t depart from that because the underground imagery was myself, it was my past. So these narratives started to come up, but all of this paperwork was dealing with my past and my childhood. I did a lot of really childlike work, and I guess this [the faces] is my teenage work. As a teenager you start thinking, ok females are coming into the picture and I had a lot of old magazines…I think those are images from an old Playboy, one that I had when I was maybe 14. So it became childhood merging into teen angst or something. And then I think painting on skateboards came as self-portraits as well. That was my personality, I was a skater. I turned 11 and got into skateboarding, and that changed my life forever. In central Louisiana, I was the only kid in high school that skated and had long hair.

C: Why do you incorporate text?

J: Growing up my dad worked for the forestry department, and you know those old dot matrix printers with the perforated pages? He had those at work and would bring paper home, and they always had green and white stripes on them, and they’d already been used, so it had mathematical problems and printed text on the paper. When we wanted to draw, that’s what we drew on. I think that’s why I’m drawn to painting on collage, because I already have something, and I can manipulate from there.

In college I would stretch these huge white canvases, and then I would get a graphite pencil and start writing whatever came to mind and then paint over it. And some people who have bought my artwork, if they ever took x-rays they would see shopping lists or random lyrics or whatever. It was a way for me to break up the canvas. A lot of times it had nothing to do with what I wanted to draw. I kind of liked that dichotomy of embedded memories or just randomness beneath.

C: Do you think of yourself as an outsider artist?

J: It’s hard to say, because I am a professor. I do teach art, so I feel in some respects that I’m an insider. But when I show or try to show my work, I feel like an outsider. A lot of my art influences are mostly outsider artists…or at least they were back then. Now you have Shepard Fairy, and Ed Templeton who are definitely on the inside at the moment.

C: Who were the first “high brow” artists that really influenced you?

J: At the Menil they had Andy Warhol, several Mark Rothkos, Jasper Johns, Rauschenberg and  the Cy Twombly gallery, and that just blew me away. I remember looking at his work, there was so much energy, and I had no idea what he was trying to say, no frame of reference as to what the paintings were about, but I liked the fact that I didn’t really know. In [my paintings in this exhibit], the text wraps around the canvas, and it’s not too obvious what what the characters are trying to say. That’s a direct reference to Cy Twombly, not giving a viewer all the information needed to figure out what the composition is about. You give them a small amount and from there, you have to use your imagination and delve into the painting. So it depends on the viewer and how much they want to look.

C: Now as a professor, do you make a distinction between “real” art and say, skateboard graphics?

J: I don’t really bring up that conversation in class. When I talk about artists, I show my students Ed Templeton’s work, along with Jasper Johns and Michelangelo.  I don’t really distinguish, this is lowbrow, this is highbrow. It’s just this is art to me. I want the students to think of it that way.

C: Do you think that’s where the general viewpoint is heading?

J: I think there is still a big distinction, and some of the artists [from both camps] like the distinction. But when I’m teaching, I don’t like to show it. Plus, Norwich is a military college. We’re [Art and Architecture] the only department that doesn’t have to wear uniforms. Within that area, we are pumping different ideas into the university system, and I like having the opportunity to do so.