The Gordon Chronicles
©GORDON MASSMAN
Gordon Massman, Joy, 2025 [detail].
July 9 2025
Paint Humbly and Ask for Nothing.
On the flip side, so that one not call me melodramatic, I cannot pole vault over my own impossible bar; ad infinitum, like a charging yak, my earthy corpulence bangs into the bar which angles into the pit upon which I plummet like Icarus, unworthy of my own standards.
Sweating, like ice water, I dart with the pole, leap skyward, slam into the bar. I mean, nature endows precious few with such aforementioned gifts which, like sparking electrical wires, wrap tight around a magneto of inexplicable magnificence. Pollock had it. Beethoven had it. Einstein had it. Van Gogh had it. God resides in all living creatures, but few possess omnipotence. Think of William Blake. Think of Hermann Hesse. Think of Victor Hugo.
I'm a putz in a studio glutted with God envy.
How we lumpen masses dip our hearts in paint, mightily create a sailboat here, a shoreline there, colorful splashes everywhere, a duck beside a rocking chair. And how we turn it gleefully with pride toward dependable eyes.
"I love it!" they exclaim. "Kudos!" they cry. "Perfection!" they declare. And now the grandchildren toss it in the trash.
In my evolving little brain something becomes plain: paint humbly and ask for nothing. It bears repeating: paint humbly and ask for nothing. Jesus the Nazarene painted that way. So did The Buddha. I suggest we ditch the Olympics and award the gold to the nobody we are.
My heart is full and that's just about it.
June 13, 2025
Chris, I love the inaugural Massman Chronicles and hope I have touched other COSMOS readers with my ravings and ravagings. I will continue these missives under the framework of periodical desperado emails to you, when I am in that frame of mind.
I'm painting hard in what must be my penultimate ten years of remaining life, trying to throw a boilermaker to that cursed universal inevitability we call extinction, mortality, or more chillingly death. The word death ends with that appropriately gauzy "th" sound, such as cottonmouth, nether, ether, lethe, thick, thalidomide, or Darth. Venomous nightmarish clawing utterances.
Most artists, I aver, slather paint on surfaces in order to talk through the ashes of their tongue. To speak beyond zero. Art tears two breaking tracks of resistance in asphalt after jamming its heels through the flivver's floorboard.
Regardless of the pitiful effort, the thing plummets into the void. And there I am inside a dugout titled Gordon, high, drunk, or sober, struggling to perfect the imperfectible human body into a perpetually life-vibrating piece of immortality. The body with its screwdriver hands and cylinder rod legs is but an instrument for the delusional brain, pathetically protected by its ever-crushable skull.
I do not paint to add yet another microscopic particle of beauty to our world. Pure poisonous ego paints my pictures. Selfish, disgusting, uncompassionate ego, dolloped with the sour cream of fear and rage. My paintings are eyes ripped out of sockets, epiglottis torn from throat. I want to create bleeding gods, laughably. I am but mash in the machine, like the cut down flamethrower on the battlefield hill. Painting is aloneness, loneliness, and tears.
Well, off to the studio I go.
New work:
Sentinels at the Palace of Love, 5.5x14 ft
A COSMOS Creator Blog
INTRODUCTION
By Chris Munkholm
As editor of Cape Ann COSMOS, I operate in an email milieu needed for guiding many prosaic initiatives. Articles, advertisements, queries, error reports, and so on. Typing across four accounts, I manage the influx.
The missives received from Gordon Massman, our artist Enfant Terrible who paints with ferocity on Gloucester harbor, are of a different order. While his emails arrive in the Google queue with all others, they seem written on a brutal operating system. One that writes only raw reflections and does not shy from relentless self-criticism.
I have come to appreciate how Gordon’s compiled emails are a mirror of the creative battle. Albeit often fractured, they report the endless tumult of transferring imagination onto canvas.
Gordon was also a poet for decades. He can find original words to express unique insights.
At COSMOS we thought – why not share Gordon’s poetic expressions?
His insights and laments, his thrill at creating “his best ever,” Gordon’s despair at the growing mountain of immense paintings, now piling up on the 20 ft walls of his studio. As ocean waves relentlessly break on the dock, in easy reach of washing everything out to sea.
Today, June 11, we are pleased to launch The Gordon Chronicles. This continuing COSMOS series is dedicated to Gordon’s uncensored dialogues with the muse, the tyrant, the devil, and myriad others who will likely come out of the shadows.
Today is also Gordon’s birthday, let’s blow out the candles!
— Chris Munkholm
Chronicle 1: JUNE 11, 2025
No Open House This Year
And thus the saga begins with three emails from Gordon to Chris, where we meet the gulag, the hungry racoon, and the hideous mess….
March 16, 2025
Chris, The NY museum passed on the painting on an administrative mandate to only accept actual artifacts from Nazi Germany and from inmates or family of inmates from the concentration camps. This was a cannon ball in the gut which has flipped any optimism to near total hopelessness. Of course, I’ll keep painting because it’s in my DNA but without any expectations from the world outside my 4000 sq ft studio. It might as well be a gulag. Anyway, what else is new?
Hope you’re ok. If you’re up for it, I could do an open studio on June 11. I’ve got tons of new paintings.
March 18, 2025
Chris, I’m melting down around all things art. I’m going through the motions, but my heart feels frozen. Regarding the ad, don’t print over the image. Just put the title under it and leave it at that. At this moment I really don’t want art in my life. Too discouraged to have enthusiasm. Either I’ve failed art or art has failed me. I’m headed to the studio like a clothes pin to paint yet another grain of sand. When ordinary people try to do extraordinary things all the valves blow open. All I really want to do is eat a whole pecan pie from the middle out, like a raccoon.
May 17, 2025
Hi Chris, I'm ambivalent about opening the studio this year. The place is a hideous mess, especially the studio part, which is a slimy sea of smeared oil paint, kicked over coffee mugs, paint-stiff jeans and shirts, paint thinner, rags, sticks, urine, orphaned furniture, horrid chairs, crushed boxes, and unidentifiable cancer-like masses. It's a man cave carved out of clods by a demented ogre. What I'm producing in there is a mockery of art--sloppy, raw, torn, and without foundation. Additionally, I feel like a hair-triggered alligator ready to pounce on dogs, babies, children, and adults. I'm the fruit of a man who has slowly gone mad. Somehow it feels cruel to expose the public to this apocalypse. I think I am convex, hurting everyone with whom I come into contact. Somewhere lies buried The Truth which nobody has uncovered. I can tell you what it isn't: love, sex, food, drugs, God, money, art, television, weather, computers, family, or even friends. It has more to do with an unfathomable hole boring through the soul.
With that, I leave you at the beginning of another day of hope and wonder.
Really, I'm and we're all ok.
Super Contemporary @ Meta Space Gallery, Liverpool, U.K.
Gordon Massman, our local artist phenom producing massive paintings in his Gloucester Harbor studio, has scored an interview and feature in Super Contemporary @ Meta Space Gallery, a digital art platform. This new breakthrough includes curatorial review of Gordon's The Eternal Ache (2023). To see the Meta selection of 10 of Gordon's works, with several COSMOS favorites, as well as to read Gordon's interview and curatorial review:
FEATURE ARTICLES: GORDON MASSMAN
Chris Munkholm
It was a perfect Saturday night of convening as more than 200 – perhaps many more, we lost count - found their way to Gordon’s new studio on Gloucester Harbor. His new space was decked out, with a selection of his immense paintings covering the 40 ft walls, up to the ceiling. …