The Gordon Chronicles
©GORDON MASSMAN
Gordon Massman, Joy, 2025 [detail].
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
No Open House This Year
Chronicle 1: JUNE 11, 2025
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. …