Artist
[also known as the Museum School]. I knew immediately that I could do that and become an artist. It was a crazy decision.” Shapiro dropped out of Northeastern in 1958 to enroll in night classes in drawing at the Museum School, where he subsequently attended the day school program through 1962. “I fell in love with work by Miro, Kandinsky, and Paul Klee, and ended up being the only abstract painter in class,” Shapiro says. “After a while I started to paint expressionist landscapes from my imagination. A friend asked me if I had ever been to New Mexico. When I said no, he encouraged me to visit [the state] because my intuitive landscapes looked like they belonged out here.” Shapiro made three painting trips to New Mexico during the 1970s, and his landscapes immediately found an audience. He made his permanent move to Santa Fe in 1982. “Though I did well with the landscapes, I’ve never been able to paint for money. When that series came to an end in 1990 there was no going back. My work comes through me as if from somewhere outside of my personal experience. When my imagery begins to change I have to follow the new direction, because the original inspiration has already run its course,” Shapiro says. For Shapiro’s 2006 solo exhibition catalogue at Zane Bennett Contemporary Art, critic Jon Carver wrote: “There is no beginning and there is no end. The magician’s ability to be in multiple places at the same time is another way to acknowledge the sage’s deep realization that the incredibly complex multiplicity of universes . . . is also, in sum total, the seamless oneness of the cosmos . . . Basically, Shapiro’s paintings ask the question: what is the fundamental nature of reality? Art and philosophy, which rose together in human consciousness, have always asked this question. . . . In one sense it is the only question . . . And it is Shapiro’s brilliance to grasp this, and then to bring his considerable artistic skill to the project of framing the question, and embarking headlong upon a protean search for the answers.” Near the end of our interview, Shapiro moves to a large worktable where he begins to separate stacks of small paintings while drawing attention to their ghostly black and white imagery. “After working on these things for some time, I had this revelation that these are metaphors for energy systems similar to what quantum physics is looking at— pre-matter states. This is stuff I’m really interested in and have been reading about, and all of a sudden these ideas began to appear in several series of paintings. I named one series Photonic Code because they reminded me of light particles,” Shapiro says. String theory—which is argued by some to be more like a philosophy, with its dreamlike eleven-dimensional universe and five separate but equal mathematical theorems—could offer Shapiro unlimited metaphorical latitude in which to explore energy systems and the mythology of physics while practicing self-expression. If any artist could take such a perilous path, Shapiro is likely to be the first to reach the mountaintop. Paul Shapiro’s work may be seen at GF Contemporary in Santa Fe. 90
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Cosmotex #67 (2006), acrylic on panel Top: Galactic #5 (2008), acrylic on panel
COURTESY OF PAUL SHAPIRO
STUDIO