John Millei’s studio sits in West Adams, which is next to Culver City, and if you’re the kind of person keeping track, he got there first. It’s all LA, I suppose, but compared to the trendy zone to the west, this spot has noticeably taller weeds, more plastic bags drifting across its streets, and a lot more unharvested dog shit. The artist has been in this space with its soft-blue, but Alcatraz-ready, steel-bar facade for so long that the entire floor is an opaque-gray dermis of congealed paint. It’s like walking on the skin of a dinosaur. You know instantly that an extraordinary volume of material has moved around here over the years.
As we talk, I recall how I found myself in front of three of his immense works back in 2002. They were titled For Surfing and created as an elegy to a fallen friend, Travis Musselman, who drowned at Pipeline in March of 2000. They were tall and lean in format, measuring 138 × 80 inches. They loomed over the viewer, suggesting that they, in fact, might’ve had their own views of things beyond the beholder.
In short they were sea pictures—the bottom third of each a roiling twist of multi-hued blue lines reminiscent of unspooling skeins of yarn, the top two-thirds composed of subtle atmospheric washes of darker, denim tones. A mournful lament seemed to come from them. Inasmuch as they were intended to mark the passing of friend, they felt as though they were in fact intended for the ocean itself. There was a reverence in their disposition that was disquieting and honest. They were so tall as to feel profoundly overbearing and immersive—the jumble of wavelines like a boil with its own gravitational tug. Ultimately, they struck me as first-person narratives that presented the sea in its primal state: all-powerful and fierce. Musselman’s corporeal absence, pictorial and factual, found its own mass within.
There are so few artists for whom scale is so benevolent. Most painters, since Monet’s Water Lilies, have had an itch to go big. Few can really nail it like Millei can. He confesses that he likes to “sneak up” on his paintings. By this he means he likes to casually distract himself from them, then dart his attention back again in an effort to resee them—to instantaneously find their strengths and weaknesses as a first-timer might apprehend them.
The entire periphery of his studio is shoulder to shoulder with leaning canvases in various states of completion. Off to one side is a group of tables covered in tidy stacks of handsome books and a couple of rickety chairs. Millei is an avid reader when he’s not standing up and working. Stacks of “blanks,” his term for prepared but unused canvases, are present. He likes to work with lots of raw material at hand. A wooden and slightly-crooked staircase, painted a glossy teal that’s chipped and stained, rises to something of an office or nap site above the killing floor.
Millei is deeply tanned and crows-foot-wrinkly with slightly-busted-up teeth and an athletic build, consistent with a life spent in the ocean catching waves. He learned to surf, and a few other things, at Malibu in the 1970s, coming down from Point Dume to sift out the occasional left at Third Point and take proper stock of the girls on the sand. At Dume, where he was raised by a television executive father in a house full of books and quarreling siblings, there were excellent and uncrowded waves.
Perhaps enough has been said about that time in surfing: transitional boards and hippie-smoke deepness, longhair stoke and angry lokes, etcetera. Nonetheless, at 18, armed with a fledgling Taoist worldview gleaned from the Berkeley dropouts at the ’Bu and an urge to get deep, Millei coyly took the measure of a prepaid offer from Yale, inhaled mightily, and then blew off New Haven. He grabbed his shit and headed a whole lot farther east, to surf.
After stints in Indo and then time spent on Oahu, his surf game was properly tuned but he chafed increasingly at the burned narrow-mindedness of the scene—not nearly enough deep thought to keep up with the deep tubes. He turned increasingly to books about art, religion, and philosophy. Presented with the chance to teach at the college level, he boned up on his art theory, an autodidact route spent crunching Deleuze and Derrida and washing it down with Foucault, all the while painting his brains out. Thirty-five-years later and Millei has an extraordinary body of work behind him, and can also count, to his credit, several generations of younger artists who’ve worked alongside him at Art Center College of Design in Pasadena.
To hear him tell it, he’s broken down his painting practice into a few concise exercises. There’s the “noun” work and then there’s the “verb” work. In the “noun” work, a painting gets made with the representational image being primary in the construction—a seascape, for example, or a seated figure. To that “noun” seascape, he is willing to bring “modifiers.” That’s where things get a little slippery. The “modifiers” can be any measure of different moves, devices, colors, and applications that the act of painting can encompass. This opens the door very wide to the alteration of the “noun.” Put another way: who knows how this thing might turn out once enough modification goes down. If the “noun” gets lost, well, so it goes.
His “verb” paintings, on the other hand, are inherently nonrepresentational and give over their compositional eventuality to the act of their own creation from the get-go. They owe nobody nothing so whatever happens, happens. Though not disclosed in either approach, Millei is looking to get lost. This is central to his life experience and his studio output. It’s the Toaist lessons allowing for an opening to slip through—where a synthesis of self and environment can occur. Sound familiar?
There is an eclipsing potential in the act of painting, especially on big canvases, where the entire body needs to move constantly in order to cover the acreage at hand. The process lends itself to the kind of deep mental state that surfers also know and crave. Yes, the physical work is happening and, yes, the mental work is happening too, but somehow everything starts to loosen. It is a type of vortex effect where the aesthetic momentum of the piece and the physical heft it takes to make it are so absorbing, it essentially blocks out both the world and conscious thought, sweeping the artist along in his own current. Ocean-size.
Painting, as an art form, has been killed a thousand times and yet it always comes back like a dandelion, radiant as ever. Though its relevance has been systematically challenged and rebuffed for nearly 70 years, it has endured and self-pollinated, making its own crop and spreading its influence. Since the 1950s, a lot of American painting has been at once ultra-physical and psychologically invested. This is mostly thanks to Jackson Pollock, who essentially introduced the world to “action painting,” a kind of picture-making focused more on the choreography of the artist and his materials than the effort to make a “rendering” of some object. Pollock’s finished work is thus a remnant of the one-man dance that’s gone down in the studio: the movement of the body has in fact been traced and recorded by the drips and scatterings.
This change in painting is a type of prescient “selfie” phenomenon, wherein the focal point of the work is now trained squarely on the artist as much as anything else. This method suited Pollock, whose struggles were many. Casting his material about in such a Freudian fit made for some big and angry paintings, with plenty of robust psychological mapping to boot. In his wake, artists like Willem de Kooning, Richard Diebenkorn, and Joan Mitchell have pushed this direct and muscular method to stunning places where the blood, sweat, and tears of the maker are palpable, but there remains plenty of “picture” leftover for the viewer to possess.
Millei’s work, while noticeably more mannered, is not entirely dissimilar. You might say, however, that he has better style. The material-struggle that dominates the work of de Kooning and other Abstract Expressionists has given way in Millei’s paintings to something closer to ballet. And while Millei himself would likely reject an association with the Ab Ex generation on the grounds that his work is not “expressionistic,” it must be said that he is amazing with paint and it was indeed the Ab Exers who made paint itself central to the story.
Millei has given everything to the material itself, examining its mass as much as its hue. He stretches and pulls paint all over the place the way a baker kneads dough. He often applies it as thick and greasy as cake frosting in juxtaposition to other passages, where it’s water-thin and matte. His color choices are also subtle and singular. Up close, you can feel the gelatin elasticity of the matter as he careens a four-inch line of French Ultramarine across 30 feet of canvas.
You can also almost hear the tension sizzling across a massive plane of geometric solid, the flutters of a mainsail crackle with kinetic punch. His Maritime series features several enormous black-white-and-silver paintings that suggest the high-wire tension of a ship’s rigging, mid-tempest, with waves crashing over in blinding squalls. This is where Millei is at his best: obfuscating outsized canvases with the shadow-play of tilted masts and endless cables, light through sails, a hull curving along the bottom of the canvas plane inan arc as elegant as the rail-line of a big wave gun.
Again herein lies the connection to the physics of surfing that is so relevant to his practice. His pictures are stuffed with gorgeous hits and slashes, cutbacks and bottom turns, lofty arcs and dramatic, elegant sweeps that recall the mental playback of a perfectly surfed pointbreak. The highlines and stalls, the tube sections and lip hits are all present. Unlike the scattered and frantic antics of his predecessors, Millei has found the patience and the rhythm to lay down his marks with equal parts power and control. In his larger work, particularly, there is an aura of full-body engagement that looks a whole lot like surfing feels.
[All photos courtesy of ACE Gallery]
