Joe D.
By Paul Mantee/Special to The Malibu Times
I asked myself, can I capture this guy in an interview, or do you need to see his work to get the complete picture? You need to see his work. Joe DiVincenzo is a blazingly bright artist of the blunt school. Don’t talk to him about P.C. liberalism, health food or gun laws. Unless your thing is to get eaten alive with a crooked grin, because he’s as deft verbally as he is with a brush on a canvas. I don’t think we’d vote the same way on the inevitability of sunrise and sunset, but Joe D. is never dull.
We sat at the bar at Guido’s, deciding lunch. Chef Eleano leaned in and suggested Italian sausage on a bed of lightly sauted broccoli. Joe and I agreed the idea was reminiscent of “the old country,” in our case, San Francisco. To our right, against the south wall, hangs his painting of a pair of hands preparing to caress a drink. An Old Fashioned, I thought, by the look of the glass. I see it as reminiscent of a lonely moment. Joe refers to it simply as Little Did I Know.
“I did it with my left hand,” he explains, “and I’m right-handed. I was in the middle of another picture and I had this idea.”
I took a stab, “A watercolor.”
“Oil on index paper,” he corrected. “At first, I just threw it on the floor and left it. Like a note to myself.”
I reminded him of his larger, more complex painting of a similar bar scene-one that jumps with wit-hanging in the foyer on the way to the restrooms. One in which he’s fashioned mini-sculptures that protrude from the canvas.
“Neither a watercolor nor an oil,” I suggested safely.
“A serigraph. Silkscreen. My intention was to paint into it, but the two images were arm wrestling, they weren’t going anywhere, so I put it aside. Then one day I was sittin’ in here dickin’ around with a cocktail napkin, I have this habit, and I started laughing. And I thought, I’ll make these stupid little objects that I will name.”
Joe cracked himself up.
“Like Loch Ness monster, super computer, nuclear missile, all the things nobody can get a handle on, but they exist in the language. I wanted to keep it minimal and direct. Of course, I wanted the bar to be the frame. With me, going to a bar is like going to church. That’s where I kick the doors open and rearrange the furniture.”
I wondered, “How many mediums do you use?”
“Anything.”
I asked him what started him as an artist.
“I always was, I just didn’t know it. The only turn I ever made was finally giving up, acknowledging I was an apple, not an orange. And that took forever.”
Lunch arrived. Textured brown set in a field of green on green.
Joe continued.
“When I was in art school I didn’t know there was a thing called ‘just make art for no good reason.’ I assumed you had to have an application in mind. I thought that other stuff was just dark Bohemianism. You paint, you starve, you die. I had no respect for what I could do, because it was easy. I had teachers taking my stuff home, but I couldn’t connect the dots because I had no reference point.”
“Where did you go to school?”
“The Art Center School.”
“In Los Angeles?”
“Uh-huh.”
“I used to model there, three bucks an hour, dinner and a movie. You’re originally from San Francisco, right?” I asked, shrugging off my own reverie.
“No, I got led in a big circle by women.
“You too?”
“I’m originally from New York, but what I cherished was the back cover of National Geographic with the blonde in the Chevy convertible, waving from somewhere on the West Coast. I wanted to go where that is.”
We laughed. Older boys have much in common.
I was curious. “Do you ever paint from the shadow part of yourself, the socially unacceptable side?”
“I think so,” he admitted without hesitation. “One side of me is crazier’n a snake and the other side is totally conservative. Half the time, I think I’m not breaking enough walls down.”
Most of his views are delightfully unprintable. Here are several that made the cut.
On youth: “My fondest memory the morning after (a frivolous encounter) was to see the chick’s house disappear in my rearview mirror.”
On aging: “If you’re lucky, you get to know you.”
On death: “I want to say to God, okay, moron, what was plan B?”
On the slice of sunshine he’s been married to longer than he deserves: “A royal flush.”
On life without creativity: “Like asking for a date with your pants around your ankles.”
On regret: “We don’t have time for that story.”
Joe picked up the check and we moved the party to his studio.
Countless paintings, drawings, sketches, sculptures, often combinations of all the above either hung, leaned or merely graced the floor. Notes from the artist to himself. It’s a workshop devoted to wild imagination. Dozens of exquisitely crafted fish flies occupy a small corner.
“This is what I do with my hands when I take a break.”
Joe D. hangs in New York’s prestigious Marlborough Gallery. Yet his studio (310.463.4309) is a brush stroke away from the church at Guido’s Malibu.