Speaker 1 (00:00): Coming up on Art Palace, Speaker 2 (00:03): You can go to a museum or a gallery because you want to look at art, but when you're driving down the street, it just happens upon you. Speaker 1 (00:22): Welcome to Art Palace, produced by Cincinnati Art Museum. This is your host, Russell Erick. Here at the Art Palace, we meet cool people and then talk to them about art. Speaker 3 (00:31): Today's cool Speaker 1 (00:32): Person is Cincinnati, still life artist, Jonathan Queen. This conversation was originally for a video I made for our Cam Kids Day online program, but I edited Speaker 3 (00:41): That Speaker 1 (00:42): Version down to about five minutes and I felt like this was a good place to let you hear an extended cut that is about twice as long. Speaker 2 (00:55): Hi, my name's Jonathan Queen, and I'm a Cincinnati still life painter, and my main focus is trying to tell narratives with using vintage toys. Speaker 1 (01:07): So tell me, when did you start using vintage toys? How did that come about for you? Speaker 2 (01:12): Well, when I was in college at uc, painted people and I wanted to start including objects with the people to start telling stories. And then close to the end, I started getting interested in telling stories with just objects. My professional career started with me selling still life paintings. So after doing that I painted a big boy bank and my gallery got really excited and they said, would you want to do some more toy paintings? And I thought, sure, that'd be great. So as I started trying to set up these paintings, I really liked trying to include some sort of story or narrative and I was painting a lot of animal toys and then I started using squeaky toys from the fifties, and so the toys kind of became the figure for me. Pinocchio, the Tin Man from Wizard of Oz, I'm really drawn to things that are made in the likeness of people, but there's something really nice about the caricature aspect of a toy. Speaker 1 (02:22): I was curious about, I feel like Pinocchio comes up a bit, doesn't he? Or have you done Pinocchio quite a few times the idea of a toy that wants to be real? I didn't know if that was something that you thought about or if that was an interesting idea to you. Speaker 2 (02:39): The reason those stories are so powerful is because there's something in us that as humans that we're kind of reaching for, we're kind of looking for this thing maybe that's outside of ourselves. Speaker 1 (02:53): You are giving the toys an implied life. So there's actually a little bit of a separation from maybe the traditional still life in that way. And I don't know if that's just something we can't help but do, but it's also coming through the way they're posed as well that we kind of give them a life. Speaker 2 (03:13): For me, it's very intentional and a lot of the toys that I like painting are not very posable, but to think about what I try to do in my paintings is set up a scenario around that toy so that it's very limited. Movability or posability is seems intentional. It's kind of creating a set around that. And I think about my still life's more like a stage, almost like a performance because even when I paint what I would call a landscape, I still show that it's photos I've taken and then I tape them up on the wall and you can see the borders of each photo strung together to make a panorama, and then the characters are on a table in front of that. Even when I try to paint something large, I still keep bringing it back to this is a story about something. I'm not trying to make it overtly surreal as if these toys are running through this space. And I think what's fun for me is trying to balance between those two. There is a little bit of surrealism. Sometimes objects are floating or they're kind of going against gravity, and that's more interesting to me. Honestly. When I was in school, I thought still life was really boring and I was kind of surprised that that's the route that I ended up taking. But I think it's because I've figured out a way to arrange it and light it in a way that's interesting to me. Speaker 1 (04:54): Well, and that also makes me think about how a lot of traditional still life paintings are sort of full of symbolism that maybe doesn't read to a contemporary viewer as well. Like a person today doesn't understand that, oh, this moth is clearly about death or something. And so I kind of wonder if by using things that objects like toys that we immediately connect with, if that also is just making it easier for a viewer to connect immediately with those objects. Speaker 2 (05:31): I think so, but for me, I've found that I've ended up painting a nostalgia for toys that I never owned. It's like I'm drawn to toys that were made before I existed. So I'm not painting my own childhood. It's kind of surprising for me is that I'm not painting the toys from my childhood. I grew up in the eighties and everything was commercialized and there was a cartoon for every toy line. And I think as time has gone on, toys become more exact interpretations of that show, and I'm kind of drawn to toys that the individual sculptors and designers had more of a say. There were artists in their own right. I mean, I didn't even know when I was originally drawn to my favorite toys that they were based on Ruth Newton drawings illustrations from the early 20th century. And then Edward Mobley is the sculptor who did clay sculptures based on Ruth Newton's drawings. And one of the most recent paintings I did was a toy that I bought just because I loved the sculpt of it. And then I found out after the fact that that same sculptor did that toy even it was for a different company, but I thought there's something that resonates about his interpretation that he was able to convey some emotion. And then what I tried to do is kind of put that in an environment, kind of take it to the next stage. Speaker 1 (07:05): So tell me a little bit about the toy murals that you've worked on recently. Speaker 2 (07:10): Well, the big toy mural that I did on West Court Street was to honor the heritage of Kenner toys. And when I was working with the funders and artworks, it kind of boiled down to the idea that they wanted to do kind of almost like an all-star, the best of the best things that lasted for decades. It included Mr. Bedhead, which is Hasbro's mascot, but when Hasbro purchased Kenner in the nineties around 1990 and they were still here in Cincinnati for another decade, it was really fun to me. The challenge of that was I couldn't just set up a single still life and take a photo of it because it was so big. So I built that idea, I built that image in probably seven different little subplots. So I had it all set up. The way that I do those murals is whereas in normal when I'm painting a still life, I set it up in my studio and I put the light on it and I just set my chair up. Speaker 2 (08:19): I even tape off where the legs are and I sit back in my chair and I observe it and I paint directly from the still life. But obviously you can't do that on a building. So I composed it in Photoshop with different little clusters and different layers and kind of built the space. And then I unified it by painting the shadows in. And then when we to get that onto the wall, we use a grid. So when I did a printout, one square inch became two feet on the wall. We created a line drawing, and then when my team was blocking it in, I actually counted up the cups when we were cleaning up, I mixed over 700 colors for that wall. So when you're working on something that large, you can't just have a pallet set up. So I think one of the background colors, I made seven gallons of that one color. Speaker 2 (09:14): So yeah, it's a challenge. And then you have to climb down the scaffolding and walk down to the corner of the block and look at it and hold up your reference and make adjustments. It's a very indirect process, but there's something really wonderful standing in front of such a huge wall to where it fills your whole vision. There's still basically still life paintings, but I always think about where the viewers are going to see them from the vantage point. So when I did the Kroger mural, I designed it as if you're standing on the corner looking up and you can kind of see up to the inside of the box. When I did the Kenner mural, you're looking up into the right, and then the newest mural I just did for bang Zoom designs is a stretch monster toy. He was the bad guy nemesis of stretch Armstrong. Speaker 2 (10:02): But I tried to paint him to where it looks like he's actually holding onto the side of the building. So instead of painting a background, I painted him, stretched out, and then I painted the cast shadows underneath him to look like a shadow on that colored wall. It was like dark, cool gray kind of wall. And that one also painted sight specific, just meaning that it's the way that you see it. I'm thinking about when I paint that image, how the sun's going to be on that wall and the direction that you're looking at the object. So when you drive by and you look over at the side of that building, I want it to trick your eye, kind of make people take a second look to wonder if there's actually some giant toy on the side of the wall. Speaker 1 (10:50): I mentioned earlier that I live close to the big Kenner mural, and it's really fun to see people stopping in front of it constantly. It is really a piece that grabs people's attention, and I think it does in a way that I don't see a lot of other murals in the city do. And I think it probably a lot of that is, thanks to the subject matter, a gigantic care bear really is very eye catching. Speaker 2 (11:21): You're not expecting to turn a corner and see a 35 foot cheer bear. Speaker 1 (11:28): Yeah, definitely. Speaker 2 (11:29): I mean, one thing that's nice is when you drive down that street, it kind of unveils itself. You see just that edge and then as you get closer it kind of opens up to the wall. But I mean, it's one of the beautiful things about murals is you can go to a museum or a gallery because you want to look at art, but when you're driving down the street, it just happens upon you and there's something kind of special about when an image engages you when you weren't expecting it. Speaker 1 (11:58): Well, thank you so much for chatting with me today. Speaker 2 (12:01): Alright, thank you. Speaker 1 (12:08): Thank you for listening to Art Palace. We hope you'll be inspired to come visit the Cincinnati Art Museum and have conversations about the art yourself. The museum has currently suspended in building visitation for a community health break in support of healthcare workers and Cincinnatian through December 14th. After that time, please visit Cincinnati art museum.org to register for your free timed admission tickets. Current special exhibitions are black and brown faces and Women Breaking Boundaries. Upcoming special exhibitions are Aqua aga. All the flowers are for me opening December 15th and Frank Duveneck, American Master opening December 18th. You can follow the museum on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and we also have an Art Palace Facebook group. Our theme song is Tron, music by Balal. And as always, please rate and review us to help others find the show. I'm Rosa Leig, and this has been Art Palace produced by the Cincinnati Art Museum.