C
incinnati-based artist Jonathan Queen does not shy away from long-term commitments. His 20-month-long project with the Haile/U.S. Bank Foundation painting Cincinnati park scenes for Carol Ann’s Carousel in Smale Riverfront Park was unveiled last March, and Queen is also responsible for the highly visible 2012 “Fresh Harvest” ArtWorks mural on the side of the downtown Kroger building.
A graduate of the University of Cincinnati’s College of Design, Architecture, Art and Planning, Queen lucked into his first gallery representation in the early aughts almost by accident, when a collector was having the artist’s commissioned work framed at Miller Gallery. Shortly thereafter, he began part-time work as a framer for the established Hyde Park exhibition space — a solid, reliable job for any artist, not to mention a young father of four.
Queen began creating what he calls “narrative still lifes” in 1999, wherein he paints hyper-realistic scenes of vintage toys (often figurative objects or stylized animals) that seem to interact or share human-like qualities. Set within a false frame of a trompe l’oeil shadow box or sometimes with the aid of books or other bolsters to stand on, Queen’s figures appear animated and engaged, staged to imply plot. In doing so, the artist elevates his subjects from mere objects to figures.
For instance, a Flash Gordon “rocket fighter” takes aim at a cartoonish dinosaur that looks indignant and surprised at its position; and Pinocchio (a recurring figure) gazes at himself head-on in a mirror, unable to see the full length of his nose or the (literal) monkey on his back.
Several recent projects have served as catalysts for Queen’s continued artistic growth. The 2012 Kroger mural was a challenge for the painter, who up until recently had been diligently painting dark, small-scale paintings in a basement studio in his home. Although conceptually similar to his past work, the 48-by-90-foot mural is comparatively brighter, with a tight composition emphasizing color and pattern.
“I’ve been thinking about working on a larger scale for a few years,” Queen says. And he tells a story of seeing a white 55-foot-long 18-wheeler truck trailer that consequently looked like a blank canvas to the artist after the mural project. “All of a sudden, doing something on that scale didn’t seem too intimidating,” he says.
Since then, Queen has painted several larger pieces, always searching for a balance between the painterly quality of his medium upon the canvas and the rendering of the finished image.
Up until a few years ago, Queen’s process typically involved photographic aids or posed marionettes as opposed to preliminary sketches. “I almost feel like marionettes were a gateway drug to where anything goes,” he says, laughing.
Many of the artist’s past paintings incorporate landscape, but in an idiosyncratic way — the figures often “overlook” panoramic photographs that appear to be attached to a stage-like background. Thus, landscape is embedded within the larger story of the painter’s toy subjects.
Originally, the Carol Ann’s Carousel approval board just wanted park-scene landscapes for the project, but when Queen applied for the commission, he submitted the aforementioned still lifes because he had never done any straight, traditional landscapes.
And even though it wasn’t a part of their early expectations, the decision makers allowed Queen to include his own original figures within the scenes, painted around the top of the carousel, flipping his typical subject/landscape dynamic. So Queen painted 16 Cincinnati parks that feature his original characters moving within that natural environment.
“I kind of think about Alice stepping through the looking glass,” Queen says of the paradigm shift. “I liked that switch of point of view.”
Because the organizers agreed that Queen should create new characters to depict in the scenes instead of finding ready-made objects, he sculpted stylized animals out of Plasticine before painting them within each park landscape.
“That’s always my favorite part: going from nothing to something,” the artist says of working in 3-D.
And Queen welcomed this conceptual change that challenged his established approach. “For me, this was the perfect chance to push through something like that,” he says. “A commission is something different than you normally do; it gave me the chance to dive in.”
And perhaps most importantly, Queen says, he’s interested to see how it affects his work.
“The reason I use [ready-made toys] is because they’re created in man’s image,” Queen says. “They’re desiring something more. Specifically, those narratives we can all relate to: existing and striving for something that’s beyond our grasp, desiring to be more than what we are. So I rely on those stories, but I would rather rely less on those specific known characters and begin to create my own.”
The carousel was a perfect vehicle for such original character development.
“I’ve never really made something completely from scratch to be the main subject of a painting,” he says. So his current exhibition at the Taft Museum of Art, From Studio to Carousel: The Whimsical World of Jonathan Queen, features many of the artist’s models for the 30 animals he painted within park-landscape scenes for the aforementioned commissioned public art project.
Don’t expect the artist to completely abandon his well-honed practice, though. He took a lot of photos during a sojourn in Scotland that he anticipates coming in handy for his upcoming solo show at Miller Gallery in October.
However, Queen confesses, he has a lot of “shoulds” and “shouldn’ts” dancing around in his head.
“I was getting comfortable in a specific style and scale and manner of working and getting known for that,” he says. “But I’m a different person now.”
It should be interesting, then, to see how these new influences and procedural approaches affect his masterfully painted compositions.
FROM STUDIO TO CAROUSEL: THE WHIMSICAL WORLD OF JONATHAN QUEEN is on view until Sept. 6 at the Taft Museum of Art. CAROL ANN’S CAROUSEL is now open at Smale Riverfront Park. More info:
taftmuseum.org; cincinnatiparks.com.
This article appears in Jul 29 – Aug 4, 2015.
