Relationships of all sorts are difficult; they ebb and flow throughout time. This is the sentiment Craig Cully, Professor of Painting and Drawing at NMSU, incites in audiences who view his newest collaboration collection, Collusions. Collusions was displayed from February 5th to February 28th at The Mad Hatter Gallery in downtown Las Cruces early this year. This collection of paintings was co-created with his wife, Kelly Leslie, as a means of depicting the way that collaboration comes with discord, as well as harmony. This project began during COVID, as Cully will describe.
Discussing with Cully about his and his wife’s experiences with the project, it was revealed that collaboration was difficult for them. They have been married for about 20 years and they’ve been unable to produce a collaboration piece until Spring of 2019, the beginning of a global pandemic. It was discussed that it was a difficult process for them. Cully explained the reason they were able to make it work was by negotiations and reactions. Cully and Leslie had created a set of rules to be followed to ensure the best results when collaborating. These rules were created to help set boundaries between one another, a crucial part when collaborating. They’d sit and talk about ideas with each other. Leslie, a graphic designer, would create compositions for their pieces and a rule they had was Cully wasn’t able to see or say anything about her work until she invited him into space. Cully and Leslie found a process of collaboration that allowed them to produce this series of beautiful paintings, Collusions.
Their project, Collusions, is the result of their collaboration showing their transition into being in a single place for a long time with each other and how they turned objects in their immediate surroundings into imagery for their paintings. Cully explains, “We started making work transitioning out of the things on our property to things in the world around us, our spaces we inhabit together, interior, exterior as well, but also other objects that could stand in as metaphors for this co-creation or even surrogates for ourselves.” In this collection of paintings, the use of things they find in their daily life, whether it be living or dead, are incorporated to create these interesting combinations of interruption from the realism in these objects in the foreground coexisting with the serenity that comes from the softness of colors and images in the background. Viewing the Collusions collection on these large canvas consisting of different uses of plant and animal life that can be found on their property along with a series of different types of chairs. This collection began when Cully and Leslie decided to paint the roses in their garden blooming. They’re experiencing a pandemic together and found it metaphorical, the beauty of the roses on their property surrounded by everything else in the world crumbling. The imagery chosen for their paintings is in a way symbolic for Cully and Leslie as a form of embodiment. Cully says, “Sometimes you’ll find chairs in our paintings or sometimes you’ll see objects that represent one or the other of us or perhaps it’s an emotion that we had about an experience or an event that we shared.”
This project shows the challenges of a relationship, of love, and building your life with another person. We so often are fed the love and ease of relationships in media, but Cully and Leslie’s Collusions reminds us of the discordant nature of communication. It prioritizes the chaos in our differences, and the beauty that chaos provides. This is a project that is applicable to all; everyone has lived through the constant negotiation that connection brings. They shine a light on the qualities they hold as individuals, and how sometimes these qualities can cause a lack of harmony. It is a beautiful collection that holds power in its chaos, and Cully has done an incredible job of integrating innovative artistic techniques to paint these pieces.
Below is an excerpt of an interview held with Craig Cully discussing in depth their experiences with this project, their process, complications, his takeaways and what he wants to be shared with their viewers and anecdotes of his experiences in painting. It has been edited for clarity and length.
Chantay: How did you and your wife go about choosing the imagery for these pieces?
Craig: So, we were married for, like I say, about 20 years when COVID hit. We work in two different locations. My wife teaches at the University of Arizona in Tucson. I teach here. So, we spend about half of our lives apart, which works for us. Nevertheless, we’re not used to living together full time as much as what happened in the spring of [2019]. We were required to stay home and live in the same household and occupy the same property full time for the first time in a long time. We’ve been teaching for years and years and years prior to that. And we had to kind of renegotiate our relationship a bit. It wasn’t just like this easy, smooth kind of transition into this way.
We had tried to collaborate numerous times to no avail. I mean, we’re talking like knock down, break out, divorce type fights that happened.
And so, one evening, we’re sitting there contemplating life. We’re in our rose garden; we have this little rose garden on our property. For whatever reason, we had this miraculous bloom that year. The roses were outrageous. They were sickeningly beautiful, every one of the bushes. And we’re just loving it, smelling it, and enjoying our cocktails, and thinking about the world.
And we’re looking out past the roses and the entire mountainside is on fire in Tucson. The whole thing burnt down over the course of the next few weeks. And we thought to ourselves, oh my gosh, this is so interesting. This is a metaphor. The beauty of roses, the beauty of us being able to stay together full time. The beauty of learning new things, the horror of the mountain burning down, the world crumbling in front of us, and the politics that were involved with it all.
And we thought, this is the perfect cocktail for creating the kind of tension that I was looking for in my paintings at the time. And we were talking and we decided we would start by painting the roses. That’s how it all started.
Oh, and then, of course, it moved on from there and it evolved. We started thinking about [how] we should look towards everything on our property. And we decided that, well, at the heart of all of this was really not the pandemic, not the roses or the creatures living and dying on our property, or the mountain burning down, or politics. At the heart of it was really us as a couple and how we’ve co-created a life together. So, we started thinking of things that could be embodiments of that. We started thinking about how the paintings could be a kind of archive, not only of the literal creation of the work itself, but also of our lives together and how we’ve created this life together. And so that’s kind of how we moved on from just the living and dying vegetation and animals on our property to things beyond that.
Mackenzie: What do you want audiences to feel and to gather from the project?
Craig: I want them to understand the tension in the work. I want them to sense that feeling of suspension as I talk about. Get lost, that’s what I want. I want them to feel a little bit lost, a bit confused, a bit uncertain, a bit ungrounded.
The work is very much about this co-creation of a life. Two people come together and figure out how to get through this thing called life. We’re essentially born, someday we will all die, and in between that we’re just in this nebulous space of figuring it all out. I don’t know about you guys, but I just don’t know what’s going to happen next. I mean, I can do certain things and kind of predict the outcomes, and maybe as you get older you get a little more understanding, a little more distance, and maybe you can control things a little bit better. But there’s just a sense of insecurity in life and in relationships that I find intriguing. I’m hoping that people come to my work and feel a little uncertain. That’s what I’m looking for.
Chantay: You tend to paint on a larger scale. What were some complications that came with that?
Craig: Storage is an issue. You know, I get four or five large paintings and I don’t have space for them anymore. So, I have to end up unstretching them and rolling them up properly and storing them away that way, in which case sometimes they can get a little bit damaged. One of the other logistical nightmares is just shipping them. We had a show in Flint, Michigan last summer with this work, and I thought I had done the math right. I looked up FedEx prices for shipping and I measured everything and I built this special crate that was super lightweight that would house all the work. I thought I could get away with about a $2,000 bill to ship it there and back. When I went and actually got it all calculated by FedEx, it was going to cost me over $10,000 to ship it one way. So that show, all the work was unstretched. We had to figure out a way to pin back the excess canvas that we typically do with the stretcher bars. And then I used a kind of cloth tape that you iron on to make sure they stayed put. And then we created a special hanger system. It’s just a lot of complicated, silly stuff just to get the work shown in a location.
Mackenzie: What do you feel like is just the most unique aspect of this entire project?
Craig: Unique is a difficult term, because I don’t want to claim like I’ve invented something. But for me personally, unique has been the ability to incorporate the stupidest techniques and methodologies of painting. [Technically, the way the work is made is that Kelly, my wife, she does all the digital work. So, she creates these sort of digital collages. And if you’ve worked in any kind of software, what you can do digitally is phenomenal; I mean, the tools, the way you can cut, paste, and overlay, and transparencies, and blah, blah, blah. Well, when we agree on the final image on the screen and we say, okay, that’s it. That’s the painting idea. And I’m handed that image, I print it out, and I go, how do I make that happen in paint? And so, one of the challenges, but one of the exciting parts for me as a painter is actually trying to interpret that stuff. What technique would I use to create that thing? What medium, what brush, what tool? And part of the fun has been kind of thinking up new tools to use. If I use something like one of those stiff old straw brooms and I stab the painting with paint on the end of the broom, what happens then? Or if I take a mat from a car that’s got those little nubbies on it and I press that into a pile of paint and stick it on, what happens then? Or if I drizzle paint from nine feet up to the ceiling down, what happens when it splatters out? And then what do I do after that? How do I manipulate that?]
When I was really young in elementary school, I remember I had a teacher in art and they said, okay, guys, we’re gonna make a Halloween scene now. And you’re gonna put stars in the sky. And the way you do that is you dip your brush into runny white paint and you paint your background black and then you splatter it with your thumb. You sort of roll your thumb or finger across the bristles and it’ll splatter little stars across the sky. That was elementary school. Of course, you grow up and you don’t do that anymore. That’s a no. But now, I could show you in my paintings where I’m literally doing that. Or, when I was a young man in high school, I discovered the airbrush, which is a tool that is known to be, well, sort of de rigueur, out of fashion, silly. It was used very heavily in the 70s, I guess, for commercial purposes. And it has a certain look to it. One day I was like, wow, you know what would be really cool on this painting. Airbrush. So, I went and looked and I found my airbrush and I still use it on those paintings.
So, I think unique-wise for me would be on a personal level, I don’t want to say I’m inventing them entirely, but for me it’s been the inventiveness of methods and techniques that are alternative to conventional ways of painting.
Chantay: You tend to use portraits in your other works, why didn’t you include portraits for this body of work?
Craig: I come from an area not far from Philadelphia and Philadelphia is known for its portraiture. It has a great history of portrait painting. And so that was a big, you know, subliminal influence, if you will, on me. I always wanted to be a good portraitist. I went to an art school in undergrad that was very much about the medium of paint, like using paint to do all it can and not concerning yourself with illusion necessarily, definitely not doing portraiture of any sort. And so, after I graduated from that, doing very different kinds of work, I steeped myself into hiring models, drawing and painting from life for several years and got okay at it, I guess you would say, and then pursued that further as I went on to graduate studies. And I’ve always been fascinated by human beings. And so just the psychology that you get painting a portrait of a human being. And so, I’ve always tried to imbue my portrait paintings with that kind of psychological edge to them. I don’t paint a straight portrait ever. I’m always twisting it, distorting it, contorting it, or misproportioning it for the very purposes of creating that kind of psychological charge to them.
When it came to this work, I guess what happened is I just kind of grew tired of it. I do things for a while, I try to do them as intensely as possible, and then at some point I just get disinterested. And so, when it came to this work, I didn’t want to include that. I mean, especially because at first it was really about the animals and the plants that were living and dying on our property. Moving into this project, I just continued to move away from portraiture, which is not to say I don’t still do it. I tend to keep on working on both avenues simultaneously. I tend to lean more heavily towards this new body of work, the stuff I’m doing with my wife, versus the portraiture. But even in the middle of the collusion series, I stopped doing that work for a little while and did a whole series of very intimate portraits, small scale portraits. So, I can’t say that I stopped doing that, but definitely for this work, it was more about the use of objects as stand-ins for ourselves and the experiences we’ve had co-creating a life together.
Chantay: Are there any big takeaways from this project?
Craig: I am not a proponent of art as therapy. I get it can be for some people. I was just saying to a student earlier today, art should hurt, [and] I really do believe that to some extent. Like I don’t want to make art that’s feel good. I want it to be difficult and challenging and maybe a little painful at times for people. I know it is for me to make it very painful and difficult and challenging. But the big takeaway is it’s 25 years of marriage. It’s a beautiful thing, but it’s got its ups and downs. It’s got its difficult spots.
Being able to collaborate with my wife has opened up a new dialogue for us. It offers us something we can talk about. I mean, I’ve heard all her stories. She’s heard all of mine, probably 10 times over. And, you know, while we have new experiences together, we [also] have different lives because I’m here part of the year and she’s there part of the year. The point is, though, that it’s offered us a kind of common ground to share ideas and open up a dialogue that we otherwise wouldn’t have had. I mean, it actually gets us talking about art and noticing things in the world around us and about our relationship that we might not have noticed in the past. And it also opens up a safe space for us to talk about the issues that can arise in any given marriage. So that’s been a big takeaway for me. It hasn’t necessarily healed anything, if that’s even a requirement, but it hasn’t hurt everything either. It doesn’t always hurt.
