Art Sync: The Cave

JL: Fast forward to 2020, my family and I live across from the Wiss. Hiking was the only outdoor activity we had mid-pandemic. My imagination began to expand from walking the same woods and paths as the hermits; then I began researching them. Those forty hermits came to the new world, the edge of the wildness back then, to await the apocalypse. Their story started to feel little less crazy and more like a mirror to ours.

I’ve always found myself attracted to stories of faith and/or hubris that end in failure and/or discoveries unsought. It’s a fruitful metaphor for my painting practice. If a painting ends up looking like the image I had in my head at the beginning, it usually doesn’t work. When a painting works, it’s a journey, a failure and a discovery. If you have the time, it is better to get a little lost in the woods then it is to walk the same path every day.

EJ: Since both involve intense group effort, how does creating a body of work around the hermits build on your experience with Tim Rollins's K.O.S. (Kids of Survival)?

JL: I grew up in an ecumenical Christian community that my father started in the ’70s. In the early days, all the members lived together in one house. The story of the hermits living together adjacent to society but not a part of it was not much of a leap of imagination.

JL: I met Tim Rollins when I was a freshman in high school. He came down to the Philly suburbs to work on a mural commissioned by the Main Line Art Center for the Narberth train station. He asked the school district to work with kids who had social/emotional issues and kids with learning differences (of which I have a few) to compose the mural. Tim had a magnetic personality. It was through his encouragement and tough love that I was able to believe that my private passion for drawing could become a career, a lifelong pursuit. He taught me art could be a serious thing.

For a time, Tim became a mentor, taking me to museums and galleries in New York. I showed some early paintings with K.O.S. before losing touch a few years later. The mural itself (based on Franz Kafka’s Amerika) was built on wood panels and installed in the underpass below the train tracks. Suffice it to say the mural did not last; it warped and split from moisture. Working on it, however, was a formative experience.

EJ: K.O.S. painted on pages of literature and music, telling a story with cultural ephemera. I connect this with your painting Autumn (The Collector) that assembles images, as you say, "from a museum, painting, film or story that is not my own." Is the contrast between owning and not owning images and story a catalyst for you? Are you wary of capitalism and proprietorship? Does this come from your K.O.S. experience?

EJ: About the painting Forty Days, you write: "Forty is a biblical number that the Hermits of the Wissahickon were obsessed with. There were forty hermits in their sect. . . .I painted the hermit's cave forty times. Each day I would place two pieces of tape down, covering a strip of the previous day's work, starting from the middle and working out. You can see the seasons change, starting from the warm yellow greens of early spring in the middle, and ending with the dense cool greens of late summer on the edges. By the time I finished the painting, it was completely covered with tape, and I had no idea what the painting looked like until I removed the tape piece by piece." Was the moment of reveal forty times as exciting as each day's work? I jest, because I sense a fascinating problem. For all our divisions and repetitions––and painting is a great place to practice them––would you say that reaching for summation is an enduring pursuit in your work?

JL: Yes, I would say all my work is. It’s important for me to find specificity in my subjects and my content, but not so that the whole picture will ‘add up.’ The image and the surface should ask questions but never give answers.

EJ: Wissahickon Bathers and The Women of the Wilderness: Sunrise, Moonset feature figures in the process of disappearing, alluding to hiddenness revealing something. You mention that Fig Tree "was a combination of a fig tree and a male torso. The fig leaf was once used to reframe the body, with the concept of modesty, to hide it. Here, it is meant to reveal, a body unframed." A portion of your Karl Ove Knausgaard quote catches my eye: "to be human is to categorize, subdivide, identify and define, to limit and to frame." By waiting indefinitely at the edge of the forest for the end of the world, the hermits seem to have been willing themselves beyond a definite, physical limit. How does the limit between belief and knowledge figure into your current work?

JL: I think that doubt is the partner of belief. I don’t look at them appositionally. Likewise, memory and experience, or the constructed image and the visceral process of painting, are partners that work together in the production of the paintings.

I work in layers of paint over many sessions. I admire painters like Hockney or Picasso who can leave all the air and freshness of the initial mark making in their paintings. Maybe when I am an old man, I will join them. But for now, why not keep painting, keep exploring? There is so much pleasure in the question “What if?” I hope that my paintings carry the history of all those compressed layers of decision-making.

EJ: About The Entwined Ducks, you write that you recall being inspired by Egyptian paintings of the Middle Kingdom and "how the scale, proximity and color of these very flat, isolated objects created a sense of space…As I worked, I began to stretch those ideas of space even further. Objects that were around me began to creep in, I painted my studio plants from life, I painted a postcard of a cave with dry brush, my kids’ piano, etc. Each addition meant to pull the elastic space of the original painting in another direction." I love the different shades of background orange and that you are partially framing the piece in blue and white. How do you feel about being tugged between realism and abstraction in storytelling?

EJ: Studio Interior lifts me out of realism like a dream that brings nature inside. Your attention to painting wooden panels makes the dream space inviting, believable, tangible. You note: "Whenever I paint a space, I always have the impulse to negate the logic of it. A painting is a painting and no matter the illusion, it feels necessary to honor the flat surface. I find myself consistently fascinated with expressing space and form in as many ways as possible within each painting, while hoping that the whole thing won’t fall apart."

The brick wall depicted outside is warm yet forbidding. Is this painting expressing tension between imagination and inhibition?

JL: I really enjoy that tension. One of Richard Diebenkorn’s rules for himself as painter was “Don’t be careful, except in a perverse way.”

Joseph Lozano: A Discreet History of Trees | February 21 - March 22, 2025

Joseph Lozano (b. 1982, Philadelphia, PA) grew up in a religious community in the suburbs of Philadelphia, the son of a preacher. His path as an artist began when he was invited to work with Tim Rollins and Kids of Survival (KOS), subsequently becoming a member of KOS. Traditionally trained, He received an MFA from the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts (PAFA), Philadelphia, PA, in 2009 and a certificate in painting at PAFA in 2007. His oil paintings are images of magical realism; painted in many layers -with a singular attention to how color can create a variety of sensations of space. Lozano’s themes lie at an intersection, between grand historical narratives about exploration and the beautiful banality of his current domestic life. He has exhibited extensively in the northeast and is the recipient of the PAFA Museum Permanent Collection J.M.C. Purchase Prize, the Women’s Board European Travel Scholarship and the Wolf/Khan painting fellowship to attend the Vermont Studio Center. He teaches painting at Immaculata University and lives on the edge of the woods in Philadelphia with his wife and two creative children.