r HION /ARTS/ CULTURE "CONNECT1NGCREAT1VES"
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·artist orofile: Percy Fortini-Wright •
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VIBRAIIONAl FREQUENCY BY MARK HOLT-SHANNON
We could start with light. Sometimes it seemed Percy was less concerned with how to use it, as he was curious about where it comes from in the first place, how the fuck it gets here. I got the impression that what he is searching for, what he's trying to capture, is nothing less than that genesic moment when, simply and profoundly, light cascades onto matter. Call it grappling with God (which he did), call it looking to unlock the secrets of the universe (which he did). And yet, "Sometimes," he confessed, "I don't think I even know what the purpose of art is." Purpose aside, his search seems focused around that moment of combustion or ignition, some kind of creative Big Bang. In the simplest terms he seems in pursuit of the act of creation itself. "Like the creation?" I asked. "Yeah, yeah, yeah." On the way over, I had reels in my head of street artists, paint cans in backpacks, late-night crouching, sprinting across dark, glaring wet streets, climbing rusted fire escapes, dangling from billboards or trestle precipices, all in the name of tagging some shit, righting some wrong, expressing some truth. Couldn't wait to meet this guy.
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And then ...suburbs? Master's? Well, yes. But not exactly. Hold on. Percy Fortini-Wright,the hyphenated name foreshadowing the complexity to come that Sunday afternoon. Photographer Chris Dempsey and I had met up with him at his bottom-floor studio in the belly of Motherbrook Art Studios in Dedham, Massachusetts,the concrete cube space an explosion of materials and mediums, colors and textures,works in progress, ideas set aside,junk drawer cardboard boxes of ...stuff. Seemed part gallery,part storage unit,part office,and part living room,a mix of form and functional influences that now strikes me as an extension of Percy himself. Pardon the expression,but with Percy,there's a lot going on. "My whole life is a fucking project," he said, chuckling. It didn't matter which of the questions scribbled on my yellow pad I intended to ask first; once I was in the vicinity of those portraits,"Children from Beyond ",I was possessed,as possessed it seems as they are. Percy describes the collection as"a multi-dimensional,self-reflective,bi-racial experience of the extreme other,or alien." You can say that again.Chris,I think, uttered "robots." I called them "horrific." Percy laughed,the three of us now together staring into the line-up of the spray paint and oil portraits."Yeah," he chuckled, "people say that."
An overarching theme in Percy's work, and in our conversation,is the recognition of and dealing with life's dualisms,its polarities. Opposing, juxtapositional forces, masculine feminine, light dark, birth death.It's all there. What fascinated me even further about these Children portraits was how he'd conceived them from "memory." So not artist looking outward at subject,but artist looking inward,into one's own sweeping personal landscape.The portraits seemed to channel and reflect his own genetic and cultural tapestry, African, European, American, Native.Son, father, B-boy, student,teacher,tagger. So yeah,when you look unhurriedly into these paintings, you recognize Percy in there,maybe in the eyes--or the eye, the single more open and complete one that is looking right back at us,inspecting us. He likens this depiction of himself to the scientist observer,that single focused cycloptic eye like his magnifying glass,his microscope. Trippy. Haunting. Playful. "Where does the playfulness come from?" He thought about that some. "I try not to take myself too seriously." Which got me wondering about parts of his life that aren't art,and it turns out he's also "a serious fisherman."
In tracking his path, identifying where that initial creative light first shone, Percy spoke of his grandmother and grandfather, both artists, but then spoke mostly about his mom. "Norwegian," he said. "A lover of black culture." In fact, as Percy put it, "a lover of black everything, black men, black cars, black cats." He shared these stories with grace and levity, almost as if she were sitting there with us, in on it. But of course she wasn't, having passed in 2014. Losing his mom was devastating for all the expected heart-wrenching reasons. It also overlapped with the birth of his son. That was, continues to be, a difficult road. Early in our conversation Percy pointed at an enormous landscape portrait of his mom, spread like wings, like a horizon, across the studio wall, a portrait Chris and I agreed could have been one of Joni Mitchell. Sitting below the painting, fingers woven together on his stomach, a princely tableau, he would nod toward her each time we found our way back to talking about her.
So many influences coalescing into the creative collage of Percy's life and work. I can see and hear him now, using his mingling fingers and hands to remind me that these aren't separate categories, that they're all--and here come the hands- mixed together. Such a story. He spent his formative years, surprisingly (maybe just for me), in the suburbs, in what he called a "black" family in a predominantly white neighborhood- yet another factor contributing to the everpresent push and pull, the polarities of his life. He started his creative work early, but not in the way, again, I had imagined. So, not in the "streets," per se, but in the books. Growing up he had a good friend, the son of his mother's best friend, an older boy Percy described as a "brother." This friend had already, at fourteen-, fifteen-years-old, established himself as a graffiti artist and DJ in his own right, and was instrumental in laying the foundation of Percy's classical training.
So though I waited for stories that included close calls with the police and late night phone calls to parents, and while I did get the impression that those stories exist, it wasn't the story he told. Instead he talked about his time in the books, under the lamplight at the desk, reading, studying, mimicking, sketching. Practicing. Mastering. Percy explained how critical this early practice was to his later success, because when it was time to take to the streets, his stuff was tight. This early discipline may have been responsible for his eventual earning of both a bachelor's and master's in fine arts from the Art Institute of Boston at Lesley University. Also, probably because his work was so diverse, he was invited to teach for the lnstitute's pre-college program, which he did for ten years, trying to give back some of that discipline he'd received.
JOURNY MAGAZINE
This part of his story surprised, delighted, and enlightened me. The truth is I've consumed a limited diet of what graffiti actually is, what it and those who "perpetrate" it look like. As a grown up I know to lead with openness and allowance. But still, the first image I frame in my tiny head squares around a lanky kid carrying a skateboard, wearing a black ski mask and a T-shirt or hoodie, and who is shoving a tightly-focused Johnny Cash middle finger in my face, your face, the face of the establishment. And while the physicality of Percy himself, meeting him, matched the image, the lightness of ego did not. Because mostly what he did that afternoon was lean back on his couch and listen--nodding, scratching from his chin answers to my art theory 101 questions. I was left with this impression of him--again with the polarities!--as master and student. The evidence of both all around me. His knowledge and attitude and openness was like a taut cable running high voltage creative juice from his head or heart straight into the middle of his hands-on practice and study. It was all right there in front of us. Pretty cool.