JUXTAPOZ Magazine
Pending Doom: The Art of Jason Maloney
by John Gunnin
November 2006 #70

The pop culture images in Jason Maloney’s art can be edgy or satirical, but they often represent the painful saga of the artist’s past. Maloney likes to peel back his scar tissue to remember himself as a teenager watching his parents get a divorce. His stress was amplified a year later when his stepfather died of AIDS. Soon the high-strung young artist got derailed into a world of booze and drugs that sent him spiraling downward for eight years until he woke up as a hog-tied amnesiac fumbling to explain his actions to the police. “I was a lost 26-year-old nightmare,” he says. “Then I went to a 12 step meeting and never left. I started painting again and my real life began.”

Maloney moved from Tennessee to California when he was a kid and spent most of his childhood bouncing from school to school. When he settled into Damien High School, an all-boys Catholic school in La Verne, California, he became a class clown immersed in skateboarding and looking to get high. “We were hell-bent on breaking as many rules as we could,” he says. He built his reputation as the school artist and soon was drawing flyers for parties based on the Iron Maiden album covers of Derek Riggs. While family strife ate up him up on the inside, he responded by becoming a risk-taking rebel who soon had his first run in with the cops. He started tattooing his arms—“a big fuck you to my parents”—and hanging out with losers and stoners.

Maloney’s attendance at Cal Poly Pomona in the fall of 1994 was cut short when he was arrested for breaking into cars. Fortunately his art training picked up again at Citrus College in Azusa under an encouraging teacher named Cliff Cramp who recognized and cultivated the young man’s talent. He then went on to Cal State Fullerton where teachers praised and nurtured his weirdness. He integrated illustration and fine art by combining tightly rendered images with the color field painting that is typical of minimalism. He now admits, “Those color fields calmed me down when anxiety attacked.” He devoured issues of the pedantic Art Forum magazine and would use his newly acquired vocabulary to spar in painting critiques. But his artistic success was sabotaged by the inner demons that prompted him to medicate himself. He was being groomed for the master’s program when a teacher saw through him and asked, “Do you do a lot of cocaine?” He wasn’t fooling anyone and was on the brink of discovering that the hole in his chest was just too big to fill. He stopped painting altogether and tried with all his strength to block out the monsters of addiction and self-doubt.

The panic attacks increased and he fought back with drug use. He drank so much that he started blacking out. One day he got drunk at a party, passed out, and woke up hogtied and under arrest, with a gang of policemen staring down at him. As he wondered what he had done to get there, a moment of clarity descended upon him. As he headed for jail he finally acknowledged the nature of his progressive illness. A few weeks later, in a 12-step meeting, he found a supportive surrogate family and in a few months he picked up his brush again. Maloney graduated from Fullerton with a BFA in Painting and Drawing in fall of 2000. About this time he quit bartending and got an interview with the entertainment division of Disneyland. He put on his best smiles and charms and got his foot in the door. Suddenly he had the job security he needed to develop his own art. His day job continues to this day at with Disney where he works alongside a group of top scenic artists who have immigrated to Orange County from Walt Disney Imagineering in Burbank, California. The work has included such tasks as remodeling the Haunted Mansion into Tim Burton’s Nightmare Before Christmas.

Maloney still struggles with demons but the war is played out in his art. Murderers and monsters symbolize his addiction and self-doubt. He reflects and filters his experiences into tightly rendered images full of metaphor. Desires, compulsions, vulnerability and fear of abandonment get distilled and polished with the patience of an old master. If he runs short of personal angst, there’s always his perennial problem with women to use for source material. Sometimes his old girlfriends turn up in portraits. Maloney never hesitates to peel back his psychic layers, mining himself for ideas, and pursuing painful and threatening themes. He can be funny as well, irreverently appropriating pop culture. This can be seen on his biceps, tattooed with Marylyn Monroe and Frankenstein’s monster. “I paint what I see everyday,” he says, “The bizarreness of the world is my main source. We live in a time when Jenna Jameson can explain the legitimacy of her act on Oprah. It’s natural that my art would be bizarre. I pick out brand names, new gadgets, celebrities in pop life, or whatever people deem popular and then make fun of it. Like talking shit do it with paint.” Maloney’s latest pop imagery includes sinister versions of Nicole Richie, Paris Hilton, and Lindsay Lohan.

Maloney’s creative process fluctuates with his mood. When an idea germinates, he works feverishly. But he is also prone to depression, an art-killer. He says, “I get in a self-loathing mode sometimes, marinating in my own crap. It’s the flip side of the mania. But I just hang out there because it always passes.” He sometimes takes a break from art and slows down to observe the world with calm and detachment. In these quiet times his new ideas emerge.

In technical terms, Maloney uses old master techniques combined with skills he learned at Disney, such as the use of cutout masking. A painting in progress is always littered with technical notes. He paints with a limited palette of earth tones and the primary colors applied to primed linen. He orchestrates color conversations –– contrasting colors in layers or adjoining positions –– in order to focus the viewer’s attention. “Whenever I need an idea I look at the old masters,” he says. “I was attracted to the work of Seventeenth Century painter Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres most of all. I read all the books on him and then later studied his paintings and drawings up close at the Norton Simon Museum and the Louvre in Paris.”

Old master techniques play an important part in the construction of Maloney’s work. “My paintings are built up very slowly,” he says. “I like to use a full range of earth colors in the beginning—raw umber, raw sienna, burnt umber, burnt sienna. I lay those in on top of a bright lead white ground. After a day or so the earth colors are dry. I then use warm and cool values of the primary colors—blue, yellow, and red. Next I use very thin glazes of medium and build the image up from there. This way my colors are always talking to each other from the start of the painting because I'm constantly mixing them together. The painting can sometimes take months to finish, depending on size.”

He has never used a tube of black in his painting. “The tube black makes the dark areas of the painting appear flat,” he says. “I mix my own black with five or six different values. An example would be ultramarine blue, with alizarin and a hint of burnt umber.” In the final stages of a painting, Maloney employs a Vermeer-like obsession with detail. “I'm a detail freak,” he says, “like the tiny threads on a fucked up teddy bear, sparks from a wire or highlights on blood. It makes all that study of form, line and color worth it.”

Maloney applies a similar approach to drawing. “I build each drawing up in a full range of pencils 8h (the hardest) to 8b (the softest). I work very slowly until the image is fully developed, being aware to show the form of whatever I'm drawing along with a simple single light source.” Maloney’s drawings sparkle with a meticulous craftsmanship that’s reminiscent of the French masters Ingres and David.

Besides the old masters, Maloney admires the work of Ryden and Eric White as well as the British wunderkind, Damien Hirst. In music, he gravitates towards Atrayu, Poison the Well, and My Chemical Romance, in addition to the older heavy metal classics. Maloney reads a lot. “I still read Artforum to this day,” he says. “It's a hard read but the show critiques in the back are outstanding. I also read Art News and Art in America. Juxtapoz Magazine was the turning point for me while in College at Cal State Fullerton. It’s the art magazine of my generation. Finally there’s a forum for us to express our voice.”

The latest image percolating in Maloney’s Newport Beach studio is a drunken Popeye lolling around inside the cutout of a pink elephant. He also keeps returning to the theme of predator and prey. His latest drawings, combinations of graphite and acrylic, once again deal with vulnerability and abandonment in relationships. He says, “I never really want to let women into my life, in case it ends like it always does.” He tries to step outside himself to observe the psychic and emotional drama in his own life, and then transform his feelings into imagery with a detached and rational perspective.

The very act of painting has been essential to the artist’s recovery process. “It's pretty hard to get into a painting after eating pills, doing a bunch of coke and drinking all day and night,” he says. “Now that I'm sober, I can really tap into something and the best part of it all is that you really feel it inside. It's weird, but I like it and I will keep doing it.”

Maloney began showing at the Cannibal Flowers happenings in Los Angeles in 2004. His presence increased when Billy Shire picked three of his works to exhibit in a group show at La Luz de Jesus in March of 2005. In April 2006 he showed at Billy Shire Fine Art in Culver City. He is now represented in Jan Helford’s Culver City location as well. Maloney hopes to visit New York and exhibit there someday. His big dream is to show at the Whitney. At present he is enjoying the ride of his newfound success. “I never want to arrive,” he says. “I want to always remain teachable and to help other artists, especially younger ones who are just starting out.”

More work of Jason Maloney is on view at Corey Helford Gallery.com, La Luz de Jesus.com, and JasonMaloney.art.com.