Ballets in the Dark:

Elegant Displays of Inelegance

Barry Nemett

As if with his middle finger, which he seemed to extend, as well, to anyone who passed by his early, cartoony canvases, Tony Shore first painted the people who inhabited the neighborhoods where he grew up. When MICA and Yale replaced Pigtown and Morrell Park; open books replaced addicts’ discarded syringes; and Caravaggio and Rembrandt replaced rage and Robert Crumb, Tony wound up replacing that finger of his for a masterful, compassionate brush. Ultimately, that brush has come to dignify a core group of friends and family members without ignoring gangs of thugs who came with the territory.

Effectively, what makes a true imprint doesn’t really get replaced. It gets revisited, re-seen, redefined. And added to. In his dramatic compositions populated by his personal cast of characters, Tony goes back and forth between exchanging the violence and racism of his birthplace with the poignancy of its grit. And grace. And depth.

The high-contrast aspect of his subject matter is built into the very nature of the black velvet cloth that has replaced the more traditional supports of canvas, linen, or paper used by most schooled artists. Given Tony’s sophistication and artistic training, we don’t expect him to paint on velvet; that’s for amateurs. Or so we’re taught to believe. Shore – who earned his BFA degree from Maryland Institute College of Art (where he is now Chair of the Painting Department) and his MFA degree from Yale – has turned that belief on its head.

“The original idea,” the artist quips, with his impish, ever-present smile, “was that I would do black velvet paintings about people who would own black velvet paintings. They were pretty common where I grew up.”

Fact is, technically, the material poses great challenges for a painter. “Velvet’s unforgiving,” the artist asserts. “It’s easy to overpaint or kill something, ’cause you can never get back to the original black. Essentially, it’s like saving the whites in a watercolor.”

Acrylic brushstrokes shine off his inky surfaces like sunrays emblazoning stainglass windows. Light penetrates the fabric’s lush nap and comes out with an inner glow. Bright and dark tones,
then colors, take turns taking the lead, Shore intermittently coaxing shapes and volumes out of and dissolving them into concealment. Likewise, the painter caroms his subject matter between bad blood (Jump Out, Beat Down) and goodwill (Booper’s Yard, Booper’s Table). You can hear the violence and the joy. And there are silent but telling looks between poor people whose voices have been muffled, if not muted.

In In the Alley, we see a big guy with his friends towering over and stomping an outnumbered, smaller soul burying his fears and wounds into the dry, bloodthirsty dirt. Beneath the strapping, centralized stomper’s T-shirt there’s blubber. Otherwise, for all its realism, the painting is remarkably abstract. And trim. In this pared-down composition ruled by an attacking, no-eyed, multi-limbed monster, whatever’s there, belongs.

Whose hand, arm, and leg is where in this melee of kicks and poundings? The rag-tag troupe’s limbs are tied together and punish in hate. The paths laid out are clear. Still, it’s easy to lose your place. As the artist intends. Fights are disorienting.

Are the big guy’s friends restraining their beefy leader? Are they shouting, “Enough!” or are they pitching in, ganging up? The choreography for this sadistic, four-against-one dance is crisp, yet fractured. “When the subject is strong,” the twentieth-century’s most famous African-American painter Jacob Lawrence, with whom Tony briefly studied, once stated, “simplicity is the only way to treat it.”

But simplicity can be mazy. Like all the fight scenes included in this exhibition, Alley is a large-scale, elegant display of inelegance. Yes, elegant. I see the same diametrically opposed components at work in even the most cringeworthy of Francisco Goya’s images from the Disasters of War series. Take, for instance, the upside-down, naked Spaniard about to be castrated or sliced from crotch to crown by a uniformed group of saber-wielding French soldiers. If you appreciate the skills and smarts that go into art, it’s hard to view this etching as only gruesome. Despite yourself and the subject matter, you marvel at the cruel and gruesome beauty of its execution. But cruel and gruesome it is. Tough to look at, but look you do. Credit the seduction of art/the art of seduction. Without that, we’d turn away and not return.

This happens also in Shore’s Fucked Up, where there’s no sense of place, which suggests that what’s happening could happen anywhere. The black man’s tortured look is harrowing. Otherwise, it’s the gestures of the human body that communicate the evil. To literally add insult to injury and see an “other’s” agony as a mere joke – as entertainment – one assailant mocks the victim’s pain by heartlessly videoing it on his phone, the artist thus shoving our potential inhumanity in our collective face. Take care, he seems to warn, before we destroy ourselves cell by cell, by harming others. Confront the worst of what we can be, he instructs. To ignore is to accept.

To empathize, many artists need to either cherish or despise their subjects. Accordingly, Tony also depicts his beloved, working-class family members and friends – individuals who Tony’s wife Andrea calls “urban legends.” The kitchens, motels, porches, garages, front yards, pickup trucks, and alleys these “sidestreet luminaries” occupy say as much about them as do their facial expressions, clothes, and interactions.

The worlds of Mondrian and Vermeer are pristine, refined. In Shore’s world, not so much. Well, Kitchen finds its own kind of honest grandeur. The interior sports no polished chandeliers or splendid leaded-glass windows. Instead, there are shadows, dustballs, and dirty laundry … colored by the magic of an inner glow.

Resisting the urge to label, dismiss, and therefore to not see, Tony insists that some of the seemingly “lowbrow art peddled on street corners near gas stations are worthy of being hung in museums.” Of course, there’s nothing lowbrow about Donna, her kitchen, Donna’s Kitchen, or Tony’s talent. He doesn’t display his work on street corners. But talk about museumworthy!

No less worthy of artistic appreciation is Dialysis. Here, Harry Shore is the subject. As is time and the tender toughness of its passing. In Tony’s paintings, we see dad middle-aged, aging, eating, sleeping, struggling, stoop sitting, hanging out, lighting up, buttoned up, shirtless, healthy, ill … you name it.

Writing about a show of Tony’s in which the artist’s father dominates every image, the art historian Kerr Houston insightfully noted: “But even as you watch Harry age, you’re also watching, as you move from painting to painting, Tony develop his skills as a painter. Even as the father’s body thus weakens, the son’s body of work grows stronger and more confident.”

Listen to paint caressing its silky midnight surface, as Tony records the now-deceased shipping clerk. Hear a penpoint graze a virgin page, as the Welsh poet Dylan Thomas writes about a man going gently into the night, into “the dying of the light.”

The powerful Dialysis feels chock-full of detail. But it’s not. The artist suggests much while showing little. There are subtle surprises in his seemingly empty, flat black expanses that are seldom empty or flat black. There’s no flab. That said, the artist is not above – dispassionately? affectionately? – spotlighting a bare, tubed potbelly. The belly is as powerful a portrait as the face. Take your time. Let your eyes adjust. Watch the cancerous darkness open up and the sad story get even sadder. And more poignant. At best, Shore’s paintings are slow reads. And worth every masterful minute.

This painter doesn’t shy away from bringing life’s harsh realities into the most innocent of places. In Tracy Adkins Park teenage brawlers ignite a childrens’ (caged-in) sanctuary. Again, listen. One song is loud and clangy, with its jungle-gym chords and colors. Beware the bare-chested guy on our far left, poised to crush someone’s skull with a rock. (My guess: he’s related to the Fucked Up guy with the cell phone.) In another tune, play fills the imagination. And in the distance, Tony orchestrates one of the few leafy landscapes I’ve seen from him. It’s a beauty – poetic, humming, and moody.

Which brings us back to where we, and Tony, began. Turns out, it’s an inspiring place, with its cacophony of brutality and hardship, fealty and friendship, including all those Harrys, Donnas, and Boopers who’ve helped make Tony Shore the kind, complex man he is. The artistry, shrouded in bolts of black fabric and pared-down ballets in the dark … they’re all his.