T.S. Eliot wrote, “The masters of the subtle schools are controversial, polymath.”
While I’ve always hoped that this could apply to me, it certainly applies to Phillip Larrimore, the Wizard of Wingate. Larrimore is a poet, a critic, a visual artist working in several mediums, a landscape designer, and possibly the most erudite man I’ve ever known. Conversation with him is like barreling down a mountain road at top speed with headlights cut off all the while the driver is blithely whistling the Goldberg Variations and discoursing on Kleist’s theories on Puppet Theater.
In our conversation for this story, Larrimore mentioned the strong influence that poet Elizabeth Bishop has had on him, casually referring to her as “the Vermeer of American poetry, you know because of her wonderful lucidity and the sense that she is writing in real time.”
Did I mention he’s a Sufi mystic who recites the 99 names of Allah as he paints? The man baffles me honestly, but knowing that Phillip Larrimore is around makes me feel better about life choices I’ve made — mainly the choice to live in Charlotte.
In spite of studying art at the Corcoran School (to be fair he was only there for a year before “running off with my sculpture professor’s wife, which got very weird very quick,” as he explains it), much of Larrimore’s early life and career were spent as a writer doing highly regarded journalism and poetry under a different name. When asked about the alias, Larrimore gets squirrely and mentions the draft board and certain underground organizations.
He says he returned to visual art because, as a voracious reader, “I had ruined my writing and had to go back to painting. All my undigested influences were making me miserable.” We should be grateful that the man took his brush back up. While Larrimore is a writer of great style and insight, it is as a painter that he has made his greatest discoveries.
A Journey Around My Room, Larrimore’s solo show currently up in Nine Eighteen Nine Studio Gallery at the Visual and Performing Arts (VAPA) Center, is a retrospective of sorts. Gallerist Joanne Rogers has curated an overwhelming assemblage: some 86 of Larrimore’s acrylic on metal screen paintings spanning the last 25 years.
Read More: Joanne Rogers Spotlights Artists of Color at Nine Eighteen Nine Studio Gallery
These paintings, made on screen, are remarkable for the uncanny illusion of movement they create. They vibrate, as if the inner light and life of their subject were struggling to be contained. Larrimore cites Leonardo da Vinci as a key influence in his shimmering screen paintings, but the artist that overwhelmingly comes to mind when I witness the work is 18th-century British visionary William Blake.
Larrimore’s work is deeply spiritual, influenced by his lifelong engagement with Christianity, Islam and Buddhism, and it quite miraculously pulls back the veil of reality to reveal something shimmering and vibratory underneath it all.
This transcendent quality isn’t merely a product of Larrimore’s intellectual interest in spirituality, although as the son of a Baptist minister, he does seem to come by that naturally. Rather, the work in his current show was born out of and matured in, that most potent crucible of spirit: grief.
Living and working in the visual art and dance scenes of New York City in the 1980s and ’90s, Larrimore found himself plunged into the role of caretaker to a battalion of ailing friends during the AIDS crisis. Such proximity to the slow painful separation of body and soul will do something to you, not to mention the simple catastrophic quantity of loss. Larrimore lost 100 friends in one year — a loss that is difficult to comprehend.
It was in this context that Larrimore, who had been obsessed with the quality of movement in da Vinci’s drawings of water, began studying the movement of fire. (When he tells me this I immediately flash to images of the legendary Djinn, pre-Islamic creatures composed of smokeless fire. Should I ask Larrimore for three wishes?)
Larrimore and his partner at the time were running a video service that documented dance performances. Using the editing bay he had at hand, he slowed down 15 minutes of footage from trash can fires on the Bowery until it was 24 hours long. This allowed for trancelike meditation on the mechanics of fire, how the eye perceives motion and how the artist’s hand could possibly present it.
In one of those leaps of cognition that artists (the good ones anyway) everywhere will recognize, his study of fire led him to one of his other loves: music. Larrimore realized that by splitting an image into parts, a la the four part harmony of a work by Bach for instance, he could create the interplay of light and image that would create the illusion of movement in the viewer’s eye.
Thus Larrimore conceived of his screen paintings, which typically consist of something more like four screens. Each screen has a different “score” painted on it. When layered on top of each other the screens create a harmonics that in turn creates the sensation of mirage-like movement.
And it works beautifully. Even in the unfortunately insufficient lighting used for A Journey Around My Room, the psychedelic effect of the work shines through. It is a testament to the work that the fluorescent lighting in the gallery doesn’t ruin the effect.
Upon entering the space you are confronted to your right by several large format works, these are amongst the oldest pieces in the show and they are not to be missed. And please take your time. The work needs to be viewed from different distances and, self consciousness be damned, a slight sway from side to side enhances the lysergic aura of the pieces.
While I found the sheer number of pieces on display to be a bit much, I will concede enthusiastically that the volume and variety of work gives visitors to the gallery a compelling peek into Larrimore’s preoccupations.
The paintings range in style from abstract to representational and, within the category of representational, the subject matter varies wildly from nature scenes and cityscapes to homages to the work of Gustave Doré and references to Pol Pot’s killing fields. Since the subject matter is so varied, the unifying element here is formal; this is a show about paint applied on layers of aluminum screening and the visual effects these techniques can create.
In a conversation about the show, Larrimore discusses the peril of making work that is ostensibly formalist, saying “with the so-called visionary work you don’t get to address issues.” This is a problem for Larrimore, who despite his esoteric interests is very much a man of this world.
Some of the most powerful work in the show is explicitly political. I’m thinking here of the Khmer Rouge-themed “Year Zero” and its stacks of skulls, then to a small canvas titled “Trayvon” that addresses, somewhat obliquely but with sensitivity and discernment, the extrajudicial murder of young Black men by police and others that remains endemic to this country.
Larrimore acknowledges that “it is dangerous for a so-called ‘white’ person to co-opt that experience” and expresses frustration with white artists who bristle at criticism of their work addressing racism or the Black experience in America.
“Truthfully, we don’t have much right at all to be hurt about such things,” he says. But having a wide and diverse circle of friends he has felt compelled to express anger and “fear that people you love are in mortal danger just walking down the street.”
The show is divided in time. The larger works are mostly from Larrimore’s New York plague years. The remaining pieces are small format, created from scraps during Larrimore’s time isolated in his ancestral home in Wingate during COVID.
Larrimore returned to North Carolina in the mid-1990s, partially to escape the horrors of loss he had been experiencing in New York and to care for his aging parents. They both passed away in the 2010s, and isolation and grief were doing a number on Larrimore during the pandemic.
As a means of managing, he put himself to work, and the small pieces on display at Nine Eighteen Nine are small miracles of form. While the large pieces work like spectral tapestries, or in one notable example as environments unto themselves, the small pieces serve as windows.
The effect is inward, as if these paintings were portals into something. This is a marked contrast to the large works which emanate outwards toward the viewer.
A Journey Around My Room, which closes on Sept. 5, offers visitors a glimpse into the interiority of a singular individual — there is no one quite like Phillip Larrimore.
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