a cover-up?

by Bing Futch

When some artists look at a blank canvas, they find themselves faced with one of the greatest challenges of the fine art world. How do you start? What do you see when you peer into the Gesso? The first brush strokes contain only mere hints of what will eventually become your effort at expression, perhaps even communication. That’s if you’re in a financial bracket where purchasing canvas isn’t a problem for you. Some starving artists will paint on alternative mediums like posterboard, cardboard, even discarded scrap wood, anything to cut back on the sometimes prohibitive cost of new canvas.

Chris Bordner has found a way around this problem, and it doesn’t make a lot of people in the art community very happy.

Bordner, who is probably best known for his highly visible and hyperactive role as bassist for local surf-rockers PILLER, is a passionate student of the arts and has near-on forty canvases in his collection. How does a near-broke artist who also has the additional finance-vacuum of being in a rock band afford materials that can cost around fifteen dollars for a small area in which to express himself? Simply and cost-effectively, he reveals. Bordner goes to pawn shops, used art stores, rummage and garage sales–purchases paintings for low, low prices and then paints over the previous artist’s work.

But not completely.

Sometimes, he leaves key portions of the painting intact, using it within his design. “I’ll get inspired by the patterns that I see in a painting,” he says. “And then I’ll just block out certain portions and create a new image that’s entirely mine.” Though he doesn’t always use this technique, he admits that lifestyle demands force him to work this way much of the time. Getting his work shown in galleries hasn’t been easy, since many local art enthusiasts frown upon his canvas canniblism. “It hasn’t won me many friends in the art community, let’s just say,” he smiles.

His work ranges from extreme Abstract veins to dalliances in Picasso- style Cubism. Many of the images are lurid, otherworldly and even nightmarish. The types of mediums are as varied as the works themselves and not all originated as other people’s paintings. One of his older pieces is done in ballpoint pen on a strung-up piece of fallen tree bark . This and other pieces were exhibited as part of the “mill any one” exhibit at this year’s Art And Technology show at the Orlando Museum Of Art. It was Bordner’s first official showing and it inspired him to get busy enough to produce his own gallery gig.

Though PILLER takes up a good portion of his time, along with real trabajo, the painter in Chris Bordner is struggling to make himself known. Lord knows, it’s bad enough when you’ve chosen one particular facet of the arts to focus on for the long haul, only the best, boldest and bravest can survive the madness, it ain’t no easy road. To be a multi-hyphenate is even worse, especially when you’re in people’s faces on both sides of the coin. The gregarious artistic pursuits of this renaissance man have only begun to make themselves known. Perhaps much more is to be uncovered even as plenty of past artistic exploits are being covered up. You can ask yourself “is it art?” till you’re blue in the gills, but who decides what the answer truly is?

Ah, that’s another column