By Sean Bradley~
Daniel Massad painted his first still life as a ten-year-old growing up Oklahoma City. Despite his passion for painting, he didn’t pursue it as a profession until his mid-30’s. Massad was actually a psychotherapist after receiving a couple of English degrees from two prestigious universities: Princeton and University of Chicago. He is now highly regarded in contemporary art and has pieces displayed in major museums such as the Art Institute of Chicago and Philadelphia Museum of Art.
I had the pleasure of spending an hour of my afternoon at the Palmer Museum of Art attending a gallery talk hosted by Massad and museum curator Joyce Robinson. The talk was called, “A Small Radius of Light: A Conversation with G. Daniel Massad,” and it consisted of Massad discussing pieces from his retrospective exhibit along with Robinson, who curated the exhibit and co-wrote the recently published book on Massad’s work.
Massad and Robinson spoke to a group of about 20 people as they led us around various pieces of his work. He stressed the connection of his art to his past and family, and he provided a look into his mind as an artist and a creator. One of the pieces he stopped to discuss was Hide & Seek, a lithographic print. It was a piece with many layers including the words “hide and seek” faintly inlaid on the print, and a bunch of grapevines, which his Lebanese grandparents brought with them to Oklahoma.
In the middle of the exhibit there was a display box full of various items like keys, bottles, and even a small Pinocchio toy. At Robinson’s urging, Massad explained why these items were included in the exhibit and what significance they have to him personally.
A collection of Massad’s objects used in his still-life pastels is on display as part of the Palmer’s exhibition of his work.
The bottles in the case were very similar, if not identical, to the bottles that Massad includes in several of his works. He described the bottles as a metaphor or a “stand-in” for humans and even compared the anatomy of a human body to that of a bottle. There is a lip of the bottle, a neck and shoulders just like a human–something I never realized myself. But what attracts him to glass bottles is the aging process. He said he is always drawn to old oxidized bottles because of the shape and the color that only comes with aged glass. Massad’s intrigue in bottles even led him to telling a story of how he would look in his friend’s own backyard in hopes of finding other random objects.
“Memoria”, 2018, pastel on paper, Collection of the artist. IMAGE: G. DANIEL MASSAD
At the end of the tour of his exhibit, Robinson urged him to do a reading from the book the two of them put together to accompany the exhibit. Massad, although clearly against his will, gave us a reading about a pastel entitled “Letters from Home” with a few interesting elements to it (see image below). The first obvious thing that appears in the painting is the large, centered Tiffany-colored blue bottle, which Massad loves to incorporate. Inside the bottle were colored letter blocks. However, the most interesting part of the painting was a seashell, which Massad admittedly added after it was initially finished. His explanation for including the seashell was that it represented “the man that my father never became.” He told us a story that his dad wished he had been a beach goer suggesting that he was regretful for not taking some time off his work in the oil business (represented by the oil can in the image). Like Massad’s father, my Dad is somewhat of a workaholic, and I have always been telling him to take some time to just relax.
“Letters from Home,” pastel on paper, Collection of the artist. IMAGE: G. DANIEL MASSAD
“Each of these exquisite pastels takes the artist upwards of four months to complete,” said Robinson. “There’s much more than meets the eye when it comes to Dan’s work.” I loved that Massad included this, and although he didn’t want to give a live reading, he did a terrific job of giving us such complex insight to paintings that at first appearance look so simple.
Joyce Robinson will be hosting another gallery talk November 30, at 12:10 p.m. at the Palmer Museum, so mark your calendars if you’re interested in checking out some more art on campus!
“A Small Radius of Light: G. Daniel Massad, A Retrospective,” a major loan exhibition featuring 72 works spanning five decades, is on on view at Penn State’s Palmer Museum of Art from Sept. 25 through Dec. 9.