Merging Past, Present, and Future: A Conversation with Alex Nodopaka
by Melissa Gish
Swami Vivekananda suggested that "[t]he whole secret of existence is to have no fear." Alex Nodopaka-poet, actor, artist-certainly gets this, for he is truly a most fearless creator. In his words, "Starting art with a blank canvas or monitor is like looking at a swelling ocean and visualizing a creature waiting to be instilled with life so to speak." Yet Nodopaka has never shied away from such challenges. A native of Russia and former student at Ecole des Beaux Arts in Morocco, Nodopaka today makes his home in coastal California, where he continually reaches toward the fringes of creativity and, as he once explained, "merge[s] the past into the present into some perceived future." Throughout an extensive and colorful career-which began with childhood finger paintings more than seven decades ago-Nodopaka has emphasized a critical examination of the world, citing some of the best advice he received as an artist: "To look beyond the seen and heard and to question everything we are taught and to write between the lines our own thoughts." Experimenting with everything from paint and sculpture to digital design, Nodopaka's work has been featured in a variety of forums from the Livermore Times and the Dublin Independent to the Montalvo Arts Center and the Laguna Beach Art Festival. He has shared his artwork extensively with small presses such as the Rappahannock Review, Ascent Aspirations, and Up the Staircase Quarterly; his work is also included in numerous online galleries including ArtSlant and Saachi Art. Over the years, Nodopaka's art emerged and advanced; it has been abandoned and re-invented in myriad ways representing major shifts in not only medium and technique but also style and objective. Nodopaka explained, "Like any human being my art evolved with my personal experiential development." Aji's selection of Nodopaka's work offers a glimpse of the artist's passion for digital media, which arose some decades ago. Nodopaka explained: "I believe that the PC killed abstract art the way photography killed clinical representative art through its instant stylistic conversions and transformations. It killed it for me because I stopped painting long hand since just about then. In the history of art, every school of art has met its end through replication. The human characteristic always needs titillation to survive or it dies through stagnation.”
Nodopaka has described the pieces featured in Aji as "Figurative-Cubo-Expressionism-Futurism" and defined the term as such: "The combination of the four terms represents previous individual schools of art styles that I thought too limiting for my pieces. In my search, I attempted to combine all four under one -ism. The reason for the figurative is that I believe humans are genetically programmed to recognize primal representative forms. Pure abstraction is visible either under great magnification or reduction but hardly to the naked eye. In effect, abstraction existed since the beginning of the world, so nobody can claim credit for it." In discussing his creation of Figurative-Cubo-Expressionism-Futurism, Nodopaka had this to say: "Like Raul Capablanca said when playing chess, `I think of only one move ahead, but it is the best,' and so is my work at the time of its making. To paraphrase Kandinsky, `that each work of art is a child of its time' is representative of what I do at this time. Paul Klee is another of my inspirations by his rending child-like stick figures, and of course Surrealism has got possession of my mind despite my apparent seriousness. To explain my latest artistic venture, they resulted from my re-immersion in the French, Italian and Russian avant-garde of the very early 20th century, 1905 to 1922. This dunking resulted in the present artwork featured at Aji." When asked why his current pieces have no titles, Nodopaka stated, "This question has been debated innumerable times in art and has become a problematic question in modern times. I believe that descriptively titling quickly becomes boring by narrowing its interpretation." In a discussion of how his digital art contributes something unique to a flooded field, Nodopaka said of his work, "Yes, there is a massive amount of digital artwork since the 1990s, but the vast majority is of the copycat variety. What distinguishes mine is the application of the peculiarities of digital techniques. So, in that way, I am not a perfect pioneer but a synthesizer of pre-existing styles and techniques. Of course I'm not always successful and often fall in the traditional trap of accepted aesthetics. In fact, looking closely at my cubist effect I do not use the original philosophy, but then mine doesn't have the `Where's Waldo syndrome.' Mine is an interplay of geometric planes. Mine is not the original technique applied by futurists but by partial replication of content instilling the visual effects of motion and is closest to the original visual intent." So where does a digital artist begin? Nodopaka advised, "A key element in creating a digital art piece is the seed of an original idea to render an old form with novel techniques. The great achievement of the PC is to have at your keyboard fingertip infinite possibilities and variations. The subject may be common but its visual perspective must be original but not to the point of being arcane in which case it loses its audience. It is a question maybe of proper balance and harmony in the final piece." And when does a digital artist know when "proper balance and harmony" has been achieved? Nodopaka offered this analysis: "We undeniably are influenced by past artists, theories and visual accustomization or brainwashing through simply numerical increase of published `new' art. Theories on art are numerous-as many as beliefs in astronomical data. Mankind believed the world was flat; mankind couldn't comprehend perspective until it was demonstrated through the laws of optical geometry. Dynamics and physical motion couldn't be represented until the photographic process was implemented and winged creatures fell by the wayside. The microscope and telescope brought their own yet unseen micro-macro views of the world, and now the PC has revolutionized the creation of art by giving us instantly an innumerable variety of views, perspectives, with imaginary and surrealistic physical distortions of content."
Returning to Nodopaka's more personal experiences, we discussed his having goals for a piece of art versus allowing the work to evolve naturally. Nodopaka stated, "It depends on the purpose of the artwork. If it is a commission or a work with `intent,' then it immediately contains preconceived ideas, but I always leave room for evolution." And when considering a finished piece, what is the strongest influence: that on the art or on the artist? Nodopaka speculated, "I imagine frankly speaking that my own art has brought only minuscule changes. Some reasons are purely geographical and cultural changes pertinent only to myself. If anything I have synthesized a multitude of schools. My most prominent achievement in sculpture and some two-dimensional art has been of a metaphysical concern." When asked how he would typically choose a subject for a piece of art, Nodopaka said, "Since commercialism was ever hardly involved in my art, I always felt free to do what I wanted at the moment of doing it. That includes my photographic period, when at one point I knew where the sun would rise or set behind which rock or when fog would roll in or out during any time of the year. Yes, I had my periods of `fixation' if not obsession, which included or excluded the presence or absence of anything manmade." And is it always like this for you? Nodopaka confessed, "Some of my artworks now undergo an intricate thought process of virtual painting and hardly ever physically are executed. They are of an indescribable peaceful meditative nature where the eye meanders from point to line to dissolving points describing archangels as Kandinsky intended in the Spiritual in Art."1
In addition to creating art, Nodopaka has served as an art editor, judge, and instructor. He has strong opinions about art in America: "Well, American art began barely in 1917 with a men's urinal on a museum wall hung by a satiric Frenchman who as a pun called it art. It gave carte blanche for artists, which in turn started the school of art about nothing. It quickly caught on, as it didn't require an ounce of academic learning. In essence there has been no new art in America since the 1920s; nearly everything that followed in the following 30 years mimicked pre-existing art. Actually, more was written by critics about modern art than ever to explain it, who were more enamored with their writing than the art they were writing about." The conversation turned to students of art and what it takes to contribute to the world of art. Those who seek to become artists, Nodopaka suggests, should be "educated in preceding art movements . . . and include the study of humanities. I mean, why reinvent the wheel? Improving on it demands higher skills and pertinent creativity, not original creativity. Grandma Moses had her place in history, but it could've been nearly any of hundreds of other naive artists. It was the luck of her draw. Inventiveness is a different sort of creativity where the failure rate is greater and requires self-motivation to persist despite all obstacles. One must self-pleasure in one's achievement not just for the sake of the financial reward that may or may not accompany it. It's the satisfaction in a job well done that the sense of achievement is its validation and that must be instilled through education." What Nodopaka considers an adequate education in the arts and humanities seems like an overwhelming challenge, given decades of budget cuts to public school programs in the arts. Is there any possibility for a turnaround? Nodopaka isn't so sure: "I realized a long time ago that our culture is not supportive of the arts. Art in America consists basically in the selling of apples and potatoes (i. e. it is a strictly commercial enterprise). To have a cultural society/civilization supportive of the arts, it must be started at the grammar level, no least, and have at least two generations of parental similar background support to contribute to a child's development in the humanities. At best I speak of a select two percent that are presently art-savvy. We do not live in a culture 24 that allows art to be a career." Nodopaka benefited from family support himself, but he was also self-motivated. He said, "Thanks to my father, an architect-artist, who dragged me in every museum and monument of stature upon our vacationing in Europe from Spain through France, Germany, Italy to name only a few. However, I was an inveterate reader since a young age and massive reading during and past my schooling days." Do we see such self-motivation in the current generation? Nodopaka believes "it is abysmally disheartening that most college graduates read no more than a few books in their lifetime and I bet it's not art books to boot." We spoke of art students' self-motivation and sense of personal satisfaction versus expectations of financial rewards. When asked about his personal view of success, Nodopaka shared, "My greatest artistic success has been to have relentlessly pursued the making of art in many of its forms in spite of financial or critical setbacks. I was always a self-motivator and my livelihood never depended on making art except for a two-year period of my life when it became an absolute bore to deal with commercial demands. I never was cut out to be a peddler." To reiterate, Nodopaka is fearless-his art comes first. But not everyone has a handle on the secret of existence like Nodopaka. Do students of art in America today perhaps give up, or give in to commercial temptations, too easily? Nodopaka offered this viewpoint: "I don't think art students give in; they expect a six-figure income right off while other artists give it away. Art for art's sake is not for the feeble of heart bent on even poverty level living. So much for commercialism unless you're executing company graphics art 8 to 5 for a paying employer. Not that bad of a deal, remember Leonardo?" What about passion? Does anyone know what that means anymore? Nodopaka does: "As for passion for art, it goes back to our youthful years. If we are not exposed to it in school, home and public places, including at least some weekly TV art programs, there's little hope for any audience. The dilemma is inside a squirrel cage. We start spinning for nothing and like gunning a car with the clutch on we get nowhere. Besides, by now after 55 years of nearly absent teaching in the humanities in schools, I suspect25 that much of contemporary art since then is about nothing; we lost our audience as long ago, and I admit it does take something called education. Nothing to sneeze at especially when one graduates with a $100,000 student debt. Of course they could repay it with one Pollock, but who needs more than one Jackson? Besides, one must be learned enough to distinguish the degree of nothingness, as Sartre might've said." Lost education. Lost art. Lost audience. Are we doomed? The conversation concluded with Nodopaka speaking of the future of art in America: "No, we aren't doomed anymore than the rest of the world was since New York snatched art primacy from Paris. But what if those Europeans hadn't come to the USA? As for the rest of the art world, their art simply became invisible. I mean, why promote anyone else but our own? As to who will be making decisions about future art in America: The same people who do art today and those who write histories of art (i. e. the most powerful nations of the moment). Who else writes history! Would a popular consensus be valid? If it were we'd still be at the cave art level, though, mind you, it took 25,000 years for it to be recognized as modern art. And if there were a popular vote, how legitimate would it be since we already discussed the paucity of art education in America. Forming an art Academy? It already has been done in America, France, Soviet Russia, Germany under Hitler-and all failed abysmally for taking politics into account instead of art. Art is as temperamental as an unpractical item. It just disappears from circulation. The definition of art has been as varied and impermanent as there have been makers of art during every historical life cycle. . . . I cannot speak for the next century about any particular nation, but I can speak for the next minute about the next minute of evolution. The international intercontinental advent of mass instant communication will cause art to meld through mutual influence. Ethnic original peculiarities will slowly disappear and chewing gum will become the art of the future. What will emerge will be (short-lived) fads."
1 Kandinsky's book Concerning the Spiritual in Art (1910)
Interview reference http://www.ajimagazine.com/issue-2-spring-2015.html
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