Joe Letitia: Knoxville Artist

In this interview with Knoxville artist Joe Letitia, he shares his fascinating experiences as an assistant to world-famous artist Chuck Close, what brought him to a career in art, and a brief introduction to how he came to his current artistic focus.

It's important to mention that Mr. Letitia's art is portrait-oriented, and utilizes both negative space - which is the profile of the artist he is portraying - and a theme that calls to mind the work of the artist being portrayed.

These subtle approaches to portraiture lead to a pleasantly unique viewing experience: the more you look at his work from the perspectives he used to create it, the more amazing Joe Letitia's portraits become.

Knoxville Art Scene: What made you fall in love with art and pursue it as your profession?

Joe Letitia: In high school, it was the thought that I could possibly get paid for drawing the kind of random science fiction characters and scenes that I was inspired by in magazines like Heavy Metal, especially the detailed pen and ink work.

I went to art school at The Boston School of the Museum of Fine Arts, intending to go into illustration or graphic design. After a year in art school it was the experience of almost daily visits to the Museum of Fine Arts and the many other awesome museums like the Gardner Museum and the Fogg Museum in Cambridge - with its Van Gogh self-portrait with the shaved head and turquoise background that had the biggest effect on me.

But that influence was in conjunction with the experience of absorbing a big city on my own - at a school with no dormitories - and being surrounded by the many faculty and students, with all its diversity.

Like I said above, the Museum School doesn’t have any dormitories so I had to find outside housing, and I ended up living in a small room in Kenmore Square, right across from the big flashing red Citco sign that can always be seen in the background of Red Sox games.

The bands and the music scene in Boston were as much an influence on my ideas about art as my passion for post impressionist and expressionist artwork.

A large part of my experience in art school was starting a band and having those experiences blend with making art. At 19 years old I thought I had some kind of special coolness because Ric Ocassik, the singer from The Cars, gave me a knowing nod once when I walked past him in a local club.

But seriously, one of the most defining moments for me at the Boston Museum School was the Traveling Scholarship Exhibition that Mike and Doug Starn were in.

There was the beginning photographic works that they went on to gain recognition for, but also one of the twins did these enormous figurative paintings that blew me away.

And their studio loft was so cool the way they built the entrance to their dark room to mimic an off kilter cartoon entrance to a house… Somewhere between the conceptualization, the physicality, scale and craft /anti-craft in the Starn’s presentation, I became enthralled with the scope of what conotates art.

Knoxville Art Scene: How did you come to work with Chuck Close?

Joe Letitia: In 1989, I received my MFA from the Yale School of Art and Architecture. Because of my carpentry experience, nice people at the school found many ways to help me financially through frequent projects for the school.

I built a mantel and bookshelf system as well as a table for the Dean of the Art School, David Pease. David is a good friend of Chuck Close. After Chuck’s debilitating collapse of a spinal artery, which left him quadriplegic, he needed an assistant that could help him in the studio as well as to help him physically get around his busy professional and personal agendas.

He asked David to recommend someone living in NY who might need the job. David knew I had just moved to Greenpoint, Brooklyn, and gave Chuck my name.

Knoxville Art Scene: What was your experience like working with him?

Joe Letitia: It was a great experience in all kinds of ways.

At first I was star struck and terrified that I would say or do something stupid, but Chuck is the most genuine, understanding and giving person I have ever met.

He even took the time and effort to visit my studio in Brooklyn, and also visited the other young artists on my floor. I became very aware of just how inaccessible many places are when someone is in a wheelchair. And on the other hand, the magnitude of Chuck’s personality and talent can easily make one forget that he is inhibited at all.

Part of my job was to be instantly thrust into his life and family, to help him to do things that he would normally do on his own. I remember near the end of the first week I worked for him, I brought him up to his apartment.

It was perhaps the first time I was asked to bring him into his home, and it was at the end of a week of fumbling with my preconceptions of a famous artist and my larger than life images of him.

I remember wheeling him into his kitchen and looking at all the family pictures in the foyer. Pictures before his debilitation, pictures of him as a father and husband. All of a sudden I realized the incredible pain and hell that his family went through and was still enduring.

I have met so many artists, curators and writers through the social structure of Chucks daily life, from the late Kirk Varnadoe (Director of MOMA} to Julian Schnabel at his Montauk summer studio that was formerly owned by Andy Warhol.

No matter who or where I helped Chuck meet or get to, he always earnestly and kindly introduced me and never made me feel uncomfortable or insignificant. He always acknowledged me as an artist first and his assistant, and he made me feel like a friend and a part of his family.

I could always feel comfortable talking to Chuck about anything and lunches were one of my favorite times of the day. Lunch was usually referred to as “the executive decision of the day”. There definitely wasn’t a shortage of great places to pick up fantastic food close by to Chuck’s studio.

One of my other favorite things to do working for Chuck was to see the monthly change of gallery shows. If Chuck traveled to museums for various reasons, it was always a treat to be with him, and get the special tour of the collections by the curators and directors.

Knoxville Art Scene: Do you have a favorite story about working with him?

Joe Letitia: One of my favorite times with Chuck was when he brought me out to the small cemetery in the Hamptons where Jackson Pollack and Ad Reinhardt are buried. I made several grave rubbings. If Chuck knows you have a particular interest he was always terrific about sharing his experiences and antidotes.

Knoxville Art Scene: Did you learn anything from Chuck Close that you think is important to the business of being an artist?

Joe Letitia: The business of art certainly is the one thing I can’t seem to learn a damn thing about.

One of the things I admire about Mr. Close is that he has consistently made the art that has interested and engaged him, and never tried to sniff out trends. There is no other artist I know that has seen as much art, from the grass roots level to the most valued and historic works.

Knoxville Art Scene: Your work seems to be very organic - lots of natural shapes in natural materials. How did you come to your artistic niche?

Joe Letitia: In 1990, I was working on this enormous assemblage piece that was a portrait of my mother and father.

The photos of my parents that I chose to paint were taken when they were close to the age I was at the time. The whole thing was constructed out of many wooden elements, and within the actual portraits were painted wood grains, which echoed a kind of homespun early American décor.

The backdrop for the entire structure was three sheets of plywood. At some point I decided to try and paint the middle sheet of plywood to look just like plywood. I was struck by how much effort and patience it took to complete the panel so that it didn’t stand out from the two adjacent pieces and still be painterly when scrutinized.

When the piece was complete I was disturbed by the fact that no one ever noticed that the center 4’ x 8’ panel was painted. It was painted convincingly enough that the work of art disappeared.

It was a strange thing; because what at first bothered me became the most genuine art experience I’ve ever had.

The thing that I worked the hardest on received no attention. Wasn’t this antithetical to the whole purpose of making a painting? And if I was making a work that dealt with my identity, I was now overwhelmed with the concept of how the identity of both the actual piece of plywood and the paint itself disappeared into each other and questioned the apparent truth of an object.

This experience led to a series of paintings of plywood, on plywood. I used a fresco technique, covering the actual wood surface with plaster and then painted a new surface with an image of itself again. Someone once referred to the concept as a kind of “Emperor’s new clothes thing.”

In these works I only used earth tones and I have pretty much stuck to that palette with a few exceptions. The plywood paintings led to a series based on topographic elevation lines, which looked a lot like wood grain to me. Where the grain of plywood is like painting a layer of peeled skin off of one individual tree, a section of topographic information on a map depicts a large surface area covered with hundreds of thousands of trees.

When I moved to Knoxville in 1997 after doing a visiting artist residency at The University of Tennessee, I became a husband and father, and became engrossed in my new family.

During this time, I decided to try my hand at building furniture and woodworking. This led to working on a wood lathe, which brought me in the direction my work is currently exploring.

The turned objects I make - as well as the ceramic forms derived from them - still in a way explore ideas about perception and identity, using the profiles of artists that have been meaningful to me to create the forms I make.

Knoxville Art Scene: Do you have any aspirations for your art career in Knoxville?

Joe Letitia: I guess my biggest aspiration would be to do a project with The KMA someday.

Knoxville Art Scene: What shows do you have coming up?

Joe Letitia: I currently have some work at an International art fair in Basel, Switzerland, and I am in an Invitational Exhibition at the Ewing Gallery at The University of Tennessee called, “Unspoken Dialogues”, which will feature eight Knoxville-based artists.

The show is scheduled for August 1, with a closing reception on September 9.We hope you've enjoyed this interview with Knoxville artist Joe Letitia.

If you'd like to contact Joe Letitia about his art, you can do so using the form below.