I first saw Paul Madonna’s work as I was browsing the campus book store – it was a tan coffee table book on a small stand and aptly named All Over Coffee. In scanning the book I found that Madonna published once a week in the San Francisco Chronicle.
The cover of All Over Coffee is a drawing of some San Francisco panoramic dense shadowed buildings framing Alcatraz the bay and the east bay hills. Standard right? San Francisco scenes are a dime a dozen – but there is something subtle about Madonna’s work. Expressive through simplicity the lines of Madonna’s buildings just shake and undulate so that the eye is not quite sure of the abstraction the artist is suggesting.
Or whatever. How does one write about art? I know when I like something but I don’t always know why. Putting art into words is hard almost impossible and usually makes the art sound lame and the author sound pretentious.
From an Entertainment Weekly Review of Madonna’s All Over Coffee: “Does It Deliver?
The relentless Zen stillness sometimes turns arid in Paul Madonna's All Over Coffee but even tiny variations (like flashes of colors other than latte-ring brown) seem bracingly quirky. B+” What the hell does “bracingly quirky” mean? In the course of reporting and producing this story a few of my editors kept asking simply why? “Why Paul Madonna? What is the story here?” And in response. I would just show them Madonna’s book as if that were self-exclamatory.
Yes. I am fascinated by artists. It’s not just the work but the fact that it is simply work. I believe that anything someone does for a living is a story in itself because it’s a story everyone can relate to – but making money with one’s art seems rife for tension within the soul.
What are artists shooting for? Fortune and fame? Greatness? What would we consider a successful artist? Is it someone who makes a living by making their art? Do we measure success in increments of money or increments of fame?
Paul Madonna is steadily achieving all these facets of success – but the hook and the angle to this story (in my opinion) is that an artist set their goal worked hard and made it.
Paul Madonna never wanted to be anything but an artist. He and his friends (who he called the art geeks) used to crash college art classes at Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) in his home of Pittsburg. PA. Madonna said he wanted to go to the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) but his parents encouraged (demanded) him to apply to other schools. Madonna was accepted to RISD but was offered a “pretty sweet deal at CMU.”
“It was a mix of traditionalism and modernism,” Madonna said of CMU. Madonna had originally wanted to be a painter but said he didn’t enjoy all the studio time. As he was trying to get ideas for paintings. Madonna would scan his notebook. He said three-quarters of his book was filled with writing and the rest with drawing. “And this was all stuff that I was doing when I wasn’t quote-unquote working when I was just hanging out with my friends.” Madonna decided then that drawing and writing were to be his specific pursuit in the arts.
Madonna moved to San Francisco almost ten years ago. I asked him if he fell in love with the city when he came out because I sensed a passion for the city in his drawings. “I know I should say yes,” Madonna said. “But I was broke when I came here and trying to make my way. But I knew enough to come here.”
And so Madonna began – he said he used to pay $150 for rent (in San Francisco!) for what was essentially a common area room. He unhappily worked odd jobs but only enough to survive. “They used to call me ‘little-black-cloud,’” Madonna said of some of his co-workers.
Yes the compromise of the artist (and here I through musicians and actors under the umbrella of the word). To make a living pay the bills and try and pursue one’s passions is a dubious juggling act. Madonna’s commitment to being an artist was total – he made small graphic books and left them (for free) in coffee shops.
“In Pittsburg the café culture was starting to emerge around campus,” Madonna said and the coffee shop began to influence Madonna’s work. “It’s casual it’s a place where you can be public and private there’s energy going on there there’s people there’s ideas there’s conversations but no one will bother you.”
Madonna’s first “baby” was a graphic novel something that when reading the afterward of All Over Coffee seemed to drive him slightly mad: “The plot and outline were all down on paper but when I began scripting it turned into a monster. With every scene two more were added. And each decision caused the last three to fall apart. I began distracting myself while in the studio which drove my crazy. I feared I was becoming one of those artist who only wanted to make art not one who actually made any.”
All Over Coffee first emerged as Madonna created cartoons submissions for MisterSF com. Madonna slowly created a strip absent of characters and with snippets of dialogue that often resembled over-heard conversations or ribbons of thought. He got a website and eventually submitted All Over Coffee to the Chronicle.
“Most cartoon submissions seem to revolve around a penguin,” said Nanette Bisher the Deputy Managing Editor of the Datebook section of the Chronicle. “And I opened Paul’s [submission] and it was these beautiful city still-life’s and this rather unique writing. We called it Haiku and we loved it.”
Madonna immediately got a job with the Chronicle. “I had read stories about authors getting their first book contract,” Madonna wrote. “ and all had in common a sense of frozen time. When I listen to that message. I felt out of my body as if I were looking down at myself at that moment.”
Madonna first appeared in the Chronicle four times a week. “We nearly worked Paul into an early grave,” said Bisher. Madonna said that he’s gotten “really good,” and very confident with the amount of work and the deadlines the Chronicle gives him. Madonna’s strip is now a weekly attraction in the Sunday Datebook section.
An artist makes it. Is it wild. Andy Warhol fame? No. Is it mad depressing Van Gough infamy? Thank goodness no. An artist makes his living with his art. “I’m pretty psyched to be able to pay the bills,” Madonna said. “Pretty cool.”
But what of art? How can it be put into words? The last time that myself and photographer Sandra Garcia met with Madonna he invited us to take pictures and speak with him as he was working on a drawing just around the corner from his Mission District apartment. We approached the sight. (Madonna sporting a fedora and cargo shorts).
“Ok here we go,” Madonna said as we stopped at a completely unspectacular spot in the alley of medium sized apartment buildings. Seriously. I thought. Surly San Francisco had a thousand more spectacular scenes to offer. But as Madonna set up his table and unveiled I the drawing he’d been working on. I saw it!
Madonna buildings and lines were puffy looming and pushed abstractly overhead. The buildings and the street were unquestionably the same just exaggerated. Yes here it was before my eyes – an artist’s perspective an artist’s interpretation of a scene.
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Related article:
http://xpress.sfsu.edu/archives/arts/009683.html
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