Christopher Noxon: So much color!

I can’t help it - I’m a maximalist. The room where I work is crammed with pictures and journals and tools and a hundred or so stuffed chickens.

The same is true of my paintings - they're jam-packed with brushmarks and scratches and drips and blobs and big bulbous clouds and curvy roads and boxy little houses and lots and lots of color. 

A few times I’ve tried to get serious and limit my palette to tasteful creams and beiges and big empty fields of nice muted tones but it’s no use - once I get going, the colors take over and all the spaces scream out to be filled up.

When people come to visit the studio, nine times out of ten they stop, take it in and say some variation of: “Wow - so much.” 

At this point they either scrunch up their face (their expression reading oh-so-clearly: NOT FOR ME), or start wandering around letting all this stuff do what it does to me. I love the feeling of super-saturation and world-building, the dreamy calm I felt drawing imaginary maps as a kid or the engrossed concentration of clicking together whole cities with multicolored Legos with my kids when they were little.  

Every once in a while, someone comes in and looks around and says with a conspiratorial wink, “Hey man - mushrooms? Or ayahuasca?”

I get it - there’s definitely a psychedelic, head-shop energy to many of my pictures. I’m not all that interested in actual physical reality. I try to capture what I think of as the thing behind the thing. I play with perspective and point of view, filling a single image with multiple vantage points and sources of light. There’s a reason a series of mine is called the Big Weirdies. 

The truth is I’m not into psychedelics. No shade at all to those who are. I’ve read the Michael Pollan books and admire those exploring deep reaches of inner and outer space with whatever tools that work for them. 

But the truth is none of my pictures were created with chemical assistance. I’m no fun on drugs harder than a good Sancere. Weed makes me anxious and insecure - every sentence ends with some variation of: “Do you like me?” 

After looking over the Big Weirdies at a recent show, a friend said with a wink-wink laugh, “I’ll have what he’s having.”

He’s welcome to it! What I’m having is fun.