All that’s missing from Jon Langford’s artworks at Eastwick Art Gallery is the sound of The Mekons and The Waco Brothers bands playing their respective punk rock and hard country music.
If you had attended the opening of his exhibit “Hard Country,” however, or if you now take home a CD of his songs on sale at the gallery, you’ll gain a fuller understanding of the guitar-strumming artist’s talents and inspirations. In the meantime, you’ll have to be satisfied with the pretend sounds coming from the guitar of a life-size Hank Williams painted by Langford on a gallery wall.
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Born in the working-class city of Leeds in South Wales and living in Chicago for the last four years with his wife, Helen, Langford has been influenced by classic country musicians as well as cowboys, both of whom loom large in American mythology as hardworking, sometimes anonymous, chroniclers and symbols of everyday life.
Langford’s 40 paintings, etchings and monoprints have been affected by still another factor. He grew up while Cold War politics hung over Europe, with the nearby Soviet Union’s power still dominating.
Yet while these influences seem disparate, they share the artist’s infatuation with the idea of the transience of fame, good and evil — and even life. In more than one canvas or etching, Langford poses the question whether success is a worthwhile goal or temporary high.
Sometimes, he hints at this idea. In “The Dollar Dress” oil painting, a woman wearing an outfit filled with dollar signs dances with a skeleton dressed as a cowboy. An angel suggests “No.”
In the etching “Hank Signs the Contract,” a record company mogul attired in a business suit chomps on a cigar while getting ready “to chew up and spit out Williams,” attired in Western wear, once the singer signs the contract, according to statements the artist wrote. Grouped near Williams on a desk are a skull hinting at Williams’ and all mankind’s mortality and the painkillers the musician took because of his undiagnosed spinal bifida. Williams died several months after being fired from the Grand Ole Opry.
“In his life, he was misunderstood. He suffered terribly and wasn’t a drug addict as many thought,” says Thomas Masters, co-owner of the gallery. “He’s considered one of the most highly regarded songwriters now, but during his lifetime he didn’t get the respect due him.”
Often, however, Langford is blunter with the messages written boldly in their canvases and/or their frames, such as “Cowboy Funeral,” an oil on board, which says, “I am just a simple boy who couldn’t keep up the pace ’cause in the world you live now for me there is no place.”
Stylistically, the paintings in oils, acrylics, liquid markers or combinations of media and the black-and-white etchings and monoprints are all rich, with faces depicted with great expressive detail and fussy backgrounds packed with a riot of his favorite icons such as guitars and cowboy boots.
Some paintings imitate an Impressionist-style pointillism distancing them from reality while others incorporate photographs and are painted over to convey greater realism. Some are quite whimsical, such as the 14 works grouped for “Wall of Cowboys.”
– Gallery owner Erica Judd of Eclectic Junction for Art has mounted a show of 11 artists who produce affordable works. She’s kept the price of works for sale to less than $800. The works on view (the show is titled “3D’s on Damen”) are three-dimensional and made from a variety of media such as metal, papier-mache or wood.
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“Hard Country” is at Eastwick Art Gallery, 245 W. North Ave., through Monday; “3D’s on Damen” at Eclectic Junction for Art, 1630 N. Damen Ave., is on view until May 4.