For Loren Connors' "Night of Rain"
Text by Aki Onda
There was a time, more than a decade ago now, when my wife, Makiko, and I would regularly visit Loren Connors' apartment on Henry Street in Brooklyn Heights. On the weekends we would spend a couple hours together, mostly just chatting; occasionally the three of us were joined by Loren’s wife and collaborator, Suzanne Langille. The primary purpose for our visits was to document Loren’s life through my camera lens; however, our long-term friendship, which started in the late ’90s, rendered these visits highly spontaneous. Depending on our mood, we would go to museums to see his favorite paintings, Jackson Pollock’s and Mark Rothko’s among others, or take a walk in the historic neighborhood of Brooklyn Heights.
His apartment, which is in an elegant nineteenth-century Italianate building, is small and humble; with its sparse and simple furniture it feels a bit like a monastic cell. Not much sound reaches the apartment, other than the noises of the city coming from afar, and stillness hovers. Through a window, though, one can look out at beautiful trees on the patio. The apartment is also Loren's studio, where he has produced much of his music and visual artwork over the last several decades since the couple’s move from New Haven in the summer of 1990. His guitar is often left on a black leather sofa, a small amp on the floor, and his drawings and paintings are hung on walls or, more often, rolled up and left in a corner.
It was there, around the late aughts, where I witnessed the production of "Night of Rain,” a series of drawings now collected here. The images look abstract but Loren describes them as “seascapes, or expressions of the sea and shore. [They are] about the power of rain and the sea, lagoons, bays, tides." The original drawings in pencil and black ink pen on paper are all very small. Loren would bring these originals to the Kinko’s at the corner of Court and Montague Street, close to the apartment, and copy them at a larger scale. This copying was often repeated multiple times as the pieces continued to grow. Once copied, he would draw on them some more, then copy them again, and again, until he reached hold of the final image he desired. The size eventually could swell to 8 x 6 feet, one is 12 x 3 feet. When we visited, Loren often showed us the latest versions. Since his apartment was too small to unfurl them, he would spread them in the common hallway or in the building’s marble lobby, his neighbors staring at us. It was fascinating to see the images get both larger and more detailed along the way. However, as he worked exclusively on ordinary copy paper, the final works were not durable and easily wrinkled and ripped. Therefore, Loren always considered the digital images as the "originals.”
Artists tend to learn from their mistakes. Loren started another series, “A Coming to Shore,” around September 2021 and completed it just recently. These were painted with acrylic paint on stretched canvas—more formidable materials than the ones used in “Night of Rain.” Describing the works, Loren tells me: “They all have the feeling of horizon, but not all of them depict horizons.” To me, they arrive like a scene you saw decades ago, a vague memory pulled back from the void. When asked about their history, Loren continued: “In a way, I started this series in 1970, when I first began painting. None of those paintings exist anymore. I took it up again in the early 1990s, with a series on canvas called the ‘Genesis’ paintings, which also don't exist anymore. About seventeen of the "A Coming to Shore" images exist as paintings. The rest exist only as digital images. When I run out of canvas, I just start painting over what I already did. I guess I better stop doing that.”
Where did those images come from? It’s obvious that Loren—who is now seventy- two years old—absorbed the essence of the New York school of Abstract Expressionism when he was young. Works of painters such as Mark Rothko, Barnett Newman, Jackson Pollock, and Franz Kline have been a source of inspiration for both his visual art and musical practices, which, at their fundamental level, hold an abstraction of form and an emphasis on personal emotional expression. An explicit reference to these influences can be glimpsed on his album Blues: The “Dark Paintings” of Mark Rothko, originally self-released in 1990 and formally reissued on Family Vineyard in 2015. As a musician, he started absorbing blues at the beginning of his career in the ’70s as he continued to establish a highly singular and idiosyncratic musical style over the following decades. This is one of the crucial and more revelatory albums in his repertoire, as it captures Loren shifting blues-oriented music into his own original forms. Though working outside the realm of Abstract Expressionism, another important early influence on Loren was the Cleveland-born sculptor and educator Michael Skop, a student of Croatian sculptor Ivan Meštrović (in turn a pupil of Rodin), who Loren studied under in his college years and after graduating as Skop continued to give him one-on-one mentoring focused on his painting. In totality he considers his art: "an outgrowth of Abstract Expressionism ... infused by the teachings of Skop.”
However, even with his influences identified, something still puzzles me. There is a mystical quality in his art. When I see his paintings, they suggest seeing what's beyond the surface. What’s there? I’m still not able to articulate in words, but it touches the deep end of the human psyche. It reminds me of what Rothko's late paintings suggest, but they’re not quite the same. This mystical quality, I believe, separates his work from any throughline in art history and its pre-existing discourses. Maybe this quality is what was borne from the isolation that marked much of his life and his sense of severe detachment from what people referred to as “reality.” Loren was diagnosed with Parkinson's Disease in the early '90s. Rather than spelling the end of his practice, however, the diagnosis reminded Loren that his time was limited and motivated him to work harder. Every morning, he would record his guitar with his 4-track tape recorder. Then, in the afternoon, he would go for a walk exploring the city. In recent years, his routine has shifted: he explores the city in the early morning and paint on canvases in the afternoon. In any case, his life continues to explore and at times celebrate a sense of isolation, a cosmopolitan hermit. His visual work, much like his guitar, doesn't seem like anybody else’s—a singular and distinctive voice with a sense of urgency and magic.
Loren Connors’s book "Night of Rain" was published from Recital in 2022