The Plain Dealer – cleveland.com, OH

Painter John Motian surprises himself as he sees where the paintbrush takes him

by Karen Sandstrom / Plain Dealer Reporter
Saturday October 11, 2008, 12:00 AM

Gus Chan/The Plain Dealer

John Motian works on "Karen’s New Dress," a painting he made over an
old junk-shop canvas. Behind him are some of the hundreds of paintings
he has done since the mid-1980s. An e-mail went out to Cleveland
artists several years ago from a young woman seeking someone to help
her father organize the paintings and drawings he had been making for
years.

Karen St. John-Vincent, a fine-art photographer, answered the call and
soon found herself parked outside the Union Avenue home of John
Motian. She figured she’d stop in for an hour and see what the job
looked like.

St. John-Vincent was greeted by Motian’s outgoing daughter, Rachel,
and by Motian himself, humble and a little introverted. She stayed
five hours. And it wasn’t just one world she fell into. There were
scores of worlds, drawn on paper and painted on canvases.

She found impressionistic landscapes full of color, portraits of women
sketched in pencil and charcoal, pictures of Jesus and images of the
crucifixion.

"Initially, I was overwhelmed, but it wasn’t that I wanted to escape,"
St. John-Vincent recalls. "It was that I wanted to see more. It almost
felt like a religious experience."

She came away with the conviction that other people needed to see
Motian’s art. Now they can. Thirty-nine of Motian’s paintings and
drawings on are view through Wednesday, Oct. 29, at the Gallery at
Brecksville Center for the Arts.

Though Motian has had shows of his work in the past — in his
hometown, Cleveland, as well as in California, where he lived for 20
years — it has been a while. And though the Brecksville gallery isn’t
exactly in the heart of any of Cleveland’s art districts, Motian hopes
people stop in for a look.

"That’s the trouble with me, I need the feedback," he says. "I don’t
get any feedback."

At 75, Motian brings a young man’s energy to his work. He rises in the
pre-dawn hours, brews coffee, greets and feeds Leche and Picasso, his
sweet, raggedy Pekingese-Maltese-mix dogs.

Then he gets busy in his studio — a south-facing living room in an
apartment above a defunct storefront.

Motian inherited the building from his late mother, Rose. Over the
decades, the street-level store has been a butcher shop, a church and,
more recently, a junk shop whose owners abandoned some of their
inventory. That included a "little kitsch painting," Motian says, with
a walnut frame worth preserving.

In the tradition of frugal artists across the ages, Motian has covered
what he says was a pretty bad landscape with an ethereal, almost
abstract painting that glows in colors of gold, green and
cream. Ghostly figures have emerged sketchily over the time Motian has
been working on the painting. It’s still not done.

The most distinct of the figures is perhaps more female-looking than
the others. Motian calls the painting "Karen’s New Dress," and says he
thinks that St. John-Vincent doesn’t know he has had her in mind as he
has been working on the piece.

"Karen’s the only beautiful woman I’ve met recently," he says.

And beautiful women have always been part of his inspiration.

But only part.

A life devoted to creating art

The son of two Armenian immigrants, Motian earned middling grades in
Cleveland schools but showed an early affinity for art. At around age
10, he borrowed a library book about French Impressionism. "I knew
then that I was going to be an artist," he says.

When he got older, he took classes at the Cooper School of Art, the
Cleveland Institute of Art and the Art Students League in New York
City. He served in the Army from 1953 through 1955, and took jobs in
labor and construction to earn a living while making art.

In 1966, he packed his car full of art supplies and headed to
California. There, he found other artists who inspired and mentored
him; met a woman he describes as the love of his life, who ultimately
moved back to her East Coast home; and had daughter Rachel and son
Noah with wife Nancy, to whom he was married from 1971 to 1984.

During those years, he did hard, physical jobs to make money — but he
lived to make art.

"I even told my wife, if it’s her or the art, the art comes first,"
says Motian, who admits the message didn’t go over well.

A year after his marriage ended, he returned to Cleveland to care for
his widowed mother, who died in 1991.

He also threw himself further into painting and drawing.

In the years since he moved back, he has filled his house with his own
work. Canvases, finished and mostly finished, are stacked against the
bedroom walls.

Most are representational, though some veer toward abstraction. He has
paintings that evoke van Gogh, Cezanne, Gauguin and Matisse, but
they’re always overlaid with Motian’s own sensibility.

"I’m unimpressed by photographic reality [in art]," Motian says. "I
want poetry, mystery."

Canvases filled with stories

A weekly attendee at Broadway Christian Church, where he says the
Rev. Mike Frank has become "my best friend," Motian describes himself
as a spiritual person who generally rejects religious dogma. And he
admits that he can’t quite figure out why Christ and the crucifixion
so often work their way into his compositions.

That is part of the mystery, and the mystery is a huge part of what
propels John Motian to his worktable each morning. When he starts a
new project, he simply begins to move his paintbrush or pen along the
surface of the paper without much of a plan.

With painting in particular, the materials begin to speak back. They
drive the next movement, he says, and they’re powerful.

"I make things with a lot of energy," he says. "That’s when I really
feel good. It reveals more and more."

Images emerge. Themes emerge. Ideas, half-articulated, invite the
viewer’s response rather than dictating it.

St. John-Vincent says she believes she’s so drawn to Motian’s art
because she loves stories, and his canvases and watercolors are filled
with them. They surprise her.

They surprise him, too. "I have to surprise myself, or I can’t work,"
Motian says.

These days, Motian’s daughter, son and grandchildren all live out
West. With his family obligations behind him, he greets every day as a
new opportunity to be surprised by the process of making art.

He even draws at church, where his hearing aids fail to pick up the
words of prayers and sermons. His friend, the pastor, gave him
sketchbooks to fill during services, but someone stole them. Motian
finds things to draw on. Almost anything will do.

The point of all that relentless passion is the delight of discovery:
What will show up as the piece is in process? What will show up when
it’s finally done?

But Motian doesn’t want the discovery to be his alone.

"I wasn’t that ambitious about money," he says. "I just sort of wanted
to be known. I need the approval."

He wants observers of his work to share some of what he experiences in
making it. Self-deprecating and angst-ridden as he is, Motian can
nonetheless look at his own work and find it beautiful.

He wishes viewers would, too. When they look at his paintings, he
says, "I like them to feel the way I feel."