The Joy of Painting Saddam

Photo by Garik Gyurjyan "I feel like I'm picking up the people that have fallen off the creative cycle, with the more intangibles of artmaking, and painting in particular — jumping into that fear of failure." John Kilduff is getting prepared to shoot back-to-back episodes of his cable-access show Let's Paint TV in Adelphia's tiny, less than state-of-the-art studio in an industrial neighborhood in Eagle Rock. There's not much to setting up — he spreads a dropcloth, dumps out his paints in a big pile, puts up a blank canvasboard and positions the little white cake that will be the subject of today's painting. Dressed in his trademark crumpled and paint-stained Brooks Brothers suit, Kilduff — a gangly, balding, charismatic 30-something — seems only slightly wired in spite of the fact that his program is unscripted and unrehearsed. But after 150 episodes, it's not surprising that there's a bit of matter-of-fact routine even to the most improvisational of TV shows.

Of course, that's not such a rarity in the world of cable access, home of the insane rant and the sprawling, self-indulgent variety show. When I first saw Let's Paint TV, I was almost certain that this was a clever parody of the Bob Ross tradition of painting programs, perpetrated by some CalArts performance or video graduate who had never touched a brush in his life. Kilduff's tone is slippery and a little sarcastic, and he was doing a portrait of some kind of rowdy street freak (probably another cable-access host), using what appeared to be an enormous house-painting brush. Later shows introduced a very peculiar array of models and still-life objects — 99-cent-store toy insects, a clown dressed as Uncle Sam on stilts (who chased the artiste around the studio), a thrift-store ceramic bust of JFK and, for four entire episodes, a potty-mouthed Saddam Hussein brought in to experience the rehabilitative power of painting practice. It all smacked of prankish subversion. The problem was, Kilduff was too good. In spite of the zany antics and rough-hewn, possibly naive expressionism of the images, you could tell this guy had pushed some paint around.

And the more I saw, the less frivolous it seemed. I also experienced the unusual sensation of agreeing with most of what Kilduff had to say about painting. At least I'm pretty sure I agree with it — Kilduff's stream-of-consciousness play-by-play can become seriously fragmented, studded with malapropisms, mixed metaphors, and shaggy dog stories that trail off into the ether. Yet underlying this lurching banter is a cheerful determination to entertain and inform and get to the other side of the 28 and a half minutes. "Just throw down the paint!" is his mantra. "Block it in. Squint. Use a rag. And try to have fun. We at Let's Paint TV want to encourage you." This gives his performance the same kind of improv buoyancy that makes his paintings so authentic.

As it turns out, this confidence comes from having painted most of his life and now finding himself in the unusual position of supporting himself with his artwork. Raised in Oakland, Kilduff took art classes throughout his childhood and migrated south to attend Otis in the mid-'80s. There, in spite of studying with postmodern artists such as Mike Kelley, Roy Dowell and Carol Caroompas, Kilduff perversely insisted on pursuing his interest in the quintessentially early-Modernist practice of plein-air, on-location painting — a practice that, despite its pivotal role in freeing the Impressionist painters from academic strictures, has become an invisible substratum, an embarrassment to the mainstream contemporary art world.

But plein air embodies a category of artmaking (alongside the still lifes and posed models that make up Let's Paint TV's repertoire) that isn't available anywhere else — a complex improvisational relationship among the painter, the subject and the canvas, enacted in real time, unscripted and deeply rooted in the human body. And it has its adherents — thousands and thousands of them, particularly in California, whose landscape-painting tradition continues to support a vital and lucrative parallel art universe with its own galleries, collectors, magazines and art fairs. These fairs have allowed Kilduff to avoid a real job. This year he'll be peddling his wares (including his elaborate shaped canvases with three-dimensional elements — an approach he's tired of but that's a hit with art-fair regulars) at 15 such venues, including this weekend's 52nd annual Sausalito Art Festival, ranked the No. 1 art fest in the country.