Stretching the canvas, or the boundaries of time
In the narrow, dusty gallery at the Allston Public Library, a warped canvas stands blank and motionless behind pacing, anxious feet. Spitting curses, Markus Jaroslav Nechay traipses around the room with the gangly gait of a scarecrow. He’s got all the space and less of the time he needs: lengths of Nechay’s paintings hang off-kilter as he grabs about for pieces of the costume he should have already been wearing. As it stands, he’s a casual figure in loose, tattered threads, brimming with all the pencil lines he chose not to erase.
A wardrobe in tow of period wear and middle names, Nechay is racing to arrive to a place where time stands still. Through the peculiar craft of history reenactment, living in the past is something else: with his arsenal of raw, deeply premeditated paintings, he’s set the stage for his current alter-ego to merge their talents. His current exhibition, “Landscapes and Mindscapes,” is actually a collaboration between Markus “Surrealius” Nechay and “Washington Allston,” the pioneer painter whose namesake town can neither remember nor fully reproduce its refined inheritance.
It’s Halloween, but that doesn’t change much. Nechay, 45, makes sense of himself through the regular changing of outfits, and he’s pulling all of his theatrical strings in his opening reception. Fittingly enough, Washington Allston did a lot of his own initiating: pioneering American Romanticism in his imaginary landscapes, he was the first painter in America who didn’t paint portraits on commission. Today, Nechay’s audience has the privilege of watching Mr. Allston posthumously reproduce one of his masterpieces.
Also on display are Nechay’s trademark “mindscapes,” some of his newer pastel landscapes, and artifacts from Allston’s time. These are the earnest scratchings and hyper real hues of a self-proclaimed amateur: technicolor turbines flapping across an endless body of water, cosmic audiences beaming upon sketchy Homo sapiens reaching for original sin. Landscapes borrowed from the dreams of Dalà are newly disturbed with topographical limbs and corporate logos. Kept to the side are a few moody landscapes, what he calls his suburban grandmothers’ drawings. “They’re means to an end,” he says to an analytical friend. “Throw in – throw in a monkey wrench and a chicken bone. And maybe a dead salamander. There you go.”
Nechay and his ever-expanding family of artists, art-enthusiasts, and eccentrics all gravitate around these homegrown endeavors. He’s his own personal cabaret, but once a month they join in at the Whimsy Variety Show, which he puts on in various discreet locales. There’s a handful of them lingering around the canvas as Nechay hunches before the wall, turning away to yank on a canvas gentleman’s shirt.
Breath escaping, he’s trailing amazed, phantom growls behind him. Moccasin boots, ox skin pants, necktie, and top hat are pulled together in practiced style. Maniacally inspired, his thin poltergeist lips are permanently articulating something he’s got going on under a mane of scraggly ash-blonde wisps that embrace his crown out of careless habit. A green felt homemade coat completes the metamorphosis.
“Well then, my name is Washington Allston, and I was born on November 5th, 1779,” he begins, adopting a somewhat priggish affect. “I was brought up against all the slaves, and I was ah, taking in, taking in the landscapes of the soil of the south, yes, and then my father died. My father was a member of the Marion’s army as was illustrated in the ah, Mel Gibson movie, The Patriot,” he goes on.
It’s kind of a rare opportunity to see him acting so informally, says Liliana Skrzypczk from within the audience. “He knows how to perform, but in a social setting he’s very genuine.” Skrzypczk, 45, is Nechay’s bridge to his Polish roots. They’re cousins, though they’re not. Nechay, who was born in Krakow, reimagines his origins through Skrzypczk, who was looking for an “in” to American culture when she came here a few years ago. “He’s creating a kind of energy – you can’t miss him, you know? That’s the reason he gravitates towards different kinds of people,” she says.
Nechay thinks he gravitated towards Washington Allston because he was the first of the American artists to go to Europe twice. “Somehow I identify with all those people that have been to Europe rather than people that have never been to Europe, right?” he proposes. One of the higher manifestations of what he calls his own “scatterbrainedness” is primarily this drive to breach the limitations of the physical body. Nechay’s philosophy is to live beyond one’s time.
“He’s distracted easily, but he knows that,” says Skrzypczk. “He has such a vivid imagination; he’s been driven in different directions. In many ways he’s like a child – going to the candy store and losing his mind.” Currently, his biggest problem is “masochism.” “I don’t even take myself seriously,” says Nechay.
Going full-time into art meant bowing out of a career that was quickly going corporate on his creative drive. Nechay was an architectural draftsman that was replaced by a machine, so he speaks. Since then, he’s been more or less his own ringleader, working on commission for various murals and signage he’s done for coin shops, lawyer’s offices, and taxi companies, among others. With few external limitations, he’s got his own self-imposed obstacle course to maneuver: “After you become the age of Washington Allston in 1816, [the scatterbrainedness] becomes more of a conflict,” he allows.
He’s got all the space and less of the time he needs. His current dwelling is what he calls the Markus Surrealius Museum of Creative Chaos in Central Square: “In this house, by horror haunted,” he says, quoting Poe with one chalky index finger in the air. Spouting off a laundry list of phobias, up to and including suicide, blindness, getting his right hand cut off for stealing, his eyes ripped out, and heart attacks, Nechay is afflicted with what
Skrzypczk calls “a bit of a Peter Pan syndrome.” “Right now, he’s trying to understand what it is to be immortal,” she says.
Nick Wyneken, 58, banded together with Nechay in the interest of the local art scene and its own immortality. “In the olden days kindred wild-men didn’t need formal introductions,” he says. Over the years they’d run into each other, “attacking each other’s galleries with totemic figures and Haitian idols. After the final yuppie invasion of the local art scene, we were forced like diminishing prairie tribes to band together,” says Wyneken, whose choice alter-ego is Larry the Lizard, an exploited reptilian Neanderthal with an interest in the occult and quality coffee grounds. Together, the two created their headquarters in Cambridge, the Zeitgeist, home to the Whimsy and various succeeding projects.
Nechay and Wyneken are both “history geeks,” but not to the exclusion of their relationship. Nechay and Skrzypczk taught Polish history to young teens last year at the Polish St. Mary’s Church’s Saturday school. While Skrzypczk did most of the lecturing, Nechay would carry on the playacting, putting together skits for the kids to act out. It resonated with them, he says, because they remember it better when they play out the roles. Skrzypczk says it was hard work, but she knew him well enough at that point to know how to manipulate his talents. “His ability is to go deep. He really tries to understand the other side. He’s like a sponge – he absorbs everything,” she says.
Wyneken mentions the vivid dreams they experience in alien places connected with the past. In his “old hitch-hiking days of the lawless 60s,” Wyneken once crawled off the Missouri Highway and into a field, where he was visited in his sleep by the confederate outlaws that, he later found out, took that route. Nechay has told of similar experiences “dozing deep in European ruins,” he says. “Once you tap [into history] you have a pure and endless spring source.”
Nechay’s taken courses here and there, and with luck, he says, he can “panhandle the government” and finish with a diploma so he can continue as a substitute teacher. “What [impresses] me is his instinctive knowledge of the most obscure,” remarks Wyneken. “He can rattle on about myths, military strategies and winter wear as though he were speaking from the field.”
Nechay, twitching a quill pen and referring to Napoleon “Boney”-parte like an old schoolmate, nears the end of his rant. There’s a tangible shift as he lapses into rehearsed delivery: “Patronage, patrition, patronage – it’s always the rich paying for one’s work. It was a battle at the beginning of my century; it was about, mm, the tyranny of convention.”
The thing with Allston is that he was painting whatever he felt like painting. And if there’s any lesson that Washington Allston had to give to Markus Nechay, he says, it’s to “spend time, out instead of just roaming around, just sit with a place. We don’t sit with what we see. We don’t take it in. These are landscapes, we are the end of an age – [do not] forget to smell the flowers.”
He stops for a second to observe his sentences hanging in the air, and just like that, it’s like he’s moving on springs again. He’s packing up and undressing, having saved the thought and taken it elsewhere. The exhibit closed last Saturday with a dialogue between Washington Allston and Andy Warhol, reaching high(brow) and low along the continuum of human potential.
