ART MATTERS: The Truth of Phil Sigunick

After 30 years, I didn’t expect that I could learn anything new about this artist, Phil Sigunick. Writing an honest piece about my closest friend has difficulties. Too often my responses to Phil begin with “how could you”, “give it a rest,” and “really, now, it’s time to cut your hair.” Seldom do I come up with “how did you do that?” So, this writing is somewhat about separation and honesty as a family, whether or not you have grown up together, live together, or share your lives in some small communal way. I confess that the quagmire of daily life blinds me, but I’d like to start at a garden he planted in 1985 in Cragsmoor, raising cabbages, beans, tomatoes, daikons, potatoes and about 75 other varieties of things to nourish body and soul. Friends came to see, in disbelief at the 3 foot diameter cabbages and fairytale bushels of eggplants, the longest scarlet runner beans on the planet, and at how our daughters head paled in size to the tomato she was eating. Oh my God became my favorite mantra. Because Phil was more interested in horticultural challenges and a mutually beneficial relationship he had with the soil than he was in the preservation of produce, we struggled through some stressful harvests, but ate better than you can possibly imagine.

But that’s not all. He needed to share his vision, like the painting he did recently of three chairs. His purpose starts with a “human presence heightened by 3 chairs.” Likewise, the spirit of the earth, the worms, the sun and the moon, the gardener and the picker joined hands in our daily salads.

Years later, Phil stands on his front porch looking at a looming and proud old tree, gazing at the landscape, hands in pockets. Rarely, if ever, does he paint or sketch from memory. He prefers visual directness; like he’ll miss something, and of course he probably would, because it is a one-of-a-kind moment, different than anything that preceded or followed it. So why is that moment so important? What’s special about the tree, or the way he uses his pastels, or the quality or rationale behind his (expensive) tinted paper, or even the thousands of sketches to achieve such a marvelous quality of line? The geography of his works provides comfort in it’s realism, but so what? A piece of fruit, a few peppers, lemons, squash are all clearly recognizable. A photograph would work. Or would it?

Here is the rip. His subjects mean something different to us all. Some are drawn to the eggplants (the ones in his paintings), some to his soulful or edgy landscapes, some to the colors and relationships within the work. We are invited to develop our personal narratives inside of his painted spaces. Phil Sigunick immortalizes his subjects and that’s good, I suppose. But, more than that, Phil’s aversion to euphemisms and “wrappings” is evident in his comment, “I want my differences to be recognized and valued”. Hmm. Self interest I wonder? But, I take it back. Phil’s art is a way to enter into the world of you and me: our painting, our differences laughter, and as Peter Beagle describes in his book about his cross country travels with Phil, the feeling of two scooters bound for the West Coast, our wind. “ Find a friend” says poet Naomi Shihab Nye, “who is so different from you, you can’t believe how much you have in common.” Phil is a seeker of truth – and wants you, the viewer, to know that he’s different. That means that you, too, are unique. And how I think he does this is by telling the truth – a constant and agonizing process of recognizing the spark, commonly referred as “the spark of truth”. I suspect he wants us to recognize this truth in ourselves and be part of the world with him so that we can, in Nye’s words, “figure out some really interesting things to do together.”

In Peter Beagle’s book, I See By My Outfit, There is this passage about the two 20 somethings, Phil the painter and Peter the writer, struggling mutual understanding: Phil says to Pete, “You have this idea that painting’s another world, you think it’s a totally different way of looking at things. It’s not. It’s just a way of making you look at things. I don’t think it’s much different from what you do…it’s unlearning everything you’ve been tahgt all your life about seeing….learning….with your own eyes.”

You probably guessed. I am married to Phil Sigunick. A guy who retreats from controversy when it doesn’t hit him broadside, knock him over and alter his perspective altogether. He has trouble with really sad movies. (But grizzly disgusting ones are okay.) He is not one of those fighting piranha types in his aversions to news headlines, genocide, the war in Iraq, ethnic wars, WalMart, internet domain wars, eminent domain and the likes. He just wants to figure out how things unify: “to make the subject (of his work) and the paper (manufactured tinted) fit.” – like a prince and a pauper, or a Rabbi and a Buddhist Monk, or frail lemons floating awry in a stolid landscape. And speaking of awry, I suppose he would rather let the red peppers and acorn squash talk about things like survival of the fittest or socio-political inequities than write about it.

Phil attended Syracuse University and the Boston Museum School. He was perhaps his own paradigm: the subject of a really cool book, a back-up guitarist in the West Village, a published songwriter, studied painting with the Soyer brothers, survived the East Village roaches, slept on nasty floors during a potter’s apprenticeship, invented BirdieMaster, a training device for golfers and more. His work is nationally exhibited. Watch for an exhibition in Stone Ridge, NY at the beginning of May, 2007.