Simply Red
July 2007
Grooms, however, is not a covert social commentator. It is simply that the giddy, multi-ringed
circus of quotidian big-city life enthralls him. So, too, with the newest paintings, it is not the stone towers with their battlements, buttresses and fluttering pennants that dazzle the viewer’s eye, but the animated two- and four-legged figures and their frenzied quest for a chimerical beast.
Born Charles Rogers Grooms in Nashville, Tennessee, the artist admits to an early fascination with the circus. “My grandmother lived close to the grounds where the tents would be set up,” he says. “I’d watch the circus trucks coming from Union Station. It seemed so liberating to see all these roguish outsiders invading us.”
Grooms’ father was fired from his job and forced into self-employment for two years, making copper bowls and ashtrays in the family’s basement. The exposure to resident artisanship had a stimulating effect on the future artist. “I realized you could create your own world in whatever quarters you had,” he says, noting that both his mother and father encouraged him to be an artist. “My family was like an audience. They always asked to see what I’d done.”
Soft-spoken and unassuming, Grooms’ only out-of-the-ordinary visible characteristic is his namesake red hair. His Tennessee heritage manifests itself in his warm Southern accent. When talking about one of his favorite restaurants, Nha Trang, a Vietnamese place, the words somehow come out sounding like “neu-tron.” His New York studio is on the ground floor of a desolate-looking building at the edge of Chinatown, just south of Canal Street, a perpetually bustling thoroughfare where one often has to walk in the gutter because the sidewalks are so jammed with avid shoppers and faux-designer merchandise. The location, Grooms says, “has been a tremendous influence on me. Canal Street attracts droves of people.
“I’ve done so many aspects of this neighborhood in my work,” he continues. “I get my hair cut in a Chinese barbershop.” One might surmise that fact from “Shave and a Haircut, Six ollars” (2003), depicting a light-haired Caucasian male in a crowded barbershop being shorn by a female Asian barber. Grooms’ delightfully hyperbolic pieces often do have an ironic edge. “I’ve been called a ‘benign satirist,’” he says. “That sounds like being a ‘kind boxer.’ Yet, it’s not impossible. I don’t try to take a point of view, I just accept what’s there.”
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“Sargent in 1925,” 2004, |
Born Charles Rogers Grooms in Nashville, Tennessee, the artist admits to an early fascination with the circus. “My grandmother lived close to the grounds where the tents would be set up,” he says. “I’d watch the circus trucks coming from Union Station. It seemed so liberating to see all these roguish outsiders invading us.”
Grooms’ father was fired from his job and forced into self-employment for two years, making copper bowls and ashtrays in the family’s basement. The exposure to resident artisanship had a stimulating effect on the future artist. “I realized you could create your own world in whatever quarters you had,” he says, noting that both his mother and father encouraged him to be an artist. “My family was like an audience. They always asked to see what I’d done.”
Soft-spoken and unassuming, Grooms’ only out-of-the-ordinary visible characteristic is his namesake red hair. His Tennessee heritage manifests itself in his warm Southern accent. When talking about one of his favorite restaurants, Nha Trang, a Vietnamese place, the words somehow come out sounding like “neu-tron.” His New York studio is on the ground floor of a desolate-looking building at the edge of Chinatown, just south of Canal Street, a perpetually bustling thoroughfare where one often has to walk in the gutter because the sidewalks are so jammed with avid shoppers and faux-designer merchandise. The location, Grooms says, “has been a tremendous influence on me. Canal Street attracts droves of people.
“I’ve done so many aspects of this neighborhood in my work,” he continues. “I get my hair cut in a Chinese barbershop.” One might surmise that fact from “Shave and a Haircut, Six ollars” (2003), depicting a light-haired Caucasian male in a crowded barbershop being shorn by a female Asian barber. Grooms’ delightfully hyperbolic pieces often do have an ironic edge. “I’ve been called a ‘benign satirist,’” he says. “That sounds like being a ‘kind boxer.’ Yet, it’s not impossible. I don’t try to take a point of view, I just accept what’s there.”
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