Interview with Jeff Jordan
- René Delacroix
- Jun 27, 2024
- 11 min read
Updated: Nov 1, 2024
Suggested soundtrack: The Mars Volta - Vermicide
We had the honor of having a nice chat with a true genius of contemporary surrealism. My generation fell in love with his work thanks to the covers he made for The Mars Volta, but his is a long path of total dedication to painting, half a century of constant career among giant chicks, mutant beings and fragments of oneiric visions. A journey that continues to generate fantastic imagery to this day.
As the master Storm Thorgerson said of him "...not any old Joe!".
You are known as a surrealist painter, but yours is a long journey, which began in an American Air Force station in Greenland.
Actually my journey started at age 4. My grandfather, who was my first hero, was a Sunday painter, and he inspired me to want to be an artist. I was class artist all through Elementary, Middle and High Schools. Most kids moved on to something else, but by the age of 6 I was already set on becoming an artist.
I joined the US Air Force in 1966, when the whole Vietnam problem started. I didn’t want to go to college, didn’t want to flee to Canada, so I joined up, hoping I could keep myself out of that whole mess, and I did succeed in doing that by enlisting. My first tour of duty was in Thule, Greenland, and that allowed me to slip through the clutches of that stupid war. Since I’d already had an overseas posting, I was ineligible for 1.5 years to take another overseas shipment, and by the time everybody that was behind me got shipped to Wherever, I only had 3 months left in my enlistment, so I was too Short, time wise, to get shipped again. The big Plus that also came along with that was that I spent a fair amount of time drawing, and by the time I was done with the USAF, I’d gotten pretty seriously into the beginning of my artistic journey wanting to do Underground Comix, which ended up not being where I was headed as an artist, but it was a start.
We are very interested in your relationship with music, being the author of some legendary covers (The Mars Volta, Protest The Hero, among others). Do you listen to music to paint?
I got hooked into the English Invasion in High School in the early/mid 60s, so music was always part of being alive for me, then and now. Beatle Mania was the beginning, though I wasn’t actually a huge Beatles fan. Right after them came the Rolling Stones, and those guys were the ones that moved things forward for me. Then came the Summer of Love—I was still in Greenland at that point, but was into it no matter what. I got done with my tour of Greenland, went home on leave, and the night after I got back I went to a Grateful Dead/Quicksilver Messenger Service concert, so that pretty much set the stage for me. By ’68 I’d passed the Acid Test and wanted to do dance posters in addition to wanting to do comix, but the comix part went away by 1972, when I started oil painting. It turned out I wanted COLOR, and loved the Surrealist painters. Began by emulating Max Ernst, doing my version of what he was doing with unconscious beginnings to paintings and seeing where it would take me. I always liked Dali, but my work never really imitated him. Even so, it was a profound thing for me to find I shared a Birthday with him, and that pushed me forward in spite of myself. I felt like I was in the right place at the right time, at least.
All the while I was listening to music. When I saw the Santana Abraxas album cover, their second album, painted by Abdul Mati Klarwein, THAT”S when I started wanting to do album covers, little realizing I’d get there eventually. My tastes then included most of the San Francisco bands, still loved the Stones, started listening to a lot of Jazz, including Bitches Brew, which I consider his peak, musically. Interestingly the cover to that one and some of his other albums were also painted by by-then Painting Hero, Mati Klarwein. I always preferred edgy music that went far beyond the Pop music most other people were into. That’s still true today. Now I’m an Old Guy—amazing how fast time flies—and that’s still where my tastes go, musically. Somewhere along the line I realized that most people, no matter what age they are, still think of themselves as being about 18 years old. At least it’s that way for me, still….
Long way around—to answer your basic question, if I’m painting, there’s usually some kind of music on the box. My tastes are all over the map. Rock, edgy Jazz, Punk, Noise, Ambient—I’m a HUGE Brian Eno fan, for instance. Right now my favorite band is probably Harriet Tubman, a Black power trio that’re undefinable, also people like Nels Cline or Sonny Shamrock. A lot of noisy guitar-based music generally not liked by many people.
As most fans will know, Storm Thorgerson designed the artwork for The Mars Volta's first two albums, but surprisingly, they rejected a proposal from him for the third studio album, Amputechture, and chose a painting of yours, permanently changing the aesthetic for subsequent records. Can you tell us about your artistic relationship with the band?
I loved Storms covers from the get-go, long before TMV (The Mars Volta) had come along. I now think he was something of an influence on my thinking. His visual concepts were ahead of their time, and I’m just an artist who learned a lot from him. By the time I’d done the Amputechture cover or shortly after that, his book, Taken By Storm, had come out. I was enough of a fanboy that I picked it up because of his amazing body of work. I have a LOT of Heroes—he’s just another one. Anyway, it was really interesting to see that he’d actually done 2 different concepts for Amputechture, neither of which I liked, and I can easily see why they weren’t accepted by Omar and Cedric. The real bonus in there for me was him saying, re the Amputechture album “At some point I heard I’d been replaced, not by any old Joe…” Which was ME! I was blown away! I thought that was very kind of him to say that.
It’s interesting, Octahedron just turned 15 years old. So the last time I spoke with those guys was ahead of the album drop. I understand. I wasn’t falling all over them to be Buddies, you know? I like both those guys, and really treasured their belief in what I do enough to use me 3 times. But their lives are so constantly on the go that it wasn’t anything personal when we lost contact. I was super glad to have had the opportunity to work with them. I’d been aware of them but had never heard the music. I saw the review of De-loused in the Comatorium in Juxtapoz Magazine, when that came out, and it was a good review, so I was interested in them just as a band I hadn’t heard. When their management contacted me I said YES, I’d let them use the Mutant for the Amputechture cover, then went to the local record store and bought Comatorium, Scab Dates, and Frances The Mute, the albums that were available then, and LOVED the music, so it was really great, my Big Break, as it was. I think their attitudes and mine were exactly right, perfectly aligned for those times. I can’t think of a band I’d rather be known for, for doing their covers.
What about Storm? Did you know him personally?
I didn’t know Storm personally, but he was still alive when I read that bit about myself in one of the comments he made re the failed attempts at the Amputechture cover. I sometimes wonder if he enjoyed what I did for TMV—one of those questions that will never be answered.
There are recurring elements in the imagery of surrealist art, I am thinking of Gonzalo Endara Crow's giant fruit, Magritte's doves, or more generally of dreamlike visions and graphic representations of states of mind, such as Max Ernst, Leonora Carrington or Remedios Varo. What element do you feel is distinctive to you?
The Big Mutant was at the beginning of the work I felt was Mine. Disrupted Scale is one of my recurring motifs. Usually giant creatures in some mundane background setting. My Curiosity painting really set things up for the next 20 years, as it turned out. At the time I did that painting there didn’t seem to be anyone else in that era doing anything like that, and I really ran with it until quite recently. Giant animals, humans, food, on and on. I’d been doing work like that for several years by the time I was approached by TMV management to do the Amputechture cover. Imagine my surprise to meet Sonny Kay, who was doing all the interior packaging for Volta albums. It turned out we were doing a lot of similar collaged images, sometimes mirroring each other in that we did several images that are basically coming from exactly the same place. Sometimes we were even doing the same thing at the same time. The difference was that he was doing his images digitally and I was doing mine the old-fashioned way—cutting stuff out of magazine pages, using acrylic mediums to adhere them in bound artist sketchbooks. If you haven’t already, check out his book Headspaces. He’s done a lot of AWESOME work in digital collage, and really, it seemed like we were the only ones in that weird little arena at that time, 20 years or so back.
One of my recurring images is the giant baby chicken that started with my Curiosity painting. A few years back I met a local guy by the name of Xeff Scolari, who is a Singer/Songwriter, the Mastermind and leader of a local band called Red Hot Shame. Xeff used the Curiosity painting for the first RHS cover, ever, and in the intervening years we’ve gone on to doing 4 album covers and an EP cover, and album #5 is coming up on the horizon. I never would’ve thought the baby chick would go on to having a whole series of adventures in the various RHS covers…..
Where do the creatures you paint come from?
In the early 1980s I became friends with John Pound, who was doing Sci-Fi book covers with a lot of robots in them. He’d make a robot with Collage, using mechanical image fragments of cameras, vehicles, etc., and it would become a robot. That was really impressive to me. At some point a few years later I was looking for a new direction, after going through my Max Ernst phase, using it up after 3 years or so. Then onto local landscapes, which also got used up after a few years, as well as other directions which came and went. So I decided to try collage for something new, and at the same time started getting into Picasso, doing my version of Cubist portraits. Did that for several years, through at least 3 different iterations of Cubism, then along came the Mutant, and soon after that the Curiosity painting, and then things really took off. It’s an amazing thing when you find out who you are, and those collage images became who I was.
Again, at that time, around 2002, nobody else I was aware of was doing work like that, and I didn’t meet Sonny Kay until around 2007. It was amazing! I’d been looking for many years, tried a lot of different things, and found myself at last. I had always wanted to do work nobody else had done before, and to some extent I feel like I succeeded Bigtime. And I’ve been VERY lucky to keep finding new thoughts. I never would’ve thought of myself as an original thinker, but I frequently see images done by other people, and sometimes one of my fans will send me an image—a giant chicken on Fukushima beach, where they had that nuclear accident, that more than one person has sent to me saying “This reminded me of you.” Needless to say, that makes me a VERY happy guy, though it’s weird being ahead of the curve like that. But I LIKE that!
Do you have any special creative process? How do you work?
I’d guess about 95% of my paintings are based on the collages I’ve been doing since late 1983. At this point I’ve done probably close to 4500-4600 collages overall. As I mentioned, I put them in bound artists sketchbooks with the black hardcovers. Currently I’m working on volume 26 of the collages. The thing I love about collage is that it frequently surprises me, takes me to places I hadn’t actually intended or thought of, which is what keeps it fresh for me. I have a dedicated collage table. It’s covered with piles of magazine pages, and often I’ll notice 2 pages side by side that become another image. I try to avoid any preconceptions about what I might do, which also aids the surprise element. However, I’ve done so many collage images that at this point they’ve become fewer and further-between, since I also try to avoid as much as possible repeating myself too blatantly. Sometimes a variation on something I did before will take whatever thought that led up to an actual collage to a slightly different conclusion. I’m OK with that, but I do tend to avoid outright repetition. I believe collage is the most important method of creating images in this time we’re in. Also, times are already so surreal that collage seems to be what best represents the world we live in today.
You have been painting for over half a century, what do you think are the main differences between being a painter in the 1970s or being a painter today? Is it better? Is it worse? How do you see it?
I’ve been painting for 52 years and counting as I write this. Like everybody else, I went through a lot of different “isms” before I found what I feel best represents my own outlook on life. About half of what I’ve created over the years was more or less dipping my toes into one type of creation or another while I was trying to figure out just who I am, both as an artist and also as a human being. Certainly there’s a difference between wanting to do some form of art without being committed to one or another school of thought, and I’m glad I took my time finding out what all that meant to me.
At this point in my life, age 76 years, I’ve scratched most of those major itches you get when you’re trying something new, and to be honest, it isn’t as exciting right now as it was before I’d covered as much ground as I have 52 years later. It’s no matter, because I keep finding new thoughts and different ways to go I hadn’t thought of before, just not as frequently, now. Everything I’ve done in the past leads me to new ideas, and I’m not the type of person that’s content to just paint something that “$ell$…….so every day I wake up could lead me to yet another interesting thought I hadn’t had before. Every day is a treasure, and has the potential for new surprises, and that’s where it’s at, for me. In other words, I’m still excited about whatever might come my way, and glad to have a fairly solid history to share with anyone who might be interested in it, but just not quite AS excited as when I had no idea where events would take me. I’ve had a lot of fun doing what I’ve done, and in all honesty, FUN is my major reason for continuing on.
And what about the new technologies?
I’m Old School. I have zero interest in digital stuff at all. I can do what computers can’t do, and lately I’ve been noticing that so much of the AI imagery I see reminds me of what I was doing 20–30 years ago. So, in a way, technology is just beginning to imitate what I did without anything but my brain and magazine pages combined with increasing my oil painting skills. Because of that, I’m a happy guy! NFTs? WHY would anybody pay big bucks for a handful of electrons? Buy a painting from me, MUCH BETTER than a few electrons, and each one is different. The next big thing isn’t always that interesting. I believe traditional skills are still the best, and will endure when fads come and go.
Final question, what is your Gold Egg? the most precious thing in life.
My Gold Egg is having had the chance to do exactly what I wanted to do for many years, now. Sometimes, when I’m being an asshole, I ask someone what they’d do if they could do ANYTHING they wanted to. I’ve been doing that for a long time, now, and hope to keep at it as far as I can go in the future.
It only remains for us to thank Master Jeff Jordan from the bottom of our hearts for his willingness to share his thoughts with us and especially for his undeniable contribution to surrealist art.
His work is already part of history. We highly recommend following him on social networks to stay up to date on his latest creations, and who knows, add an original Jeff Jordan to your collection (Highly recommended investment).
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Jeff Jordan Interview
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