Paul Chelko
I Live In Love
Atlanta Citymag - Feb/March
by Jon Cooper
Paul Chelko is a man of the moment.
That isn’t a way of saying he’s all the rage in the current art scene — although in a career that spans more than 45 years, that distinction surely has been his. No, he is literally a man of the moment. This specific moment.
“I don’t think we need to have any emphasis on what I said a moment ago, a year ago or 30 years ago,” said the 74-year-old Chelko, who was born in England and raised in Scotland. “What might be viable is what we bring forth in the moment in a creative act together, which calls upon us to continually be present in that moment. It’s like keeping it clean and creating it from nothing until something shows up. Creating something truly shocking, astonishing, beautiful.
“What is possible? If I’m willing and open to approach it as an invitation for it to express itself through me, what is it that I might bring into existence that has never been here before that could possibly touch people, including myself, in a way that truly moved the moment?”
A digression is necessary here to catch everyone up to this moment. Chelko, who has been a vital presence in the Atlanta art scene for more than 40 years, is world-renowned for his abstract painting, ultra realism, portraiture, performance art, music, poetry and film. His art has graced such places as The High Museum of Art and The Smithsonian Institute.
He has taught at Emory University, The Quinlan Art Center and Massey Junior College, is a former member of The White House Art in the Embassies Program and was recently appointed the official artist for The Annual National Charity Awards Banquet in Washington, D.C. His art appeared in the 1992 movie “Freejack” and is in the collections of the late Frank Sinatra and Vincent Price, former Atlanta mayor Maynard Jackson, former Senator Max Cleland and Coretta Scott King, among many others.
That’s why it’s news when the man who has fought off cancer three times and has not granted an interview in 15 to 20 years lets his guard down and invites a member of the fourth estate to his gallery in Decatur.
Those who know him understand and appreciate the vibrancy and positive energy flowing from Chelko, as he truly lives for now. While others may label him as flaky or derisively as “an artist,” that’s OK. Chelko takes the “judge not lest ye be judged” philosophy very seriously and brings it to another level. To him, it’s more like “judge if ye want but ye shall not be judged by me.”
“You can be any way you want to be with me,” he said with a laugh. “I gave up my seat on the judicial bench of life.
“I think I reached the highest level that I could operate on creatively, as a creator and a communicator, when I gave up needing you to understand who I was or what I was attempting to explain, define or bring into existence,” he added.
“The need to be understood lives concurrent with the need for approval and acceptance. So when I gave that up, you no longer were being held hostage in the relationship with me in as much as you understood what the fuck I was talking about, there was going to be this kind of something missing between us. There was going to be something that wasn’t complete.
“So when I gave up needing you to be a certain way and I just allowed you to be just exactly who you are and who you’re not, and I communicated to you knowing full well that’s who you were in that moment was being shaped and formed by the story I was making up about you, that I could keep you small or I could speak to you as if you were a divine being and as if there were no longer any limitations on you that had their origins over here with me. You had the freedom to be and within that freedom to be, you and I could create something extraordinary or something beautiful because you were no longer being held hostage by my judgments or my evaluations.”
This freedom from judgment allowed him to move beyond the boundaries of expectation, giving his life and art a deeper passion and allowing him to discover a truer, deeper love in others and in himself.
“I’m reluctant to use the word ‘judgment,’ because the relationship I have with myself is extremely gentle, extremely kind and extremely compassionate. In other words, I love myself unconditionally, and when you love something enough, you will give up all of your secrets. I have no secrets. There is nothing I won’t do publicly. I have nothing to hide. I live in love, and I live simply for the world to be in love with me.”
Chelko learned that gaining that love comes at a price, and once he paid that price, he was able to truly become who and what he wanted to become.
“I tried to fit. I tried to belong,” he said. “I just wanted to be able to hang out and get down with the people and the folks and talk about little league and all that shit. But guess what? I can’t do that. I don’t fit. I don’t belong. To even attempt to be sane is even more insane. So I was finally able to accept myself.
“The creative act was no longer being curtailed by a past, a present or a future, or any of my judgments or evaluations as to whether they were right or wrong, good or bad. I was in that act and immediately transferred into a whole new system of reality, and a world of opposites no longer existed and no longer curtailed who I was in the act of creation. I was free. I was free to be in love.”
The act of creation, while free, was still fraught with complications, and the vision was not always solely his own. Inspired by the beauty of women — one of his most striking pieces is “The Three Faces of Eve” — Chelko admits to drawing inspiration from a twin sister who was lost at birth, but “who lives in my life. There is no separation. She is the female counterpart to my masculinity. She lives in the eyes of all of my art and behind my eyes.”
Chelko’s conflict in the vision behind his art frequently transferred to the canvas.
“Every time I did painting, I would do three paintings,” he said. “There was the one I was going to do, the one I did and the one I should have done. Then one day, I started choosing it the way it is. Choose it the way it’s coming down.
“In that moment, I rediscovered nothing, because I have no past to compare it to nor do I have a past that I could wander back into and hide out in an attempt to piece together maybe enough acceptable pieces and fragments so that I could come up with a slightly better identity that suits me at the moment. Nor was I off in some projected fantasy future seeking the Promised Land. So it was a problem discovering for me and uncovering who I was and the truth as to who I am as a human being.”
Discovering himself meant leaving an important part of himself, his past, behind.
Chelko believes the artistic heights he has reached no longer matter, and there’s no need to remind him that “you can’t take it with you.” He is about one thing and one thing only: love. Besides, whatever fortune he should leave behind is earmarked for the recently established Paul Chelko Foundation, which is dedicated to the empowerment of women.
“I’m not in it for the money,” he said. “If I learned anything, I learned in a very brutal way, if you love something enough and are passionate enough, you’ll never have to sell it. Everything you touch is imbued, permeated with that love, and it shines and it’s elegant as in the truth.
“I can’t get enough of that stuff. It’s called magic. I’m the purveyor of magic. I’m a magician. Not a painter, not an artist. I’m not any of these conventional historical labels. I deal in magic and beauty and life and love. I never really discovered who I was as a magician until I met my wife, who died. We were together for 31 years. She was my favorite love, Debbie.”
Debbie, his fourth wife, is the one indulgence into the past Chelko allows himself. It is a magical love story. They met at a party he threw one summer in his cottage in Nantucket, Mass., in the 1970s. She came to the party with a good friend and — as Chelko would later find out — said on the way out of the party that she knew she was destined to be Mrs. Paul Chelko No. 4. Months passed. While he longed for her, she searched for him but could not find him, thanks to his unlisted New York phone number.
They next talked on the phone by chance a few months later, when he was making an airline reservation to Atlanta and she was taking the reservation for Delta Airlines. They met again at a party he threw in Manhattan later that year and an unbreakable bond was formed. They married and were together until she succumbed to leukemia in 2005.
Chelko, an admitted philanderer and junkie prior to their bonding, made the choice to sober up and be faithful to the end, nursing Debbie and staying by her side until she died. His soul mate rocked his world and turned everything upside down.
“Before I met Debbie, I was always in denial of who I was, but Debbie wouldn’t allow me to continue living that kind of a lie,” he said. “One day, I got the commitment. I got her commitment. And in that moment, I was moved and touched and inspired and altered in a way that was irrevocable. I couldn’t believe that someone could care that much about me. But it wasn’t personal. What Debbie was committed to was the love that she saw within me. It was love seeking itself, and in that moment, we began to experience freedom in our relationship unlike anything. We were free to be with each other and it was beautiful. I got my life back forever.”
Since Debbie’s death, Chelko has continued his creative process, writing poetry and producing books of his line drawings (his latest is a series of line drawings and poems entitled “Auditing the Weight of Skin,”).
It’s part of a continuing challenge to push himself creatively, something he feels is sadly lacking in today’s society.
“It’s like no one takes responsibility for their intelligence because they’re afraid that if they do that, they’re going to have to deal with something that might be a little outside of what they already know,” he said. “You know what scares me more than anything else in the fucking world? What I already know. That scares the shit out of me, because it’s seductive as hell. It’s comfortable. It’s comfort, it’s seductive and it’s a lie. You see, who I really am is what I don’t know. So I am potential. I am not fixed. I am occurring. I am creative. I am curtailed only by how I limit myself in my relationship with my imagination.
“I think it lives potentially important in everyone,” he added. “It’s not for everyone. In my experience as an artist, as a creator, I have spent my life creating what I refer to as ‘doorways’ that provide people with an opportunity and an invitation to come through this doorway, into the house of being, and when one is present, when one accepts that invitation and stands in the house of being, one is then just naturally returned to that place inside where the truth lives and we recognize who we are and our own ability to create.
“Ideally, in that moment, the individual will begin to create his life as a work of art. So it’s like the paintings are just like stepping stones or star gates or windows or bridges to another reality in which all possibilities live, including human beings rediscovering again who the fuck we really are.”
Just as Chelko chooses not to look back, he refuses to look ahead to the future. He is invigorated, confident, defiant, in his continuing battle against cancer; he’s happily living in the present and determined to stay in it for a while.
“I know I’m going to wake up,” he said. “I choose to wake up the night before I go to bed.
“No matter how difficult my circumstances, no matter how much pain I’m in, no matter how fucking sick and tired I am of life and human beings, who really annoy the shit out of me,” he said with a laugh, “I’m getting up tomorrow morning. I’m going to get to tomorrow. I’m going to go for it one more time. But I’m going to go for something startling, astonishing, something that will take me beyond where I have always sought.”
http://www.chelko.blogspot.com/