This article originally appeared in the November 2015 issue of Louisville Magazine.
To subscribe to Louisville Magazine, please click here.
Beneath the house, the jungle. Green dangles and sways in artist Joel McDonald’s basement, in the “grow room” he built, the plywood structure containing heat, humidity, light — bright and brighter, reflecting the mirror-ish Mylar walls. Here, the beautiful, the carnivorous. The cephalotus plant grows, bug soup in its bulging belly. Others, many of Asian origin. Most ordered online by the “not-a-botanist”/“not-really-a-nature-man,” self-proclaimed.
With the jungle beneath his feet, at his back door (the jungle extends into the backyard, some species in claw-foot tubs), McDonald is always aware when something’s growing. New leaf sprout or, finally, a bloom. When he watches the plants grow, he remembers walking the Bullitt County woods as a boy, the smell of decay. He remembers the movie "The Burden of Dreams" and Werner Herzog’s rant: how the jungle is sex and disgusting and everything is rotting and eating everything. McDonald thinks of the cycle: an ending necessary for beginning. The tree that falls gives light for orchid to bloom. The purity there. The chaos.
The 37-year-old channels this chaos into his drawings. “I like compositions that are cluttered, that don’t flow,” says McDonald, whose new show — a mix of plants, drawings, quilts, sex, death, dreaming — will be Nov. 6-Dec. 28 at Zephyr Gallery in NuLu. Where’s Waldo? creator Martin Hanford inspires him. Usually McDonald’s drawings are large, detailed, sprawling. Sometimes the jungle lives in them. Almost always he represents some sort of hell. “Hell for me is confusion, self-criticism,” he says. (Beneath his bed, in flat-file cabinet drawers: the monsters. Failed ideas, hints of the occult, white-ink skulls, and a gesture drawing of the devil.)
He’ll draw in the front room of his Germantown home. The drawings can take 200 hours to complete, evenings spent bent over the drafting table. He’ll create his “psychedelic” panoramas section by section. He ticks thousands of tiny lines triangularly till his hands hurt. Says he’s tapping into the dream consciousness.
As a cure for the chaos, quilts. McDonald has quilted for a year now, taught by Mama and YouTube. With quilts, an ease into the simple: structure, minimalism, particular patterns, continuous stitch lines for extra strength. He uses this traditional craft to represent larger themes, matching blocks — the quilt-top patterns each with its own name — to these themes. Sex becomes “Young Man’s Fancy.” Dreaming a “Wild Goose Chase.” Death, “The Tunnel.” He adds his own designs in block corners: a concentric womb diagram, penises, hourglasses. Turns the practical perverse, looming. Craft into fine art. Reality a question mark.
Photo by Aaron Kingsbury
This article originally appeared in the November 2015 issue of Louisville Magazine.
To subscribe to Louisville Magazine, please click here.
