Austin Fitch is a man stuck in fast forward. His gestures quick, his speech accelerated, his thoughts – mile a minute. His laugh is loud, and his hugs are easy. Here is a man with more energy in his Tuesday afternoon than most of us can conjure on a Friday night. He’s the type of person I have to try to imagine in repose.
Few Richmonders have the continuity of expression across multiple art forms and decades as Austin. He’s been relevant to the music and arts scenes in Richmond since the 80’s. He has contributed to a landscape of wild defiance and planted the flags that herald the guerrilla ethos of the city. He’s a deeply thoughtful man, a kind person, and exactly what gave RVA a sense of edge as our collective story was written in the 80s, 90s, and beyond.
On Saturday, November 9th, Austin will be hosting an Open Studio event named Heels, Seals and Accidental Landscapes at his residence off Forest Hills Ave where you can receive a guided tour through his collection, have a PBR on the balcony, and take in what is a foundational perspective on a journey down the Artists’ path. I’ve known Austin for more than two decades and I’ve never seen the man beaten. The maelstrom of freneticism in his conversation is always tinged with furious purpose, a great sense of humor, and a punk rock idealism that is so refreshing to see persist despite the crush of existence.
Christian Detres: I’m thinking of how to frame the grand story of Austin Fitch. You’ve been in Richmond, active in the arts since 1986. You’ve seen everything that’s happened here since then. You’ve seen this place progress and grow as an artistic entity. You’ve been deeply embedded in Richmond’s music scenes and art community since then. Let’s go down memory lane a little bit. Tell us a little bit about what your experience has been with Richmond.
Austin Fitch: It truly started when I went to VCU to go to art school. The people that I met then I’m still very close with, and still work with, on one level or another. I was a military brat. By the time I was 18, I’d moved 21 times, so I never had a tribe. I finally found one in Richmond. I grabbed it by the ears and just rode it, you know, as far as it could go.
I met all these different minds and was surrounded by complete and total lunatic weirdos that, at the same time, were extremely intelligent and very prolific. We all gravitated together. This scene changed my whole perspective of the world and helped me understand punk rock, made me understand how important that is. Punk rock is about showing up. It’s about a symbiotic relationship. I don’t mean that in a hippy-dippy way. I mean that in an electric way.
At its essence, it’s a DIY environment and endeavor. So if you want to get it done, you want to put a record out, you figure out how to do it. Yeah, you know, you pick apples for a summer and save all your money and then get into the studio. I had friends of mine that did that, the whole damn band would go up to Massachusetts or Delaware or wherever the hell, pick apples and make a bunch of cash and come back and blow it all in the studio.
All so they could, not just make their dream happen, but, also keep their word to themselves and their community. It’s like, we’re gonna do this. We’re gonna make a record. We’re going to open a gallery. We’re going to succeed. That’s just showing up too.
CD: We’re gonna tackle a bunch of different things and land on art, but let’s explore your musical background first. Where did you come from as a guitarist, a performer and whatnot, and where did that lead you?
AF: I was weaned on 80s metal. In high school, I was in metal cover bands. Judas Priest, Metallica, you know? It’s not that I didn’t like Ramones etc. I mean, simple punk rock stuff. I loved it. I just didn’t like playing it.
And then I came to Richmond, played a couple of open mics at like, Alpina Pizza—half drunk. I ran into Tom Peloso my sophomore year, when I lived in an apartment on Grove and Harrison, directly across the street from the music department. I could open my window and hear people playing. And I’m pretty sure that I saw Tom dragging his stand-up bass, and we just started up a conversation. He started playing a Zeppelin bass line, and I was just like, holy crap, he can really play.
We started jamming together, and that’s basically how Tenth Street Chakra—which is the worst name ever for a band—started. We added Matt Boyle, changed the name over some hilarious conversation, probably after bong hits. We came up with King Sour. Dave Klein was singing. He stopped showing up for practice, so we just molded into an instrumental band. And that’s the way we stayed from then on out, a three-piece. We had our decade-long run. It was good.
Then it was Small Town Superstar. That was with Chris Bopst, Ed Trask, and Carrie Buckman. From there, it was Damn Dirty Ape with Tim Forrest, Keith Wilkinson, and Marshall Dowell. Lee Reynolds and I did the Beautiful Zoo thing for quite a while, just a two-piece. I formed the Fontanas with Russ Jones, of Inquisition and Ann Beretta. I was playing guitar, and David C. Wingfield, “Ding,” was singing.
Man, those were fun shows. Our whole thing was everybody in the band had always been in original bands, and this was a cover band. We were gonna make it fun. It’s like, if we stop having fun, we’re gonna stop playing.
CD: I enjoyed those shows, man. I think the majority of the people that knew you would know you primarily as a musician or as an omnipresent bartender. In the very close background however, you were a prolific artist and gallerist.
AF: The whole music thing is just one timeline of my life. That whole time, I lived in a warehouse big enough to have significant studio space. I could do a lot of multi-disciplinary work at once. I needed to have a lot of things going on. I was throwing huge parties there, working on music, and painting the whole time.
I graduated in 1990 with my group of collaborators—which included Ed Trask, amongst others. We stayed close so we could get better, and get more shit done with each others’ help. Four of us opened up the Ampersand Gallery. It was basically a co-op. Our deal was anyone could be represented at the gallery with three pieces of art ready to hang, $20 a piece. That’s it. The only stipulation was you couldn’t be a student, because students had enough chances to show. This was for working artists.
Sometimes we couldn’t fill up the walls just on that arrangement. Ed Trask and I would be like, “Shit, man. We have a lot of blank walls here.” So he and I would do these huge paintings together. We’d already started doing big stuff, but the need to make work for the space really turned our careers in that direction.
He and I were also doing guerilla art using wheat paste, painting on pieces of plywood that we measured to fit over windows of already boarded-up buildings. The whole music thing was going on simultaneously for both of us.
We got nonprofit status for the gallery so we could have art, art history, and education students come answer phones for class credit. We got a lot of press for it because it was a salon-style environment. We were just trying to fill up the walls.
Watching the unbelievable joy on people’s faces, who never had their work exhibited before, and being able to tell their family “I’m in an art show!” was great.
CD: Finding your full expression is a wonderful thing as an artist. I’ve seen your work over the years, you know, become more and more itself, as opposed to becoming more and more constrained in a genre. It just becomes more you. I think that’s the path every artist wants to be on but it’s hard. Maybe it’s not linked to confidence necessarily, but trust in yourself as an artist.
Now you’re a father, you have your home, you’ve been a celebrity bartender all over Richmond for God knows how long…
AF: Almost 33 years.
CD: You’ve been, you’ve been somebody’s, you know, shoulder to fucking cry on at the bar, or just happy face to see, therapist?
AF: Therapist, clown and ringleader. And sometimes bouncer.
CD: I’ve seen you in all of those roles. You have a strong sense for iconography. I see a fascination with institutional logos, seals, like in the Seal of the United States of America, or like Illuminati imagery, portraits taken off currency etc.
AF: I always wanted to be a pop artist, and specifically an American pop artist. I love pop art. It is truly an American art form. It’s like jazz. There is no historian that will argue that point. I love using established cultural or institutional iconography in my paintings. When a common or counter-contextual image is elevated to totemic meaning, it invites curiosity and exudes a new ambiguity.
The Seal of the United States is a pop image. All Illuminati stuff, the four Black Flag strokes, those are all pop images. They all elicit something, right? My portrait of Thomas Jefferson? Half of the people look at it like, “Oh, what a cool portrait.” The other half would be like, “Man, that dude’s an asshole.”
When I used to play music, and we would have a Fish Bowl gig, there’d be, like, three, we would say goldfish. Like, three goldfish in a bowl, swimming laps, and nobody’s paying attention to us. If we started playing and the room emptied? That’s as good as playing and sucking their attention to the stage. Because it’s legitimate. It’s a visceral response to an art form. Be great or terrible. Just don’t be boring.
So as I began using the pop images I’ve been known to repeat in my work, they started to get a little bit more ambiguous. The more ambiguous they became, the more interesting the viewer’s journey to finding an understanding with it became. You still have to be able to rein them in with an image that is engaging or at least identifiable to all, because otherwise it’s not a pop image, right? But with just enough mystery as to not shout its intentions from the get-go. Like, it’s too easy to use a middle finger. That’s lazy.
A buddy of mine made this small painting. It’s like eight by eight inches on canvas. It’s just Marvin the Martian’s pistol in his hand. A very American pop image. If you’ve watched any Bugs Bunny-related anything, you know exactly what that is without having to see the whole character. This image that is implied, implies this whole other thing. The outline of the story is to be created by the viewer, not me holding their hand. It’s a difficult balance.
Art implies soulful investigation of an image. The ambiguity of pop art leaves so many questions, that the answers are myriad and surprising depending on what the individual brings with them in their heart and experience.
CD: Isn’t that the fun part?
AF: Yeah, to me, that’s catharsis. That’s where I take all my crazy and put it into this tangible thing. It’s like a journal for my psyche, and a trip for the viewer.
CD: I noticed you’ve been using a recurring image of this high heel shoe. It’s not titillating though, it’s demure – and ugh, I hate the way people ruin that word – but you know what I mean.
AF: Yeah, because you’re using it properly. Yeah, it is. It’s not an over-the-top, you know, stripper heel. It’s a closed-toe, something you wear to work or on a night out. It says something about something, but it doesn’t say it loudly.
You bring what you bring to it, yeah. That’s exactly it. That’s also why there’s no leg in it, right? It has so many implications to everyone whether you wear them or not.
The high-heeled shoe isn’t confrontational, but it is representational of so many disparate moods, situations, memories, and triggers.
CD: It can mean sensuality, oppressive beauty and fashion standards, empowerment, gender identity, domination, fun… I could go on. It’s vague and mysteriously prominent on the canvas to the point of emanating an obvious statement with zero obvious intent. The iconography of this particular high heel, the banality even of it, is key. It’s not an inspiring shoe that’s supposed to be sensual. It’s so matter of fact that it gives you the opportunity to interpret it.
I think it would be a crime not to mention the fact that these iconographic pop images, whether it’s George Washington or the high heel or whatever it is, reside on top of a wheat pasted tapestry of old maps, blueprints, painstakingly arranged strips of data-filled static dissonance. An incomprehensible background lattice of visual noise creating this Babel-like podium that contrasts the simple image.
AF: I don’t like things to be asymmetrical, but when things are asymmetrical, they usually have a lot more power. I want everything to be straight and plumb and true and exact right down the middle. I put tape over my T squares, so I don’t know, like, what a measurement of a line is. I just put a mark on the tape the desired length of a line, so I’m not compelled to just round up to a neat whole inch measurement. That makes it easier, because that’s what my brain would want to do, yeah? I’m deleting limitations to create new solutions, which is what creates new images and gives me a better vocabulary on how to do what I’m trying to do.
CD: Sure. It comes across as order on top of order. Then a different type of order on top of that order, which turns into an asymmetry. One of the things I love about your work is that there’s order in your chaos and chaos within the order. There’s order on top of order on top of chaos.
Finding your full expression is a wonderful thing as an artist. I’ve seen your work over the years, you know, become more and more itself, as opposed to becoming more and more constrained in a genre. It just becomes more you. I think that’s the path every artist wants to be on but it’s hard. Maybe it’s not linked to confidence necessarily, but trust in yourself as an artist.
AF: That is very important, too. Bob Gorman (GWAR) and I were in the same sculpture classes together, right? Ed Trask and I had the same painting classes together. While we were in school, we were already playing music. Most of the people that I was really close to artistically and musically were doing both at the same time. A lot of people don’t do it full bore though. We were doing all that stuff simultaneously, and we really just couldn’t think of any other way to be but intense, because otherwise we would just go nuts.
CD: You guys dove in head first and never looked back.
AF: I have been really broke for a lot of years.
CD: Yeah, hey, you’re preaching to the choir, man. I mean, That intense dedication to a craft that withholds financial security but gives you all of those stories, gives you the chance to experience all these things, to inspire, to be inspired, to find that deeper meaning of self within the artist, the artist fighting itself. To me, all of that pays in ways money could absolutely never.
AF: I’m proactive. The people that I’m describing, they’re all proactive. They all have insane work ethics. Most of them are insomniacs like myself. The best way to get anything done, especially with art and music, is to be prolific. Practice, practice, practice. Make every single mistake you can possibly make. And it’s cliché, but you learn what not to do to keep your sensibilities happy. So make those mistakes with a smile on your face.
Having to sleep on that couch for a couple weeks, or being broke and between paychecks, or between gigs, has been worth it. To leave the path I’m on means to go to a place where my soul dies well before my body. On my deathbed, I really want to be able to look myself in the mirror and have no regrets. “When I was 23, I should have gone on tour…” You know what I mean? When I was 21, it was a lot of work to open a gallery, and we made it happen. Was it worth it? That’s the question I think all of us want to answer on our deathbed, and resoundingly say, fuck yeah.
Absolutely worth it, every experience. Wanting to fight with the guys in the van on tour about farts and stinky feet. Freezing my ass off in a warehouse, just so we could have a place to paint and practice and live all in the same rooms—and not have to go anywhere to be able to get my rocks off with my brain. Because of that, I don’t know if I spoiled myself (probably), but I know that I had to have the outlet. First of all, I know I’ll go loony toons if I’m not making stuff. But also, it’s a promise I kept to myself. The idealistic teenager in you often dies. I do everything I can to protect mine.
I have so much fun drawing with my daughter. Yeah, she’s six years old, and, I mean, she has her own table down here in the studio.
CD: You have the opportunity to pass the legacy on. You and I both have seen so many friends of ours who’ve had kids that are now in their 20s. Now, they’ve got their tattoos and their Misfits shirts. They’re starting their own bands and they’re in art school. They’re doing their things. That generational DIY ethic gives them at least the specter of self reliance. Your daughter will always have that example in you. “I make my dreams come true and live my life the way I want to live and still be happy, still be productive.”
AF: I’m gonna say these people that are in their 20s—a lot of them aren’t kids, because they’ve been taking care of business for years. They know that they have strength in numbers, and they have fun and solidarity, and that is the essence of it. That’s the essence of the scene in Richmond, in my opinion. Richmond has mutated and changed, sure. I think it has a larger volume. It’s bigger, and it has a lot more tentacles and a lot more strength than it gets credit for. It’s always a little bit under the radar.
One thing that I’m proud of, if I have a legacy, right? The one thing that I am proud of is that the VIM gallery that we opened right after we graduated in ‘90, ‘91 is the first gallery that ever opened on the President’s row, where all the galleries are now. Where First Friday is. When we did it, we got nonprofit status. Somebody asked me how to do it, and another friend of mine did it, and then somebody else did it. And so there would be these big, giant open spaces that used to be, whatever, stores on Broad Street. You paint it white, “ta-daaaa, Gallery.” The rent was dirt cheap.
Ed and I, I mean, there would be times we would just be standing on the street looking through these dusty windows, being like, duuude, we could put a skate ramp in there. We could put a gallery in there. We could have a party there.
CD: You guys tested the waters for us. No, I really think that there’s, especially the art row, you know, the gallery row, I guess call it the Art District now. There are whole areas that were ripe for the taking, if you only knew how not to ask for it.
AF: Exactly. It got to a point where the Richmond Police Department was just playing whack a mole, you know, with the punks and freaks trying to make that space their own. Having that confidence to just not ask for permission to do a thing is art in itself. You find out, maybe the Richmond Police Department doesn’t have much of a personality or sense of humor, but you also find out if you got some balls or not. Art doesn’t ask for permission. Art doesn’t ask for an interpretation. It just shows up. It just is.
Give Austin Fitch a follow HERE.
