Finding his zone: A biographical sketch of JJ Manford
To become is not to attain a form (identification, imitation, Mimesis), but to find the zone of proximity, indiscernibility, or undifferentiation.
Gilles Deleuze, French philosopher
Hello friends. JJ Manford here. I am leaving my studio at the Hunter MFA building and moving studios to Bushwick. I am moving out of my studio and selling many interesting things, including stretcher bars of all sizes, a beautiful full length mirror, a microwave, a flat screen tv and full entertainment system, misc. kitchen appliances, MY ART, misc. art supplies, and much more!
First come first serve, best offer type situation. My studio is #406. Sorry. I am without a phone. :(
From a mail about a studio sale the artist sent his friends, January 15, 2013
WHO knows how or when someone decides to become a professional artist?
“There was no a-ha moment for me,” says JJ. “For me the process of being an artist has been an organic one.
I am not sure if becoming an artist was necessarily preordained,” he adds.
A certain amount of serendipity was involved, he agrees, notably being fortunate enough to have two creative and supportive parents, Barbara and David (Lucian), who happened to be artistic workers—architects—themselves.
JJ’s mother Barbara concurs. “My husband and I were both architects and our educational background was in art and architecture,” she says. Barbara also both placed a high value on education, not surprising for someone who entered Harvard at 16.
At the same time, both Barbara and David encouraged JJ’s artistic leanings from an early age.
However, he adds, his parents never pushed him into being an artist: basically it just happened. Perhaps the best way of putting it is that Barbara and David provided the emotional wherewithal, as well as the physical materials for JJ to become an artist, starting from an early age.
“JJ was surrounded by art materials including all sorts of blocks from the crib,” Barbara concurs. “Before he actually started drawing he would arrange his blocks and his many cars and trucks in geometrical patterns on the playroom floor,” a portent of the grid which Manford uses to block out his work today.
According to JJ his parents were also open to his suggestions, including some surprising ones— for example, agreeing to paint his room grey. “How many parents do you know that would be ok with painting their child’s bedroom a neutral grey?” he asks. “Grey isn’t a child color. In fact, technically it isn’t a color at all. It’s neutral.”
That’s news to his mother. “Wow!” she exclaims. “How memories diverge. I don’t remember JJ’s room ever being painted grey. I remember that it was red!”
“We used a Ralph Lauren gloss paint which required five coats and it still didn’t look good!”
Grey or red, mother and son agree, his room was really his first canvas.
“I definitely collected a lot of things there as I grew up,” says JJ. “Baseball hats, cards, various memorabilia. I created compositions by organizing the stuff neatly on the floor and photographing them.”
“Sort of like your own Joseph Cornell box?” the author asks.
“Sort of.”
JJ says he often returns in his mind’s eye to that crucible-like room on the second floor of the Manfords’ simple house in Hopkinton, Massachusetts, the small town of 15,000 twenty five miles west of Boston where he grew up.
In a sense that room was his first studio.
But it was more. “That room was like a space capsule for me,” says Manford. “And every night was a voyage to the outer limits of my consciousness. I still voyage there in my dreams.”
“I was happy to escape Hopkinton,” he says of his relatively isolated hometown, whose greatest claim to fame is that it is the starting point of the annual Boston Marathon.
“But I miss that house.”
“I also remember my father’s office very well,” JJ continues, mentally scanning the interior of his former home. “He custom-built a desk that curved around the room and occupied two walls.
“I also remember my parents’ architecture books, particularly their Corbusier books, which were placed on custom-built shelves.”
Corbu, as we Cornell architecture students used to call the French master, would approve.
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TEACHERS. It is not surprising to learn that a number of supportive art teachers also participated in the process of helping JJ find his zone as an artist.
JJ continued his first creative strivings with the aid of his teacher, Honig Hahn, at Meadowbrook School, the private elementary school in nearby Weston.
“She really liked me and nurtured my exploration of clay,” JJ recalls of his first artistic mentor. “I made a lot of ceramics with her.”
Meanwhile his artistic consciousness, including a rudimentary, comic-based iconography, was cohering.
“The visual culture which was prevalent in grade school was very influential,” Manford said in a round robin online interview with various artists in 2022. “I think cartoons and video games were the first things that tethered me to lifelong passion for design. One of the first things I tried to render in earnest was actually a Batman figurine. I was also mesmerized by Sonic the Hedgehog, with those bold, black contour lines, and saturated color harmonies.”
JJ’s aesthetic education took a big step forward when his parents enrolled him at his next school, Belmont Hill. An independent boys’ school principally known for its strong sports program located on a sweeping 32 acre campus in Belmont, a suburb of Boston, JJ studied there from 1996 to 2002, the entire span of his adolescence, until he entered Cornell in 2002, aged 19.
“A school for smart jocks,” is the way Boston Magazine described Belmont Hill.
Formative years they were, and demanding ones, as the artist recalls—far more demanding than the four years he would later spend at Cornell. “Belmont was much more academically demanding than Cornell ever was, and much more competitive.”
Not to knock Cornell, Manford adds, “but it would not be an exaggeration to say that the foundation for my career, including my work habits, was formed at Belmont.”
“After sports and staying late in the art studio until my mother picked me up, I was basically up until 11 or 12 every night doing homework, writing papers, or studying for tests, then up again at 6 am.”
Meanwhile, Richard “Whitey” Morange, the head of the school’s small art department, recognized JJ’s talent and took him under his wing. “Most of the boys that pass through Belmont Hill aren’t particularly creatively inclined,” says JJ. “so Whitey and I bonded.
“He also happens to be a great guy.”
“I’m not really sure what talent is,” is the way Morange, who recently retired after teaching at Belmont Hill for 34 years, puts it. “What I did notice early on was JJ’s intensity and his imagination—especially the power and granularity of that imagination. He thought visually and worked to bring that vision to the page.
“More than an early facility with drawing, which JJ had, I think that may be the best indication of an artist.” Most importantly, adds Morange, his prodigy “had an evident need to express himself visually. JJ worked hard to develop his skills.
“ JJ worked so hard at growing his artistic skill set that there was a disconnect between his hands and his brain,” he recalls, marveling at the memory. “His mind moved faster than his hand at times,” he adds, a trait which others would later notice.
“Over time,” Whitey continues, waxing eloquent as he sums up the four years JJ spent under his wing, “he became not only more facile in the making, but more confident in the importance of his own work.
“I believe that art chooses the person. Some respond. Many do not. JJ jumped in at the deep end and kept on swimming.”
And so, under his teacher’s guidance, JJ developed his artistic skill set and produced work, work that he was confident of, and kept on swimming. As one can see from his extant Belmont Hill portfolio, which include a series of accomplished charcoal sketches of his father, and various other works, including a John Heartfield-like drawing-cum-collage entitled “Live Every Moment Like It’s Your First” which earned JJ first prize in the annual Belmont Hill art contest, that formidable skill set, along with his wide-ranging imagination, was firmly in place by the time he graduated.
At the same time, in a portent of his future curatorial work, which would ultimately grow into a parallel career of its own, the young artist also enjoyed encouraging his fellow students, his proud mother observes.
Morange noticed the curatorial side of JJ too. “He collaborated with other students to a remarkable degree. His openness and positive response to other students always made them feel seen and appreciated. That is all a kid needs sometimes,” he reflects.
“That’s basically what I tried to give to JJ,” he adds.
To be sure, it is difficult to overestimate the Belmont Hill teacher’s impact on JJ.
Nevertheless, Barbara is quick to add, her son’s first true mentor was his gifted and prolific father. “JJ and his father drew and painted together,” she continues, “just as JJ does today with his older son, Jonas.”
“My father was my first drawing partner,” agrees JJ. “We would draw a lot together when I was growing up. We drew a lot at home at the dining table. He would make pastel drawings of the scene outside the window.
“And I drew pictures of him.”
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FRANCE. Inevitably France comes up when JJ talks about David, notably the horizon-expanding trip the family made to France in 1996, the summer before Manford matriculated at Belmont Hill. Manford senior, a devout Francophile, decided that the family should visit Cezanne’s artistic and spiritual home of Aix-en-Provence. JJ couldn’t wait to go—so much so that he sold his entire, cherished baseball and basketball card collection to help pay for the ticket.
Suddenly, the Manfords were in France, and JJ was in artistic heaven.
“We stayed at a hotel that Cezanne had painted,” the artist recalls. “Cezanne had also been my first favorite painter in grade school.”
What did the artist, who today applies himself to his own work with Cezanne-esque zeal, find appealing about the French artist? “The same things about him I find appealing today,” he states. “His style, his dashed abbreviated brushstrokes applied in typewriter fashion.”
Unsurprisingly, the hotel where the Manfords stayed had a reproduction of the work that its famous guest executed when he stayed there mounted in the dining room.
“I remember looking at that reproduction when we had breakfast and taking a mental snapshot of it,” JJ recalls. “The following day I sat exactly where I imagined Cezanne sat, based on the vantage point of the painting and made a pastel drawing.”
Later the thirteen-year-old bought the poster of Cezanne’s interpretation of that same scene and had his parents place it in an orange frame, the same color as the oranges Cezanne liked to paint, and hang it in his room. It is no accident that that peculiar orange—that iridescent, glowing-from-within-orange one sees in Cezanne’s paintings—is one of the most frequent colors in Manford’s later incandescent palette.
To be sure, many roads for JJ, both aesthetic and personal ones, lead back to that pivotal trip to France.
Architectonic roads, too. “I remember visiting the caves in Aix,” he says. Also on the itinerary, unsurprisingly, were Paris and the City of Light’s architectural triumphs, particularly Centre Pompidou, a building that is still part of Manford’s psychological firmament.
“The Pompidou made a huge impression on me, not so much because of any of the art works I saw, but because of how it caused me to think about light and space,” he says. “If you climb to the top, as we did, you also get that unforgettable panorama of Paris. That has always stayed with me.”
Unsurprisingly, the Pompidou was on the top of the artist’s to-do list when he took his own family to Europe and France in 2018.
Of course, he also remembers seeing Monet’s Water Lillies and some of the other fabled masterpieces on exhibit there. “Nevertheless,” the painter adds, “my recollection of events during that period of my adolescence has more to do with novel spaces and environments than specific art works.”
One exception to that rule was an etching by Kathe Kollwitz, the German Expressionist artist noted for her War and Poverty “cycles” that hung in his maternal grandparents’ apartment in the Yorkville neighborhood of Manhattan that glued itself to his imagination at this juncture.
“I believe [the drawing] was of a mother and child, perhaps a reproduction of a charcoal drawing,” JJ recalls. “Or perhaps it was a lithograph. There was an expression on both of the subjects’ faces that was very severe and seemingly stricken, yet also strong and defiant. I always assumed that the work was about the Holocaust.
“I really appreciated Kollwitz’s style,” he observes, “how she could be both precise and loose at the same time, a balance I try to achieve in my own work.”
Today Manford often travels back in his mind to summer of 1996. During errant moments he envisions himself with his father sitting there on that hill in Aix, somewhat the same way that he does today with his sons, Jonas and Emil, when the three of them go out to draw in Prospect Park, near JJ’s and his wife Elisa’s Park Slope home.
Someday, he says, he hopes to relive that same original father and son scene in Provence: from father to son, to grandson, much like his fellow Cornellian E.B. White, the great essayist, wrote in his classic feuilleton about the cycle of life, “Once More to the Lake.”
Except that this time, when JJ makes the same intergenerational voyage into the past that White wrote about, it will be to a hill in Provence.
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IN THE event, 1996, the year JJ turned thirteen, and the year he started at Belmont Hill, also coincided with an arduous passage in his life when his beloved father was diagnosed with cancer.
Whitey Morange was particularly helpful in navigating that passage, his former student attests. “Whitey was close to me when my father fell ill, and he gave me the space and encouragement to work through and process my feelings about that through my painting and my drawing.”
“I don’t think I knew at first there was an illness in the family,” says Whitey. “I just saw that he became darker, sadder and quiet.
“The studio was a place where many kids found refuge,” adds Morange, who by then had acquired a reputation amongst his colleagues as a “well-cultivated shepherd of lost souls,” as he puts it. And JJ was one of them. Art is therapy for many and JJ began to spend every minute he could there. Eventually he talked of his father, and I simply listened.
“It was a difficult time,” JJ recalls. “But I kept busy. I channeled a lot of my feelings about my father’s illness through my art. For a time he was my sole subject matter, somewhat as he had been when I was growing up, and we were sketching together at the kitchen dining table.”
“Except now I was the one who was doing the sketching.”
JJ did not hang out, unlike most of his classmates. He would catch up on that, as well as other adolescent prerequisites later at Cornell. Instead, he says, he helped around the house, taking care of his father and mother.
All in all, Manford’s adolescent years were a serious time. “I didn’t drink or do drugs,” he notes.
That, too, would come later. “Basically I was just a very good student.”
“I did other things, of course. I played baseball. I was passionate about baseball,” he says.
“But my focus was on academics. My mother made sure of that!
“I actually think I excelled during this protracted period of hardship,” he reminisces, “in the same way that I excelled, so to speak, during the pandemic.”
“It brought a heightened sense of focus and purpose.”
JJ would continue to return to the subject of his father in his work during his Cornell years, most notably with the extraordinary homage project, Lucian’s Scrapbook more about which anon.