Gordon Massman/ Book Edition

Gordon Massman paints exclusively in oil on monumental canvases inside his 4,000-square-foot studio gallery, built on piers over the Atlantic Ocean at the edge of Gloucester, Massachusetts’s commercial harbor. His process is raw and instinctive; each brushstroke is driven by primal obedience and liberated from artistic convention. “There is the paint, the canvas, and the sum-total of your life. Period,” he says. Painting, for Massman, is elemental and uncensored—a medium for unchained emotion. He disavows failure, citing no lineage by which to measure himself. Though deeply influenced by Jackson Pollock, Lee Krasner, and the Abstract Expressionists, his work is not derivative but a singular projection of the psyche, irreproducible and unashamed.

Massman came to visual art after four decades as a poet. He has published seven poetry collections—including one nominated for the 2013 Pulitzer Prize—and appeared in over two hundred journals, including Harvard Review, The Georgia Review, and The Antioch Review. When he felt he had reached the peak of his poetic voice, he turned to painting, drawn by its immediacy and cathartic power. Unlike literature, visual art demands no elite literacy; it strikes directly.

Nothing is taboo in Massman’s work. He confronts elemental truths—survival, power, ego, procreation—with instinctual urgency. Like a jungle creature, he metaphorically dips his claws into paint and slashes at vast canvases with feral precision. Every mark aims to hit the viewer in the gut. He is not an abstractionist but a visual storyteller using non-representational imagery to narrate visceral truths. In Bluebird Drowning, a fragile life is swallowed by a maelstrom of postnatal adversity—poverty, betrayal, powerlessness. In The Wall They Clawed, a black-and-white composition reveals itself as a reimagined photo of the Auschwitz gas chamber wall, complete with Zyklon-B canisters and claw marks left by the dying.

Yet Massman is not pure impulse. Intellect seeps into his work like rising groundwater. His paintings mature through a fusion of high perception and raw emotion. The result is a canvas that speaks. His works range from 7 x 10 feet to as large as 8 x 24 feet—schooner sails of painted intensity. Smaller formats cannot contain the emotional scale or accommodate his full-body improvisational practice. In his creative state, he is Edward Hyde embracing Fred Astaire: a choreography of chaos and grace in expressive disfigurement.