In Woody Allen’s Midnight In Paris, the main protagonist suffers from Golden Age Syndrome—the romanticised concept of being happier in another time period.
Artist Nathan Karnovsky reckons he suffers from the not-so-rare disorder, with nostalgic yearnings for working class 1930s and ‘40s America.
He’s also dewy-eyed about the jazz and blues halls of the same era.
“But the reality of being an African-American in the 1940s wasn’t a pretty image,” he says, bursting the bubble of reverie.
“Even being poor and white at the time would’ve been a hard life.
“But I love they way the people looked—although they worked incredibly hard, they didn’t act as though they were hard done by. It was just life, death, living and everything in between.
“I always listen to jazz and blues players like Robert Johnson, Booker White and John Lee Hooker when I draw. I love listening to the stories they tell.”
Almost all of Karnovsky’s sketches are drawn from photographs taken around the Depression era, including hundreds of snaps taken of Dust Bowl refugees fleeing their worthless homes after a decade of drought and erosion, many taken by Library of Congress folklorist Alan Lomax.
“America actually paid for these photographers to go out and capture what was a dying America, which it really was,” Karnovsky says.
“Just the way the eyes look when they looked into the camera, because the camera would’ve been new to all of them as well.
“The way their clothes fold over them and even their hands and feet.”
His show Lightduress, which runs at EHDO Gallery in White Gum Valley from July 5, looks at unmasking the working men and women of that era.
Karnovsky focuses his work on the “working hand” of workers generally invisible from art in the 1930s and ‘40s.
His bleak, dark, gritty drawings show miners, constructions workers and welders “frozen” in time.
“I like these people because they are salt of the earth in a way—they have got more character,” he says, his sense of nostalgia rearing up again.
“I’m not interested in drawing models or pretty young people, they are just not that interesting to me.
“The idea that people used to be happy with very little and we have become so material in every way, and even I have.”
Karnovsky works with oils on pastel on brown paper: The medium is challenging as the image can’t be altered once drawn.
He jokes his style is not too dissimilar to the recordings of blues players he admires.
“Once the pastel has been drawn you can’t remix, that’s it,” he says.
“It’s almost like when those old guys recorded music, they were one-take wonders.
“It went straight onto vinyl and that was it, whether you liked it or not.
“Sometimes the imperfections get overwhelming and I can’t look at it. Other times it’s what is special about the artwork.”
by BRENDAN FOSTER