Hugo Lau of Hong Kong's MiLK Magazine Interviews Lee Harvey Roswell

June 2009

MiLK: What makes you draw in the first place?

LHR: It's an inherent thing. I was drawing as soon as my two little fleshy mitts had acquired the necessary dexterity to hold a crayon. Very artistically involved, very early on. Drew on everything. Drew on the walls. Drew on the floors. Drew on my mother's ankles, the family dog, anything near ground level. And there was certainly a line-up of creative individuals in my family, so I can chalk up my artistic propensity to genes. My grandfather was very artistic, wrote stories in the bathtub and loved to draw cartoons. He was a real Renaissance man, dabbling in anything that caught his interest... and just about everything caught his interest. His son, my uncle and godfather, is the proverbial "apple who didn't fall far from the tree," who made a living as a successful sign painter. For a short period as a kid, for a couple of summers, I was apprenticed to my uncle and learned a few things about how to handle a paint brush and the secret of using a maul stick for painting detail or line work. Valuable lessons as it turned out. His sister, my aunt, is another artistic apple in the family tree, with a past in fashion design and illustration. And my mother too has an artistic hand that she still makes use of today with her own puppet business. But genetics makes for a rather dry answer, I understand. So, what motivates me after 34 years of a genetically well-backed life in art to continue drawing? Well, over the years it's become a form of personal therapy, like meditation. I need to paint. I've got gangs of dark thunder clouds that will cover me like an old suit if I don't from time to time- that is to say, incessantly- draw or paint.

MiLK: Do you paint in oils? What is the charisma of it?

LHR: Most of what I do is oil painting. I think of it as the Cadillac of pictorial mediums really, top of the line. And the countless mysteries to unlock in oil paint can and should occupy a painter his whole life. I think a painter who dies having obtained perfection in his profession is a painter who died self-deceived.

MiLK: I inevitably think about Joker in Batman, the dark knight when I see your paintings, sure your works came earlier than the movie, do you see something in common between the characters? Are there female clowns in your world?

LHR: I loved The Dark Knight, and Heath Ledger's Joker was a stroke of acting genius. He took the character to new depths. I mean, Caesar Romero in the television series, and Jack Nicholson after him in the first Tim Burton film version, both made for colorful, memorable Jokers in their time, but neither portrayal truly gave the impression of terror that a disfigured homicidal maniac in grease-paint really should. Heath Ledger's rendition goes that far. But that said, I don't relate much to that character in my work as it stands. My use of clowns is more traditional I'd say. I'm conveying something that's at heart full of hope. The Joker, as Ledger plays him, is essentially someone beyond hope.100% monster. Give me a few years...

And yes, yes, and absolutely yes! My world would not be worth much without female clowns. My wife, Anne-Marie has become a regular character in my paintings, along with a number of other fine ladies. I'm also connected with a local San Francisco group called the Sisters of Honk, a gang of frisky female clowns, great for parties. You know, like a lot of things in life, women were excluded from the world of clowns for a long time, and that's really only changed in the past hundred years or so. Just ask the late James Brown about worlds without women and girls, and from beyond the grave he'll tell you in song, they "wouldn't be worth nothing!"

MiLK: Talk about the Clown, most people connect him with happiness, funny, clumsy and joy, all those kinda positive feeling which you interpret him ironically melancholy in your works. Why do you see him so differently?

LHR: Oh no, the clown is a walking tragedy in the making. He might start off happy-go-lucky, but to give a routine any progression there has to be conflict. Whether he's causing it or he's the victim of it, his proper element is trouble. When the great Buster Keaton was just a little kid working the vaudeville circuit with his parents, he and his father had an act that, if done off-stage, might have looked more like child abuse. His father would throw him all over the stage, and right off it sometimes. This of course was Buster Keaton's talent. He could do these physical feats, and it didn't really faze him. So already they were using no lighter subject matter than a family squabble that's come to blows, as comic entertainment. But as they went