Five questions for painter David Mahaffey

Parchment #2 by David Mahaffey

When VITAL Source was a print magazine we ran a monthly feature called 5Q, where we asked local notables or up-and-comers five questions about their craft, career or passion. Now, in our super-deluxe web format, VITAL veteran and former Art Muscle publisher/editor Judith Ann Moriarty is resurrecting the series in a bi-weekly format. In this installment of 5Q, she chats with painter David Mahaffey.

He’s 56-years-old and lives in a slender, many-sided ivory-colored tower on Prospect Avenue. The view from his unit faces east. David Mahaffey is a name you may or may not know. He’s a retired VP of outpatient and hospital services for a health care corporation, with an undergraduate degree in comparative religions from Miami University in Oxford,  Ohio, and an M.A. from UW-Madison in rehabilitation counseling and counseling psychology.

You seem to be living the good life. Is your studio also in your condo unit? Please don’t tell me you are one of those “Sunday Painters,” or the interview ends here.

My studio is where I live. Before retiring in 2008, I would paint before and after work and sometimes in the dead of night on weekends.

You seem to be right out of the 70s abstraction bag. Are painters from that era your heroes? Give me a few hero-names.

Uh, I don’t have any heroes per se and really shy away from that appellation. I’m open, very much so… sometimes the scales fall away and I see with new eyes. Recently I went to London to see the Turner exhibit at the Tate … it was enough to make one weep, which I did. Then some drunk Brit dude came up and propositioned me, right there in the gallery. G-Zeus Mary and Joseph on a roto- rooter, that hasn’t happened to me for about 30 years!

It matters a little to me, but not a lot, whether anyone else thinks of me as an “artist” or not. Yes, I would like to exhibit, but I am particular about venue, vibe, karma, attitude, presentation, price, lighting, etc. I don’t have to sell and I find deep pleasure in giving things away to people I love. The work is the thing, the rest is just decoration or discussion or what have you.

Yes, but these days young artists often work several jobs and are too beat to make art before and after their multiple jobs. Come on now, didn’t you ever want to be an art star? Say, someone with a rock ‘n roll persona and slathering groupies hanging around and sucking-up so as to attach themselves to your glory? If you have no desire to be a Big Deal art-maker, then what’s the point of making art?

It’s utterly separate from the Big Deal. What’s up with the whole Big Deal thing anyway? It seems, well … ridiculous—a narrow way of thinking. Frankly, it’s only in the past few years that I feel I have enough decent work to show publicly.

I can tell from your Facebook postings that you have a keen sense of humor.

Thanks, I’m looking forward to being famous now. Do I get a discount at Red Lobster?