WT: I’ve heard your work described as a melding of the traditions of medieval manuscript illumination and dadaist collage. To me this is a mind-bending leap—these forms of art spring from radically different sensibilities, not to mention a span of hundreds of years of human history.

CG: For most of my adult life philosophical and religious problems obsessed me, and I spent many years reading and thinking—mostly thinking—about such riddles as the existence and nature of free will, of ultimate reality, the meaning of a particular color, and so forth. I kept a journal to help clarify and distill the most pressing obsessions, and for several years even considered a monastic vocation, making retreats at a number of monasteries both here and abroad.

While browsing in a second-hand art bookstore that I frequented when I was working as a mail clerk in a Manhattan hotel, I ran across an extract from Plato’s Symposium, written out by Edward Johnston, who was a brilliant British calligrapher and type designer in the early part of this century. The practice of competent manuscript illumination had died out, of course, so Johnston was appointed by William Morris’s men to reintroduce the broad-edge pen and techniques of illumination. Johnston had a keen philosophic and mathematical mind, and seeing this excerpt from Plato in his late characteristic hand electrified me. Here was the perfect graphic incarnation of logic and mysticism, I thought, and damn it, I had to know how it was done.

WT: The techniques were, quite literally, a lost art.

CG: Johnston also wrote a textbook, the seminal book in the form, called Writing & Illuminating & Lettering. I studied this book in the main reading room of the New York Public Library and taught myself the techniques of calligraphy and gilding using Johnston’s methods. In some cases I would write out a text so many times that I would lose sensation in my fingers. I bought artist handbooks and ground my own colors using raw pigments and looked at everything in sight as potential models for my manuscript work—books, paintings, even architecture. As my technical and speculative confidence grew, my books began to absorb the modern artistic and philosophic idioms that more honestly reflected my actual, contemporary experiences. The delicious dogmas of medieval spirituality that appealed to my youthful religious instinct gradually receded.

WT: So how do you create? In the liner notes to Miles Davis’s famous recording, Kind of Blue, the pianist Bill Evans compares jazz improvisation to Japanese calligraphy. The artist marks rice paper with a brush, but it must be done freely, with the simultaneous confidence and detachment from results that comes from thousands of repetitions. Once done it can’t be undone. To my eye, your work seems to embody the opposite approach. Do you block out compositions the way a filmmaker storyboards a sequence before building the set? You must make some kind of draft before you actually cut the patterns and start gluing, or before you dip your pen in the ink.

CG: Because the compositions are so precise, most people assume that there was a very long, structured preparatory process. The best writing was preceded by time-consuming efforts to build concentration and steady the hand, especially as I often suffer from great anxiety. But in fact each page took shape as I went along—the page composed itself, as it were. If you do drafts, you learn how to make drafts, not the real thing. It’s like an athlete training for a race—you’ve got to perform with all your intention each time you make something, or it won’t have the edge it needs. Before we become too high-minded, let’s remember that my original intention was to keep a record-book, an illuminated album or scrapbook, to receive blocks of text and images that excited me at a particular moment. I’m horrified when I look at some pages now, embarrassed by the compositions and shocked by the innocence behind them. I estimate that I’ve destroyed, without a shred of regret, many more pages than I’ve kept. They are all records of experience, that’s all.

WT: Do you like being in New York?

CG: I was born in Manhattan, and grew up in the metropolitan area, but spent many years in the South before returning to the city after college. I’ve lived in New York for the past twenty-one years. Now I live in a quiet, faux-Tudor part of Queens called Forest Hills. When I was in my early twenties I went to graduate school for a masters degree in theology at The General Theological Seminary, which is a blissfully tranquil and isolated campus in Chelsea—a strange and wonderful place. Well, I didn’t last long in school, but when I left the academic part of my schooling behind, the seminary allowed me to continue living there for a year. So for fifty bucks a month, I could retreat at night to a nineteenth century suite where I would try to work through the accumulated experience of a day in the city. It was the perfect place for me, this ordered oasis nestled within the sprawling chaos of New York.

New York can still be fabulous, but I don’t live there now for the chaos, the energy, the glamour—some of the usual reasons. For my work, the freedom and the resources the city offers are beyond belief—it would be impossible to imagine them anywhere else. There is so much affordable treasure to be mined. The learned piety of the Middle Ages got me started, but, finally, at age 45, I’m happy to say I now live in my own place and time.

WT: Martin Antonetti tells me your favorite kind of hangout is a hardware store, or a candy store, where there are bins and bins of "stuff" to pick through. He said, "If Chris went into the candy store on the corner of Main Street, he would come out with a small bag containing three pieces of this type, two of that, five of another--all carefully, individually, painstakingly selected for the right color, texture, size. . ."

CG: Or a text—a ribbon of shapes trapping a spark of meaning. You know, a textual composition allows you to "have your candy and eat it too," providing a special pleasure at once aesthetic and intellectual: the beautiful arrangement of shapely marks and the anticipated thrill of a mind about to grasp their varied meanings. It is a single, essentially cognitive experience in which sense images are grasped and concepts are seen, as it were—something every literate person, every person who has encountered a composition of symbols, has enjoyed at least once. One may be granted this pleasure simply by glancing at a page of text, or even a single word, if the mood is right. In this respect, the prospect of a trip to the bookstore may be indistinguishable from that of a trip to the museum, and vice versa, and the pleasure equally potent.

CG: Along those same lines, something I think about a lot now is the notion of a visual language, in which colors and formal shapes replace words. Wittgenstein said in one of his writings, "Wisdom is gray," and that stuck. I enjoy imagining a kind of art in which a vocabulary of geometric shapes, arranged in specific ways and having different values of color, or gray--would have definite meanings.

WT: In a commercial sense, at least, our culture seems to be headed that way, doesn’t it? The logo-driven, image-conscious "brand culture" we see developing across the USA?

CG: True, I suppose people think of certain images or ideas when they see a Nike logo. But what interests me is an entirely different kind of language, of visual communication. Something that bypasses the part of our brain, or the thought process, that we now articulate through words and could instead be expressed visually. I’ll have to chew on this one some more.

WT: I think I understand what you’re saying but don’t have the vocabulary to explain.

CG: Exactly. But that’s the point, you see.

WT: You’ve been making art for a long time. Why haven’t you shown before?

CG: I sold one of my notebooks to the New York Public Library and had one work on display at the International Exhibition of Sacred Art in Santa Fe, in 1991--that’s another story--but yes, this is my first "real show." When I started the first notebook, it was mainly to record practical information about the crafts I was teaching myself to help me attractively register ideas that gripped me at the time. The books then became commentaries and repositories of visual concepts and were made strictly for my own enjoyment and amusement. Only recently have I begun to see them differently. A true artwork is not finished until it is viewed by others. An interested viewer completes and perpetuates and even alters the process, providing alternative interpretations and contributions, a Duchampian notion I am in complete agreement with because I see it happen over and over again. There is also, quite frankly, an emotional response for exhibiting. It seems that a public exhibition may be the only way for me to meet other artists, to escape my relative isolation.

WT: What happened in Santa Fe?

CG: I was included in an exhibition organized by a well-meaning group that hoped to unite in one setting religious art from a variety of traditions. I didn’t see the show, but when the keynote speaker, a respected scholar who persuaded the organizers to include me, called after its run, he was obviously furious. He said the exhibitors had censored my piece. He did not say exactly how, but it was a work I had made representing the Trinity. In the place usually occupied by an image of Christ, I had inserted part of a pornographic postcard from Times Square.

WT: And this upset them?

CG: I didn’t mean to offend anybody by using this image, but rather to glorify the senses. And there are always aesthetic and formal reasons. Still, you know. . . if I’d known my work wasn’t going to be displayed the way I made it, I would absolutely have pulled it out of the show. It taught me never again to participate in an exhibition sponsored by a religious organization or any group toeing a party line.

WT: What about the Web? Are you looking forward to seeing your work there?