His geographical roots are Lincoln (and the family’s Route 2 truck stop restaurant) and Bangor (and their 19-room boardinghouse). But his work has also always been informed by travels and quests, settlings, in Ohio, Washington state, Nevada, and Louisiana, among others. Working both inside his studio and home, and outside on the land, he peppers the four-and-a-half-acre Ripley bog he bought in 1970 with bright, bold, compelling pieces and structures made from the detritus of daily life
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Warren’s work has been exhibited nationally, including group and solo shows in Blue Hill, Camden, Waterville, Portland (Maine and Oregon), as well as Idaho, Washington, and Grand Cayman Island, among many others. His most recent exhibitions were at the Center for Maine Contemporary Art in Rockport and Carnegie Hall at the University of Maine. His work is in private collections as varied as Saks Fifth Avenue, the University of Washington Hospital, and Stephen and Tabitha King.
When did you start thinking of all of this waste as material for art?
I never did. It just happened. When I was a kid, I was making model trains out of tomato boxes. I must have been five or six. I’ve worked on canvas, too, but this all developed as a result of being a product of the environment of the times.
Is it a love/hate relationship?
I’m repulsed by it, but fascinated by it. I think that’s true of a lot of writers, too. They find the material that they are drawn to write about both fascinates and repulses them. I think automatically of Capote.
Where do you get your materials?
Everywhere. Sometimes it’s the Dexter dump, or someone could bring me things. A friend just sent me a package of wine corks. And here, these are my pens that I draw with. When I use them up, I can put two of them together and they’re like the Petronas Towers in Kuala Lampur. I’m always looking at architecture, looking through a lens of architecture. I like building skyscrapers and model cities. Always have, but I’d never heard the term “assemblage.” Until Arman. [Robert] Rauschenberg calls them “combines.”
I also see your work as landscapes, but your landscapes don’t conjure up a traditional image of a landscape.
No, more like, I think, a surrealist landscape, but probably the labels are best left to someone else. I call my cities dreamscapes, cities of dreams. I dream about cities and landscapes. And most often they are urban. I think that what I create in this state reflects my dream state.
When I arrived, you were out on that mound by the driveway. You clearly have a vision for your artwork as part of this land.
I’m not sure it has anything to do with clarity. I’m just like Wal-Mart, spreading out. I’m transforming this into my own humanized landscape—cutting trees down. Instead of all the tree stumps, I’m putting up totem poles, kind of like making my own statement on this little four-and-a-half-acre bog.
We don’t often see land as a canvas for art.
Not in the Northeast, but in the West and the South, yes. Sometimes in the most remote and out-of-the-way areas, you’ll see the most incredible constructions that somebody just on a whim has spent 30 or 40 years building out of stone and machines—a whole place out of car parts, an oasis.
Your dreamscapes have a heavy message—the refuse, the waste, environmental concerns. But because of the coloring and the composition, I always see an element of hope, of possibility, as part of the message.
Hope? That makes me think of the Salmon Rushdie book where he says, “Hope is a disease.” I don’t want to be Pollyanna. I don’t want to legitimize the complete destruction of the place. So if I’m giving people hope, I wonder if it’s the right idea.
So what do you intend to give them?
I’m not doing it for them. I’m doing it for me. Self-gratification. I try to brighten my own world with red, yellow, blues. I’d be awfully damned depressed without colors around.
But major themes of your work are transformation and resurrection, wouldn’t you say?
Yes, that’s right on.
Did it always seem that way to you?
No, not always. It came with time. The material grabs you in and you just keep working and working. They all become little stories, little runes. Very symbolic. But it doesn’t start off with a philosophy. It’s my own self-indulgence. Building things. Playing with my hands. Working with stuff. It isn’t like I’m saving the world.
