Published: July 11, 2007 09:38 pm         

Neil Garrison uses unique medium to create dynamic artwork

TERRE HAUTE — Neil Garrison lived much of his life with a secret. His family knew. Some friends knew. Patrons of Wabash Valley art shows might have noticed. Garrison, the 46-year-old marketing vice president at St. John’s Dental lab and candidate for Terre Haute City Council, is an artist.

“I tended to think … if people saw me as an artist, they wouldn’t see me as a business person or a marketing person or someone who could strategize. So I always tended to … hide that a little bit,” he said.

In March, Garrison shared the secret publicly at a political fund-raising event for his primary election campaign. At an evening of “Art & Whine,” Garrison displayed five original portraits at the Halcyon Gallery, invited guests to “whine” their concerns about city government and to bid on the art in a silent auction with all proceeds going to the campaign. It worked. Garrison went on to win the Democratic primary in District 5.

“I think they wanted to see it,” Garrison said of colleagues and friends who came to the event. “Quite a few … said ‘I had no idea you did artwork.’” But even some of his family members were surprised by the finished portraits he displayed at Halcyon. “[They had] watched me do it, and when it was done they [said], ‘so did you paint that?’”

Garrison did not paint the artwork. Neither did he etch or sketch the portraits of famous politicians. Instead, he used adhesive tape — electrical tape, duct tape and shipping tape. In Garrison’s version, the Nixon Tapes is a portrait of the 37th president, not an incriminating audio recording. He calls the art method “drawing in tape.” It’s the same medium he used to create the Hillary Tapes, Truman Tapes, Lincoln Tapes and Kennedy Tapes.

The art began with a trip to the hardware store. One roll each of several tape varieties could be enough for three or four portraits, Garrison said. Then, after choosing a photo for each portrait subject, Garrison sketched “a little bit of a drawing” followed by “putting tape on and cutting some of that away,” he said.

“Some of it’s an overlapping of the tapes which gives it different tones and values,” Garrison said. For example, he used only brown and tan tapes to simulate a Civil War-era portrait of Abraham Lincoln. “Techniques back then kind of blurred the image … there’s not a lot of depth, so I left the black out.”

All in all, Garrison has created nine illustrations in tape. In addition to the five pieces sold at “Art and Whine,” portraits of Lyndon B. Johnson and the singer Sade are in Garrison’s home and Mick Jagger was on display at Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology.

Garrison’s most recent portrait adorns the bedroom wall of 12-year-old Samuel Vollmer. David and Lynn Vollmer bought the Peyton (Manning) Tapes for their son in March at a fund-raising event for Arts Illiana. Samuel Vollmer loves football, his parents said. “It’s important they get an appreciation of original art,” David Vollmer said about his children. David Vollmer is curator of Swope Art Museum.

The originality of Garrison’s tape drawing attracted Lynn Vollmer, who works in the emergency room at Union Hospital. “[It was] the first time I’ve ever seen anything like this,” she said.

Originality motivates Garrison. “In a lot of things I do I try to look for something that’s never been done before,” he said.

Illustrations in tape are Garrison’s latest expression of a decades-old commitment to use what he considers a God-given talent. “I try to do a couple things every year. That’s a kind of commitment I made to myself and I figure if I start when I’m 25 and live to be however old, that’s going to be quite a few pieces of work.”

This commitment has led Garrison to try a variety of artistic mediums. A recent display featured his paintings and lithographs. The tapes series is “more than I’ve ever done for one type of technique,” he said. “I jump around a lot in techniques because I get bored … with the same thing.”

In fact, it was airbrushing that first inspired Garrison to consider drawing in tape. He still has a cycling helmet on which he airbrushed an image of the rock band KISS in the 1980s. A few years ago, he tried it again. “Part of that air brushing is not what you spray on but what you block off or tape off,” he said. “And at the same time, I was wanting to try some collage, so I thought, ‘why not try the tape and see how that would work.’”

The use of tape was so new to Garrison that he experimented first to see if adhesives would deteriorate over time. He created a sample tape drawing, applied a chemical seal suggested by a fellow artist, placed the sample in a hot attic for three months and then transferred it to a freezer for one month. In a separate test he exposed one sample to natural light and blocked all light from a second sample. Despite the exposures to extreme temperatures and light levels, the samples did not shrink or expand, Garrison said. “I think it should be long-term stability.”

Garrison is not sure what he will create next. His new Web site, www.tapeillustration.com, invites users to contact him “if you have ideas you would like to see created.” He intends to take a few months off from creating art and start again in winter.

In the meantime, he’ll be running for City Council in the November election. “I like to stay busy,” Garrison said. Art and politics, though, are separate interests for Garrison. “I even wondered how that would work,” he said about running as a candidate and an artist. “The stereotypes are completely different.” He said his interest in politics comes more from marketing than art, through helping other candidates with marketing in their campaigns.

Yet, he says being an artist is an asset in government and work. “Artists and creative people [often] have a tendency to see things before they’re created. I don’t see why that wouldn’t apply to city council or to business or to anything, really.”

Political campaigns have a way of uncovering secrets. For Garrison, the truth is out, framed and adorning walls across the Wabash Valley.