Painting through the dictionary, Madison Webb gets stuck on the letter M
By Theo Douglas

All across Long Beach, people are making art you’ll never see—whether because it sucks, or just because they’re just not willing to put on a show and give the art gallery 15 percent. Madison Webb is one of the latter. He looks like a member of the Vagos (Harley, muttonchops, bulging biceps), but he’s a National Merit Scholar who earned a Master’s of Fine Art at UC Irvine. His studio, on West Pacific Coast Highway next to a cheap motel, is jammed with motorcycles, leather jackets—and his work, most of it involving oil paint and mathematical calculations. It’s small-scale, for reasons that will become apparent, but what’s striking is the human touch—no matter how subverted, it’s there.

“I love the way the paint looks, but then not the personality of the touch,” Webb says, extolling the cleanliness of numbers to the dozens of tiny dictionary-page canvases that line his studio. “For me, it’s more methodical.” His last gallery show was five years ago in Los Angeles, and he says he’s not ready for another.

“It’s supposed to be bad taste to talk about it directly to a gallery owner. My ex-boyfriend said I have Asperger’s syndrome. I find it hard talking to gallery owners,” Webb says, chuckling. Later, he adds, “I do it mostly for myself. It pains me to sell them. I actually want them back after I’ve sold them.”

He’s devoted thousands of hours to his current work, “Dictionary Pages,” based on pages ripped from the 1936 Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary he found at Acres of Books. The letters A, D, F, N, O, P, S and V are done, and he’s stuck on the letter M.

“When I get to a technical block, it slows things down,” he says. Webb would like to paint over the “M” pages with a series of small, precisely colored and placed dots—using the holes in a screen for a guide—but he can’t find a screen with small enough holes. Should he make one? Have one made? He can’t decide. What he has thus far is all the pages from the M section of that dictionary, glued to black-painted sheets of wood cut to the same size (roughly 4-by-8-inches). As with other Dictionary entries, he’s blurred out most of the type with white gesso, obscuring all but key words and phrases he likes, such as “several bodies”; “large straight horned Africans”; “ortolan”; “about six inches long.”

“Some of it’s sexual,” he says. (“About six inches long”? Really?)

“I find words very aesthetic,” Webb says. “I used to write a lot as a kid. It’s flow-of-consciousness stuff. It’s not well-thought-out. It’s Beavis & Butthead. I see the word ‘hole’ and it’s like ‘Heh-heh, hole.’” But part of it is well-planned, and it’s what takes him years: looking for a screen. Or, as he did in his P Series (heh-heh, P), it’s drawing precise graph lines on each page, assigning a prime number to each square, then giving it a color.

“I spent a long time at the P-T in my off-time, doing the charts and doing the check-off list for it and checking my numbers,” says Webb. He does page control for the Press-Telegram and—full disclosure—I knew him when I worked there, through 2003.

You can still read those prime numbers through the gesso, or atop it. But that’s up close. Step back (each square is about a quarter-inch per side) and it all fades into a tiny quilt of color. Eighty-one pages. Eighty-one tiny canvases, all for one letter. He has 18 and a half letters to go. Then maybe there’ll be a show?

MADISON WEBB’S WORK CAN BE SEEN AT MADISONWEBB.COM.