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“When I’m a Director, I’m a Painter”: Titus Kaphar on Exhibiting Forgiveness
Exhibiting Forgiveness (Courtesy Roadside Attractions) Titus Kaphar’s artwork can be found across the nation at the Museum of Modern Art, the Brooklyn Museum, Yale University and the Mississippi Museum of Art; his painting Yet Another Fight for Remembrance might be his most recognizable, as it was commissioned by TIME Magazine as a response to the Ferguson unrest following the fatal shooting of Michael Brown by a police officer. The MacArthur Fellowship recipient continues to examine contemporary Black life in his feature film debut, Exhibiting Forgiveness.
Actor André Holland stars as Terrell, an acclaimed painter living with his singer-songwriter wife Aisha (Andra Day) and young son Jermaine (Daniel Michael Barriere). While his agent urges him to complete a new exhibition, right off the heels of his last, Terrell is more focused on familial matters: He is in the process of moving his mother Joyce (Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor) out of her home and closer to his.
But what may have been a dramatic move becomes even more tense when Terrell arrives at his mother’s home to discover his estranged father La’Ron (John Earl Jelks) — now homeless and in recovery for drug addiction — has returned to their lives in the hopes of a fresh start and mended relationships. La’Ron’s reappearance triggers deeply rooted trauma, which Terrell attempt to process with his family and, ultimately, through his art.
I spoke with Kaphar via phone weeks after the film’s September premiere at Gagosian Gallery in Beverly Hills — which also served as an exhibition space for the paintings in the film — and days before its wide release on Oct. 18., with the first-time feature explaining his initial inspiration for the project and how directing a film is an organic evolution of his multi-disciplinary artistic pursuit.
Filmmaker: You’ve described this as an autobiographical film, and I’ve read that you were considering different ways to tell this story — at one point, you had considered a documentary. How did you arrive at the decision to write and direct it as a narrative feature?
Kaphar: My intention was to find a way to speak with my sons about my very different upbringing than theirs. Over the years, I’ve told them, “I’ll tell you more when you get older, I’ll tell you more when you get older…” My oldest is 17 now; he’s going off to college next year. It felt like it was time, as he’s about to head out into the world. I started writing, not writing a script — kind of writing the narrative. I’d get up in the morning at about five o’clock and write for a few hours, and then take my kids to school. And then after dropping them off at school, I’d head to the studio and I would paint. And then in the studio, I’m painting the things that I’ve been thinking about and writing about in the morning, and I’m listening to the things I’ve written on my phone. I was finding that there were new images that were coming back to me that had been suppressed for a very long time. So by the time I got done, I had a body of paintings and a narrative that were burst at the same time. It wasn’t until after that that I began to think about the possibility of it coming into script form. It felt clear that this piece of art that I was in the process of making wasn’t wasn’t just a painting. And so through some conversation with a few friends, it became clear that this wanted to be a script.
Filmmaker: You sort of answered my next question, if the script and the paintings that we see in the film were created in tandem. But I’m curious about your approach as a storyteller in these two mediums. With the script, you set the narrative and guide your audience, whereas your paintings may evoke something different in the minds of people viewing them.
Kaphar: I do think of myself as a storyteller. The mediums are very, very different. The medium of painting allows me a single frame to tell an entire story, and that is probably the biggest distinction. In a film, I can give you the before and I can give you the after in a way that painting traditionally just doesn’t function. But on the other hand, there are things that only paintings can do. There are things that only films can do.
As an artist, I want to be led by the art itself. If the only tool at hand is a hammer, as they say, everything looks like a nail. So if the only artistic expression, the only language of art that I speak is painting, then that ends up being quite limited. In my whole practice, I’ve learned other mediums to be able to more articulately tell stories. I was working on a project a few years ago and had to learn glass blowing; years before that, I was working on a project and I had to learn how to carve in wood. Part of a lifelong practice of making art is putting yourself in places and in situations where you don’t know the outcome, where you have to learn how to get to the destination. If you already know the outcome, if you already know how it’s going to end up, then you’re not going to surprise yourself. I had a professor that said it this way, once and where. He was crass. I’m just gonna say it: “If everything you make succeeds, you’re not fucking trying hard.”
Filmmaker: To say making a movie is more collaborative than painting is an understatement. But what were some of the learning curves you experienced in leading this production? Were there moments where you had to force yourself to give up control and trust your collaborators?
Kaphar: I feel really lucky to be honest with you, because the people that I collaborated with are not just great at what they do — they’re extraordinary human beings. I selected based on that. That goes down to my producers and my cast and my crew. I didn’t know anything about choosing people in terms of their resumes for film. I’m a painter. I make paintings. I was using all of my instincts that I’ve developed over the years about people. I was just trying to find the best people to work with, right? And so the questions that I was asking a lot were maybe less about … I’ll give you an example: Lachlan [Milne], my DP. [Our conversations were] less about what camera and what kind of lens to use? Those weren’t the kinds of conversations that we’re having. We were having conversations about family and about what it meant to be fathers. We both have two children. Then we got to know each other through that process.
That was the same thing I did with my actors, so that by the time we got on set, we had a real relationship, we had a real friendship. We still have a real relationship and a real friendship. I’m gonna talk to them pretty regularly, or at least through text. I don’t know what the normal process is, because obviously I’ve never done this before, but in the end, I feel like it works to my benefit.
Filmmaker: You speak of yourself as a multi-disciplinary artist, and on this project you were the writer, the director, a producer and a painter. Do you compartmentalize those roles at all?
Kaphar: No. It’s very interesting, because I think people don’t understand what I mean when I say this, but when I’m a director, I’m a painter. And when I’m a producer, I’m a painter. And what I mean by that is being a painter is an expression of how I see the world. And I think once you watch the film, you see the ways in which an artist, one artist, sees the world. Any moment can be interrupted by the muses to deliver some particular piece. In the film, obviously, we use the strategy of having the younger [version of Terrell, played by Ian Foreman] push these compositions into Terrell’s consciousness, and we become aware of that.
But what I mean by “I’m a painter” is, when we were shooting this film and we were setting up the camera, I looked through the lens and the question for me was, “Would I paint this?” If the answer is no, then we move the camera. If it’s yes, then we can shoot. So I’m not turning that off. I mean, ultimately, my goal from the beginning was to try to make a painting in motion. I guess it’s for others to judge whether we did that, but that was certainly my intention.
Filmmaker: As an artist, when do you know when a project is finished? And is finishing a painting similar to finishing a film?
Kaphar: The end, when a thing is done, is elusive. I don’t know if that’s as good a question as, “How do you choose to stop?” Because there’s always more that you could do, but you definitely hit a point of diminishing returns. And I know this from painting — it could be more saturated, it could be more contrasting, it could be more realistic, it could be more abstract. Each artist begins to develop a way of deciding when to stop. The question of “done” is challenging. It feels so so finite. But for me, when I’m looking at a painting and I feel like I’m getting close to that point of choosing to stop, it really has to do with how my eyes burn across the surface. If my eyes get stuck in an area, I know that I have a little bit more work to do. But when, when the painting begins to feel like a whole, and I can feel myself moving through the composition, as opposed to getting stuck in one area, that’s when I know I’m close to being able to stop.
Filmmaker: I think that’s a perfect answer, actually, because that happens on screen: Terrell stares at one of his paintings, and the way he finishes it is to extract one of the figures out of it by cutting out the body’s outline. It’s a metaphor for him overcoming a traumatic moment in his life, but also for your process of finishing a painting.
Kaphar: I think André did an excellent job, and we worked together to teach him how to paint. He just really committed himself to the practice, and that particular moment in the film is conclusive in that way. And it is, as I’m sure you recognize, it’s based on this sort of therapeutic strategy of where a therapist might take you to a traumatic moment in your life and ask you the question, “Who could have been there to save you, to protect you, to care for you in that moment?” And you might say, “It could have been my mother. My mother would have been there to protect me, my father or my brother or my best friend, or maybe even my adult self.” And that’s essentially what’s happening in that moment: Terrell has painted this moment of recurring trauma, and he goes back to that moment. He rescues that child from that moment, and he takes the child out of the painting, leaving a void in that moment of trauma.
