Bruce Tapola has an uncanny knack for finding the humor in things. When I arrive at his St. Paul garage-turned-studio, he offers me my choice of beverages, but cautions against the sparkling water that tastes like feet. The studio is decked out with works in progress and mementos accumulated throughout his practice as a painter, professor, and person. His workbench is lined with shelves brimming with trinkets, figurines, and items with out-of-context phrases and slogans, like the mechanic’s name patch embroidered with “Art.” An outline penned by one of his students, presumably a scrap of homework, is framed and mounted above the workbench. Tapola sees the meaning in the small things, picks them up, and adds them to his personal archive.
An artist for the vast majority of his 60-something years, a St. Paul resident for about 30, and a professor at St. Cloud State University for just over 20, Tapola has made a long life for himself as an artist in the Twin Cities.
Tapola grew up in Ohio, did undergrad in Utah, moved to Montana for graduate school, then landed in Chicago for seven or so years before ending up in St. Paul in the ‘90s. He and his wife, Melba, had a young daughter, and he remembers a catalyzing, come-to-Jesus moment sitting in his unheated loft in Chicago in the middle of the winter with his baby. “The heat was dead, it was freezing cold, our cars were dead, and I remember looking out the window like, Oh man, what terrible mistakes I’ve made, a series of terrible errors,” he says, laughing. Soon after, Tapola and his little family came to Minneapolis. They found art handling and preparator gigs, and eventually snagged a foreclosed home in Summit-University that they’ve lived in ever since.
“I’ve been doing this for a while—y’know, 50 years or so with some intention,” says Tapola. Though he sees his creative drive as part of his identity, a soul-level human need, his motivations have shifted over time. “One day I just took the pressure off and was like, ‘Dude, you’re never going to be famous.’ It wasn’t my driving force in life, but I knew it was part of the fantasy.”
These days, Tapola is glad not to be bogged down by the concerns of younger artists striving to make a name for themselves or “keep up” with the art world. “I don’t have the energy to chase stuff. I’m kind of weird, and I stay home and make stuff,” he explains. He is free from the pressure to sell himself, attend art fairs, or know who’s who, and in that there’s “a life.”
He is also grateful for his tenure at St. Cloud State University which—rather than hawking paintings at art fairs—has allowed him to “make it” as an artist all these years. Tapola, who retired two years ago, thinks that the college’s recent budget cuts, which have impacted his former art department, are “very sad.”
“We had such a good department at one point, with terrific faculty—all these really good artists, like Alexa Horochowski, Justin Quinn, and Shana Kaplow,” Tapola says, which “just got administrated out of existence.” According to Tapola, SCSU hasn’t hired more arts educators in tenure-track positions, so the instructors are mostly adjunct professors (less expensive and less secure positions)—a story not unusual for liberal arts post-secondary programs today.
Tapola is burdened by the things that make so many of us morose. He waxes perturbed about Trumpism and the economics of art-making. He is bothered by art which is too preachy or too pretty. He is worried about college-aged kids in the post-pandemic world. Humor is an artistic stance he takes intentionally.
A tension exists within Tapola that underlies his paintings: the silly and the serious. It’s in the irreverence of making humorous artwork when the social and art worlds are so heavy with seriousness. Or in making an impressive painting of a lewd joke. Tapola mythically merges the high- and low-brows of art into a cheeky expression.
“The things that you find ridiculous, and that I find ridiculous, are so… ridiculous,” he says. “I’m making fun of you, but I’m also making fun of me. I’m also making fun of the pretensions of art, but I also think this is excellent art. I’m making fun of painting, but I also think this is a good painting,” he explains. “There are things I really care about, and probably overreact to all the time, and a lot of what I make is heartfelt. I like a sad thing, too. But I also like a sad thing to be a little funny.”
“I like a sad thing to be a little funny.”
-Bruce Tapola
This sentimental humor is the through line in Tapola’s work, and it is reflected in the trinkets and ephemera memorialized in his studio. As an exercise, he would have his students parody book covers, and on one wall of his studio hangs a half-finished painting, a submission for this assignment. The book title reads, “I Should Have Taken Ceramics.”
His latest artistic mission is to repurpose unfinished paintings and breathe new life into them. “I like hanging in there with the paintings I’m working on, because I think they get a weird voodoo power. I’m a bit of an overdoer, but the overdoing makes the voodoo magic happen,” he says. “I’m going to just work on these exclusively, until none of them suck,” he decided. “Not till they’re all masterpieces, but until none of them strike me as a shitty painting.” This quest became Bad Tooth, a series of 28 paintings shown earlier this year at the gallery Post Times (run by former Twin Cities resident, Broc Blegen), which was Tapola’s first solo show in New York City.
The small paintings in the show express a range of emotions—some pensive, some goofy, some verging on absurdity. And each has a deft, painterly touch in the form of harmonious hues and admirable brushstrokes. Most are scenes of cartoonish figures in the midst of some occurrence. In Plein Air Parvenu, a painter, awash in a Gogh-esque glow, looks upon a field whilst whipping up a portrait of a swimsuit model. Both figures look in opposite directions, gazes averted.
“When you go to art school you begin over-intellectualizing and over-critiquing things, which I’m guilty of as a student and as a teacher. But making art isn’t just an intellectual exercise,” Tapola says. “One of the things about painting ‘dumb stuff’ is that it is seen as anti-intellectual. But I think my best paintings are as smart as anything that’s supposed to be smart.”
“There’s great stuff in the trash heap,” he says. “When some of this goes to the thrift shop or the dump, I want someone to think, Well, god damn it!”
Tapola used to make work that he felt was more “critical,” and used found material to make commentary, to respond to other artworks or conversations around art. He describes his previous work as being “a little punk rock.” But after letting go of any fantasies of fame, his approach to making art has taken on a different tone, and he makes everything from scratch. That way, he feels that it’s easier to make art that’s more focused on his own thoughts and emotions as opposed to taking cues from, or responding to, something external.
Tapola sums up his personal and artistic drive well when he says, emphatically: “I feel like a relentlessly hopeful motherfucker out here in the world, despite all the evidence to the contrary. Sometimes I feel that art is besmirched—and I’m not the defender of art, but I am a believer in it.”
