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The calling and privilege of artists is to create what Picasso termed "lies that tell the truth." Many artists have extended this license to self-invention, as appropriation strategies used in re-contextualizing collaged imagery resurface in artists' affected swaggers and adopted personas. Today, the virtues of veracity and creative uses of the truth are heatedly debated. And while many artists apply those concepts to dissecting America's identity, few of them address that subject with the genuine empathy, integrity and awareness of moral ambiguity that Dan Attoe demonstrates in his paintings, drawings and neon sculptures.

Death Metal devotees, a threesome in a drab office, stringy strippers, and burly bikers bonding around a bonfire are among the subjects of the highly polished, precise and piquant paintings that Attoe has presented with titles like "Loaded, Nailed, and Short on Cash," "Simple Thoughts and Complicated Animals," "You have more freedom than you are using," and "You Get What You Deserve" at solo shows at Peres Project gallery in Berlin and New York and London's Vilma Gold gallery.

The titles of Attoe's works offer only a glimmer of the greatness Attoe adds to his images through the texts he pencils on his paintings' surfaces, the backs of his canvases and the walls on which they hang. Slivers of isolated text often have the brilliant, lingering bitterness of country music's most powerful lyricists. Though Attoe's subculture roots are in metal and more immediately potent music genres, Johnny Cash. Kris Kristofferson and Bobby Bare are evident forebears of the poetic lines of text that infuse his imagery with jolts of pain, poignancy and pathos. For example, the grizzly noir-ish scene of a murdered naked blond on a motel bed, with the line written under the action "We take some things with us when we go/ Take what you need," could be the hard, stark illustration of Bobby Bare's 'Tecumseh Vallery.' And notably, one canvas presenting an idyllic family picnic has a decorative faux leather label embossed with the confession, 'I Make Most of This Shit Up'.

Born in Bremerton, Washington in 1975, Attoe was raised in a rough, tiny Pacific Northwest town. He was fascinated by punk-rock and post-modern theory and studied creative writing while completing an MFA at the University of Iowa. In a 2007 review on Artnet, Melissa Gronlund wrote, "In his first solo show in Britain, West Coast native Dan Attoe presented a suite of painterly landscapes that are suggestive both of the grand canvases of the Hudson River School and the amateurish paintings of the American wilderness sold at malls and by mail-order... In reaching after the sublime -- or compromised versions of it -- Attoe achieves a curiously personal effect. The uneasy relation of binaries (between nature and culture, the sincere and the ironic) that recurs in his work reflects the contradictions of the place where he grew up (born in Portland, Ore., Attoe currently makes his home in Washington State) -- the Pacific Northwest, both a bastion of environmentalism and a technological heartland."

Contradictions between natural splendor and superficially anachronistic cheap culture are the apparent axis of Attoe's art, and offer his most salient insight into an America few artists who show in New York, LA or Europe ever see or understand. But what makes the particulars of national and cultural identity so revealing in Attoe's work and his faux-naïve style so startling is the genuine humanity in his fully-fleshed, complex characters.

We met in Berlin for coffee after the opening of his most recent show at Peres Projects Berlin and continued the exchange over email.

Installation view at Portland Art Museum, Portland, Oregon

Ana Finel Honigman: How do you relate to the current trend for trucker hats, wild-man beards and Southern Gothic style among urban hipsters?

Dan Attoe: It is a little offensive, but I'm sympathetic toward it. Even though that's the corner of American culture I draw from most, and I feel like I have some genuine insight into it, due to growing up in and currently living in rural and remote locales, I have never really been a local myself. I've always moved fairly frequently, because my dad had a government job, and later because of college, so I've never had deep roots anywhere, and this has allowed me some perspective on the places I've lived. Growing up in rural areas, I never wanted to be there. I was always interested in skateboarding and punk rock. And trying to get out. I started college by trying to be something that I wasn't. I was trying to be more urban. My earlier art was graffiti based. And that was just because that was what was in Trasher magazine when I was a kid. It took me a while to come around to embracing the culture in the places I'd lived and admitting that the things I kept coming back to were actually part of me. With a father who was a forester, I was just more familiar with nature and rural culture. It is funny to think that the rural kids are all wearing hip-hop clothing, while the urban kids are wearing what they think the tough people in rural areas wear.

AFH: I'm always surprised by the disconnection between the value placed on nature by urbanites and the rural kids who actually live surrounded by nature. I spend my summers in Vermont, and I'm always fascinated by the fact that Vermont is an incredibly sublime, magnificent, clean part of the country where my family goes to commune with nature. But a noticeable amount of the local kids are deep into their mega-bags of potato chips, meth, Gansta rap obsessions and chain-smoking. From your paintings, it seems you were raised in what could have been a hippie utopian paradise where the sheer sublime beauty of the surroundings would override any other urge or desire for excitement. Urbanites desperately want to gentleman farmers or total Wildman recluses, but instead you revered Trasher culture and an image of a wild urban lifestyle. The feral, rawness you revered seems like it would be found more easily in the woods than in the city. Why did you emulate images of urban aggression, instead of putting those drives in to hunting in the woods?

DA: I did do some hunting as a kid; a lot of random gun shooting, lots of hiking, camping and fishing was just something that everybody did. However, what captured my imagination most was what I imagined to be in the cities. I was just too familiar with rural activities to see more meaning in them.

Dan Attoe, 'Your spirit is a dirty thing', 2007

AFH: Obviously poverty, the depression of agrarian culture and lack of opportunity are the causes for this dichotomy between the amazingly healthy environment and unhealthy living. But I'm wondering why this fixation on dead-end urban culture among kids suffering from limited opportunities in the country. Is it just anger?

DA: I think there is just a defensiveness that comes from things we don't understand. All the kids I grew up with were particularly fascinated with violence. Maybe it's just natural for boys to be that way. But since growing up, I've met a lot of people who don't have that part of their past. It's kind of funny how many people in small towns see these movies about the really sensational crimes that happen in New York and L.A., and it sort of fuels an anxiety about what is happening in the outside world. Maybe it is just defensiveness and a territorial sense of feeling threatened. Being rural, you have space to be territorial about. I imagine there must be something similar in urban areas. I guess we're all just animals.

AFH: By "defensiveness," do you mean insecurity?

DA: Maybe. Maybe it really is just not understanding the other culture and relaying on a mythical understanding of each others' culture. Urban people might see some toughness in the rural kids that they emulate. I know that rural kids want to project the toughness they see in street culture and that is part of why they adopt the look and culture of urban areas. I think the fascination with Heavy Metal and Gangsta Rap was both about protecting yourself and familiarizing yourself with something alien. It sort of creates a shield; in the rural kids adopting gangsta wear, its purpose is to let the urban folks know that we're familiar with their ways, and for the other rural folks it sort of marks the wearer as a little scary for their delving into something unknown, but recognizably aggressive. Of course, this all breaks down once these things become trite, and they tend to just indicate a certain lack of awareness and self- esteem issues in the wearer. It's funny how the headbanger look reached that stage, but now it's being revisited in sort of an anthropological way.

AFH: What was your relationship to the actual nature? And what do you think was the reason kids were negating the value of nature? As a city mouse, nature was so rare, valuable and precious that I can't really understand squandering that experience.

DA: For me, because it was ubiquitous it was just background. It was always there. It was awkward being a rural kid looking to escape that. When I was a kid, my friends and I were skaters. We were interested in skateboarding and punk rock. And, in our minds, the most fascinating thing we found was this old burned out mining equipment on the north shore of Lake Superior - where I went to High School. We were so happy because to us, that was like discovering a burnt out old city. We were always looking for something that seemed to us like the civilization we didn't have. And we were ignoring the fact that just down the hill was Lake Superior, and this beautiful shore. Ultimately, we would end up going fishing and exploring with our fathers. We went camping. But there was always a need to find out what was going on in the cities. There is definitely a clumsiness to these things. These delusions are always awkward. When I was in High School, I had this class of thirty kids. Two dropped out. We graduated with a class of twenty-eight. But I was fascinated with Trasher magazine and I wore fishnet stockings and had a green mowhawk. I didn't want to be there. I had a Mad Max idea of what the rest of the world was like.

Dan Attoe, 'Accretion # 38', 2007 (detail)

AFH: Are you disappointed?

DA: No. Not really.

AFH: You don't sound convinced. Are you disappointed that all these green-haired punk kids around us in a grimily looking strip of Berlin are just drinking coffee and eating brunch instead of drinking gasoline and eating the bourgeoisie, or whatever?

DA: I've learned to accept that it's in my head, more than anything. The delusions went away pretty quickly. I moved to Minneapolis and I was trying to make a living in the city when I realized that it was hard. I was broke all the time. I wasn't familiar with this urban world. I was trying to hang out with kids who attached to me a persona of being this hick kid. I wasn't as good at skating and tagging as everyone else. I didn't know what they were listening to. I hadn't been around enough. But what I could bring to the group was the knowledge of setting up a Bar BQ, building a fire or knowing how to go camping. I knew these things. The more I was in the city, the more I became the thing I wanted to avoid being when I was planning on getting to the city. Now I am in a cabin two miles outside civilization.

AFH: What other cultural influences interested you, besides music and Trasher?

DA: Growing up, it was music.

AFH: Though Jessica, at Peres Projects, mentioned that you were big into literature and writing.

Dan Attoe, 'Everything Falls', 2007

DA: I took creative writing courses in graduate school. I had always read. My mom was a librarian.

AFH: Read what?

DA: I read lots of stuff now. I tend to gravitate heavily toward nature writing, like this guy from National Geographic - David Quammen, but I also read some books on psychology, I love the classic writers like Twain and Faulkner, I'm really into Hunter S. Thompson and I've been making my way through Charles Bukowski's many poetry books. Something that was formative as relates to my work was a brief fascination with art theory. I was working at the Walker Art Center after undergrad and they have this great bookstore there, where I would buy and read art theory and post modern philosophy. In college, I had taken an existential philosophy courses and I was primed to start reading art theory and Post-modern theory. Leotard and Foucault. Ultimately, I got snippits I found interesting from it. It came at a time for me that was helpful because I was mulling over all this culture, and the culture I had made up in my head and came to the city to find. So reading Baudrillard and thinking about simulating culture was a way for me to realize what I had to offer. But, I guess ironically, one of the books I really latched onto at the time was "Into the Wild" by John Krakauer. Sean Penn just made a movie out of it. I couldn't watch the movie but the book was really important to me.

AFH: Was that the story of the man who had lived among the bears for decades and befriended them, until one day the bears were like "Wait, what? Who is this guy?" And then they ate him. Is that the book?

DA: Oh no no. It's about a kid who sells all his possessions and moves to Alaska. It was important to me because it helped me see this culture I had just come from and not valued. My father was a forester and he had a strong connection to nature and the wilderness. And maybe of the people I grew up around on ranger stations were probably influenced by Thoreau and had Walden Pondish ideas. But "Into the Wild" was for my generation.

AFH: It fascinates me that a lot of your paintings seem to show the wildness as in opposition to the humans.

DA: I am definitely more interested in psychology and how culture, or our perception of culture, is formed. Also, in spending time in "wilderness" I've gotten an appreciation for how vast it is, and how small we are in comparison. So, maybe it's a piece of visual language that expresses this feeling to show people doing things we may not think of as appropriate in the wilderness. It accentuates a separation, and sometimes can result in funny or mysterious relationships. Of course, we, as part of nature, can never really do anything that is not natural, so ultimately, there's no separation at all.

Dan Attoe, 'Forgiveness', 2007

AFH: Do you value written information more than what is translated through art? Do you feel that painting enables you to be more articulate or expressive about these issues than creative writing, or philosophy, might?

DA: I don't feel there is a hierarchy. I think each medium expresses different things differently. Music can have power in its immediacy, in some ways writing can explore ideas more thoroughly, but making images is this urge that I have. I think that there are many nuanced levels of information in painting, but I don't know that it's any more than in any other mode of expression. For example: people who look at my work can usually tell if I'm making an autobiographical painting or a fictitious one, even if it hasn't been explicitly stated. How we communicate and pick up on stuff like that is fascinating to me. Music and reading are research for my work, as is traveling. Painting is just what I've always done. I've never really thought of it in relation to anything else. I've wanted to be a musician. I've never really wanted to be a painter. I wanted to be a writer. But painting has never been a conscious thing for me. In undergraduate, I wanted to be a psychologist. I studied psychology for three years, but I kept painting, and making things.

AFH: You wanted to be a clinical psychologist or to actually practice and help people in need?

DA: I wanted to practice. But I have always been fascinated by the workings of the mind. I still read psychology books. I found a great book recently from MIT press called "The Psychology of Art and the Evolution of the Conscious Brain." It is a text book that describes how the brain changed physically and how that relates to culture and art.

AFH: Is it a discussion of the actual psychological, not just cultural and historical, use for art making?

DA: Exactly. It does not make correlations, but it charts both brain development and the history of art making. Apparently, there was a fifty-thousand year period when our brains were the size that they are now, but no one was making anything. Something mysterious happened, but nobody knows what. The book just kind of shows what size the human brains were at the time and briefly describes their neural capacity, then shows us what was being made.

AFH: Circling back; now connected are the textual and visual elements to your work? Are the texts captions to your images, or are they not so directly related?

DA: Sometimes very. I've always written. Even before I considered myself a painter, I was a writer. Even early on, I was writing all the time. So, in the morning I do this daily routine where I draw and write. That is the origin of all my work. I'll do these little tonally careful drawings, which sometimes become paintings, and then I'll draw more crude, line drawings, which some become neon sculptures, and then around that, or in the same frame, I'll write whatever is on my mind. I'll collect all these phrases, images and sketches.

AFH: Why do this in the morning?

DA: In the morning, I'll meditate - this is a way turning everything to 'open.' I'll just kind of wander around in my head wherever I want to, and all of these images and thoughts float through. Some of the thoughts I get this way merit further attention. So, I'll record them with drawing or writing. I'll often get really great ideas before I fall asleep at night, and then write them down so I can recall them when I wake up. So many of the ideas that make their way to paintings and sculpture are these images that just sort of 'happen' to me. I find that if I'm deliberately looking for things, I'm too dumb to find anything with the ability to really fascinate me.

AFH: How do your parents respond to your work?

DA: They are supportive, but I don't think they agree with all of my subject matter. They are Mid-Western, solid, Christian people who go to church every Sunday. Of course, they're very complex people, and sometimes we are just not in agreement.

AFH: What aspects upset them? The Satanism?

DA: Growing up, there were all these rumors in our little town saying that me and a group of guys who also had long hair and spiky jackets were Satanists. My mother was a librarian in the town and she heard
all the gossip. She would punish me for things by taking away my music and burning it. However, I've never aligned myself with satanism. I do explore it in my work, but probably no more than Christianity.

Dan Attoe, 'It's All The Same', 2007

AFH: It is kind of lovely, in a sense, to think that kids would be into something so large. I'm impressed that your parents gave you all so much credit. Being into Satanism would entail being into a whole
ideology. It seems like your parents were giving you a lot of credit by assuming a bunch of bored kids were actually subscribing to something so intellectually sophisticated. Though, I guess growing up
in a faith-based community would mean that people were already thinking in large and abstract terms.

DA: Nice inference. Christian religion really is a huge thing in much of the U.S. and of course, having a mind trained in that way makes anyone who finds themselves outside the church's doctrine a ripe candidate for something similar, but in a rebellious form. I had friends who considered themselves serious Satanists. They would sacrifice small animals.

AFH: Eeek.

DA: I was a pretty outspoken atheist as a kid. One thing about Christianity that makes it hard to argue with is its huge history and all the reading you'd have to do to say that you objectively disagree. So, if you disagree with the simplistic basis for it when you're young, but you don't have time to do all the research, you can just adopt certain personae to serve as a barrier until you get the time to look into it further. Ultimately, this engenders some mistrust from people who don't understand.

AFH: What branch of Christianity were your family? Were they the sort who are Bush-supporters?

DA: Oh, my parents are more complicated than that. They are liberal Methodists. The places that we lived were also complex. Northern Minnesota was politically pretty liberal, but socially a little bit conservative. My family lived in Idaho for about ten years, though and I'd guess that there's probably more Bush supporters there. There was a big Mormon community in Idaho, and they just seem to lean toward conservatism. The culture is that way.

AFH: Do you feel like, in contrast, the Western contemporary community is too permissive of a culture?

DA: It would be nice to see more complexity. But then again, I don't know about much past what I've seen. I don't get out into the art world much. Last year, Javier flew me to Los Angeles and this year, it's to here in Berlin. But most of the time, I am in a little cabin in the woods. I read my book and sometimes I'll get an art book from Powell's, a huge bookstore in Portland. I get an idea of what's going on but I can't say that I have too much a sense. But saying that, I've always been really suspicious of anything, whether music or art, that relies on one theme or one temperament.

AFH: Yet, it seems that your creativity benefited from you having grown up in an environment that took expression so seriously. You were raised somewhere where creative expression was seen as dangerous and offensive. That is granting it a lot of power.

DA: I think that's a good thing to happen if things can shock people for a reason. But if people are really offended or shocked by something, whatever it is, then they just need to get more familiar with it and then move on.

AFH: Are you saying that the differences in value between good coming on stuff and dumb coming on stuff, is all within the audience's power to respond? Is this related to the an issue of authenticity behind the trucker hat fashion?

DA: That is what it is. It will be gone soon, but I'm just interested in thinking through things and getting things out of my system, while I decide what really interests me. On the other hand, I don't explore certain ideas as thoroughly as other artists who may focus more on, say... satanism. I just kind of explore it as it relates to my interests.

AFH: Are you still interested in Post-Modern theory?

DA: Not really. I read mostly nature books now. I always get little golden nuggets from any book I read about theory, but it requires a lot of wading through the texts.

AFH: Most of that theory is just bad, lazy, unedited writing. Has any of it been an inspiration to your art?

DA: If I had to choose an art theory book that had the biggest influence on me it would be Arthur Danto's, "After the End of Art". Whatever captures my imagination is what I want to paint. I want to paint it while I try to understand it. In this way, every time I read a book that has anything that means something to me in it, it informs my work. I want my work to serve as a record, so in this way the paintings are a record of my own clumsiness. Maybe in some ways, this relates to the idea of a wilderness. I can't really wrap my mind around it completely. It's too complicated. Whereas, in the past few years, I've been thinking more and more about geological time. I've been painting rocks more and more intensely. Maybe I haven't thought enough about actual wilderness.

AFH: Why rocks?

DA: I'm just fascinated by thinking about things in another, very different, time. It's just something similar to thinking about death. Geological time is something that makes us realize we're nothing. Maybe this comes from an abstract appreciation I get from rock-climbing, which I did very regularly for a few years. But over the last few years, I've been reading about how rocks form. I've also been reading about space, planets and solar systems. All of that is geology too. Maybe time is what interests me, in a bigger sense. I love the feeling I get from thinking outside my own frame of reference to time. I have a philosophy book about time, which separates the notion of time into two tenses. In one, time moves. And in the other, time sits still and we move through it. I never thought of it that way. It is somewhat clumsy but it makes sense. Time is something that we all have an inherent sense of, and when we question it, something fundamental shifts. That is why geological time interests me so much. It is just another way of wondering about one hand clapping.

AFH: When did you start using your own personal history as source material for your work?

DA: There was a definite point when I was living in Minneapolis when I realized that these experiences I'd had were interesting to the rest of the world.

AFH: Such as?

DA: There was a guy I knew who filed his teeth, so he could hold a cigarette while riding his motorcycle. There is something fascinating about that. That doesn't happen just anywhere. That takes a very specific recipe of strong culture, harsh climate, self discipline and a very specific perspective.

AFH: Elsewhere, peoples' priorities are a little different than that.

DA: True. He also had an 'FTW' self-made tattoo on his arm at 15. This was back in the late eighties, before everybody had tattoos.

AFH: I saw a woman with a tattoo on her face when I was coming here to see you. And my only response was "that's a commitment." It is the same thing with filing your teeth. You have to decide definitely teeth are not a priority. One looks like an asshole back peddling with that.

DA: Being able to see options from outside helps, but tattooing ones face is pretty easy. But when you're down in something, it can seem less obvious. I burnt a smiley face into my arm when I was a kid, other friends burnt inverted crosses and other things. But I was the prankster of the group, so I was okay to have something permanent that wasn't evil. Once I got out of this town of two thousand this meant something different. I was embarrassed at first but now I know it can be interesting.

AFH: You have no resason to be embarrassed. You were authentic. Look at James Frey, who got "FTBITTTD", short for "Fuck the bullshit, it's time to throw down" tattooed on his hand as an affectation. Now that he has been exposed as a phony, imagine the shame in wearing tattoo advertising that you expose and fight bullshit, after being exposed as bullshit.

DA: Reality can be so beautiful.