Solomon Robert Nui Enos is a Native Hawaiian artist, illustrator, and visionary. Born and raised in Makaha Valley (O‘ahu, Hawai‘i), he hails from the well-known Enos ‘ohana and has been making art for more than 30 years.  Papahānaumoku references one of the foundational mo‘olelo or stories, telling of the mother, Papa, who birthed the islands, from Hawai‘i island to Kaua‘i and beyond. Works created for this exhibition offer a conceptual continuation of the peopling of islands, as the effects of climate change reshape our planet’s land masses, ecologies, and societies. This interview has been edited for length and clarity. 

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Anne Muraoka: So, from what I understand, William is hoping to feature one of your Cloud Sculpture paintings from your current exhibition at the Gordon Art Galleries for the cover of Barely South Review.

Maybe you could speak about the series the Cloud Sculptures, in terms of what was the inspiration or what you hope viewers would get out of it.

Solomon Enos: Wonderful. Okay, great. So, the work was created on 11-by-12 Bristol board, and it’s acrylic, and I painted them during my trip to Samoa. They were actually painted in my hotel room. I was there working with the University of Edinburgh on these graphic novel adaptations of some of Robert Louis Stevenson’s stories that he wrote while he was traveling through the Pacific, and so part of it was to actually soak up as much time, as much experience, as much of the light of Samoa. You know the project itself was to try to absorb as much as we can from all kinds of different places so that we could pour as much of these experiences into the graphic novel adaptations and the work that we’re doing.

And, so, if I wasn’t out exploring the oceans and the coastal areas and the mountains, I would rush back to my hotel room, and I’d be working right into the evenings, late into the night, painting, thinking to try to capture as much of what I had seen, and witnessed, and experienced, and tasted, and smelled, to try to—you know—capture as much of this as possible; sort of like a stream of consciousness, these images emerged. 

This Cloud Sculpture is actually one of four pieces that are in a series. And I’m sure if they want to feature the other three somewhere in the journal that would be great. Or we could just talk about it as a singularity like this is one of a set of paintings that are all in that same theme of cloud sculptures.

I always work on paintings in batches, and so effectively this one painting has 3 other siblings that I would create at the same time. I work in a series of layers, and so I’ll put in a series of yellow ochre, raw sienna, burnt sienna, umber, Payne’s gray. And so, each of the 4 cloud sculpture paintings each received one layer at a time, and that gave me time to return to the first layer to add more layers. Once one color had set….

I see, so you work on it simultaneously, but you do it by layers.

Yes, just like phyllo dough, or lasagna, or—I’m starting to get hungry now—so, I build all these layers, one on top of the next. The goal would be to get my head around just the magnificence and the significance of this experience. Traveling to Samoa was like traveling back to Hawai‘i a hundred years ago, maybe a 150 years ago, and in some parts of Samoa 1,000 years ago. We were in Western Samoa, so that’s an important distinction. Because this is where Robert Louis Stevenson had a home, and Robert Louis Stevenson was involved in helping the Samoan communities in Western Samoa to organize the chiefs so that they could resist against German and American occupation, which is why you have American Samoa and Western Samoa. And, so, yeah, there are so many interesting layers to the story. These cloud sculptures emerged just because there was such a magnitude of energy that I felt being there, knowing that my ancestors had gone this way before, had seen these mountains, had connections with these places.

And when you think about the migrations that were happening throughout the Pacific, you know, 1,000-2,000 years ago, people were coming and going. They’re going from Samoa to Hawai‘i, back to Samoa. There was a lot of movement. I think the thought is that people just did one big migration and that was it. But people were coming and going, not quite as much as they do now, obviously. But people were coming and going, and I think there’s a deep kind of remembrance that happens because it’s kind of like, wow, okay, there’s so much significance here. But I just don’t understand it because I haven’t been here in a couple thousand years. So, I think that’s pretty significant.

These forms, they are, in a way, I think of them…there’s that Taoist belief that you know the empty space in a cup is something, and that’s why you have a cup right? You can now hold something. You may not put something in it, but just because you haven’t put any water in this cup, it doesn’t mean that it’s empty, right? It’s actually full. It’s full of a purpose, even though it’s not full of a thing. And so, when I see these giant valleys and places that we travel through, like walls of vegetation, I think, oh, these are like from deep dreams that I would have long ago. I mean, there’s this landscape that make me say, wow! Why is this so familiar to me? And I think it goes beyond just simple déjà vu. I think the science on that is that it’s like a cognitive hiccup or something which is more of an illusion. This is something beyond that. It’s like, oh, there’s something here, but I don’t know what it is. So, that’s why I move to abstraction, when I cannot put a finer point on it, when I cannot articulate it directly. Abstraction is a great way to capture something that you cannot define literally. 

You know, I actually think as a general rule of thumb, when we think about abstract art, it’s because we can’t say something directly, and we have to create an entire new word that has never existed before. And therefore, that’s what abstract art represents: a color that has never been seen before, a taste that has never been tasted before, a touch, a feeling that has never been felt before; we must move into abstraction.

That’s the thought behind the forms. But, yeah, I did not have to struggle at all. [The Cloud Sculptures] happened faster than I could draw them, because they came from within.

The images were hungry for paper. They wanted so badly to emerge. So, I couldn’t even hold them back. They were like ta da—but, yeah, it’s the empty space in the valleys. The space between these amazing waterfalls and these environments is what brought them to the fore. Maybe to put a more literal point on things, it was an attempt to capture the light of Samoa or the light that I witnessed while I was there.

I know that a lot of your work uses science fiction as a vehicle. So, does that play into what we see in the Cloud Sculptures? We think of science fiction, in terms of a genre, both in literature but also in film. And, for art, it’s usually something that is futuristic in many ways, but it also has something that often reflects our current reality. They are always grounded in today, right? And especially in film. 

It seems to me, and correct me if I’m wrong, that what you’re trying to convey in your paintings, especially in, of course, the collection that’s currently on exhibit in the Gordon Art Galleries, it’s more about really visualizing what could be versus grounding it in our current reality?

Yeah, absolutely. I’ve always had a connection between contemporary and modern art and science fiction. So, you know, I think I’m like Henry Moore. That’s what we’re gonna actually look like in a million years! You know, we’re gonna have these strangely configured bodies. And if we did, it would be horrific, if it weren’t the norm for a million years. Oh my God! That’s so scary. It looks like a dystopian reality. Well, it’s just because we don’t understand it. Because we can’t. 

And so, these images are placeholders for…and I think a term that I’ve been playing with a lot is cryptic utopias. They are visions of the world, which have attained such heights of harmony, the likes of which we have never witnessed before. But this world without war, and suffering, and grief, and law, and all the unnecessary suffering is almost unimaginable. A world at peace might as well be science fiction because it seems so far beyond.

It seems more likely that we’d be able to shoot lasers out of our eyes or conjure fireballs than it is for us to create a world where everybody feels safe. What I’m trying to say, what is actually more improbable, giant sculptures floating in the sky made out of clouds that you can actually walk on and being held in place with forces that we don’t understand. That isn’t a very far reach, you know, if we think about the fact that we used to be fish.

Are you aware of any artists that actually work in the way that you think? in the way that you work? Because I don’t. I can’t think of one that does that.

One of the things that motivates me to take on these themes of cryptic utopias is because I can’t find them anywhere else. I also can’t think of other people. I mean, I know there are other people that are doing this. There has to be, because it can’t be like I’ve discovered something suddenly new and special.

Of course. Even when I think about it, you get some of it in literature. Makes sense, you know, science fiction, literature, right? But the visual arts, like film, I can’t think of one that really kind of creates this kind of vision of a world that we want.

Yeah, absolutely. So, that’s why I think a lot of the motivation is to feel like it’s based on this idea of my ancestors having this wanderlust, and feeling like, oh, there’s something else beyond here, you know there has to be another island, and I think this is that feeling. 

I may have spoken about it before, is that the idea, I know such a world exists. It’s just like my ancestors knew that the islands exist. They couldn’t see them, but all the signs were saying it. And in this day and age, when there’s so much trauma and tragedy, there’s a lot of interference, right? So, it’s hard to pick up that signal, and we lose our way a little bit. But there is something pointing us in this direction of these hopeful futures. 

Yeah. Well, I think it’s like human nature. Just in the world that we live in today, that it’s a lot easier to imagine the worst, than it is to imagine the best, right? And I think that’s ingrained in us, in education, even in terms of upbringing. Just overall. And I think that’s the obstacle.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, I get bored, too. If I’m watching PBS news hour and they’re talking about stuff that, isn’t—you know—immediately related to some of the ridiculous stuff that’s going on in the world or the horrible stuff that’s going on in the world. Not just ridiculous. I was thinking about these recent court cases that are going on. I mean, like, it’s a mixture of farce and horror, right?

Allegorically, I think it’s like, as a species, we’ve gotten so used to eating at McDonald’s so that we can’t taste anything else. It’s difficult for us to taste nuanced and subtle flavors, because so much of the food that we’ve been consuming has so much sugar. There’s so much fat, so much salt, that we need to retrain our palate to be able to taste peace with the softest, the subtlety of things.

And I think that’s the world I want to explore through my art. Completely new paradigms, where all of the things that we are fighting over right now are anachronisms, are solved, that we’ve moved on to other things. It implies that these things are solvable. Yeah, these are the insurmountable challenges that we face. They are certainly surmountable and transcendible. So, I think that’s why I don’t need to understand what I’m painting at all. In fact, the more I stay in the mystery of my own, my own art, the more I’m staying out of my own shot as a cameraman, right? My own shadow doesn’t need to enter into the frame at all. I’m trying to get myself out of it so that I could be a medium for something beyond, something really beyond me and beyond our understanding of how the world works now. 

But I keep coming back to the idea of a placeholder. It’s just a wedge holding open a space. And that way we can future. It’s like a future proofing, you know? It’s like, let me just put this here. I don’t know what it means, but it’s going to hold that space in the meantime.

Born and raised in Honolulu, Hawai‘i, Dr. Anne H. Muraoka received her BA in Art History from the University of Hawai‘i, Mānoa, MA in Italian Renaissance Art History from Syracuse University, and PhD in Italian Renaissance and Baroque Art History from Tyler School of Art, Temple University. Dr. Muraoka    has been at ODU since 2011. She is the Director of the Institute for the Humanities, Director of the Art History Program (Art Department), and Associate Professor of Art History.