Heating Up: The Art & Basketball Life of Jeff Sonhouse

Words by Blake Gillespie of Sacred.

“Can you imagine working on a piece for months and just losing it during that final act? There was so many matches…the shit went up in flames and caught the matches on the other afro. That was my first scare.”

Jeff Sonhouse believes powerful art demands risk. For him, that looks like building an afro out of matches on canvas and lighting that shit up. It’s a practice that sets him apart from his contemporaries. It’s a challenge that says, I’ll risk it all. Will you? As a teenage graffiti artist in Washington Heights, risk has always been tied to his art long before the interest from galleries and private collectors. Even as he found basketball and went on to play college ball at Marshall and professionally in Puerto Rico, there were always dangers and cautions just beyond the game lines. But, Sonhouse’s story is also about the sages who appeared at consequential moments to guide him towards art. Through their presence, encouragement, and tutelage he learned how to harness fire like Prometheus. 

Decades before that scare Sonhouse’s artistic curiosity was fostered during the birth of graffiti in New York City. Perhaps the allure of risk began when he saw his aunt’s teenage friend write in marker on a public surface. The act struck him as odd, and a lingering, foundational memory built around that feeling. By age 10 Sonhouse was tagging walls and trains with his friends around Washington Heights and Sugar Hill. He saw the name INCH2 often. He understood that INCH2 was famous. In a way, INCH2 is Sonhouse’s first sage. When his aunt’s friend was killed before reaching adulthood, Sonhouse learned that he was INCH2. After he was gone, Sonhouse would see his tag “decades after on the walls inside the tunnels of number 1 train line,” and loss mixed with legacy can linger with a young man.

Sonhouse chose the moniker SCORCH, which feels like a prophecy in retrospect. He tagged it on the downtown train on his way to Henry Chalflant’s Soho studio with childhood friend TAKE ONE where he hung out with graf writers like SKEME and ZEPHYR. He was introduced to documentarian Martha Cooper at Fashion Moda, and met CRASH through a friend in the Bronx. But, SCORCH was short-lived as he lost interest in the letters and drifted towards drawing character figures. He painted his characters on customized Lee Jackets. He sketched portraits of girlfriends. The summer before ninth grade he was out bombing trains every night, and during the day he played basketball. At first basketball burned with vengeance in the form of an eighth graders versus teachers game at P.S. 143 Eleanor Roosevelt. He fantasized about cheap shots on teachers with an elbow in the paint. Sonhouse was always the tallest in his class. He’d eventually grow to 6’7”. As he stacked basketball-filled summers where blocks challenged other blocks, a love for the game grew. His athleticism for shot blocking and rebounding led to two years in JuCo and two years of Division 1 ball at Marshall from 1988 to 1990. 

Art was a constant for Sonhouse even with the demands of being a student athlete. The original goal was to be an architect, but he admits now that he lacked the discipline to make the grades. The talent was there, but not the application. He switched to graphic design at Marshall, but left school without a diploma when his athletic eligibility ended. A family friend introduced him to the owner of Titanes of Morovis, a pro basketball team in Puerto Rico, and for the next two years he played on the island. Basketball in Puerto Rico is a brutal game played by butchers on a beautiful island with beautiful people. Early practices included “drilling us on how to make dirty plays” like stepping on a player’s foot so they can’t pivot and when to grab a jersey so the referee doesn’t see. There were also warnings about not stopping at red lights while driving after dark because carjackers lurked in the bushes, open gambling at games, and, even though the opposing team would throw a party for the traveling team after the game with meals and groupies, if you had residual beef with an opponent, a post-game party could double as a set up to get jumped. For Sonhouse those warnings remained as much, and he built lasting friendships with teammates who remained in Puerto Rico long after their playing days ended.

He used his downtime to build a design portfolio, which he submitted to the School of Visual Arts in New York City. If he didn’t get into the school, he would play another year in Puerto Rico. When he met Jeanne Siegel, head of the fine arts department and his second sage, for his entrance interview, she informed him that his portfolio indicated unequivocally that he was not a graphic designer. He was a fine arts student. She scribbled her decision on a sheet of paper and sent him to enrollment. It was a meeting that changed his life, and he still gets choked up thinking about her (she’s since transitioned), and says, “I feel so grateful to this woman.”

“I registered to begin classes that fall and my days of playing basketball ended that afternoon,” he says.

 His third sage is none other than Jack Whitten, the abstract painter and sculptor. As two black men in the fine art world, they bonded through their shared experiences of growing up with mothers who were seamstresses and having creative minds grounded in the technical, mathematical, and rigor. When Whitten took family trips to his home in Crete in the summers, he gave Sonhouse the keys to look after his studio and keep it clean in exchange for use of the space for his own work. Sonhouse recalls Whitten as a natural born teacher, polite, and never complaining despite being overlooked most of his life. When Whitten’s work was picked up by Hauser & Worth, Sonhouse says he wasn’t surprised: “I was beside this great spirit.”

“He was put on this planet to teach,” Sonhouse says. “Everything that man said I just absorbed and put it into practice.”

The matches idea was incidental. Whitten’s classes introduced Sonhouse to adding material layers to his figurative painting. He experimented with materials that “inform the rendering of the figure’s disposition.” After his BFA, he attended Hunter College’s MFA program. Around 2000, Sonhouse had been producing mixed-media portraits of black characters, using copper and steel wool to reproduce the textures of black hair. The day before a painting critique deadline, he realized he was out of wool. Sonhouse dashed to a nearby restaurant for a handful of cardboard matchbooks. He adhered the matches to the canvas until the afro outline he’d drawn was covered. Problem solved, and he approved of the look. But he didn’t ignite the matches. It wasn’t until a year later during his thesis show that he thought to start a fire.

He started small. A watercolor drawing on paper tacked to a wall. “The experience was exhilarating in that it was the first time I considered, while the flame was spreading, what was to be gained or lost during this final act,” he says.

Working with fire appealed to his senses. The smell of burning matches mixing with dried paint. The heat coming off the canvas. The anxiety and adrenaline that came with wielding the fire to his needs. Even watching it burn thrilled him. Then came the reaction when people would see it.

“I truly thought I’d discovered something that was really powerful,” he says. “That people could relate to more than pretty much any other material I’d worked with before.”

He extended his burn technique to canvas works around 2005, which have become his most striking portraits. The lingering fury of the flame, the stain of smoke on the painting, gives his characters their own undeniable rage that speaks for the restraint of their circumstances. His characters stand trial or simply exist with defiant and vexed looks behind harlequin masks. Some remnants of fire betray the coolness of the character, like in Decompositioning (2010), where a jazz musician stands before a destroyed grand piano. The piano is still exploding in the background, still smoldering, while the musician's look conveys a willingness to burn it all down if he must. One, entitled Resuscitation of a Golden Era Blues (2018), is a bearded black man’s severed head impaled atop an ornamental wrought iron gate. Even though the head should appear fixed in its place, Sonhouse tricks our minds. The matchboards positioned on the head like jet wings and the trail of soot staining the canvas produce the illusion of a flying head, and because of his gritting teeth, he’s moving with a vengeful purpose.

Looking at Sonhouse’s work brings precedent to mind. How many artists would dare risk the possibility of absolute destruction to their work?

There’s a history of raging artists who’s inner critic tortured them into destruction. After his death in 1992 the excavation of Francis Bacon’s studio revealed hundreds of smashed canvases. Jasper Johns famously destroyed all his early work to clear his studio—and mind—for a breakthrough. Georgia O’Keefe, consumed with her legacy in death, bought back several paintings to have them destroyed. While conceptual performance artist John Baldessari cremated 13 years of paintings, folded the ashes into cookie dough, baked them, and placed them in a cookie jar for The Cremation Project. Then there’s Ai WeiWei’s Dropping A Han Dynasty Urn, a series of three black and white photos of the Chinese artist intentionally dropping a 2,000 year old artifact. But, it’s only in Baldessari’s work, like Sonhouse’s, that fire is part of the public presentation. 

Sonhouse isn’t out for destruction. Too much of the surface around the burn is often dedicated to precision to be preoccupied with pyromania. He’s more interested in the inherent uncertainty and volatility of fire that challenges our prejudices and vain fixation with order. In a society that polices black hair with work and school policies that assume the right to control a person’s follicles, Sonhouse gives the authority of fire to black hair. There is always a risk that he will lose everything and for him, “life is that way, especially in the city; you’re not guaranteed to make it home.” It’s his hope that the viewer understands that life is more combustible than we perceive it.

“You’re letting the viewer know that you are taking a risk and it’s not just for yourself,” he says. “This is something that you’re sharing. You’re hoping for something transformative in not only what they see but what they’re thinking.” 

 He nearly lost one work to a fire. He hadn’t considered the flammable differences between cardboard and wooden matches. The latter produced a bigger and faster flame. His conjoined characters had massive afros. He lit the first afro, and the domino effect ignited with such instantaneous rage that it caught the adjacent afro on fire as well. Realizing his small cardboard fan wouldn’t contain the flames, he pulled off his t-shirt and smothered the canvas. Relieved and a little shook up, he stepped outside for some fresh air. But, outside he smelled smoke again.

“I go back in to find out that the wood of the frame caught fire and it started burning the canvas again,” he says. “I almost lost that piece.”