On Artistic and Career Goals
As a young artist, what were your goals and how did you accomplish them?
I think as a young artist you have so many goals. In the beginning it seemed like my main goal was to make my painting look like the thing I was looking at. In other words does this painting look like that person. At some point my artistic goals started to get a little more specific and individual and I started to talk about things like experience and metaphor. I started to think about who I was in the world and what I had to say about that.
I decided pretty late in the undergraduate process that I wanted to teach painting. This was a big goal for me because I wasn't ready to go to grad school by the end of my bachelors. My paintings weren't ready. I was making strange and awkward figurative paintings of people wrapped in sacks and sitting on furniture. One of these paintings is still in my living room. The painting is me and my wife (we were already married at the time) sitting on a green couch. We have it hanging over a green leather couch in our house currently. The strange thing is, we didn't have a green couch when I painted this but we do now. We think we subconsciously bought it because of this painting. I'm not proud of this painting, but here you go.
It was a necessary step and if I can offer some advice here, stand behind the stages of your development. There was something there, and you meant it. I really don't like this painting and my wife wont let me take it down so I have to look at it every day. Its not a very good painting but I am posting it on this blog because it was true in the moment in which it was made. The various graduate review boards where this painting and 19 of its contemporaries went, agreed that these painting were not quite ready. On my first attempt to grad school, I did not get in.
This was a disappointing set back at the time, as you might imagine. It created an opportunity for me to set a new goal and that goal was to get into graduate school for painting. It was tough in some ways because I had graduated and didn't have access to a painting studio. A common plight for the recently graduated. So, I set up the spare bedroom as a painting studio and made it work. Rent deposit return: uncertain. By this time, (applying to grad school is a lengthy process) my work had moved in a new direction and I began to follow it.
When you were starting our as artists, beginners so to speak, did you imagine a meaning or purpose for your work? If so, did this meaning or purpose change as you both grew into the artists you are today?
By the time I set up the studio in my spare room, I was starting to imagine quite a lot of specific meaning to my work. I got a small basil cell carcinoma on my nose at roughly the time I did not get into graduate school. I think I was 22 or so. It was uncommon and a little scary that I already had cancer (albeit a very small and non life threatening cancer) and I began to process this in paint. They removed a plug of skin from my nose and transplanted it with a similar sized plug from my ear. It never looked like if fit all that well. This began the series of paintings titled "Basil."
These paintings dealt with various ways of describing and interpreting flesh and the body. I used all sorts of devices to describe damage to the body, transplantation of different types of related material an so on. In the course of a year, I created a body of work that dealt with my experience of having a skin graft and cancer but in one very specific way - the wound itself. These were the works that gained me access to my graduate school experience.
The show we just had at EKU titled "Corporeal Anxieties" has a clear and direct connection to this early work. I am not directly processing the scar I have on my nose anymore. What I am dealing with is this idea of consciousness tied to fragile and impermanent meat sack. The concept has gotten larger and the work has become abstract in a different way but it has, in many ways, the same fundamental basis. Even my cow paintings traveled this field in many ways. I have a sentence in one my artist statements that says "large and ungainly physicality." This is a common idea in art. I think it always has been. At various times, I have dealt with the cliche and the common responses to this idea. The fear, the anxiety, the look of the thing all have come in and out of my painting the body.
I once painted two cows humping under a floating meat sack. This was the first meat sack I ever remember painting and somewhere in there, I found basil paintings again. The culmination of this in its most current form, are the paintings from the show we just had in the Giles.
Next post: I will tackle the questions on the topic of the Creative Process.