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This is the second part of a five-part series, released M-F this week, called “Artist’s Talk”. You can read the previous parts and other pieces on my newsletter archives, here. Enjoy - and please share with anyone you think would enjoy this piece and others like it, and encourage them to sign up with their email to receive the newsletter themselves. Onto… Artist’s Talk: Part 2 - A Most Intimidating Dream — … Back to my fantasy scenario, giving an artist’s talk at the Met. I now have to get up (likely black tie) in front of a room of celebrities, art world higher-ups, collectors, luminaries, artists, etc, in Manhattan, at my favorite museum. I see the task as unnecessary, maybe, but it can help to frame my work - I can write a personal letter to the audience, to give them a chance to understand my art beyond just what it looks like, to satisfy their thirst for importance, for relevance, for the answer to “why is this here?” So, this is that letter. Thank you for coming here tonight to hear this talk. I am grateful to have the chance to speak a bit about why I’m making what I am, and I hope that in listening, you will find a relevance to your own experience. Very easily, my career as an artist could have been subsumed by other interests, by art-adjacent divergent careers. I went to undergrad for a traditional BA, not BFA, and in grad school the closest I was to an MFA was getting an MLA, a design degree for landscape architecture. These attempts to come close to art while coming closer to practicality and conventional job-searching-adherence were made partly by me, but mostly by my family. Wouldn’t it be convenient to tell you all I was rebellious by nature, and struck out on my own artistically at 18? That wasn’t the case. Conversely, as a child who was always drawing, my parents are owed more than anyone else for what it is I can do today with visual artwork, my primary media for communicating with others. What my family did for me was to recognize my aptitude for drawing, and enter me in as many art classes or other art-related experiences as they could. Even when childhood-me was tired of going to drawing class, hating it even (before I was there), my family wouldn’t let me miss any of it - I had to go. Of course, once the day was done, and I’d made new artwork I didn’t even know was possible, I was always happy, and couldn’t help admitting how right they had been to shove me reluctantly out the door. I’d go to sleep grateful…until the next morning, when, again, I’d rather sleep in and play video games on a summer weekday than to go back to the art summer camp. But I kept going back, learning more and more, and eventually became obsessed with learning as much about art and making art as I possibly could. The art education I had from a very young age was unusual, exceptional, and set in place habits of production and entry points to representation that very few, if any, of my peers had. For how young I was, I didn’t know anyone else who could do what I could do with drawing and painting. Drawing especially was a part of me. At times, as a child, I was so frustrated with not being able to draw something I wanted to, I drove the pencil through the paper, wrecking the work (to my parents’ horror). In tears, I’d give up for the day. I’d try again the next day, always. A sketchbook was how I related to the word, both real and imagined, and it never left my side. Adults began to take notice of what I could do, and I could see this sharing of my drawings as a way to get their attention, to get them to take me seriously. I understood that what I could do, and the kind of representational art I loved, was respected, admired, valued by almost everyone I met. There was another narrative developing in me, at the same time, a kind of confusion, which I didn’t think too much of, but nevertheless unsettled me. It seemed to me that all my favorite artworks, the masterworks in museums, from Michelangelo to Sargent, Degas to Monet, Bernini to Velazquez, specifically the very accomplished representational works, were barely being made anymore… by anyone. I didn’t see evidence of a lot of living artists capable of working with the grace, skill, poise, mastery of the French impressionists, or the Baroque sculptors, or the renaissance draughtsmen. Despite the rationalization that artists were no longer “choosing” to make this kind of art, this didn’t ring quite true. My observation, as a young person who doesn’t care about societal consensus, was that the majority of artists “choosing” to forego these ways of making art were not really making that choice or not - it was made for them by default because they’d never deeply applied themselves to learning how to draw or paint with representational skill. Painting and drawing from life, accurately, only comes through relentless practice. It just doesn’t happen any other way. I saw many artists’ lack of training, lack of practice in doing such things not giving them the ability to choose or not to choose what kind of art to make. It’s a choice if you can do both, and choose one. I’m not advocating against non-representational art, abstraction, modernism at all, because I love many modernist and abstract, non-representational works. What I observed from a very young age was that it was so, so rare for anyone to be making art in a rigorous representational way, today. This struck me as odd, because what I was doing, working in that way of observing and representing, was still very highly valued by audiences of all ages and backgrounds. The audiences who enjoyed my work were in alignment with me, flocking to art museums for shows of the works of my favorite aforementioned artists from the past. Part of the specialness of that kind of art, it seemed, was its extreme scarcity, like gold from a mine almost out of ore, a limited quantity, with few to none prospecting anymore. Thank goodness for the Gage Academy of Art in Seattle. Gage kept my dream alive of being able to one day feel no barrier of technique to expression. Through an assemblage of wonderful art instructors, many of them master artists in their fields, and the rigorous classes they offered, Gage gave young people like myself a chance to learn how to draw and paint in almost-forgotten ways. I studied in middle school in Gage’s summer art camps. At age 13 I was allowed for the first time to join the adult figure drawing classes. Figure drawing changed my world, and remains to this day my favorite subject. For me, nothing is as personal and rewarding as a figure drawing or portrait sketch from life in graphite or charcoal. I was young when I started with the figure, and immediately had a positive and challenging experience therein. There is a permanent groove in my mind for figure drawing to soothe and heal me as nothing else can.
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