a not-so-brief history of myself as an artist, part 1

I have been a writer and artist since before my first memories. According to my parents before I could actually write I would dictate stories to them and in some cases I would have them lay out the stories over several pages of a pamphlet so that I could illustrate each page.

I spent the first nineteen years of my life in northern Virginia, which has a surprising lack of culture for being so close to the capital. I was writing plays before I had actually been to a professional play, and likewise my exposure to art was limited. Most of the art that I saw firsthand was craft fair style art. In terms of art via books, my local library provided me only the basics of Van Gogh, Dali, and Picasso. By the time I was in middle school and high school one of the primary ways I heard of painters was when my work was compared to theirs, such was how I learned of Edvard Munch, Alberto Giacometti, and Henry Moore. There was also the influence of comic artists such as Jim Lee and Dave McKean, such that much of my work was a sort of surrealism crossed with the odd physicality of comic action heroes. This refined itself to a barely expressionist realism that dominated my work for more than five years (spanning mid high school through post-college).

I briefly attended college for screenwriting but money problems and severe disappointment with the lack of rigor in the curriculum led me to drop-out. During most of this period, I concentrated on drawings with graphite, charcoal, and pastel. However, I was becoming disillusioned with realism. I worked for many years to have the skill to draw portraits that were life-like, but once I reached a certain plateau of achievement, I then didn’t know what to do with it. It looked life like, but that was all; it was too easy to look at, identify, and dismiss.

After exploring the work of Egon Schiele and Oskar Kokoschka, I decided that I needed to add color and expressionist techniques to my work by shifting from drawing to painting. Unfortunately, my forays into painting were mostly frustrating. Having received only limited instruction in painting with tempera, my attempts with oil painting were overwhelmed by my ignorance of how to manipulate the materials. In my drawings I was technically adept with portraits, but I could not transfer this aptitude over to painting.

This led to a dry period where I did very little art. By mere happenstance while wandering through a library one day I found a book on Elmer Bischoff, the on again off again abstract expressionist. Bischoff’s work completely destroyed and reformed my ideas about what artists do. At this point, I had read some art history but still saw artists through the reductive lens of the central image that art history is wont to impose on their work. Therefore, I was familiar with the New York School of Abstract Expressionism only through their major works once they had hit their stride. While I did not and do not particularly like Bischoff’s abstract work, the idea that he could succeed in more than one mode and more importantly could take lessons learned from his abstract painting and bring those into his figurative work was mind blowing to me. His figurative work maintains a degree of realism but has a stunning palette that came from the more open form of abstract expressionism.

It had never occurred to me in this way before, but since my interests were in realism I looked at primarily in terms of subject, and perhaps secondarily in terms of compositional structure, balance, and movement. So though I had undoubtedly seen Kandinsky or Mondrian or any of the many artists who shifted between realistic and abstract across their careers, I really didn’t pay much attention to them because their abstract work lacked enough subject to interest me and I wasn’t attuned to appreciating color and form on its own merits.

After a year of digesting Bischoff, and then Richard Diebenkorn, as well as Clifford Styll, and others of the San Francisco School of Abstract Expressionism, I decided this was the way I intended to work myself into painting. I would learn the techniques and materials of oil paint by making abstract paintings. I wouldn’t be frustrated by the disparity in my technical aptitude with painting compared to drawing because I would not be trying to make the paintings look like anything in particular. And eventually I would take everything I learned and shift from abstract expressionism to just plain expressionism.