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Exploring the mind and habits of an artist in twenty-five questions.
I’m not sure I ever made that decision. When I got to a “responsible age,” I needed to pick a field of study, and I applied for admission to art school at the School of Visual Arts. I eliminated everything I didn’t want to do and was left with art. After that, momentum sort of took over.
My mother was OK with it, my father not so much. He was a NYC cop who grew up in the Depression, so it was hard for him to understand what an artist did to make money—which is understandable.
Such a hard question to answer because there are so many. In no particular order, here’s the first seven that come to mind (excluding contemporary artists or friends): Andrew Wyeth, Vermeer, Kollwitz, Whistler, Rembrandt, Edwin Dickinson, Velázquez.
Pieter Bruegel the Elder.
Two books that I read as a student really stayed with me: The Art Spirit by Robert Henri and Hawthorne on Painting by Charles Hawthorne. A picture book would be the Selected Etchings of James Whistler, a large soft cover I bought around 1977 and took with me on many expeditions, including to Europe, to remind me the of the possibilities of plein-air etching.
Sincerity and authenticity.
I have a pile of various sized sketchbooks I will grab when I am going out to draw. More often than not, when working on location, I’ll take a small drawing board with some Fabriano paper. My most used sketchbook lately is my iPhone. With it, I’m able to record passing people and places, and return to them later on.
When I returned to New York from a trip through Europe, I noted to myself that The Met was probably better than them all.
In 1989, I was asked to work as a roving portrait artist for a stock market firm that had hired The Met for two evenings to celebrate their twenty-fifth anniversary. I was assigned to wear a costume of a nineteenth-century French artist, as the major exhibit that time was the huge Degas show. The organizer arranged for me to view the exhibit – wearing my nineteenth-century costume – on my own before the festivities. I spent an hour with the great draftsman, all alone, not even a guard on duty. I don’t know if that was the best exhibit, but it was the most memorable one I’ve experienced.
As a ten-year-old, I wanted to play for the Yankees, as most every other ten-year-old boy in New York in 1962. Later, I became interested in music and spent a lot of time writing and performing music.
When I was fairly young, I saw the work of Jerome Witkin and was deeply impressed. I eventually got to know Jerome personally and became friends. Not exactly what I think you may be asking, but a compelling friendship that was started in my youth.
I am glad I went to school where and when I did (SVA, BFA 1975). However, the instruction at that time, emerging out of the dogma of Abstract Expressionism, included almost no technical information for someone who wanted to learn to paint in a realistic manner. The emphasis was on concepts of creativity. Whatever I know about painting and drawing in a representational manner I taught myself — because I had to.
The portrait of Juan de Pareja in The Met. When I was an art student, the Met bought it for the then outrageous sum of 5.5 million dollars.1 My teacher, Herb Katzman, mentioned I should look at Velázquez, to study the edges. I would go to the Met once a week for a year or so. But the artist I have studied the most would be Andrew Wyeth. With him, I feel a deep connection, fostered by living in the same country and at the same time. Like Wyeth with his Pennsylvania and Maine work, my work has focused on a specific place—the landscape around Staten Island and New York Harbor. So I look at his paintings with great admiration, especially as he continued to find inspiration in a few square miles of land.
I enjoy looking at the world. In the mid-nineties, I read The Artists Way by Julia Cameron, who gives assignments to help reinvigorate an interest in making art. One of these is to go on a “date” with your inner artist: go to a hardware store or a zoo or a field somewhere, and simply look around, with no imposed mission of actually drawing or painting. I realized that I had been instinctively doing this for many years before I read her book. This helps me to get interested, inspired. When I get inspired, I feel like I can do almost anything.
No. To have music intrude into my work is a tricky thing. Almost never when the work is beginning, but sometimes after the work has found its footing, I will.
The Winslow Homer show at the Met.
I’ve already mentioned Edwin Dickinson; to me he should be on equal footing with Edward Hopper. Another artist who deserves attention: Walter Tandy Murch.
Paper and a pencil. Everything else is gravy, lol.
No. Life doesn’t allow that for me. Nor do I have something to say every day. I don’t work unless I have something to say, generally.
Probably a month or two, where personal life situations wouldn’t allow it.
Try to jump-start things. Take a walk by the Gowanus Canal, take a ride in the country, go to a life drawing session.
A philosopher once said that the only questions worth asking are the ones that can’t be answered. The biggest of those is: Who am I? Why am I here?
Sincerity. Truthfulness. Imagination. Authenticity.
Hokusai said something like at age 70, he was beginning to understand what drawing is all about, and by age 100 he hoped to make a really good drawing. That’s good enough for me.
I am overwhelmed with the number of really good artists I have encountered on Instagram over the past five years that I have been active. They live in all parts of the world, and I doubt I ever would have seen their work before the time of social media.
Selection of stories, guides, and more from the League.
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