Interview with Phil Padwe

At what age did you decide to become an artist?

I was thirty-five but had been drawing since childhood and was already something of an illustrator. Following a tumultuous youth, I didn’t make it to college until my mid-twenties, where I studied poetry as an undergraduate and spent nights singing in bands down on the Bowery. That led very organically to drawing and designing CD covers and logos and t-shirts for my own bands at first, and then illustrating hundreds of flyers for a half dozen other bands as well. And that naturally led to learning Photoshop and unexpectedly landing a white-collar career as a graphic designer in marketing. Then one morning back in 2005, while sitting at my desk, I was inspired to write and illustrate the “hipster classic” children’s books Mommy Has a Tattoo and The Tattoo Coloring Book #1 and quit my job to focus on those. Needing daytime-hours off to focus on PR, I became a night guard at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and it unexpectedly changed my life!

I worked for one hour when the museum was open and the rest of my shift was when it was closed. I began walking around with sketchbooks for the first time, literally wherever I went. I tucked them in the back of my pants, always carried one in my pocket, eventually even sewed an extra flap into the back of my work-jacket so I could carry a larger one without being noticed. I filled about twenty sketchbooks with 800 drawings in just over three years. On shifts where I couldn’t draw the collection, I would draw the contractors. If I couldn’t draw a painting, I would draw a chair. There was always something to draw. And I learned so much! I read artists’ monograms from front to back, and nearly every catalog, for nearly every show (there were a lot of hours to kill). I learned about dozens of artists, in depth, and the whole timeline of art history. But moreover, being surrounded by so much amazing artwork night after night, just me, a flashlight and the collections of popes, kings, and pin-drop silence… it reached inside me and shifted something.

By the time I left the Met to freelance in design again, I was actively drawing and painting portraiture. I’d been in my first group shows, sold my first paintings, and even had a portrait appear in the New York Times! I didn’t know it at the time, but I would spend the next ten years on a journey of intense exploration, visiting museums all across Europe (we lived overseas for two years), finally getting an MFA in my 40s.

How did your parents react when you told them you wanted to be an
artist?

My mother was actually thrilled! She moved to Manhattan when I was in high school and has been taking classes at the ASL ever since; she’s a lifer. She’s always been supportive of my art and encouraged me to draw, especially.

Who are your favorite artists?

This is what working nights at the Met taught me! On the one hand, I love the High Renaissance, Mannerist, and Baroque Old Masters for their draftsmanship. Michelangelo and Leonardo; del Sarto and Pontormo; Rembrandt and Rubens and Dürer and Holbein. I did about 100 master copies at the British Museum of those artists, and in hindsight, that’s when I really learned to draw. On the other hand, I adore a slew of nineteenth- and twentieth-century illustrators. Artists with an overtly graphic line quality: Gustav Doré, Alphonse Mucha, Aubrey Beardsley, Beatrix Potter, Frank Frazetta, and Bernie Wrightson are favorites. Lastly, I’m drawn to mixed-media-draftsmen, whose work seems to tap into the creative side of entropy, like Dave McKean, Ralph Steadman, and the late Mersad Berber. I think Jenny Saville fits that bill as well. There’s something haunting in the mashup of abstraction and precision that those British artists transmit beautifully. And speaking of haunting, I just have to add, lately the work of German Expressionist Käthe Kollwitz feels hauntingly close.

Who is your favorite artist whose work is unlike your own?

Robert Rauschenberg. When I first encountered one of his large canvases as a guard it was the most foreign thing I had ever seen. But something about it spoke to me, which wasn’t the case for most of the modern wing, at the time. Over a period of years, I came to deeply admire much of his work.

Art book you cannot live without?

Intellectually and pragmatically I don’t think you can beat Harold Speed’s classic The Practice and Science of Drawing.

What is the quality you most admire in an artist?

Often I think what I most admire is strong, or unique, draftsmanship. I definitely lean that way. But then I’ll see an abstract painting that really works and realize what I truly react to—what transcends all—is something well-conceived, and then well-executed. Often it’s simply easier to tell when something is well executed when it’s a work of figurative realism. But there’s a vibe when someone is doing the best they can with what they’ve got… I guess you could call it a kind of authenticity? Creating art is ideally an authentic experience, and so is receiving it. But they’re both, especially these days, often dialed-in.

Do you keep a sketchbook?

Absolutely. I keep several at a time. Some are mixed-media and contain elaborate grounds for drawing and making image transfers and collages on top of. Others have thinner paper and are for pen-sketching, and then I’ll use sturdier ones for charcoal or pastel and graphite. And I’ve got handmade books (not by me) with 300-lb hot press paper for using ink & wash or watercolor. Also a pocket-sized sketchbook is often in the mix somewhere as well.

What’s your favorite museum in all the world?

I should say The Met, or British Museum, because they’ve literally changed my life… but the truth is that as an Old Masters drawing nerd, it’s just got to be The Albertina in Vienna. They’ve got, pound-for-pound, the best drawing collection in the world. They put on a show in 2014, Dürer, Michelangelo, Rubens. The 100 Masterworks of the Albertina, that still curls my toes when I think about it!

What’s the best exhibition you have ever attended?

Defining Beauty: The Body in Greek Art at The British Museum in 2015. I’ve got to give you the caveat that I was living there at the time, so I could return often, which is why it was the best exhibition. They borrowed the Belvedere Torso from the Vatican and displayed it alongside the red-chalk sketch by Michelangelo for the Creation of Adam. The two masterpieces were situated at the very end of the show, and consequently, it was desolate around the Torso. I’ve seen it in Rome where it lives ordinarily, and it’s constantly thronged by tourists and rather ill-lit for drawing. This was the opposite. Brilliantly lit, sectioned off, barely trafficked—a drawing dream come true. I’ve been smitten by “better” exhibits (see my answer to the previous question) but this one was simply “The best!” I got to make fifty sketches of the Belvedere Torso over about ten weeks… I spent over forty hours there. What an amazing opportunity.

If you were not an artist, what would you be?

Maybe one of those FBI agents who busts forgers and recovers stolen and smuggled antiquities? I enjoy the stories and personalities of art and art history almost as much as I do the artwork.

Did you have an artistic cohort that influenced your early creative
development?

It’s not a cohort but an unlikely influence. When I was ten, my dad died. Word went out that a little boy who liked to draw had just lost his father, and an old man who’d worked in advertising as an illustrator reached out to my mother through the local temple and offered to “draw with me.” Not teach… just silently draw. So I spent a year going over to this retiree’s house, once a week, and drawing for an hour after school. It turned out he was an Auschwitz survivor. I know this because I remember the sun crawling across the tabletop as the two of us drew cartoons; and eventually, when it would reach the gnarled ink on his forearm, he’d get up and make us hot chocolate. He was the only artist I ever met, socially (and regularly), until much, much, later in life. A “real artist” who’d made a living drawing! I didn’t realize what an impression it made on me until years later, but that was truly formative.

What is one thing you didn’t learn in art school that you wish you had?

Actually anything about psychology or sales or marketing as they relate specifically to fine art. We’re all sitting ducks for misinformation because whoever’s aggregating the useful info doesn’t share it widely, or for free.

What work of art have you looked at most and why?

The Belvedere Torso. It’s called the School of Michelangelo, in part, because it’s said he used it over thirty times as the starting-point for figure poses all around the Sistine Chapel. Not just in the ceiling, but in the Last Judgement as well, twenty-five years later. Michelangelo was literally forced to paint the Sistine ceiling when all he wanted to focus on was sculpture, having just completed the David. He was in his twenties, literally being lauded as the greatest sculptor since antiquity, and lining up commissions—when the Papacy stuck a paint brush in his hand, cancelled all his other contracts, and told him to start frescoing.

So he’d visit the Belvedere Torso, which was then kept (and still is) a five-minute walk from the Sistine Chapel—and he began incorporating it; painting it, again and again and again… turning it at different angles; imbuing it with different combinations of imagined limbs; creating endless prototypes for the hundreds of figures he needed to populate his paintings. My man effectively coded a decades-long love letter to that Torso, hidden in plain sight, within some of the most famous paintings the world has ever known. Knowing it has that kind of history made its presence vivid in my imagination — just how often Michelangelo must have visited it, and sketched it, alone in his frustrations —which made me want to spend as much time with it as I could, while I could.

What is your secret visual pleasure outside of art?

I love people-watching here in Manhattan. Just sitting on a park bench, maybe with headphones on, and watching all the characters walk by.

Do you listen to music in your studio?

Shockingly, less and less! And I don’t play movies in the background anymore… I just kind of sketch away in silence. Which honestly feels weird. I don’t know when this started, but I’m hoping it’s just a phase! I love music. And want so badly to listen to podcasts but just… don’t?

What is the last gallery you visited?

A Hug From the Art World for Marc Dennis’s recent opening.

Who is an under-rated artist people should be looking at?

The artist-instructors who’ve taught me are all underrated, no matter how successful they are; or become. For the record I believe we’re living in a Golden Age of art instruction; especially here in Manhattan. People should be looking at Frederick Brosen, Wade Schuman, Costa Vavagiakis, Michael Grimaldi, Jon deMartin, Dan Thompson, Marshal Jones, Marc Dennis, Margaret Bowland, Peter Drake, Jordan Sokol, John Jacobsmeyer, Steven Assael, and Thomas Germano. I’ve been blessed to learn from the best, and their work speaks (volumes) for itself.

What art materials can you not live without?

Silverpoint on stone-paper is an excellent, lean, combination I discovered recently. And nothing beats my Uniball Micro Grip pen, on rag paper. It’s technically a normal pen meant for writing checks (it can’t be erased or bleached and is lightfast and permanent as well as waterproof)—but I love it for sketching. I’ll throw in a Pentel Aquash brush-pen, for good measure… one of the ones you fill yourself, with wash. And of course lots and lots of sketchbooks.

Do you paint/sculpt/create art every day?

I draw every day, but it’s not always “creating art.” Sometimes (often) it’s just sketching or doodling. Keeping the machine well oiled and running smoothly. Studio days, of course, I’ll draw all day.

What is the longest time you went without creating art?

I’ve always done some kind of expressive, creative, “thing.” When I wasn’t drawing in the service of making fine art I was drawing in the service of making band-flyers; writing and recording and performing music; writing and illustrating children’s books; reading and writing poetry, etc. But that said it’s been drawing, daily, for about seventeen years. And during that time, I think I once spent two weeks away? That was while I was on my honeymoon, twelve years ago. Actually the only time I regularly don’t draw, these days, is when I’m traveling with my wife.

What do you do when you are feeling uninspired?

I’ll bring a sketchbook to a museum, usually American Museum of Natural History or The Met, and find something to draw. I’ll go and photograph garbage cans (for my Trash series). I’ll walk to the park and find a beautiful tree. Or an ugly tree! The point is, I’m out the front door looking for inspiration, not sitting home, waiting for it to knock. I know what needs to get done, and if I don’t feel inspired to do it… most days, I just do it anyway. I don’t know who needs to hear this, but there’s nothing wrong, or unusual, about feeling uninspired!

What are the questions that drive your work?

As an adoptee, I’ve spent my life pondering big questions about belonging; nature vs nurture; and the idea that things we think of as deeply spiritual or personal can be, actually, arbitrarily assigned: religion, cultural identity, and even national identity. My biological mother was born and raised in Ireland and had been a nun for seventeen years. I was adopted by a Jewish couple in Manhattan. That dichotomy often manifests in my art, and in my life, as strange mashups of unexpected elements.

I was drawn to portraiture as soon as I began “making art” because I’d spent years studying faces in crowds, wondering who might be related to me. And although I never got to meet my biological mother before she passed, I recently met my father, and it unexpectedly triggered an enormous wave of self-portraiture. I needed to draw myself to reclaim my face… and ward off the shock of seeing my features on someone else and suddenly aged into their 80s. Having finally resolved my own adoption in a positive way, I’m curious about the faces and stories of other adoptees. So a portraiture series is on the horizon. I’m also working on a long-term series based around NYC trash… still lifes and vignettes of garbage cans and sacks of garbage, as seen in the urban wild. That’s exploring entropy, and also just bearing witness to this moment ecologically, politically and culturally, etc.

What is the most important quality in an artist?

The bonkers conviction that your best work is, perpetually, just around the corner. Development is everything as an artist. Developing ability at first, and then your vision, and later on developing concepts, and processes, and connections, and studio practices. A successful art practice is all about personal development. And the “thing you can’t teach” is drive… that innate impulse that keeps you picking up the pen or pencil, or reading and re-reading the histories, or returning to an idea you had the week before. That’s the most important quality, long term: just enough delusion and/or curiosity to fuel a healthy drive.

What is something you haven’t yet achieved in art?

Having come late to the game, there’s a lot I’ve yet to achieve. I just got into my first museum, but compared to all my contemporaries, I haven’t shown much. I’m doing it all backwards!

What is the best thing about art in the era of social media?

When I think of art books from when I was a child, with crude color reproductions (if any color at all, especially for drawings), and compare those to the 4K videos people post of themselves flipping through sketchbooks on Instagram, I’m stunned at how far we’ve come. That’s got to be the coolest, best thing. But social media isn’t a meritocracy, and there’s nobody (human, or well-intentioned) ultimately curating your feed. So it’s at least as confusing as it is inspiring.

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PHIL PADWE (@philpadwe) teaches Drawing from the Cast  and periodical workshops in silverpoint at the Art Students League of New York.

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