Index:
1) Introduction
3) Art Criticism
3) Intrusive Thinking and Creativity
4) The Role of Missing Information in Creativity
5) Art and Algorithms
6) Art, A.I., and Culture
7) Autism and The World
8) YouTube Channel and Miscellaneous
Studio Photographs and Notes: Here are a few photographs of my work environment. Notes for my Inventing Landscapes with Color Pencil class, which is offered through Ivy Tech Community College, are seen on my work table in the middle set of images, while the last photographs are from classroom settings before 2021. I executed chalk drawings for instruction initially, and later switched to dry erase markers, as shown in the last two images. I have drawn countless drawings over the years for classes, and because I did own a smart phone at the time, I had no practical camera for recording them. My drawings may be compared to Buddhist sand paintings, but someone other than myself erases them.
Fuchs Dystrophy and Cataracts: Due to the development of cataracts and Fuchs Dystrophy, I gave up my drawing classes around 2022. Fuchs is a corneal eye disease that will eventually require surgery, but cataracts have been the more pressing concern for me. My cataracts were successfully removed in 2024, and my vision is greatly improved. I restarted my color pencil class, but intend to run it only until I retire from teaching in 2025. My current method of drawing instruction is to use a projector, where students draw along with me. The below image was created in this way.
Reflections on The End of My Time as An Art Instructor: Like many vain MFA graduates, becoming a painting/drawing instructor was not on my radar after graduation. And yet, my path to becoming a community instructor was an uncrowded one since obtaining a similar entry level position at a four-year college was never going to happen for me.
First, there were my antisocial (autistic) tendencies, which denied me access to an inside track adjunct professorship. And then there was the brutal fact that colleges had no more interest in my surreal art than they had in my gender or skin color. More essentially, MFA graduates, vainer than myself, would never accept the job that I have performed over the last twenty-six years as a continuing education instructor through a two-year community college.
The job pays too little.
This lack of money and prestige made me ideally suited for this job because I could protect my personal creative projects from the grinding influences of a full-time academic career, where I would be required to teach more and perform additional duties. Continuing education does not demand fidelity. It does not require me to “stay in my lane,” so to speak. I have had the time—and energy—to branch out into comics, music composition, and creative writing.
The crown jewel for any college professor is to land a plush gig in a graduate program, where it is more like counseling with one’s colleagues than teaching a mixed bag of undergrads. There is a reason why tenured professors do not teach freshman classes: They have paid their dues, and so have been liberated from the Sisyphean struggle of repeating themselves endlessly in lecture halls before an onslaught of new students. Make no mistake, most artists would prefer making art to teaching; and of those who find fulfillment in teaching, few find it teaching freshmen taking electives.
Still… I have achieved something similar to the graduate school advisor effect by cultivating repeat business with my continuing education students. Many of whom have been with me for years. I enjoy my time with them, but will enjoy that time more once I have retired from teaching my other classes.
A Philosophy for My Art: It is easy to believe that I was chased into the creative life that I have. Though I attended college and graduate school as a “fine arts artist,” this was more a holding pattern than a career choice. Attending a commuter college was only one type of outsiderism, while having autism was another. Indiana University was regarded as one of the five top programs for painting in 1986, and I got into the graduate program largely due to a professor at The University of Memphis having a daughter on the graduate selection committee. It was never a question of talent but connection, which is generally the case within competitive programs. Still, I was grateful for my opportunity to observe and mix with graduate students from elite institutions. I discuss my arts education in detail on my Porfolio pages.
I was accused of creating ‘kitsch’ when I first entered graduate art school and, indeed, there was no irony or self awareness in how I approached my shatter-shot artmaking. Had my attraction to converting consumer products into cubist compositions taken a purer form, these projects would have fallen under the approval of the Pop Art umbrella. However, it was not clear to colleagues and instructors that I was doing anything like that intentionally, especially in how I sometimes used silicon caulking and tin foil as embroideries.
Typical 3-D style painting from my BFA era, which would have received the kitsch label in my MFA era.
Nevertheless, I had a vision for myself that was there from the outset, and this brand has only sharpened through the years.
Academic styles, whether derivative photorealism or derivative abstraction or derivative abstract-figuration, mostly escape the kitsch label by being predictable enough to check necessary boxes: The work is not so imaginative that it intrudes on the unimaginative viewer’s experience. Low expectation allows the viewer to insert their own opinions into the dead air around an uninspired painting. One can chinwag cleverly over a plastic cup of box wine and feel the equal of any artist on display. The unstated premise—the unescapable reality—is that current art is ‘derivative,’ and so each attendee joins in this chorus of veiled condemnation as they claw their way to the summit, and despair,
“See… I told you so.”
This is a cynical view of the process, but there is no other way to describe why the art world never evolves out of its stagnancy. Cynicism is the gatekeeper, so mingling at art openings is the unspoken token for cutting to the front of the line where everything else is equal. The art world a social club first, and only incidentally a business for selling art.
This social dimension to fine art was always going to be my professional undoing as a fine arts painter, whereas alternative comics, and my other interests, were tailor-made for my talents and disposition. Many things can be pursued in complete isolation. And yet, here too I was in holding pattern until I could return to painting, my true love, with a different philosophy.
Fine art painting involves limited vocabularies, with each offshoot in style being its own limited vocabulary. When viewed with a wide lens, these restrictions are necessary since fine arts artists, in each category of interest, are more alike than different in terms of their entry level skill. It is a given style that sets the limits, which most painters work within comfortably. When individuals are attracted to the same pursuit, the jumping-on-point cannot be too steep.
With maturity, I find pleasure in many figurative-abstract and abstract styles. However, when presented with a plethora of accomplished paintings in these styles, it is impossible to say one sophisticated color scheme is better than another, or that color field painting is better than minimalism, or minimalism is better than figure-abstraction. These individual pathways owe everything to the pioneering contributions of artists like Dubuffet, Klee, Kandinsky, Gorky, Rothko, and others. Had I less curiosity about the breadth of creativity possibilities before me as a young man, I would have settled into one of these comfortable ruts, but it is hard to distinguish one’s self on such a well-rehearsed field of play.
As naïve as it may sound, I placed “originality” as the highest good—and the one place were I had it in spades was in comics. This makes my paintings (and especially my drawings) practically unique, apart from the early influence of Salvador Dali.
Although Dali experimented with styles invented by others, he was a world-building machine. The world of fine art of his time was more receptive to his vivid, one-of-a-kind imagination, but this door has closed in subsequent decades. Fine art no longer returns his admiration; and so my imagination-based art is viewed with the same disinterest. A nontraditional imagination is not counted as a virtue in fine arts because it is a virtue available to too few.
Finding Collectors for My Work: To date I do not sell many works. I plan to change this dynamic once I retire, but I will still be a reluctant seller. An artist’s artworks are like his children, and so he should be picky about where they go. My artwork is highly involved. The paintings in my possession number less than fifty, so it is not like I am churning them out. My pricing will not be unreasonable, but it will also not be unserious.
If one sells one’s art for too much, then there will be few buyers. If one sells one’s art for too little, then the art may be viewed as a less valuable investment, and so its provenance receives less regard. This sets it sinking down an indifferent food chain where no one may care where it winds up.
The best solution to my purchaser dilemma would be to place my entire estate in a museum collection—even if I have to give the art away. (I would, of course, preserve a percentage of future resales of my work for my descendants.) A museum is not only the best steward, but also attracts the best private collectors who will view the art as having future value. Nothing is guaranteed, even with this strategy.
As for sales out of my studio, I have sold to friends. Strangers would need to convince me that they value the uniqueness of my art, and did not simply pick my name out of a phonebook, so to speak. If they declare that they wish to purchase a painting for a special occasion, this is not heartening. A wedding gift is no better than the marriage to which it is tied. The union may go south, and take the goodwill of my painting with it. My art must be central to the purchase. The buyer must like surrealism, and not merely the “subject matter” of a given painting.
Copying Willem de Kooning: I have copied few works of art in my life, and none post-maturation. However, I thought that, should I do it again, I would copy someone I both admire and whose work is different from my own. As a gift to my sister, I made a small version of Willem de Kooning’s Untitled II.
What I like about de Kooning’s abstract-expressive oil paintings is how he excavates, almost at the very end of his process, with semi-transparent white. The effect creates misty veils of negative space that weave through his elements. This technique is common among realist landscape painters who used diffuse light filtering through tree branches to soften up the space. Often this is done late in a painting.
Here is a comic I made some years ago on the subject of Willem de Kooning.
Cataracts, Claude Monet, and Mistaken Identity: It is a apropos of something that the first painting I chose to create after receiving my cataract surgeries should be a copy of a painting I believed (falsely) to be by Claude Monet. Cataracts greatly degraded his painting in later life.
As it turns out, you cannot trust anything you find on the Internet, and the below image is one of thousands of art images I downloaded in the mid-teens from Facebook. This Impressionist homage is by Lilla Cabot Perry, an American painter who mentored under Monet. A reverse image search would have produced information about her authorship of this painting, though this Google feature was still relatively new in 2013. I hope I may be forgiven for mistaken identity since the style is a dead ringer for the master. Perry was not part of the original Impressionist Movement, like Mary Cassatt, but appeared later. Her primary interest was not landscape or Impressionism, but portraiture. She tried her hand at a variety of contemporary styles in her time, including Pre-Raphaelite.
“Giverny Landscape in Monet’s Garden” by Lilla Cabot Perry. She created at least two paintings from this perspective, with the second one being more restrained in approach.
This is my second effort at copying an oil painting by a dead painter. (See above.) I have often told my students that I would make a master forger should I ever turn my talents to a fruitful occupation.
In choosing a painting to copy, it was not going to be a precise rendering of Impressionist technique. I did not consider this level of difficulty to be essential for my project, given a short timeline. Much trial and error would have gone into working out the precise recipe of dry and wet media:
Perry’s paint appears to be dry and stiff, which gave it resistance to blending. Also, dry paint will not disperse, or level, as readily as wet paint. This makes the paint comparable to cake icing, which holds its shape while you spread it over the cake without futz.
Scale is needed to pull off this attack strategy, so it is easier to make mistakes and course-correct when the allotted space gives you elbow room. My copy is likely smaller than the original, though not by much. Regardless, I needed to break down the scale and reassemble the painting in effect if not exactitude. A quasi-pointillist technique was judged a reasonable solution. (Pointillism is in my wheelhouse, as it is.)
My version of Perry’s Monet-inspired landscape.
My first order of business was to decide whether I was going with the RGB image of the painting, or was I going to attempt to recreate the painting’s original color scheme.
RGB turbocharges colors in internet images, especially where the colors are deliberately saturated. An added difficulty arises where different digital devices offer different color calibrations. The pigments available in Monet’s time were drabber by comparison: chrome yellow and the various cobalt blues, such as cerulean. These blues gray easily when mixed with other pigments. Much the same can be said of ultramarine blue.
A more vivid purple-blue can be achieved by mixing dioxazine purple with phthalo blue (green shade). Phthalo blue is the most robust, versatile blue one can use to make any shade of blue, but it did not exist in 1897. Chrome yellow, where mixed with a lemony hansa (ayrlide) yellow, is also more vivid than chrome yellow alone. Lemon yellows, much like phthalo blue (green shade), shift toward green. This puts them closer in range to RGB colors, although RGB colors cannot be reproduced as paint pigments.
Lead-based whites were the standard in Monet’s time. I used Utrecht’s lead-based “Flemish White” as a finishing white for highlights. This white is almost iridescent in appearance, and brighter than commercially prepared whites like zinc oxide or titanium dioxide. This iridescent effect is limited, since to mix this white with any other pigment is to lose its special property.
Earth tone colors can be created any number of ways. A key element of this landscape is its distribution of olive green accents and purple-blue accents in the flowering trees. Both colors complement each other suitably, but because their tonality (translation to grayscale) is nearly identical, they create a color field of strokes that reads flat, much like a shadowy curtain. This intentional muted-ness underscores the inclusion of bright white and yellow along the horizon line, which energizes the aforementioned purple-blue.
My canvas is 11” by 14”, although a good inch has been chopped off from the left hand side of the original image. Once a painting is resolved in terms of its tonality and color, many painters will leave whatever remains as unfinished, or they will add whimsical flourishes. One sees this effect in watercolors and preliminary drawings, where a sketchbook gives the artist license to treat the boundaries of a paper page more casually or experimentally. Impressionism is not an exact science, but it does require a talent for improvisation.
To Frame or Not To Frame: Because this painting is a gift, I decided to frame it, even though I prefer painting the gallery wrap on my own canvases and leaving them unframed. (See below.) Gallery wrap canvases are the standard these day, even in New York galleries. It saves the artist the exorbitant expense and trouble of using frames.
Given Postmodernism, and the deconstruction of the relationship between art objects and the spaces they occupy, frames seem somewhat old-fashioned, arbitrary, or even intrusive. And yet, there is the expectation that they should exist.
I have no faith in my selection of frames. Whenever I try to visualize them surrounding my paintings, they never seem to work. My paintings are dense, and their lineage to comicbook art further decrease their depth of field. Frames crowd a shallow field, and so add little.
In my 2002 LA show, I could not afford professional frames so made my own from lattice wood. They mostly worked. Even relying on a painted gallery wrap as a finishing feature required some convincing to myself. However, once a painting is varnished, the wrap looks great on the wall.
Frames are traditional in older styles like Impressionism. A black frame, in my case, reinforces the shadowbox effect of the picture, where the foreground is dark while the background is bright. Dark comes forward as a rule, especially in landscapes, so the frame preserves this effect. A walnut or deep oak frame might have been better for coloring, but those frames were more ornamental and too busy for a busy painting. A white frame would have been softer, but it may also have robbed the picture of some depth. Hard to say.
This blog entry has been turned into a YouTube video. See my Video portal page for a link.
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