1. Were you always an art kid, or did
you stumble upon it later in life?
When I was a kid I read a lot. Or I
made little scrap-wood boats to float in a creek that crossed the
grounds of convent not far from my house. Art was never anything I
thought about or knew. The closest I came to art was buying (many
years later) a handful of Conté Criterium 550 pencils in Haarlem,
just west of Amsterdam, from an art store that was going out of
business. I can’t even tell you why I bought those pencils—if
it wasn’t for their beautiful, bright, new-grass colors—but
I still have them.
2. What style of art is your favorite
and why?
I
much love the Hudson River School of painting, and among its artists,
George Inness especially. Inness has a darkness and a spirituality
that thrill me. How shall I put it? His paintings are
perfectly present, but they have an atmospheric imperfection that I
find immensely attractive.
3. What do you use for inspiration, or
how do you generate ideas?
I let the painting, what’s happening
in the painting, inspire me. What
happens, happens at the easel. Only rarely do I come to my canvas
with an idea of what I want to put down. And more often than not,
even if I come to the easel with something in mind, half an hour
later I’m painting something wholly different.
4. Walk us through your creative
process from idea to finished project.
This
is directly related, for me, to your question on inspiration. And at
the risk of sounding facetious, I’ll say my creative process is the
act of painting itself. My paintings are, therefore, largely
process-directed. In this sense, I tend to discover my works
rather than paint them. Or perhaps I capitalize on emerging
possibilities. Very often I'll overpaint old paintings and canvases,
though in the finished work very little might remain visible of
what's underneath. You could say I make the past my partner. Which
means that the fortuitous is also often a factor in my process. Very
few of us can be as subtle and perfect as the aleatory and the
evanescent are.
5. What is a typical day in your life?
Typically I wake early, sometimes at 4
a.m., have coffee or breakfast, and start painting. This is partly
because I like to have something accomplished early in the day and
partly because I just can’t sleep! After painting, I’ll take my
mom to the gym so she can walk around the track there while I either
row or swim. Then in the afternoon it’s freelance editing or more
painting, perhaps a long run on the trail not far from my house,
something to eat, general work around the studio, more painting if
the morning wasn’t particularly successful, and then sleep. My
life’s a very quiet one.
6. What do you think draws you to other
people's work?
The
great thing that draws me to another artist’s work is the
suggested, the implied, the shadowing forth of possibility. What I
truly love is art that tiptoes up to its revelation but then stops
and says to the viewer, in effect, “You go first.”
7. What are your interests/hobbies?
Though I read and run, painting tends
to be all-consuming. If I’m not painting, I’m often simply
compelling myself to get going and start painting.
8. Is this your full-time job, or do
you have a job out-of-the-studio?
When I’m not painting, I work as a
freelance copyeditor. There’s an enormous difference between these
two jobs. The latter, editing, requires consistency and vastly
aggressive attention to detail, while the former, painting, usually
works best for me when I abandon detail and strive for the immediate.
If someone’s in the studio with me, conversation is one way of
achieving this, though when I get deep into a work and am bringing it
to some point of finish, I generally fall silent.
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| Workspace. |
9. What is your favorite piece you've
ever made and why?
Undoubtedly I prefer some paintings to
others, but I’d find it almost impossible to say that one painting
alone stands out from all the others. Often though, I’m very much
in love with paintings I’ve finished recently—for example,
Bringing Us (The Hilltop), and The Wet Day. This is
what I mean by coming to the brink of revelation. Knowing when to
stop (and make it, in my opinion, sooner rather than later) is
invaluable.
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| Painting and some tools of the trade. |
10. What advice would you give to an
artist just starting out in the business world?
I confess to knowing very little of the
business world. My only advice to any artist just starting out in the
business world would be that he never let business get in the way of
art, and that he work at his art every day, every single day, without
fail. This may be naive. I hope it isn’t.
11. Describe your work space.
I work in an altogether bright and
high-ceilinged room with floor to ceiling (almost) French windows and
a white wainscot, the wainscot proving super handy for propping up
drying paintings.
12. Did you face any setbacks on your
path to being an artist?
Having never seen myself as on a path
toward where I am now, I’d have to admit that I never met any
setbacks in getting here. Or if setbacks there were, I never saw them
as such at the time. Perhaps I’ve been fortunate in that I became a
painter before I very much knew I wanted to be one.
13. What milestones, goals, or
achievements are you striving for right now?
My only goal right now is, quite
honestly, a daily goal: paint, and paint well. I don’t always
achieve this goal, as far as painting well goes, but even failure has
its heroism (or I’d like to think it does).
Thank you so much, John, for taking the time to answer my questions!
