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Monday, 15 September 2008 18:42 |
Born in Kansas the second son of a college history professor, I grew up in a small town. Was always around an academic environment where people's work was with the mind. The value of a liberal arts education was deeply ingrained from an early age. Being curiously knot headed, I majored in business.
Divorced with two daughters, I spent a large part of my life to this point in Wichita Kansas. Presently living in Lawrence Kansas, home of Kansas University and a town where art is encouraged and appreciated.
After I got divorced I got a job working in a hospital on a psych ward. It was common practice when evaluating a patient to ask if they were hearing voices that other people weren't hearing. It was about that time that I began drawing and it was funny that I didn’t hear voices, but I did seem to see faces that other people didn’t see. I had no particular reason to draw it was just a compulsion that began idly and soon was filling a lot of my time.
I was in the library one day and noticed the librarian, who I see regularly behind the counter, with a pained bitter expression on her face, as if she were thinking of something that was hard for her to accept, some painful aspect of her life. Then in about a half a second her face was reformed to her usual happy and polite mask. But for that second, I felt like i was seeing something real about that person.
I have always been prone to reading a lot into facial expressions - they are so much more reliable than words which are so easily manipulated for god knows what purpose.
When I started drawing it was only natural, never even a real question that i would do faces, to try to catch those transitory moments when rough edges tend to show.
Sometimes I am a realist in that I start with a real image that I want to represent. Sometimes however I may just start with a blank page and to some extent a blank mind and see what will happen and end up with an image that expresses some emotion or what ever. Curiously I don’t think that anyone but me can differentiate which painting is “realistic" and which is more "expressionistic" because the expressionistic painting may seem realistic, while the "realistic" painting is trying to reach for some real, but elusive aspect of a real person, and ends up looking quite expressionistic.
As a second form of expression, I sometimes write short stories, and have even been so foolish as to start a novel. But where painting is somewhat like playing, writing is a painful process. I find that words, which I don’t always like, or handle well, do have considerable potential for expressing kinds of experiences that people struggle with or enjoy. In fact fiction is often like a struggle between optimism and pessimism. Happy to report that optimism seems to be getting the upper hand lately.
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Last Updated on Wednesday, 17 September 2008 03:21 |
