1/ The Story of an Artist: Discovery and Limitation
I’ve always been an artist. It’s something I feel and do. Even when I didn’t feel like an artist, I still was. Even when I didn’t do art, I was still an artist. My story as an artist has been one of discovery and limitation; longing, separation, and wholeness; expansion and exploration; and reconciliation and now integration.
This is Part 1 of 4.
DISCOVERY
Nature
I grew up as a free-range kid in the 1970s in a small rural farming town in Western New York State. With my siblings and the neighbor’s kids down the road, we climbed trees, laid in the grass looking up at the clouds, ran through cornfields, waded barefoot in the creek, collected rocks and flowers, and explored the world around us endlessly. My family spent summers in the Adirondack Mountains, at our cabin on the lake surrounded by vast untamed forests and cool waters for swimming.
The great outdoors was our playground. We trusted nature and she always felt benevolent, allowing us to discover her mysteries and feel her majestic presence.
My sister, brother, and me - early 1970s
Design
In the late 1980s I went to art school in Philadelphia and studied graphic design. I wanted to study art, but didn’t have a strong portfolio. Also, where I was from, art was not considered a good job. My father and high school guidance counselor advised against it. I could get a job in graphic design, they told me, and computers were going to be a big thing and I should get into that.
At my senior portfolio critique, 1990
I couldn’t have known it then, but design became a way for me to see as an artist, a way of visually interpreting the world around me. My drawing teacher and mentor in the design department had a profound impact on me. Her way of teaching showed me how to feel when drawing — to feel intuitively if the form felt right, if the line quality accentuated the depth well. Even more, how my hand holding the pencil on paper could feel into the subtlest of lines and intensity of strokes. That intimate sense of seeing and feeling continues to this day.
Calligraphy
I moved to New York City and got that corporate design job in the early 90s, sitting in front of a computer. But I was restless. I didn’t like clients telling me what to do because I was an artist at heart, and design was a medium to express, so I took it personally.
In my search for inspiring art, I made weekly pilgrimages to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, to the Japanese calligraphy galleries. There I spent hours leaning over glass cases of unrolled scrolls studying the meticulously written scripts from another era. My eyes followed the strokes, rewriting each character in my mind, feeling the ink on the brush, the delicate change in pressure, and the deliberate movements. It was just like I had learned in drawing.
Later, during two years spent in Kyoto, Japan, I studied calligraphy, the tea ceremony, and flower arranging. The Shinto tradition –the worship of nature and ancestor spirits and the sacred power of things, animate and inanimate – also made a significant imprint on my perception of the world around me.
Then, during a year-long independent graduate study in Basel, Switzerland, I learned experimental mark-making, expressive calligraphy, dynamic sketching, and Japanese calligraphy.
By the mid 90s, the heart of my art had become an exploration of the line and its written and drawn expression. I referred to it as experimental mark-making and written drawings.
LIMITATION
During all this time, I lived frugally. I’d work, save my money, then go abroad again to study. I couldn’t afford many art supplies and relied on limited and inventive ways to get by.
The reason why I chose to work almost exclusively in black mediums - gouache, ink, pencil, charcoal, litho crayon – was because one color was cheaper than many colors.
The reason why I started making my own ‘brushes’ and tools to make marks was because I couldn’t afford new brushes. Anything that could hold ink for enough time to make a mark was used instead. Twigs, bark, pine needles, and stones became my favorites.
The reason why I started to learn to make handmade paper, and use newsprint, and take scraps of paper from a letterpress printer, was because good paper was always too expensive.
Although I didn’t know it at the time, all these limitations were not really limitations, but opportunities for me to learn in new ways and to expand my artistic expression.