An interest in beauty is not trivial.When I’m lucky, I’m making art in a sublime flow state, and I can almost — but not quite — touch the very core of the pleasure of being alive.
For a long time I could only achieve this exalted state through drawing from life, so I pursued a rigorous training in classical realism, studying full-time at the Golden Gate Atelier in Oakland, CA from 2021 - 2023 and learning the academic sight-size method in a lineage traced to the Florence Academy of Art, and most famously practiced by Sargent and Bouguereau.
I have since trained at workshops at Grand Central Atelier in New York — a temple of artistic excellence — and I’ve had the privilege of learning technique from some amazing contemporary classical artists including Noah Buchanan, Dale Zinkowski, Justin Wood, and Tyler Berry.
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IN my early 20s when I was living in New York, I would drop in from time to time on evening sessions with a live model at the Arts Students League on 57th St. A real portal out of midtown, Art Students League is a fabulous place with a distinctive smell of turpentine and good old wood and coffee and the most amazing little art supply store. Though I drew the model with just my pencil and paper and kneaded rubber, I loved afterwards to stop at the store and toy with the smudgy sticks of charcoal, and marvel at the names of the oil paint pigments:
“Lemon Ochre”
“Burnt Umber”
“Alizarin Crimson”
“Viridian”
“Vermillion”
“Italian Brown Pink Lake” … are you fucking kidding me? Take me there!
“Persian Rose”
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I have since heard it explained that art is like music, and no matter how gifted, no one is born knowing intrinsically how to play an instrument. Technique must be studied and practiced to achieve mastery and true creative expression. This might sound obvious yet, this is not the zeitgeist, and artistic method is no longer instructed at art schools and universities. Thankfully, the atelier movement has preserved the teachings of craft and technique, and at ateliers it is still possible to learn the methods of the Old Masters.
I have always felt the compulsion to study technique. I do feel it is the “right way” to arrive fully at the easel, but maybe I just can’t trip out on abstraction without having fully taken the long road; who knows? Studying at an atelier had been my true and unspoken fantasy since I first heard about ateliers in college, but felt increasingly far-fetched as I trained my mind on more practical pursuits.
So I lived my early adulthood making art “unseriously” or perhaps seriously but aimlessly and without confidence.
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IN 2021 I lost the thread of my life. I had felt increasingly sick for years, and I finally got an answer as to why: a non-cancerous brain tumor requiring surgery and an associated chronic disease to be contended with for life.
One of the weird things about this condition: the tumor was close to my optic nerve, and unbeknown to me I was close to losing my sight. (My sight. The visual world!)
Another weird thing: living with its undiagnosed effects for years had completely altered my physical appearance and features. Transmogrification. Like a frog in the pot, my face had become unrecognizable, but in such a slow insidious way that no one close to me had really noticed.
A final weirdness: I was told that with successful treatment, most but perhaps not all of those physical changes would probably be reversed. Tbd!
In the months following diagnosis, there was brain surgery and radiation, and then expanses of time where I was not working, not doing anything but convalescing, and looking into a mirror at home in muted anguish. I was blessed or perhaps cursed with the capacity to see subtle things about faces, convexities, angles, the qualities of spaces between. Was it my true self or the mask of disease? I struggled to parse the visual information and under the intense beam of my focus it began to morph, like a word repeated too many times, into something strange and fantastical. The mirror became an abyss or a well, and I fell into it.
Utter darkness. This was a bad time for me. I felt around for an escape, a way to redirect this intense energetic need to see and to observe: I could focus my gaze on other faces, other bodies, where it would not be diagnostic or critical but accepting, curious. No longer in New York but in Berkeley California, there was no Arts Students League, where one could dabble anonymously. I found a figure drawing group with a live model at a local artist’s studio, and began to go there a few hours a week, a merciful reprieve from the endless machinations of my mind, a new object for my insistent attentions. I was also seen there, in person, by other artists, despite the pandemic and the fact that I was buried alive in a well. The real ascent was the exercise of power: the power to draft, edit, render and sculpt the form with my pencil and eraser, but this time with the benefit of a clear and desperate aim, to live in the light and sensual world again.
To see and be seen; I also posed myself as a model for that group and submitted to the loving gaze of others. This is one truth about making art from the live model: in the sustained gaze unfettered by narrative thought, the love flows —- to draw the hand, the slip of the chin, the eye in shadow, you must fall in love with it in some manner, and to let yourself be drawn you let yourself be loved.
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THIS strange liminal period of time, a period of illness and halting recovery, of endlessly seeing, of global pandemic, was also for me marked by switching context from person to patient. I was the recipient of ministrations, incursions of needles and sharp objects, another body for the nurses to contend with and a receptacle for pharmaceutical intervention. If you have ever gone through the ritualistic process of preparing yourself for elective inpatient surgery you certainly know what I mean.
At one point I needed to sit perfectly still while my surgeon turned screws straight into my skull. I’m not joking; this is something that actually happened to me. In the cold hospital room my veins hid away from the nurse with the probing IV. They could not find a way in time to get the Ativan into my system. So I was stone cold sober for this procedure. I had some local anesthesia, and I was told to prepare for a great deal of pressure and something that felt akin to a lengthy wasp sting. (I reflected that the nice thing about a wasp’s sting is it is not something you tend to have to prepare yourself for, but there I was.)
In moments like this, what is most challenging for me is to find a way to cling to my subjectivity and not succumb completely to the sense that I am an object, something put upon. I do not want to abandon my body and float above the bed. I flipped through the book of Egon Schiele’s drawings and found one that I felt could save me. I looked deeply at it and as he turned the screws I could hear the crackling in my bones.
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IT is funny to me that hospital room art is a trope for something banal, mass-produced or badly done. I cannot think of a place where art is more important. Where else are you to rest your eyes when they sink the needle in, or tell you what’s gone wrong. What else in that room is a recognition of your humanity?
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I have found my way back to a state of wellness. It has been a massively vulnerable, heart-opening process and by bringing me to my knees, it has connected me intimately with the earth; the present moment; the joy of a good piece of fruit; the importance of a flower; and the difference between an inhale and an exhale on the flare of the ribs. Do you see what I see?
I am for better or for worse completely permeable to visual influence. My relationship with classical realism is more of an affair than a marriage, and it remains to be seen how it will end. I have no definitive stylistic inclination of my own; I am metabolizing everything I see. OK, but I do have my tastes, and the challenge for me in my art is to live up to them (that’s a sticky one).
In my art, I contend with the body and the female body especially. Pleasure, femininity, and the sensual world are conscious themes of my work. Less consciously, for there are no answers, I find myself exploring through art the tension between the body as object and the person as subject. This tension is potent even in my academic drawings, for even in the most technical and measured approach to a figure drawing I always maintain sight of the subject as a somatic being with their own subjective experience of that shared moment.