A Life Time of Art
For the last several months I’ve been compiling what is known as a Catalog Raisonne, a complete inventory of an artist’s work throughout his lifetime. This oeuvre has been assembled from my files and encompasses works from my high school years to my current works to date. Looking back in time to the periods in which I created these images can be challenging to one’s psyche because analyzing one’s artwork can bring up long passed emotions. Art work, I feel, should evoke an emotional response from its viewer whether that reaction be pleasing or not. I feel artworks evolve from one’s soul, either pouring out, or being pulled from that innermost place where ideas about ourselves and our surrounding world converge. Being lost in one’s self is often equated to the act of creating art, all the arts I believe, not just visual arts, which are my focus. When you hear a musician say, “The melody just came to me”, or an actor describes becoming the character he or she is portraying, that is testimony to the fact that forces laying beneath the surface of our perceived reality are at work in the creative mind. With my creative process, it is often planned and thought about for a time before jumping in, or in many circumstances inspired by that uncontrolled spark of inspiration that comes out of the blue, to use a well turned phrase. When in the throws of creating in this manner, I often say to myself “Who’s been driving while you were gone?” This means to me that my hand and mind have been controlled by a force not consciously realized but rather driven by a deeply intuitive or instinctive knowledge of my intensions. This is summed up by saying it was a spontaneous act. But was it? Can it be that in the area of the brain where we store learned behavior the raw data for these forays into subliminal creation is always just there under the surface waiting to burst forth and onto the paper, canvas or other surface. Something to think about, but not too hard! One does not want to lose the ability to sustain this spontaneity.
That brings me back to my statement that analyzing my earlier artwork can evoke emotional memories of its origin. I was always searching for images that reflected my surroundings. I found worthiness in ordinary objects and scenery. It’s all in the interpretation of what you are seeing and how you choose to convey that feeling or emotional connectivity to your psyche. Being young and happy to be with my art making, tools and subjects, propelled me a long way toward developing the skills needed to render drawings and create pleasing results. That said, struggling with expectations can hinder any artist’s ability to reach the level of desired accomplishments he or she feels attainable. Those impediments were something that I never experienced for very long. I was always able to accept my limitations and focus on what I perceived to work for me. I could draw and learned the disciplines of perspective, life drawing and accurate rendering. These skills, to this day as a seventy-five year old artist serve me well. From those initial drawing skills comes all else that was to follow in my lifetime of art.
Each decade seemed to define my artworks in their subject, quality and quantity. John Lennon’s saying “Life is what happens while we’re busy making other plans” is a very apt summation of circumstances weighing on my life’s expectations.
An early marriage and first child, a son, were a challenging time, putting constraints on my planned art career. I would work, drawing while sitting in the driver’s seat of my car in the parking lot on my break at night, using the steering wheel as a support to brace my drawing pad. I worked at a General Motors plant to support my young family while my college plans were put on hold. So I adapted. I drew and created when I could steal time for my passion. Sitting in my car in that parking lot using the illumination from the lights on the light poles soon became a nightly practice. Using a number 2 pencil and a kneaded gum eraser I created a series of drawings depicting the belching smoke and pollution from that factory setting. On my drive to that afternoon work shift I would pass farm fields and a barn that I would later draw a series from. I once again used as my subjects what was available to me. During this period I also drew scenes of domestic surroundings such as a couch with my toddler son’s shoes sitting on the arm. My wife’s figure, drawn from the floor view, as she sat on that same couch was another.
Into my mid twenties my father in-law encouraged us, as a family, to travel to Massachusetts where on Cape Cod I found a life long desire to paint subjects from the Cape’s maritime offerings. Fishing Vessels, lighthouses, and marsh lands became a go-to for my watercolors. At this period in my life I was living in a landlocked situation and the travels east to Cape Cod became a yearly vacation locale, beckoning me all year long. My son, and later my daughter, both loved those early vacations, and now my son lives in Massachusetts, a move he made because he, too, fell in love with its charms. I currently live in the Pacific Northwest where I have many opportunities to visit local coastal communities where I garner subject matter for my paintings. My wife and I visit our son and his wife, when possible, in their house in Watertown, MA. They have a cottage on the Cape in Chatham, MA, where we all visit when in their company. That connection keeps me continually supplied with fresh subjects for my art.
Watercolor works seemed to be the perfect fit for my art going forward during those years and I enjoyed giving some of those artworks to family members. I was encouraged by those same family supporters throughout my artistic journey. In the following years, and decades that followed those early times in my artistic development, I experimented with many different mediums of art materials to create images. Watercolor continued to be a favorite, which later led to pastels and then combining those two mediums into collage work. Mono type printing became interesting to me as an element to go with the pastels, watercolors and torn paper with its rough edges for contrast. Collaging became very intuitive for me, with the placing of different medium elements next to and over each other in a dance of compositional importance: what needs to be more prominent, what needs to recede in order to let a more interesting component come forward, what will catch your eye and give some semmblance of order. Collage in a lot of ways informs the work that I do today in so much as which elements within a given painting need to jump out at the viewer. That dance of prominent and receding values, colors, shapes, line weight and perspective lead the viewer through a painting, circling the viewer from top, sides, bottom, middle and back into the top again starting at one point of interest and continuing throughout the artwork.
In my late forties I went through a divorce with my wife and mother of my children, which hit me harder than I realized at the time. It was hard when it happened, but had a more lasting effect on my psyche and subsequently my art than I understood at the time. Using collage to express my feelings in my art was a natural progression at the time. That art is mostly figurative, mixed with collaged, xeroxed, and monotype elements. The results were eye catching although somewhat dark or mysterious in nature. It was work that helped me process my feelings of rejection and lack of self worth.
On the verge of my fifth decade I had overcome the turmoil of the divorce, moved out of my home state and relocated to the west coast. With a new outlook on life and my artistic endeavors I flourished in my new surroundings. I ventured into a more crafty collection of art objects, paintings and objects d’art. Once again adapting to my circumstances, I created art works influenced by my new living conditions and locale. A lot of lodge subjects, fish (trout in particular), bears, salmon, pine trees, even making some rustic furniture became my venture.
I held down a job at a local newspaper where I learned to use a computer doing advertising ads. Once my time was done at the newspaper I moved again, this time from Oregon to Washington state where I reside today.
Into my seventh decade now I continue to paint in Watercolors, Oils and Acrylics, I consider myself settled into a good vibe using vibrant colors to elevate my mood and hopefully the viewers attitude also.