I was recently interviewed by Buenos Aires, Argentina based
D Moda Magazine. The interview will be supplemented with some images of artworks and should hopefully be in the next issue to hit newstands. Fortunately for the Spanish speaking, it will be presented in beautiful and vibrant Spanish. Unfortunately for the English speakers, it might be harder to read. So, I'm presenting the interview below, in English.
Interview by Victoria Ferreira Why did you choose landscapes as the subject of your work?Before I moved out to California, I was doing mostly figure based work. For a while, I was using faces as the focal point of my work, and later it moved to large narrative scenes and nudes. People were always the focal point of the work. My goal was to move to a new place with the purpose of turning that around and using the landscape. Originally, I wanted to make seascapes and address issues around water, but then I got out and explored in and around the Bay Area, and the landscape just seemed to call to me. Things that I really liked and really disliked started to be more noticeable, and things just really grew from that.
How did you develop your particular mixed-media technique?First off, I should mention that a huge reason we decided to move to San Francisco was because I was going to graduate school at the San Francisco Art Institute. I came to the school as part of the printmaking department and planned to paint and make prints. There was a point in my second semester where I was learning to make photogravure prints, and I had this “AHA!” moment where I decided to use a painted landscape and collage buildings into it to make this hyper-dense cityscape. The painting worked out really well, so after that, I made a series of paintings that were made entirely with collaged prints. Huge areas were silkscreened, the skies were woodblock prints, trees and grass were etched prints, there were parts that were spray painted stencils. These paintings were well received, and since that point three years ago, the work has continued to grow and evolve. Over time, Acrylic painting has become the overriding element in the work, while printmaking (and specifically silkscreen printing) has become a smaller component in my work. I feel like the process is always evolving and I doubt that I’ll be making paintings in the exact same way a year from now as I am today.
What is your creative process like?Normally, I have a really rough idea that I’ll spend some time sketching out in a sketchbook or making notes about. Really, most paintings start with a very basic idea; some component that grounds the overall work. For some of the work, I might spend some time researching an event or someplace that exists in the world. Then I’ll paint a sky and when that dries, I cover the panel with a sheet of tracing paper where I do a preliminary sketch. I should really photograph that first sketch, because the final piece is always much different than the first drawing. Then I start painting. If a component of the painting is going to be collaged on, I figure out what I need to cut or rip out, and I use an acrylic gel as a collage paste. I’ve been silkscreening into the paintings a lot more, and a lot of times, it means I have to use tape or masking fluid to keep the ink where I want it to go. I spend a lot of time in my studio over-analyzing my decisions. A lot of time, I’ll go out running in the park or on the beach and I think a good majority of formal issues I have with my work comes from me being outside, jogging and thinking about things over and over.
Where do landscapes you paint come from? Do you know exactly what you want when you start an artwork or is there a lot of improvisation and experimentation in the process?Sometimes a painting comes from a lyric in a song. Something just pops out to me, normally in songs I’ve listened to hundreds of times over, and all of a sudden a lyric just resonates with me in a new way. The landscapes aren’t necessarily exact places, but more like approximations of places I’ve been or places that I’ve read about in a book. So much of my work reads in this overhead fashion, like you’re high enough up that you see all of these things spread out in the landscape. Even then, scale is never what it should be, so things are either much larger or much smaller in relation to how they would really be in the actual world. Some of the work reads a lot like a map, while the newer work I’m making feels like you might actually be standing in the space you’re looking at.
I never know what I want a finished painting to look like when I start it. Typically I know what ONE area of the painting is going to look like, and then I build from there.
What materials and colors do you like working with and why and how do you choose them?I’ll use any material available, as long as it’s going to fit on the panel and convey something I’m trying to put in the work. Most of the time I’m using something because it seems appropriate. Screen door material looks like chain link fence, so I use it for that reason. Water is a transparent material in the real world, so it makes sense to me that I use water like that in my paintings. I silkscreen a graphic representation of water on acetate, and then I collage that into the painting. Mostly, I use materials that fit the bill and make the most sense. Hopefully, they end up adding a layer of depth to the work.
As for color, I like things that are bright and stand out. When I was painting a few years ago in Omaha, I was using CMYK colors to make full color paintings, and those colors continue to be used in my work. We see those colors every day, printed on packaging, used in magazines, used on the countless advertisements we see everywhere. I think I’ve always been drawn to these super bright and rich colors having grown up in the 80’s and spending a huge chunk of my youth being obsessed with cartoons and comic books.
What are your influences and sources of inspiration?If we’re talking artists, the list would be too long to list. Really, if I were going to narrow it down though, Chuck Close is one of my biggest sources of inspiration. He’s such an interesting person overall, but if you add in his approach to painting and mark-making, coupled with his amazing story of how he adapted after his health issues in the late eighties…he makes for a truly phenomenal person.
I feel like I’m always thinking about my work so much so that I find myself being inspired by the most unlikely of things. Nintendo was a huge part of my childhood. Just the way space used to be laid out in video games, before they got so hyper realistic, and the bright colors that developers used to set pixels apart from one another. I feel like I’m always paying attention to the way things are presented and framed in movies and TV shows. Moments from my childhood or things that stick out in my day to day conversation end up playing over and over in my brain, a lot of times culminating in ideas that show up in my work. Political issues and the way things are handled by government and big business are always on my mind. My pure disagreement with nearly everything that Sarah Palin says feels like it’s been my over-arching inspiration for the better part of two years now.
What do you want to provoke or transmit with your work?Hopefully, people look at the work and see something that’s really beautiful, but maybe they feel uneasy about things happening in the painting. Without a doubt, I’m an optimistic person. But we’re living at a time where a lot of bad things are happening to our planet. My hope is that more and more people recognize that, and they end up wanting to change things. Ray Kurzweil makes a lot of predictions about the future and our place in it, and even though some people might dismiss a lot of what he says as science fiction, it always reflects the intelligence and ingenuity of humanity. We make problems, and then we fix problems. I’m all for finding solutions to the problems we help create.
What was the change of moving from Omaha to San Francisco like?Omaha was my home for 24 years, and it’s built a lot different than San Francisco. It’s been growing westward for years now, and there are areas of the city I honestly have never seen before. Most of the houses out west are just gigantic, and it feels like the current trend is that there is a huge shopping center with Wal-Mart, Home Depot and stores like that every couple of miles. San Francisco is a lot smaller and very dense. I feel like people are living one on top of another out here, but it’s not uncomfortable at all. If I don’t want to drive, I don’t have to, and I love that. With Omaha, you almost have to drive to get anywhere. I just hate driving so much that if we ever decide to leave here, we’ll end up going to another city that has an extensive public transit system and, ideally, where we can walk to take care a lot of our daily errands.
What can you tell us of the arts scene in San Francisco, about living and working there?San Francisco is an absolutely gorgeous place to live. A lot of people don’t realize it until they get here, but the city is really small. You’ll hear people refer to it’s being “7x7”, which is 7 miles by 7 miles. But it’s a cultural hub for a lot of people, with a lot of different cultures represented here. This is a much smaller market than places like New York or Los Angeles, but there’s a quality to the galleries and shows that come through here. We have the SFMoMA, which is a great museum for both modern and contemporary work. Part of the reason I love this city is I feel like I see a lot of great work because a lot of big artists, both locally and from beyond California, show in spaces out here.
Personally, I find it really inspiring. If I’m having trouble with something in the studio, I can hop on the train and head downtown and look at shows going on in the galleries down there. There are a few areas in the city where galleries are concentrated, so there are always opportunities to see some great work. And because there are a lot of galleries, there tend to be some great chances out there for me to show my work, which helps me to continue getting it out there and seeing how people respond to what I’m doing.
You used to have a band. What can you tell us of your musical side?Ha, wow. I’m a little surprised that you found out that I was in band. Google makes the world smaller, I suppose. Basically, my friends had started a band, needed a bassist, and I had a bass guitar. So my buddy Kevin asked me if I wanted to join, and I said “sure”. We released a few records, almost all vinyl releases, and did some short run tour cd’s. Our band afforded me to get in a van every summer for a month or so and see the country and meet a ton of rad people. I really don’t play music at all anymore, but our drummer Aaron is one of the most talented musicians and multi-instrumentalists I know. He’s still out there playing in a few bands. One of his bands, Back When, just recently reunited and are one of my favorite bands to listen to and see.
What music do you listen to while you paint?Honestly, I don’t always listen to music. Some days I’ll just stream something to watch over Netflix. I recently rewatched all nine seasons of The X-Files. If the San Francisco Giants (our Major League Baseball team) are on the radio, I’ll listen to that.
Lately when I do listen to music, I’ve been really into Die Antwoord, Nirvana, Jimmy Eat World, Noah’s Ark Was a Spaceship, Sleep….a wide variety of things, really. I use streaming services like Pandora a lot these days with the intention of discovering new music that’s out there. Mostly, I just want background noise.
What do you like doing when you’re not painting? My wife and I like to try to make it to a lot of baseball games in the summer. I watch a lot of baseball and American Football. We live about five blocks off the beach, so I spend a good amount of time down there. We’re also across the street from Golden Gate Park, so I go to the museums there pretty consistently. For the last year and a half, I make it a point to run at least five days a week and stay in shape. I’d like to say that I’m the type of person who spends a lot of time outside, enjoying the beautiful city that I live in. We’re lucky to have a whole host of great galleries and museums in the Bay Area, and so I get out and see shows a few times a month. When I do stay inside, I’m probably playing XBOX or spending too much time on the internet.
What are your upcoming projects?I just went back home to Omaha to visit family and friends last month. While I was there, I stopped in to the recently re-opened Bemis Underground, which is an exhibition space attatched to the Bemis Center for Contemporary arts. They recently hired a new director, Brigitte McQueen, and I was originally stopping in just to see how she had remodeled the space. I proposed a rough idea for a show, and it looks like we’re going to move forward on that for sometime around spring of 2011. Also, in September & October, I’m going out to Vermont to work at the Vermont Studio Center. Everything else between now and next spring will be group shows in and around San Francisco. Maybe something big will fall into place between now and then, maybe not. My goal is to always just try to take it day by day.
