Tell us about your upbringing
I grew up in Memphis, Tennessee. My parents are both liberal, reformed-hippie types –though I doubt that they would love that description. We didn’t go to church. They pretty much let my sister and I learn about religion and politics ourselves. Our house was always busy with people. Both my parents and I have friends who are musicians, writers, artists, educators, entrepreneurs –it’s an interesting, creative community.
I’ve always liked to make things, to draw and write. When I was a kid I made comic books with my own menagerie of characters. But it wasn’t until pretty recently that I took up painting with a real passion. Memphis has a wealth of artists and musicians especially, but it still lacks the institutional resources to really nurture the visual arts. It is a privilege to live in a place that has major museums and spaces for contemporary art. That being the case, it wasn’t until I spent time living in Madrid and then moved to Chicago that I got to see a lot of painting in the flesh. That was around 2006.
In Chicago I was lucky to have couple of good teachers who helped me focus and actually get into the craft of painting. I decided to go to graduate school because I was naïve and curious about contemporary art, and I wanted to be influenced.
In the last year you have been making tons of work. What has driven this last body of work and where do you see it going from here?
It’s just been about getting back into a routine of making things. When I first got out of graduate school I worked on the same two painting surfaces for over a year. There wasn’t much space or materials available to me, so when I finished something I’d just start painting over it again. When I finally got a job, I was able to produce more. I tend to fill up canvases about as fast as I can get them, so I don’t worry much about what’s driving it.
As far as where it’s going, I don’t know how much trust I place in my own narrative of what I do, but I like to think that I work through ideas and then move on. And if I feel I’m repeating myself or treading on tired ground I stop and do something else.
Explain more in depth the works on paper in charcoal being condensed translations.
I was reading about how Hans Hofmann ran his figure drawing class. His students would use the same piece of paper to do charcoal drawings for the entire length of the class –not hours, but weeks or months. They’d draw and wipe away the drawing again and again until the paper literally fell apart. There’s a lesson about nonattachment somewhere in there, but also about seeing what happens as a work develops: the immediate imagery isn’t the only subject. I wanted to attempt something like that, but without wiping out each successive drawing and just letting a pile of discreet images build up into their own thing. A simple procedural rule like that can have unexpected results.
Beyond that, the task of translation fascinates me. It’s something we do constantly in one form or another. And if you only have access to a condensed translation, you don’t really know what is missing. Someone else has made that decision for you. And that may lead you to question its authenticity, something I would like to encourage.
Where do you see you paintings residing?
It would be nice to see them reside on walls; given that most of what’s left is hiding under a bed in Tennessee.
The variety of mark making, subject, and influences from certain veins of abstraction, to Japanese ink drawings, and particular eras of history run throughout your work. Tell us who you are looking at, and what your current interests are?
I’m omnivorous in my interests. I tend to get obsessed with certain subjects –artists, objects, genres, historical events, anything- and work through them. That process has more to do with indulging my own curiosity than with producing work. It doesn’t usually produce immediate results, but it comes back later. Let me give you an example.
About four years ago got really into this series of 15th century battle paintings by Paolo Uccello, famous today mainly as an example of the development of perspective. But I just really enjoyed the way he drew people and horses. They have tons of personality, despite or perhaps because they’re locked into such rigid compositions. Anyway, I spent weeks making drawings of these paintings, of all the characters individually, in small groups, little details. Eventually, I thought I needed to make some big painting of the whole mess to somehow justify this obsession. And it was awful, just really bad. It wasn’t the first lousy painting I made and surely won’t be the last. But I feel like I know something about that artist now that I couldn’t have gotten any other way, like perhaps how to use his lines to describe a contemporary scene.
That’s how I work through pictorial subject matter, but I work through materials in very much the same way. I don’t feel engaged unless I feel I’m also honing a craft and working on something new –new at least for me. For a long time I worked only with one ink brush. I put that aside when I started to feel like the limited associations with calligraphy were fighting too much with the imagery. But I still use those drawings as launching points for paintings.
As far as current interests, I’ve been trying to learn more about urban planning and sustainable development practices –a stretch to relate to my recent drawings and paintings, to be sure. But I’ve just moved and don’t currently have access to a studio, so that’s what I’m doing right now. Also recently I began using the computer as a drawing tool. I’ve had to learn all this design software for my job, and it’s been slowly creeping into my practice. I feed it my drawings and it feeds me something else. I’m not sure yet where that’s headed, but I’m excited about it.
What do you wish to accomplish in a work of art?
That’s a tough one. When the conversation gets to the level of generality of art, I feel all this doubt well up. And when I try to reason from the ends in terms of accomplishments, I almost immediately stop thinking about the work itself. Right now it seems like a luxury to ask that a work of art get up and go accomplish things, that people take x away from it, and so on. It’s a big question, though. There’s more to say about this, but maybe another time.
