Art Student's Questions

An art student named Ross asked to interview me on a few topics to help him write an artist statement.

How did you get started?
I grew up in a creative family, but they were engineers more than artists, and I didn’t take art classes because no one seemed intense enough about it. I wanted to figure it out for myself and I went to the library to dig up the way they did things decades earlier. All through my youth, I never got to watch anyone else drawing or painting from life (somehow I even missed the TV show artists). Once I arrived at art school and started meeting other artists, I was completely captivated with how other people made a picture. I was fascinated with how they moved their hand and brush, but more than that, I wanted to learn what they were thinking as they worked. I believe that drawing and painting are an intensely magical act, like a form of conjuring. What I’m trying to do with my art, books, and videos is to try to explore the source of that magic.

What do you expect from your audience? 
Social media has put us in contact with people who follow our work. I think that's a good thing overall, but I'm not sure. That contact is certainly very stimulating for someone of my generation who was accustomed to singing in the dark. We can't help but recognize that our followers support us both emotionally and financially. No question, the internet has forever changed the art business by making us accountable to our audience. 

Should a professional artist learn about business?
Yes, if you're going to be independent, you've got to know something about business: marketing, contracts, accounting, publicity, graphic design, and video production. In this age of the creator-producer, it’s important to know about distribution, and sales. If art schools don’t offer this, you can pick it up on your own. I’m always trying to learn new things about how to make what I love to do pay for my living. That said, I try to keep business considerations or audience considerations from driving what I do or how I do it. I just want to have fun doing the very best quality work I can. I’m glad that the internet lets me share what I produce and what I learn with others. I have faith that enough people will support me to keep me doing it.

What artists influence you?
The artists who influence me the most are the ones who combine observational work with their personal imagination. Sketching from life definitely builds my visual vocabulary, which helps when I’m trying to conjure a fantasy world from thin air. I often dig into my sketchbooks for poses, rock formations, trees, landscape effects, or other details. That’s one of the reasons I like to draw everything. As Adolph Menzel put it: “alles Zeichnen ist nützlich, und alles zeichnen auch" (“All drawing is useful, and to draw everything as well.”)

Which artists inspire you?
Continuing from the last answer—there are the usual favorites: Golden-Age American illustrators such as Norman Rockwell, Tom Lovell, John Berkey, plus a lot of the Academic painters of the 19th century. I also love the painters who combined academicism with impressionism, such as Sargent, Sorolla, Krøyer, Repin, and others. There are also the landscapists such as William Trost Richards, Ivan Shishkin, and Peder Mork Mønsted. I also admire cartoonists and animators, such as Winsor McCay, Milt Kahl, so this list could go on forever: I love them for their process and philosophy as much as their style. None of them took shortcuts. I think the best advice for a student is to forget about style. Try to learn from the real world with close observation and humility. Make master copies from time to time, and go to museums, but put truth to nature first. And don’t model your work after any living artist, illustrator or animator. Ignore current trends, or your work will look like everyone else's. If you must study the work of other artists, pick ones from the past, and look at many different ones, not just one.

How do you use color to speak to your audience? 
Just about any subject needs to be simplified if it is going to communicate an emotion forcefully to the viewer. That's true of tone, line, detail, light, and color. Your color schemes start to communicate emotions when you leave colors out of the color scheme. That's the basic approach of gamut masking, which is especially important in color scripting in animation and comics.
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More:
John Berkey fan site
Rockwell on Rockwell: How I Make a Picture
Tom Lovell—Illustrator
Previous Post Series: Gamut Masking Method