Tip:
Highlight text to annotate it
X
I think there needs to be a sort of consistency.
[mandolin plays]
Sometimes I'm an artist-teacher,
sometimes I'm a teacher-artist.
♫
Maybe the pineapple will be so powerful it doesn't matter.
Teaching has allowed me to paint what I want
when I want and how I want.
One of the things that I did for my entertainment was draw,
as a very, very small child.
Drawing and imagery always did interest me,
and so when it came time to think about going to college,
and I wanted to go to college
because I wanted to get out of the haystack,
I knew there was more world out there,
and even though I loved the horse angle, the cattle angle,
of where I was at, I wanted something more.
One of the instructors said
we hear that you go to rodeos on weekends.
And I said yeah, my family is involved in rodeos, this, that.
He said well, why aren't you using that as a subject matter?
My reply was I didn't think it could work-- I thought
cowboys were inappropriate-- they're too romantic;
they're too full of adventure in a bad way.
He said no, that's, that's not true.
Any subject is appropriate, and if you want to paint that,
you should paint that, but you have to find your own voice;
you have to find your own way.
The part about rodeo that was the most obvious to me
was the action part--the bucking horses, the bucking bulls,
the dynamics of horse and rider.
So I looked to the Italian Futurist group
of the early 1900s;
they took Cubism and they applied it to moving subjects.
Then also, I looked to the Abstract Expressionists,
the action painters, the way in which the artist
applies the paint to the canvas is important
to the look of the finished work.
The energy that the artist brings to the paint application
should also be communicated to the viewer in the end,
and so when I paint I want people to look at it and say
wow, it looks like he did that application of paint
with big brushes and a lot of energy,
which hopefully enhances the movement of the subject also,
and the energy of the subject.
Paint is a fluid medium that drips, and it splatters,
and those aren't collateral damage.
Drips and splatters oftentimes are collateral enhancements.
Sometimes accidents are bad accidents,
but sometimes the accident is
the best thing that can happen to a painting.
I no longer really paint
in a Futurist, Cubist style,
but I do use some of the same devices
that the Cubists and the Futurists use,
which would be multiple imagery.
One, 2, 3, 4.
I might have a horse with 6, 8, 10 legs;
2 or 3 heads that might be visible in here,
as this horse is moving through space,
as the rider is moving through space.
The process involves a chalk drawing with colored chalk.
I'll do a basic composition.
After that I will go into it with a dark,
linear painted outline of that
to refine that a little bit,
to make changes, to give myself something to go by, something
that will still show through the first applications of paint.
Then generally speaking I go to the most fun part,
that really spontaneous primary application of paint,
where I am applying paint with great abandon,
where the energy, most of the energy
will come into the canvas.
Then I let that dry, then I go back into it
and see what I can do to resolve it,
to get rid of the bad stuff, keep the good stuff.
After that it's mostly fine-tuning adjustments.
As this rider moves through space,
you'll see this green repeated.
I like polkadots, and I like angular patterns on shirts
for my riders-- they add action.
I want to see details in my paintings,
but I want them to be very, very abstract in the same way.
I don't like the idea that somebody could
walk to the painting the first time
and just identify everything in there.
I want them to find the paintings and reveal themselves
as they look at them several times perhaps.
Well, do you see any of the image in this one, folks?
My favorite paintings that I do are ones that are more abstract,
but my tendency to be fussy, I think causes me many times
to go back and work on paintings more than I should.
I take them too far.
Some parts of it I might've gone a little too far,
and I may regret it a little bit now,
but in the end, it may be just fine.
Oftentimes as a painter and as a teacher
you have to talk to students
about knowing when to quit on a painting.
I have no doubt you can probably take it
and make a really nice painting out of it,
but it is a really nice painting right now!
They have such a strong mental image of what they think
this thing is to look like that they give up some wonderful,
fresh, spontaneous, simple images to begin with.
You have to recognize when you have something that's good
and stop on it at that point
even if it doesn't match that mental image that you have
for an idea of what I want to do on this painting.
Taking a painting too far is the easy thing.
Recognizing when to stop on it-- that's the difficult part.