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♪ [music playing-- no dialogue] ♪♪.
(Bill Hubschmitt). Until I was diagnosed with
cancer almost three years ago, I commuted for a
number of years between Charleston and Zibo, China,
where I lived with my family.
During that time I met not one single politician, so I cannot
comment at all on the state of US-Chinese relations with
any expertise, but I did get to meet and make friends
with many wonderful people.
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During my travels I made a point of visiting numerous
universities and made contact with artists and
art faculty members throughout China.
I developed the following lecture which not only
introduced my art, but also introduced to Chinese students
who are absolutely starving to learn about western art
something about the influences that I drew inspiration from.
The purpose of the lecture was to inform students of
the value of not trying to imitate but to draw knowledge
and inspiration from the art of the past.
Robert Petersen, who curated this exhibition,
thought it might be a perfect way to introduce this audience
to my work as well.
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You will notice the Chinese captions.
This one says "This is one of my earliest computer works,
made almost 20 years ago."
Zibo is a city of 9 million people, actually a small city
by Chinese standards, and not even on some maps.
I was one of perhaps a few dozen westerners living there,
and yet every street and every store had signs captioned in
both English and Chinese.
The captions were very useful in China, where accents vary
greatly and translators are rarely familiar with art terms.
The captions are here for my Chinese friends,
my way of saying thanks.
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At the time I made this piece, I was faced with the technical
limitations that the computer could only make very simple
black and white marks.
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This portrait of Berthe Morrisot by Manet has always been one of
my favorites and served as an inspiration to me from my
earliest days as a painter.
I've always been amazed by how he was able to use
simplified value and form, and yet produce a portrait with
such a commanding presence.
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Because I am both an art historian and an artist,
I am very interested in historical technique.
Many of my works have resulted from the exercise of
trying to see how traditional methodologies might be
adapted to the new digital medium of the computer.
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Some works, like this self-portrait, may look like
they were made with traditional media, but it is
not how they look, but what I can learn from the
artist's approach that is important to me.
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My primary interest in this work was to create a
convincing illusion of form on the computer by using a
traditional approach to the control of light and shadow.
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When I was making this self- portrait, I was reminded of
this 1509 Self-Portrait by the German painter, Albrecht Dürer.
I wanted to achieve something of its confrontational presence
without actually imitating his Renaissance style.
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Because my principle area of art historical interest is
17th-century Dutch art, the method and example of Rembrandt
is never very far from my mind.
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For example, Rembrandt and Rembrandt school paintings like
this one have taught me lessons about how to manipulate the
illusion of light, especially around the figure, to achieve a
greater sense of volume, even in a work who's abstract quality
seems far from Rembrandt's technique.
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The knowledge gained and the computer techniques developed
can be applied in a very different way to create a work
which on the surface appears to have nothing to do with
Rembrandt's method at all.
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Sometimes I use works I admire, such as this painting by the
French 19th-century painter Henri Toulouse-Lautrec,
as the inspiration for creative experiments.
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I experimented with moving a camera during long exposures
to try to achieve in a purely experimental way the
exaggerated contrast between foreground and background space
I found in Lautrec's painting.
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It lead to this work which breaks most traditional rules
for handling space, and looks and operates nothing like
the work that inspired it.
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One of the most important lessons to learn from the past
is that in art, a rule once understood can always be
intentionally broken to achieve a new effect.
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In addition to studying Dutch art I also studied Chinese art,
and this early work was inspired by Chinese paintings and the
Japanese prints they in turn inspired.
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The strong theme of the female observed by the "other," which
develops in Chinese painting early in the Tang Dynasty,
has become a theme I return to time and time again.
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The rhythm, apparent simplicity, and yet subtle complexity of the
Tang and later dynasty painting has served as a
constant challenge to me as a western artist.
It is in large part why I traveled to China.
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Western works like this sensational work by Edgar Degas,
which in turn was directly influenced by Japanese prints,
has been a strong influence for me in all aspects of
drawing and composition.
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In my early computer works, I eagerly tried to absorb the
lessons of both East and West.
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This work by Degas, for example, has dominated how I think about
compositional space in painting.
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There is so much to learn here, I keep returning to its example
time and time again.
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For example, I marvel at how Degas used color to control our
understanding of how space operates in the painting.
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I did not consciously start out with Degas' work in mind,
but at some point while making this work, I recalled Degas'
example and tried to make color reinforce the sense of space in
the same way, moving from the warm magentas in the foreground
to what I imagined at the time was a cool Degas blue-green
in the background.
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Obviously I was completely wrong, but the punishment
for failure is often a surprisingly good education.
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I don't pretend to be anywhere near as accomplished as Degas,
but with each attempt comes an improved understanding.
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Each work, each lesson perhaps provides a little more progress.
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I think it's equally important for an artist to try and absorb
the lessons of both the past and the present.
I have also been heavily influenced by any number of
contemporary artists in much the same way.
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In this work by Richard Estes, I was particularly drawn to the
use of window reflections to introduce ambiguity into the
shallow foreground space.
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In this work, my attempts to control deliberately ambiguous
foreground spaces led in time to another work which
turns the effect inside out.
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This image of an Emanuel De Witt painting in the Montreal Museum
of Fine Arts was something of a breakthrough work for me.
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I wanted the foreground to remain a cool, abstract,
flattened, and somewhat ambiguous space and have the
illusionistic space of the painting become warmer and more
inviting, drawing the viewer past the flattened foreground
into the spacial world of the painting on the wall.
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It was a breakthrough, not because I think the work is
so outstanding, but in making it I learned I am not as bad
an artist as I feared I might be when I first started painting.
I stopped being ashamed or disappointed in my work
after this piece.
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Studying works from the past I have learned that
it is not just the color and compositional complexity
that makes a work like this wonderful painting by
Henri Toulouse-Lautrec so successful.
It is the fact that the complexity of the painting
style, its color and composition, is perfectly
matched by the emotional complexity of the scene.
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I strive to strike the same chords in my work,
balancing the color composition and style to the
emotional content, and perhaps adding a postmodern
note of stylistic ambiguity of my own.