• Abstract and Figures
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Tim White, Open, 2013 I think something is wrong with me. I don’t like art. I know that’s like saying someone doesn’t like pizza, but as I have spent the better part of my life trying to explore what art is and what it means, I feel further disconnected from it. A lot of the people who call themselves artists and what they produce I don’t identify with, I often don’t like, and I’m bugged by it. I just don’t think I like art. Let me explain further. I understand how art can affect someone profoundly; it happened to me at an early age. I grew up in a small town in Ohio, about an hour from Toledo. When I was in junior high school, our art teacher took us on a field trip to the Toledo Museum of Art. I was a child of a factory worker and a truck driver who ended school at the eighth grade. That big, old, fancy masonry building that housed the museum never seemed like it would have anything worthwhile to offer my people. It wasn’t my world, I didn’t feel like I belonged, but since a field trip got us out of the classroom, why not go? All of the stars aligned for me that day. I was in the right place, with time to spare, and an open mind. I saw paintings by names I knew – Picasso, Monet, Van Gogh – but I couldn’t relate. These paintings seemed like what one would expect to see in a fancy art museum, European and so out of my world. But then I saw Edward Hopper, Andrew Wyeth, George Bellows, and Childe Hassam. These paintings made sense to me. The sense of Midwestern space in the Wyeth, that feeling of loneliness in the Hopper, the Bellows had this movement to it, but not a clean, tight painting. Hassam’s felt like real rain, and it was about a hundred years old, from 1888! These paintings confused me with delight, I just didn’t understand. Edward Hopper, Two in the Isle, 1927 Childe Hassam, Rainy Day, Boston, 1888 I think the fact that these paintings were done by Americans helped me relate, but honestly, there was a painting by James Tissot, titled London Visitors, painted just a few years before Hassam’s, that, even though it was a foreign country depicted and the culture and time period were different, the expressions, and the realism in every sense, expertly painted, made them seem real, and right now. Painting came alive. Even the act of painting came alive. I drew a lot as a kid. Instinctively I thought about subject, composition, tonality and various aspects of the act, but seeing a Giorgio Morandi painting in person, stopping and really looking at it and thinking about how it’s put together, the subtlety and sophistication wasn’t lost on me as a kid even if I was too young to articulate what was hitting me in the gut. James Tissot, London Visitors, 1885 Giorgio Morandi, Still Life with Bottle, 1951 I became obsessed with art. I did my first oil painting my second year of high school and never stopped. I made several more trips to the museum, always rediscovering some of my old acquaintances as well as new acquisitions, like the Chuck Close painting titled Alex. So big, raw, and fucking cool! Chuck Close, Alex, 1987 I was never a leader, but somehow I became president of the art club in high school. It was no big deal, not that many people were in the art club. It was for nerds. My two favorite things that happened while being president was a trip that the art teacher planned to the Art Institute of Chicago (imagine a seventeen year old kid standing in the room that housed Edward Hopper’s Nighthawks at the Diner and Grant Wood’s American Gothic! I was the dorky kid in the corner standing quietly, blankly, and drooling. Another triumph; There was a windowless cinderblock room at our high school that all of the teachers used to smoke in on their class breaks. I successfully got them kicked out and turned it into a photography darkroom. Art dork. My art teacher was a huge influence. Once we were sitting on the front porch of his cool-ass Victorian talking about my future. He talked about college but I told him I knew nothing about how to do that and my family didn’t have any money. My future was uncertain but probably rooted in a more practical career path. He told me about how he grew up in rural West Virginia to impoverished coal miner stock. He got way into ceramics and figured out how to go to school and eventually became an art teacher. He made me believe that if you want something, you’ve got to try to go after it. So I did. I applied and got accepted to the Columbus College of Art and Design and Kent State. Both great schools. The only problem was how to pay for it. I talked to my parents and their argument was; why would you spend four years going to college when you could get a job at the factory and after four years be making more than an art teacher? Solid argument, but I just couldn’t. One night I was on the phone with my girlfriend’s brother who lived way out in California, I told him my concerns and he said that was the same position he was in a couple years before. He and his friend researched the cheapest state college systems at the time, which was Alaska and California. The decision was a no Brainer - California. Then they looked at cost of living balanced out with a city of a decent size to function. Fresno or Sacramento. They flipped a coin, Sacramento won. He told me he’d set me up with a cheap place to live and line me up with a job. I’d establish residency for one year, then start going to a community college for $50 a semester, then transfer to a larger university after a couple of years for $500 a semester. I could figure this out. It was a plan. Two friends were making a cross country trip the summer I graduated high school in a rusted out 1969 Cadillac convertible and said they’d drop me off in Sacramento. So we drove to Ocean City, Maryland and started the cross country journey from sea to sea. After a few weeks on the road they dropped me and my three boxes of belongings off in midtown Sacramento. I was set up with four other people living in a run-down one bedroom apartment in a hundred year old Craftsman four-plex for $100 a month. I didn’t have a room or a bed, but I had a place. The main dude, affectionately named Whizz-Pow, occupied the only bedroom. He didn’t have a job, I think he sold crank. I was also set up with a job. I worked at the newspaper, The Sacramento Bee, on the midnight shift in the warehouse. A stack of newspapers would come down this chute, I would assemble them, lead them into a machine that strapped them together, then stack them on a pallet. All night. I changed jobs a couple of times and moved into the apartment across the hall with a new friend who just graduated from Cal Poly. Things were sweet. Sacramento had an arty vibe that Ohio didn’t have. Art and music were everywhere. A gallery had art shows right around the corner, and once I walked out of my apartment at 18th and G and saw a van parked on the street that had Buck Naked and his Bare Bottom Boys painted on the side. I didn’t know why, but for some reason I just felt rich for living there. I started at Sacramento City College and dove into my classes head first. On top of struggling with math and science requirements, having to work extra hard since my high school was lacking compared to the local schools, I had the joy of taking some amazing art classes. I didn’t realize how good Fred Dalkey was before I took a class from him, but he is well known locally and his figure drawing classes really opened my mind to the rewards of putting in time and effort into the craft of creating quality images. Once you get over the fact that you are a heterosexual boy in your twenties who is allowed to stare at, and draw, real, naked boobs, you start honing in on the craft and become obsessed with recreating the three dimensional form into two dimensions. Fred Dalkey, Seated Figure Art was my world, I thought about painting all of the time. My friend and roommate at the time, who was in a really good band and obsessed with music, asked me one time why a painting was considered “high art” and had this weird lofty prestige to it, where a perfect two minute pop song was looked down on more, when really, they often took a similar amount of knowledge and skill. I thought this question was ridiculous. I’m sure I gave some half assed reason why this is the case, but that question always stuck with me. Painting always seemed more prestigious to me because I was obsessed with it.

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