When I was a kid, I was really obsessed with drawing and I wrote a lot of stories too. They were mainly drawings and stories of dinosaurs, or of my James Bond like character name “Johnny Kenabalo” (Ken-ob-elow). I copied alot of Star Wars drawings too, I loved the ones with the heavy black pen lines and the inked watercolor, like in the Star Wars dictionary. As I got older, I tried to draw more and more realistically and got better and better as time went on. By the time I was in high school, I was quite good at realism and even photo realism and could draw just about anything anyone asked me to draw. This was great in one way, but in another it was not so good. It wasn’t that good, because I became addicted in a sense to making things very realistic and I couldn’t imagine a drawing being good unless it was and I became very competitive and protective about this and so by the time I was in my college drawing classes, I felt as if every drawing was a competition to prove who could draw the best. During life drawing sessions I would walk around and look at all the drawings of the other students just to make sure I had the best drawings and if not, then I went back and made sure I drew even better and finished with the best drawing possible. You can probably see how unhealthy this was and how really it did me no good in making me a better artist, or a better drawer. It actually made me so stressed and miserable that I started to hate drawing. I was so competitive and upset and stressed out and angry and frustrated when I drew, because it became this performance where if I didn’t make the best drawing, or feel that I had the best drawing in the room, or in the school, or in the state, or in the world, in the history of western art, then why was I even doing this? This probably seems insane, and I think it is on some level, but this is where I got and made drawing, the thing I did incessantly since the time I was three became something that I began to hate. By my second year in college art, I was so miserable that I decided I didn’t want to be an artist and was going to figure something else out.
How does this relate to figuration and abstraction? When I was in 7th or 8th grade, I was taking an art course with some artists at the Toledo Museum of Art and I was drawing a picture of something minding my own business and remember this moment, when another student was making some abstract expressionist paintings. I thought this was ridiculous of course, because there could be no value to the scribbles of someone who did the same thing that a three year old could do and better, “because at least they were original and un-self conscious.” I scoffed as I looked at this students work and went back to my seat. Sometime over the next hour and a half, one of the other art teachers came in and asked that student to step out with him and I saw them talking in the doorway along with another art teacher and they were saying how cool this work was and really how advanced and brilliant it was. Well, they may not have said all that, but this is how my jealous middle school brain interpreted it.
Looking back, I think this moment likely derailed me in a sense and set me on a course of being skeptical and even somewhat hostile to abstraction. When I got to college and most of the arts faculty members were modernists and abstract expressionists in one sense or another, I felt that I had an axe to grind and that it was my job to somehow stand against this tide and to staunchly defend realism and Good draftsmanship. It wasn’t until almost seven years later when I was preparing for grad school, that the scales began to fall from my eyes. I was making traditional landscape paintings in the Oxford Ohio fall and I was so very bored one day while painting that I started to move my brush in a different way and started to use flat, thick paint with a palette knife. Feeling the paint move to the was beat of my heart was like lightning and it was then that I began to sense the value of abstraction.
When I got to the MFA program I was further confounded when at the start of my first year I started to make lots and lots of small abstract expressionist paintings. It probably all started when I went to visit my painting professors studio and saw the large abstracts that I think I was forever changed. I was “bit by the bug.” It’s so cliche when you hear it, but it really awakened something in me. It was funny to see then, that instead of the Caravaggio’s and John Singer Sargents that I thought would adorn my book shelf, it was R.B. Kitaj, and Hans Hofmann, Philip Guston, Matisse, the German expressionists, Marsden Hartley and probably most importantly Richard Deibenkorn.
As I worked in an abstracted and non-objective way, I slowly started to see that there was a limit to what I could say or contribute, at least personally with pure abstraction and I began to see symbols and figures come back into the paintings. In one particularly confusing critique, I asked my professor if I needed to figure out a way to combine the abstraction and figuration, to which he answered, “ I dunno” while shrugging his shoulders. He added, “maybe you combine them, or maybe you do both, or maybe that leads you to someday combine them.” He said all of this more like a question than a real answer. I did eventually find my way back to figuration and even very traditional motifs and pictures, but the abstraction has never left. That critique was almost nine years ago now. Since then I have had a bug to make abstract paintings and even at my most figurative and traditional, I still can’t ever find the motivation to make the full move into traditional painting. There have been so many times that I almost went to an atelier, but I don’t have the drive anymore.
I’ve found that I am most drawn to the artists who exist somewhere between abstraction and figuration or who moved in and out of abstraction and figuration, like Deibenkorn, Avigdor Arikha, Guston, Henry Moore, Kitaj, and David Hockney.
There is so much fertile ground here and it can be a place to mine. Abstraction is something that is truly an American art form and I dont’ know how to make art today without acknowledging it in some way, without that way being reactionary in some way. Abstraction is part of the dna of our artistic forms, but so is the figurative work of our western past and I cant see a way to move forward in painting without acknowledging that place either.
I know there are many people who wouldn’t even say there is a rub between abstraction and figuration and that all of it is resolved at this point, but I don’t see that. There has barely been enough time to mine it and it’s creative potential is large. For now, I will acknowledge the validity of both modes of expression and say that for me, I think I will probably make both abstract and figurative paintings, sometimes venturing far to one end or the other, but perhaps with an eye to synthesize them, or at least to baptize them.