Art Is . . . Drawing

I was born in South Bend, Indiana, and was raised in Kentucky. I am the son of a coal miner and a homemaker, and they encouraged me to go to college and seek my own way. I felt pressured to be a business major and to work with my hands, so I compromised by seeking a graphic design degree while taking as many painting and drawing classes as possible, I felt the need to get a philosophy minor. Although I worked under some Logical Positivist philosophy professors, I came out of the program with a more Existentialist worldview. Sartre and Camus were my main focus and my paintings and pastels were based on my emotional responses to my friends and surroundings. A Picasso and then a Matisse show at the High Museum in Atlanta were great influences on my early work. I developed a romantic notion that art was about the pure expression of an artist's emotional response. But little things started to chip away at my romantic ideals through the exposure of Post-Modern philosophers like Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault. I also was exposed to artists like Allen Kaprow and Joseph Kosuth in the last contemporary art criticism class I took at Western Kentucky. Brent Oglesbee is the one professor at WKU who really pushed me to excel at making art. Although Oglesbee had his MFA in ceramics and taught sculpture, I learned from him to follow through on processes and to follow a line of reasoning when making art. After completing my BFA I spent about two years in Philadelphia. While there, I started to read a variety of fiction from the Beat Generation and some new contemporary fiction. Then I moved to Dallas, and Texas is where everything changed about me and my art. I left my art based on emotional content in favor of a conceptual, intellectual bent. I helped to foster that slant by seeking an MA in Arts and Humanities at UTD. There I met several professors who helped me develop my ideas, but one, in particular, helped to reinvent my approach. John Pomara is the professor who reminded me that I had rejected the tools of graphic design and those tools were going to waste. I started to incorporate computer-based art into my work along the lines of Derrida's deconstructing text theories. Then I traveled to NYC for a week to see the Armoury show. Seeing all that work presented in such a professional setting, the art fair inspired me to use industrial printers and materials.