I approach a blank canvas with a sense of youth each time I paint. I was born in 1964, a long time ago. I have long since completed college and even some post-graduate art school. But I still try to paint like an art student. Why? Because I believe that although often untutored, art students have a direct line on the actual art world. They are the most tuned-in to pop culture; they are freshest and richest in their imagery; they have the strongest belief in their ability to become something significant (i.e., “famous”); and they have the most incredible sense of style (suburban street style, a slightly watered-down version of authentic street style, safe but edgy). 

This “outlandish sense of style” is what I am most familiar. I was a suburban punk rocker, a “punk” in high school, even though my day was several years after the Sex Pistols, Chrome, and Bauhaus were gone (1982). In my small midwestern hometown of Lincoln, Nebraska, there was a thriving counter-culture, but how counter-culture can you be when surrounded by a thousand miles of cow and pig farms? Yes, we were far from the center of things, but we made what we could of it.

As I mentioned before, I read about graffiti art in art news and covered the interior of a run-down, burned-out former brothel in Nebraska with graffiti. I painted melting face paintings and monsters, drew hundreds of designs for my pen-and-paper tabletop gaming (I guess that made me a nerd), and I belonged to an inherently bogus religion, The Church of the Sub-Genius (I was an ordained minister in it…not many ever are).

I wore bell-bottoms to college classes when they stopped being cool in the 1970s. I had homemade “Vans” for deck shoes, designed by me before there were any Vans at all. I also wore decorated pants with marker designs drawn all over them. I wore a Navy Peacoat covered with buttons that advertised my infatuation with favorite punk and new wave groups.

During 1983-84, I played bass guitar for “The Cruel Pastries,” a new wave group, and sang lead for the “Four-Out-of-Five Dentists,” a no-wave band with all-original songs. I also made noise recordings in the basement of a Lincoln house I shared with some severe artist-types, with metal percussion instruments, digital delays, tape loops, early synth- and midi- technology.

The expression of a young artist is powerful. As a youth, I was angry. I was so busy with art and music that I had no time for girls. If I did fall in love, it was like being doused with gasoline. I went to outrageous parties that make the Gallery Openings A/NT and other co-ops seem like church meetings. I tried to draw the most attention to myself while at the same time hating attention…yes, that’s right. I tried hard to be a non-conformist among the non-conformists, and no matter where I was, do the unexpected.

Getting back to the way I paint. I can’t approach a canvas without feeling like I am 18 years old again, which is about the age I started to take myself seriously as an artist. One does not readily have as intense a youth as I did without forgetting it. If I were to forget where I was when I was 18-22, I would begin to feel like a phony. I hope never to do that.

I paint with an eye toward exploration. I desire to do something different each time I lay brush to surface. I don’t ever want to do something the same way twice, a long boring series of paintings along the same lines. Therefore, I have an expansive repertoire. I’m not saying that one couldn’t recognize an image by me in a roomful of works by many people. I am sure you could. But you won’t see me painting a thousand butterflies or committing to work for six months on a magnum opus strangely like all my other magnum opus.

I will be untrammeled by subject matter and style! If my art choices look haphazard or not fully realized, it is because I have chosen this path. Naturally, someone who has done something a hundred times does their style with more “finish” than someone who prefers the approach I choose… something new every time. But I ask you, are “they” doing valid “Art” or are “they” more like craftsmen? The difference is not merely in the eye of the beholder. Take a hundred of my works and line them up against a hundred of theirs. My creativity and variety will likely show through as superior, depending on their level of professionalism.

I like being “ever the art student.” I still learn, I still experiment, I live for the “happy accident.” I expect things to go in a less than planned way within a picture, so I smoothly compensate as I go. Because often I have no idea what I will paint when I start. Ever new, ever springtime, ever the first snow of winter. The ONLY way an artist should work.