Drawings, 1980 - Hengst Studio

“A compressed lesson in Western Art”
Pencil/paper
8.5” x 11”
1980

This is a pencil copy of Picasso’s “Le Demoiselles D’Avignon.” But what is more interesting to me is all the scribbling and notes on it. It reminds me of those scenes in movies where it becomes apparent someone has an obsession with someone or something. It’s as though I am unpacking everything I leaned in a survey course on Western Art from this one painting.

By the middle of my first year of undergraduate studies I fell into a very impactful mentor-mentee relationship with an art history professor who was working on her doctoral thesis on this painting. Dr. Helen Woodal. Her thesis was basically that Picasso had based this painting on the theme of the Judgement of Paris, a Greek myth that among other things declares that Love is superior to beauty and brains. For a more in-depth understanding of the myth I recommend a few moments on Wikipedia.

For whatever reason this brand of intellectual art speak was exactly what my young mind and soul craved. And I was all in. I was also inspired by Picasso’s hunger for new ideas and his ability to quickly absorb and express what he was digesting. I felt compelled to swallow all of that as fast as I could. The mad impacted notes on this drawing are tiny testament to that.

Dr. Woodal had a huge impact on me that shaped my passion and direction in art that continues to this day. Her commitment to basic classical principles of what makes art great and lasting has provided a helm for me through the very challenging life of being a contemporary artist. She also held fast to the idea of genius as the ability for someone to bring into this dimension something from other dimensions so that others could experience it. She was unabashedly elitist and I was among her chosen ones. I can still remember her declaring with absolute certainty when she saw my first drawing and paintings, “you have something to say.”

By the time I was finished with my undergraduate studies I had come to question the exclusivity of some of these ideas and was interested in learning about Eastern art that to my view was at the core of many of the more interesting intellectual and cultural movements of the 60’s and 70’s.
She disagreed and felt I should go straight to New York to fulfill my destiny as an up and coming enfant terriblata … a young rising star.

But I had other ideas and so we had a huge fight like many mentors and their mentees have when the mentee is ready to take flight and go their own way. Dr. Woodal was my intellectual mother. Plucking me from my hopelessly middle class mundanity she set me on a course of rigorous artist expression and execution of my full potential. Once that was fully awakened I knew I had to go to my own way … not to New York…but to China.

“Study for a painting”
Pencil on mat board
14” x 14”
1980

Pierre Puvis de Chavannes - Poor Fisherman, 1881
Picasso

“Turning of the light”
Pencil/Paper
8.5″ x 11″
1980

Clearly I was experimenting with composing paintings that told a story or set up an analogy. Here there is a sick person in bed surrounded by 3 people. Once is clearly turning off a light. One is observing in a solemn mode suggesting the person in bed is ill and possibly dying. And the third person is nude and sitting on the bed interacting with the person on the person in the bed. But it’s not clear what she is doing. Is she holding her hand? Is she whispering something? And why is she nude? Is she an angel? Or a muse? It’s hard to say.

Over all the time of the piece is clearly sad and and even morbid. The figures all look wan and exhausted except for the nude offering some kind of care or comfort. Even the paper it’s drawn on adds to the somber mode….an old paper grocery bag.

This composition is reminiscent of early Picasso who was in turn inspired by a French painter of the late 19th century who has been ignored by history but who was popular at that time, Puvis De Chavannas.
I have included an example of his work and Picasso to show where I was drawing my inspiration.

Pencil/Paper
8.5″ x 11″
1980

“Michelle”

Pencil/Paper
8.5″ x 11″
1980

Michelle is my sister. She is younger than me by 5 years and would have been 16 or so when I did these. What is uncanny to me is how much they portend what she was to look like as a mature woman. The anger and bitterness of various unaddressed wrongs are now permanently etched on her face which can clearly be seen in the larger study lower on the page. Nearly gone is the contemplative and introspective thoughtfulness that appears in the upper study.

Perhaps because I hadn’t seen my sister for a long stretch between her late 20’s and early 50’s…a time during which the gentleness apparently melted away under the pressures of life’s proclivity to repeat our unresolved issues and wrongs too long held on to….I still see her as deeply spiritual and essentially contemplative.

These drawings, especially the smaller upper one, give me hope that what I saw is still there and that as she and I approach our elder years she will find her way back there….and I’ll be waiting to great her.

Pencil/Paper
8.5″ x 11″
1980

I listen to classical music on the radio while I’m driving and sometimes even when I’m making art. My home city of Seattle has an unusually good classical music station. But once a week they feature a show that is syndicated and distributed to classical music stations around the world. And when it comes on I switch over to news or pop radio because it makes me cringe. It is a show that features top level performers whose apparent quality of note is how young they are. Hardly before we even know their name their astounding small number of years is announced in an attempt to amaze and astound the audience. Ok. That’s cool. But ultimately, other than their parents….who cares.

Yes, it’s exciting to know that young people like the arts and thank god there is always a talented cadre to keep the torch burning. And this is all the more astounding in the musical arts because as challenging as it is, there is a system….a written language and clear rules and techniques that can be learned and applied.

This is less true for visual arts. There are no clear rules and only a few techniques that are taught and learned. And that is why there really is no such thing as a child prodigy in the visual arts. The few that we have seen in the modern era have turned out to be fakes. The work turned out to have been created by adults working a con. And age 14 doesn’t count as a true prodigy. Mozart and other child music prodigies play sophisticated music when they are 5.

Nevertheless, what I noticed when I found this drawing in a box was that it was done when I was 19 years old. That’s way too old to be considered a prodigy. But it is prodigious. Somehow, without instruction, I was able to construct a likeness of this woman with correct proportions, a complex set of emotions and a convincing 3 dimensional quality in keeping with standard artistic traditions.

More importantly, it is basically a sign post for what I would spend many decades of my life producing….somewhat realistic art that is essentially traditional but rests its value on the depth and subtlety of the psychological and physical presence of my model.

It’s all there…..right from that beginning. That still just seems wonderful and weird. Moreover, I hope it is admired for what it is….not that is was done by a 19 year old artist.