+Art+Talk #16, an interview with +Kurt Ankeny, hosted by myself and +Lena Levin .
I asked Kurt for a bio. What he gave me are these beautiful words.
“I like to describe myself as an autodidact, but that’s not really true at all. If anything, I’m a bibliodidact. Some of the works most important to my formation were How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way by Stan Lee and John Buscema and Anatomy Lessons from the Great Masters by Robert Beverly Hale and Terence Coyle. Those two were my lifeline for many critical years of development. In fact, I had given away my copy of Anatomy Lessons, when I started recognizing images from it in the paintings I was looking at. I hadn’t realized how deeply those images penetrated. So I had to buy myself a replacement copy.
Here’s a problem I have: all writing about art tends to circumvent the art itself. I’m not saying one shouldn’t write about art, but it’s deceptive to cement into prose a reaction to a piece that depends wholly on the time, circumstances, education, experience, and readiness of the individual viewer looking at it and reacting or responding. So, what you have a is a snapshot of a very, very narrow point where two individuals connected for a moment in time.
So those qualms aside, I’m a relatively new painter. I’ve only been painting for about seven years. Four of them what I would consider “full-time”. Painting, as most of us who practice with any determination and ambition know, is a very slow burn. Cy Twombly told Jenny Saville to try and remain ignored for as long as possible. And that is good advice as long as one can manage it. Because painting, especially since the modernist movement, is a vast ocean of possibilities and it takes many canvases to get your bearings.
I guess that’s my long-winded way of saying that I really don’t know what I’m doing yet. I know, I know. One isn’t supposed to undercut one’s brand and reputation with such nonsense and honesty. “I don’t know what I’m doing” does not mean “I don’t know where I’m going.” I do have plans, I have grand ideas and ambitions. It’s just that there’s a lot of white space on the map between where I stand now and Mount Accomplishment. I think that the fissure between abstraction and figuration is an obvious point of interest. Today’s painters are swarming on that like ants on a hot caramel. But between where I stand now and what I hope to accomplish, I have no idea what that path will look like. No idea which freeways and boulevards; which alleys, dirt tracks, fire roads, gravel trails, and deer paths might lead me there.
Right now, I’m working on several branches of my project at once. I’m exploring some grid-based abstractions, to see what tools and strengths I can find there, and I also have a keen interest in the lush brush lines of ink work from comic books that informed my early development. I’m seeking ways to get those same qualities back into my oil paintings. I’m also playing with other ideas like the emptied out and de-personalized compositions of my Ipswich Suite. I look at all of these lines of inquiry as raw ore that needs to be smelted and then recombined into a new alloy.
So it’s an odd time to ask me what it is that I do. I have a hard time putting it succinctly.
And I suppose that’s bad, business-acumen-wise. But I think it’s critical to not cement into prose what it is that I’m doing right now in order to get what I want from myself in the end.”
Art+Talk interview with painter Kurt Ankeny hosted by Samantha Villenave LIVE @ 2:00PM(EST)
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