The Guardian

When I was in high school I knew I wanted to be an artist. The school art classes didn’t do much to help me understand how to do that. I knew where my weaknesses were, but the classes were not really designed to help anyone become a professional artist. I started going through library books trying to find my way forward, looking at the works of the Masters.

I graduated into a difficult job market. Many people were out of work due to changes in US industry, so I was competing with adults who already had a lot of experience. I couldn’t get a job to pay for any school like MIAD or a university. My parents started sending me to Spectrum School of the Arts in Racine, founded and taught by Denise Zingg. It was a small school that could not give me a degree, but could give me a lot of the basic drawing and seeing skills that I was lacking. I continued to go to Spectrum until I was able to afford college in 1986.

“The Guardian” was my first finished work after many weeks of drawing exercises during that first session, mainly drawing boxes and mannequins. The goal was to create space and volumes using my new skills. I was able to let my imagination go on this work and try to create a finished work of art, not just a class assignment. I did not approach this with a real idea in mind. I just pulled this from my imagination. I call this a science fiction piece, but it is also surrealistic, not having started from a story or a philosophy. It is almost a dream image, just didn’t come from an actual dream. After the fact, I saw the statue as a religious artifact, guarding the way into the city.  I drew a cross on top of one of the buildings to add to this interpretation. Yes I chose a Christian cross, but this is not supposed to be tied to any real religion. This is supposed to be another planet around some other star with a society unconnected to us worshipping in some other manner. The cross serves to get that idea of religion across because, in our society, it is clearly connected to religious belief.

As an early work of mine I feel it is successful, though I still see some weaknesses in my skills here. I love to do pencil drawings. I wish more people would take pencil and ink drawings seriously as works of art. Because they lack color, drawings don’t sell very well. It’s a shame that people can’t see beyond such ridiculous biases and conditionings. There are artists who do their best work in black and white, like the illustrator Virgil Finlay. This sort of work deserves closer attention in the art market.