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Exploring the mind and habits of an artist in twenty-five questions.
Drawing was a compulsion as a child. I spent many weekends at museums drawing obsessively. I didn’t consider becoming an artist really until I was twelve and began drawing the nude in adult classes at the Art Students League. I was as fascinated by the adult artists and how they lived their lives as I was by the models. I think seeing them made it a possibility later in life.
They always supported me although I didn’t announce I wanted to be an artist. I just knew I needed to draw in order to feel OK. While I continued taking drawing, painting, and sculpture classes at the School of Visual Arts, the ASL, and Pratt, in my teens and twenties, I became a math major at Oberlin and taught math after college. My father was a mathematician and my mother a math major in college, too, so they were pleased with my path. Despite wanting me to follow in his footsteps, my father was the one who first enrolled me in the adult classes at ASL when I was twelve, and while my parents were afraid I’d never come back, they both supported my decision to study sculpture at the Repin Academy in Russia for what became a decade.
Pavel Trubetskoy, Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux, Gian Lorenzo Bernini, Alexandros of Antioch, Mikhail Vrubel, Luca Cambiaso, Pietro da Cortona.
I have a rare Trubetskoy book I’m very fond of with excellent photographs of many of his portraits very well lit, but I can’t say I couldn’t live without it. Sculpture needs to be seen in person from many perspectives. It often is composed to tell different stories from varied vantage points. It’s never the same experience looking at 2D images in books. I actually prefer some of the very high resolution 3d digitized images many museums now put online that can be rotated to see from all angles.
Obsession for what you love doing most, but I don’t think it’s unique to artists.
Yes, but mostly to draw people on the subway (I like the light there) and to catch ideas for compositions, but I really need to start small in clay quickly after a sketch to understand it three-dimensionally.
The State Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow for all the Trubetskoy sculptures they have, but I don’t know that I’ll ever make it back there in the current state of the world.
There was an exhibition of Vrubel drawing, painting, and sculpture at The Tretyakov Gallery in Moscow where I got to see his original illustrations for the poem ‘The Demon” by Mikhail Lermontov. I have never seen reproductions that did justice to the luminescence he achieved in his brilliant compositions. I have never seen anything like it before or since.
I love teaching as much as making art, but I need them in balance. I’ve been doing both since I was pretty young. If I don’t teach, I become too isolated in my work, but if I don’t have enough time for my work, I’m too involved with my students like a hovering parent. I guess I’d be a far less effective teacher if not also an artist.
I studied for seven years with many of the same people in Russia. We were together ten hours a day six days a week, and they all had ten years of Russian art training before going into the Academy when I met them, so I really learned as much from them as from my professors there.
The business end of being an artist was not part of the curriculum. Social media didn’t exist the way it does now so that continues to be a learning curve. Also, many of the connections I made in Russia to find clients, garner exposure, and negotiate with foundries, I had to create again from scratch when I got back to the States.
My professor’s professor Mikhail Anikushin made many of the monumental figural sculptures around Saint Petersburg where I studied, and he said that while 2d composition is like a poem, sculpture needs to be concentrated into a single word. Probably Ugolino and His Sons by Carpeaux is one of the best examples I’ve seen of that.
The compositions I strive for are unified by a central focal point to which all other details are orchestrated around. This is difficult to do with one figure. In this sculpture, he does it with five. Not only does every gesture and tilt of the head lead the viewer’s gaze back to Ugolino’s tortured expression, but the interlocking of limbs and even intertwining of toes bind the five figures into a single visual word. Carpeaux punctuates and reveals that word as the central theme by placing a literal linked chain by Ugolinio’s interlaced feet, illustrating how the family is tethered to their miserable fate in Dante’s Inferno. As gruesome as the subject matter is, the ability to distill the story into such clear visual language using the human body is always inspiring.
It’s hard to answer this. I love nature, but that’s in part because it is the root of harmonious composition. Our bodies are built with the same golden mean ratios found in nature and in most beautifully-composed images. I love film too but that can’t be classified as outside of art. I’m not sure I can think of a visual pleasure outside of art. Art is everywhere.
No, I find it distracts me by making me think I’m doing better than I really am because I feel good from the music instead of from the artistic choices I’m making while sculpting. I do listen while casting or building armatures though.
The National Sculpture Society.
Not sure if they are underrated, but they deserve as much exposure as possible and inspired me greatly at various stages of my artistic growth: painter Simon Gaon and sculptor Vladimir Brodarsky.
While there are myriad tools and materials I need to make armatures, many, many different wooden and metal tools I’ve made or altered myself that I use quite often, and a host of rubbers and resins for casting, all I really need is clay. My fingers are still my primary tool, and when I begin, I often work quite small and don’t use armatures. In order to see something through to completion, though, requires too many tools and materials to name. I usually work in water or oil clay and then cast in plaster and rework things in that medium before casting into resin or bronze. Each stage requires its own collection of tools and materials.
I did before I had children. Often ten to fourteen hours a day or until my wife came to the studio and hauled me away. Hopefully, I will again when they are older. I have two girls, five and eight. As difficult as the last couple of years have been with school shutting down and the fallout from that, I’m constantly reminded by friends with older children that these are years to cherish so I try to spend a lot of time with them. Hopefully I can work the way I used to when they are older.
During COVID-19, when school was canceled, my wife was in grad school online, and I was with my three- and six year-olds a lot. I would go weeks without really sculpting. It was very bad for my mental well-being, so I started doing cartoon time when I’d sculpt them. I can’t go very long without sculpting or drawing, or I’m not an affective parent/husband/teacher. If I don’t nurture that part of myself, it’s hard to nurture anyone else.
I usually have many pieces I’m working on, so if I find I’m spinning my wheels or at an impasse with a composition, I work on something else. Sometimes teaching helps solve problems because I’ll try to expose my students to lots of sculptors and painters to understand composition and often find I’m actually looking for answers to compositional problems I need to solve as well—even if it’s an unconscious search.
Questions of identity and origin.
Diligence, persistence, consistency.
I’ve never finished a piece because it’s done. I’ve only stopped working on them because I can no longer make them better. I guess I have yet to let go of a kind of perfectionism.
You can reach a much wider range of clientele now. Really anyone can start up an online store and sell their work allowing more people to access it.
Selection of stories, guides, and more from the League.
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