Interview with Kevin Sprague, Photographer

This is the twenty-ninth interview in the “Where are we now?” series. This is a very exciting and important addition to the series; Kevin is a thoughtful artist who articulates his theories about the interaction of arts, technology, and human biology in clear and insightful ways.

Please take a moment to peruse the INTRODUCTION AND INDEX to this series and to leave a comment at the end. Thank you.



photo by Eric Korenmann


Interview with Kevin Sprague, photographer and graphic designer
via email, 6 and 17 August 2010


IA: Please tell us about yourself: your writing, photography, graphic design, digital composition, teaching…. What are some of your past projects of which you are most proud? What current projects do you have in progress now?


KS: I’ve been a working professional in the graphic design/photography/web field since 1994. I’m entirely self-taught in the technical aspects of my career—I was an English major at Cornell and did a lot of creative writing then, including my first novel Viewfinder which was, ironically enough, about a photographer. I’ve always been a photographer—it was always something we did growing up. The transition from film to digital in early in my career really opened up the world to me in terms of how one “tells stories” through images. The possibility of compositing multiple images, of manipulating them to make something completely new, was very appealing and effective for me.




The work that I am most proud of over my career is the 16+ years I have spent illustrating the works of William Shakespeare for Lenox, Massachusetts, based theatre troupe Shakespeare & Company. studio two, my business, has handled all the marketing for the company for the duration and during that time I’ve had the opportunity to illustrate many, many of the plays for posters, brochures and the like. It’s a rich and compelling body of work to play with again and again. It has also been a great collaboration with many other artists.

Currently, my active personal projects are focused on the moving image—working with HD video and the exciting imaging possibilities of the new breed of digital SLR cameras that shoot video. I just completed a shoot for a client on a short film, and I have a couple of film projects that I am playing with in the development stage. I’m interested in how simply and effectively one can produce a good film—that’s the challenge ahead.



IA: What other specific techniques do you use?



KS: Editing, editing, editing. For me a big part of the creative process is making choices about what to include and what to exclude. I’ll shoot a hundred photos in a 5-minute session with the aim of getting just THE one.

Sketching, just getting ideas out of my head and onto paper is very important. I’m not a great illustrator—I just make these scribbles that are the bare bones of the idea I am hoping to create, but getting the idea down is a key part. If I can see it in my mind, I can make it happen in camera and in Photoshop.

Intuition—believing that your inspiration, your first thought, the flash of an image is RIGHT. I don’t over-think, or analyze. The doing is all.

My tools are Photoshop, Photo Mechanic, InDesign, and Wordpress. I shoot with Nikon cameras and an odd assortment of lenses.





IA: On pages 204 and 205 of Imagining Shakespeare, you explain your process of digital composition. Would you mind summarizing that explanation here for the readers of this interview?



KS: I use Photoshop, which is the king of photo editing and manipulation. In Photoshop, you can have multiple “layers” and the layers interact via masks and other methods. The metaphor would be a stack of slides, where you were looking down through the slides and masking out elements you want to eliminate and enhancing other areas you want to keep. Using layers you can seamlessly combine photographs, which is often used to eliminate distracting elements, power lines, etc. in typical “straight” photography. In my work I use the function to create new relationships between images through composition and collaging. In addition, you have at your fingertips many special effects type of tools and techniques where you can create the surreal or impossible with a few clicks of the mouse.









IA: Would you talk to us about your graphic novel, Muse? How did you get the idea for the compositional techniques in this book? And for the storyline? Would you discuss your work with Catherine Taylor-Williams?



KS: Muse arose out of a creative dry spell—back a few years ago, in the winter, I was just bored creatively, so I started a little project. The basic format was based on the idea of making a book—and at the time the apple i-book format was popular. I created a document in Photoshop that was 22x8.5”—essentially the full panoramic width of two pages. I started the project by culling a couple of thousand “interesting” images from my collection of photos (I have something like 300K+ images on our servers at the studio—I never throw my pictures out). I just picked images from all sorts of different shoots. Then I would pick 4-5 of them that seemed to want to “play” together and I would bring them into Photoshop and start moving them around the canvas. I had a “3 strikes, you’re out” rule—if it took more than 3 moves or so for an image to start working with the other ones, I would chuck it and find something else. In short time – a couple of weekends – I had some 90 new composite images done. I put them in an order that seemed intuitively correct and made the first copy of the book.

When I got the book back from Apple, I started to realize that there was a story in the images—a narrative without words. The narrative was inspired from a central event that was represented in the book. I have had the pleasure of working with a couple of great models over the years in my work—people who contribute creatively to my work by their energy, willingness and presence. Actress Catherine Taylor-Williams is one of those people. Catherine had modeled for me over the previous couple of years on both commercial and personal projects—she was always willing to “play” with my ideas no matter what they were. I’m a great believer that the creative process is something that happens by process, energy, intuition and experience. Having someone who is willing to participate in that process without criticism or question can be a real benefit to the artist.

In any case, in the woods far behind my house there is a small, old pond. For years I had in mind an image of someone in the pond, rising up from it. I finally posed the question to Catherine about posing in the pond and she said “yes” despite it being late October in New England! So one morning we went up to the pond and she stripped down to her skivvies and jumped/slid into the freezing water. She swam out to the center of the pond where there were these floating lily pad/weeds and for a scary moment, she got a little tangled up in them. That, combined with the breathless cold of the water, panicked her slightly. Of course, all this time I’m shooting from the edge of the pond and as she started to panic it occurred to me that I should put down the camera and jump in to help her.... but just as quickly the moment passed and she got control of her situation. We shot some nice pictures and then went home.




The point of this long story is that I had used images of Catherine in the pond in the composites that made it into the book. Looking at them, I realized that there was this amazing power that the creative process could have over people—Catherine had put herself in a dangerous, uncomfortable position for really little to no benefit to herself—just a belief that the product we would make together would somehow be worth the risk. I began to think about the role of the “muse” in an artist’s process—an individual who is wholly and completely committed to the artist’s vision, no questions asked. Such individuals are rare creatures and I began to grasp the vision that the ancient concept of the Muse as a kind of deity—a demi-god or spirit that comes to earth to inspire artists... Anyway, in looking at the images I had created, I realized that central to them was the character of a muse—and that this muse while both immortal and transcendent was also abused, neglected, ignored. It turns out that being a muse is a tough business. My character travels through many lives and times without a knowledge of her fate or role but she begins to get a glimmer of it as the books goes on. In the end, the muse transcends her proscribed fate and transitions from “inspiration to creation”—to escape her muse-ship she has to become an artist, or a creator herself.

The book is a kind of graphic novel, in that the images and the words work together to tell the story. But it is not a comic book and the images are really broad dreams of the circumstances. The whole thing is really more of a piece of art than a novel.







IA: You say in your description of Muse, “the muse transcends her proscribed fate and transitions from ‘inspiration to creation’—to escape her muse-ship she has to become an artist, or a creator herself.” This movement from the passive position as object to an active role as subject: is this the account of what one particular woman experienced? Or the account of what every woman must do if she is to find her life’s work? Or a metaphor for women’s history—what women as a community have encountered from the limitations past to the relatively more open present?



KS: Although the Muse is a woman, typically, and in my story is always so, I think there are male muses in the world certainly. My idea of her needing to transition from “inspiration to creation” was meant not so much as a comment on the role of women versus men but on the necessary act of DOING that is at the heart of creation. In other words, it is only when we grab onto the tools and materials of our world and make
something new out of them that we become artists. Making, doing, creating are core human activities so I think I was looking at this transition as a symbol of her evolution as a human. It certainly could be interpreted as the evolving identity and role of women across history—but it was not what I was focused on. I think her evolution was potentially timeless—it could have happened in any era.





IA: You have worked closely with Shakespeare & Co. for many years; is Imagining Shakespeare the result of these years? How have you interacted with the company, the plays, and with Shakespeare? What have you learned from this theatre company, and how has it influenced your work?



KS: Working with Shakespeare has been such a rich experience—his words have aged so well that they continue to resonate with modern audiences—and my relationship with the Company has allowed me to become fluent and conversant in the deeper aspects of William Shakespeare and his many plays. My Book Imagining Shakespeare was really just an attempt to condense, compile and organize my work for the Company into something that might help people understand my creative process and also give them a glimpse into this marvelous world and the creative people who live in it.



My work for the Company is primarily a commercial relationship—they are my client, and my job is to create compelling images and materials that sell tickets, and lots of them. If I had not been successful in this endeavor, our relationship would have ended a long time ago. As a commercial relationship, a lot of the work is driven by tight budgets, crazy short deadlines, and external requirements that threaten the creative process at every turn. I’ve learned how to work lighting-fast, how to show up, set up, direct and shoot, and break down in 15 minutes on location. I’ve learned how to be creative on my feet with a pencil and scrap of paper while 20 people stand around waiting for my direction. I always tell people that “creativity is a muscle”—i.e., the more you exercise it, the stronger and faster it gets. I love the flow of the creative process under pressure—the way that solutions, ideas and results condense moment by moment into extraordinary results. I don’t think that we, as a society, spend enough time talking about or teaching “creativity” as a necessary life skill—a learnable skill like addition and subtraction, or becoming fluent in a foreign language. In our world, creativity is tied to “talent,” this idea that you either have it or you don’t. I think that is baloney—we’re here to learn things and to express that learning and to learn again. I’m always learning from my own work and from the people around me and exercising and growing that creative muscle. Shakespeare is just one of the better places to work it out.



IA: Throughout Imagining Shakespeare, you occasionally discuss some limitations that have held Shakespeare & Co. back, at times, from fully realizing their dreams. These have almost all been financial. However, you discuss one incident in 2007 in which you thought “self-censorship” prevented the Company from achieving full artistic freedom. You had designed a poster for Macbeth that showed Lady Macbeth’s hand grasping two bloody daggers; the daggers were piercing the skin of her own wrist. The idea is that those who commit—or incite—bloody murder will not go unscathed by violence. However, you were asked to withdraw this image; there were fears about the effect this image would have on teenage audiences. At that time, cutting was rampant among high school students (and still are, unfortunately); it was perhaps one of the more widespread addictions among young people in America. There is some concern that images of self-mutilation can spur children on to try it for the first time, or to revert to that very disturbing negative behavior if they have been in the habit in the past. Aren’t there times when artistic freedom really should be sacrificed to concerns of morality, social justice, or other communal needs? In other words, is creative excellence always the highest goal an artistic company should strive for, or do they sometimes need to take into consideration potentially harmful real-life effects of their work?



KS: Certainly, I think that any organization that is participating in the lives of children should use common sense and good judgment about what materials, representations, and information gets disseminated. My observation was not so much about the content of the decision that was made but the context—I felt like there needed to be a discussion about the issue, and an examination of the role that the marketing image plays in the fabric of the entire experience they are creating. In other words, the Company needed to apply the same rigor, artistic examination and process to my work as it would to a decision regarding manipulating or editing Shakespeare's text and the presentation
thereof. By the same measure, it could be argued that many of the tragedies should not be presented to high school audience because the stories (and their enactments) are full of bloody, profligate violence and murder. My work is not ancillary to their presentation—it is part of it. It's an ongoing discussion but I think that any artist or group of artists need to work from the heart of their inspiration and need to be given an opportunity to defend, discuss and present their work before summary judgment.



IA: What other topics tend to recur in your work?



KS: We’re a branding agency—one of the things we do is help organizations distill their values, vision and identity and express those things. I do that for myself. In my personal value space relating to my work I have some core precepts—beauty, honesty, extraordinary. I’m always trying to live up to those values. I’m interested in the beautiful—ugliness, shock value, the grotesque, have no appeal to me. I love making things that make people happy, or thrilled, or excited. I’m interested in life, and the living of it. I find much of the current phase of commercial and art photography being curated by the leading magazines and critics to be lifeless, vapid, disturbed, devoid, emotionless. So many photos of people in ruined places looking exhausted, bored, or vacant. I don’t know where these people are (or rather, where the photographers creating these scenarios live). My world isn’t like that. I’m surrounded by creative people striving, working and applying tremendous energy to their activities every day—hoping to make a difference, hoping to be successful, hoping to make an impression. No one I know has time to stand around looking vacant. We’re too busy DOING stuff. We live in a fantastic world full of beauty and mystery. Get outside—go look at it.




I’m a scientist by nature—a side interest of mine is evolutionary theory and the writings of Richard Dawkins (The Selfish Gene) and Daniel Dennett (Darwin’s Dangerous Idea). I think the natural world and the amazing accidents of life and of natural selection are deeply true and compelling. Some of that, I hope, comes into my work.



IA: What theories inform your work?



KS: I believe that we are visual beings—and that our ability to understand and interpret images is driven by life experience but also by physiology—the nature of how the brain works. Working with images on computers all the time, I’ve formed some theories about the relationship between image content, image compression and the way that memory works. In a nutshell, the brain needs to compress data to optimize storage, much like a hard drive does. It does this by deleting unnecessary detail. If you think about images that you remember, you often can describe the point of focus, a face perhaps, but not really what is happening in the background. My theory is that images that reflect our mental processes tap into those emotional states of memory or perception. Why are people drawn to the aesthetic of short depth of field portraits where the emphasis is on the face or the eyes? Because that is how we, as human beings, focus our attention and our minds—faces matter, eyes matter—background doesn’t matter, most of the time. I like to play with the theories in how I approach the task of making my work effective and powerful.



IA: Do you think these topics, techniques, and theories are typical of those working in your genres?



KS: I don’t think they are typical. There is very little discussion that I come across of the relationships between “being human” in a biological sense and art—I think there are hard facts at work here, not vague ideas of composition, color, motion and so on. Where my work is perhaps typical to others working in the field is the assumption that we can create compelling images by the combination and manipulation of multiple images together—thereby removing most of the sacred truth of a given photograph and really turning it into something new, fictional and different. I don’t subscribe much to the theory of the sacrosanct image—photographs have always been subject to a degree of manipulation since the first photo was made—through developing, printing, enhancing. I think photojournalists need to live by a stricter code in this day and age, but I’m not a photojournalist—I create new fictions.



IA: Do you think of yourself as belonging to any particular ‘school’ or ‘movement’?



KS: Only the digital imaging and Photoshop movement, if such a thing exists.





IA: What can you tell us about the current state of the arts? Please talk specifically about photographers, writers, artists, actors, etc. whom you know (or whose work you know), their topics/techniques/theories, and in general about your sense of North American arts right now.



KS: I believe that we might be at a tipping point for the arts in the USA. This tipping point has to do with the evaluation of the role that the arts plays in our larger economy, focused in part by the evolving dialogue about the “Creative Economy.” I live in a community that is defined to a large degree by the economic impact of the arts—performing, visual, commercial and industrial. We’ve been changing the language about what our regional economy means by tracking, quantizing, and promoting the impact that the Creative Economy has on our regional economic health and development. In particular, I’ve been focusing on the role of capital investment in the arts and the effect of that investment. In the arts community, capital is often spoken of strictly in an agnostic sense, divorced from its impact—“Donations,” “Sponsor,” “Philanthropists,” “Grants.” All of these are a form of public or private capital investment—a donation to an arts organization is no different than an equity investment in a private sector business—the expectation of return is different from the investor’s point of view, but the impact is the same—new product development, new construction, jobs, growth.

The Arts and related creative industries have long been the whipping boy of public investment. Arts funding continues to be cut across the board. But I think that people are starting to see the glimmer. One of the great remaining exports of the USA is our creative output—movies, video games, software, media of all kinds. These are the arts in action, believe it or not. I’m a commercial artist—I make my living on my ability to think creatively every day. As a fine artist, I seek to go to deeper places to enjoy the flow of my creative output, but I make no distinction between my commercial and my personal work—I hold nothing back during the day at my desk.

I think that a new generation of artists who have many more and varied ways of expressing themselves is upon us, and this generation, and I count myself among the vanguard, find no inherent borders between commercial and personal work. We are designers, photographers, filmmakers, web developers, animators, printers, painters, performers, musicians—we are all these things, all the time. And we are good at it.



IA: If you have a religious point of view, can you comment on the differences between sacred and secular arts?



KS: I’m not a religious person. I enjoy the history and presence of the sacred arts—I love visiting churches and cathedrals when I travel and seeing the local stamp on the familiar stories, but I don’t perceive any active role in my sphere where the religious or secular are in contrast or tension.



IA: How do you think the arts (your own or others’) are responding to present and potential world-movements, such as postmodernism, the looming “post-human” phase, and the possible artistic effects of the Eastward orientation of economics and Christianity?



KS: It’s interesting to think and see internationally—there is a world of diversity at our fingertips. I get frustrated when it is clear that a western curatorial view of what is and isn’t “art” gets applied to work from other farther, different places.

My personal theory on the “post human” phase is that we are already deeply in it, and that technology, if it gets smarter, might do well to play dumb. I joke that I spend my days working so that my technology is happy—I provide it power, access to other technology via high-speed connections, I upgrade it constantly and fix it when it breaks.... Who is working for whom? Owning computers and devices these days is like living with a bunch of housecats who occasionally catch a nuisance rodent but otherwise spend a good part of the day eating and sleeping! That’s the life.

I’m not interested particularly in the “looming” of China and the East. When I was younger it was all about Japan eating our lunch, and now it is about being in 2nd place to China, etc. Who cares? We live in a global society. I live in a free country, relatively speaking, and I work on a local level—my family, my friends, my town, my region. I seek to strengthen these things.

Our world gets better. Many people like to see it always getting worse, but it isn’t true. My environment has never been cleaner, the air fresher, the water more drinkable. The opportunities have never been so abundant, the possibilities of communicating and connecting never so rich and varied. It’s all amazing.



IA: How do you think we got to the phase where we are now?



KS: Technology. I’m a geek by breeding and nature. The computer, the integrated circuit, and the Internet have changed everything. And we have only just started. This is the horse-and-buggy days of technology. Just watch.



IA: Where are we going?



KS: Amazing places—why was the movie “Avatar” so successful? Did it have the best story, the best characters, the best plot? No. But it was a tour-de-force of imagination and imaging. It was so beautiful—again, back to the idea that we are visual creatures—the movie experience was like a drug—positively addicting.

I think that was a taste of where we are going in the arts, expression and story-telling. The bar is going to be continually pushed ahead. Some of the most amazing creative imaging and imagination I see is in the gaming space—your new x-box or playstation game contains whole worlds with features, architecture and elements that exceed anything possible in the physical world—and you can walk, run, jump and fly through these spaces. This is art—whether you like it or not. It is also significant that these art forms are collaborative—movies, games, theater—these forms all require large numbers of creatives to work together. I think that the demands, expectations and economic possibilities for arts in the future will require this kind of broad collaboration, which is perhaps a refreshing change from the lone artist in his garret that has been the tradition for so long. Making art with other people is fun. Why shouldn’t it be fun?

The New "Where" and "How" of Art

I have published a little article about Street Art and Pop Surrealism in The Curator. It explores what these two genres are, then discuss how Street Art is coming into galleries and Pop Surrealism is going outdoors. I take into consideration questions of technique and communication. Take a read!

October Poem of the Month

I have just finished organizing the MS for what I hope will be my second book -- my first full-length book -- of poetry. The book will be entitled Caduceus; it's all about messages, words, voices, lies, truth, and personas. It has six sections, titled "Lovers," "Skeptics," "Preachers," "Believers," "Metaphors," and "The Voice of God." This poem is the "Prologue" to the volume.



Dramatis Personae

My little heel-wings are not made of feathers:
they are made of tongues. Their voices flap
around my feet, hiss through my veins, and coil
their noisy helix on my heraldic staff.

They whisper I am, I say, making me
play all the characters this writer writes.
I am the dead man on the bed; I am
the bird, the beast, the god, the groom, the bride.

I am a hypocrite, a metaphor,
a myth. If every wing-word was hermetic,
lovers, skeptics, Romans, Christians took
my secret voices public, grew frenetic

in praise of their high places and their gods——
in the end their clamor just might run me mad.



—— Sørina

Interview with Ryan Jackson, painter

This is the twenty-eighth interview in the “Where are we now?” series. Please take a look at the INTRODUCTION AND INDEX to see if you have missed any interviews, take a look at my conversations with those guests of most interest to you, leave some comments, or suggest future interviewees. Enjoy, leave your comments at the end of this interview, and share this series with your friends!


Interview with painter Ryan Jackson
in his classroom-turned-studio
at The Christian Academy, Brookhaven, PA,
13 August 2010



My interview with Ryan Jackson, a young fine artist and illustrator from the Philadelphia area, was a thrilling adventure. He had invited me to come to the high school where he teaches so that he could show me some of his works there; the school allowed him to use his classroom as a studio during the summer. As I pulled up to the garish orange-and-gray school building (where I once interviewed—unsuccessfully—for a position as an English teacher!), I had no idea what an amazing space I would enter. Ryan had taken the classroom and transformed it into a private art gallery and art history educational venue just for me. He had set up the movable internal walls to create just the right shape to showcase his best works. He had hung his paintings chronologically around the room, carefully lighting each one for best effect. Along one wall sat a long table, strewn with dozens of those lovely, high-quality, glossy-paged, table-top fine art books. Here are images of his studio-classroom:















Before we sat down for the official interview, Ryan took me slowly around the room, explaining and describing each piece. He has gone through several stylistic phases in his short career: several experimentations in photorealism including a black-and-white stage, a “blue” period, and some work in visual collage; more recently, he has switched to the demanding and dangerous techniques of Baroque glazing. In what follows, I will intersperse our actual recorded interview with reconstructed conversations and my own descriptions of what I saw that day, enhanced with images of most works we discuss. The photos that are grainy or ill-lit, I took with my little point-and-shoot digital; the higher-quality photos come from Ryan’s excellent website, www.ryanjacksonart.com.


I. PHOTOREALISM

In college, Ryan use a style of painting made up of little hatch marks, almost like pointillism. It depicted a chaotic sense of reality and was inspired by Antony Gormley’s “Quantum Cloud.” He said:


RJ: I graduated from Rhode Island School of Design in 2001 and then started showing in galleries for a couple of years. But I didn’t like the work I was doing; I didn’t feel as if it was representing my Christianity, my relationship with Christ. So I took several years off from painting, got married, and over the past five years have been revamping my style, exploring painting, and trying to find a way to accomplish that representation.

IA: You started out with a very literal photo-realism: painting in black-and-white, using just oil paints on canvas: flat, kind of smooth. Am I describing that correctly?



RJ: Yes. I was inspired by several painters, including Gerhard Richter, Damien Hirst, Rudolf Stingel, Eberhard Havekost, Neo Rauch, and Matthias Weischer, some of whom are considered members of the “New Leipzig School”. I have also been influenced by Michaël Borremans, Tim Eitel, Luc Tuymans, Alberto Giacametti,
and John Currin.

Part of this photorealist phase might, in retrospect, be called
Jackson’s “Blue Phase 2005-2006”
During this time, Ryan used a flat, glazy style and painted several black-and-white utopic/dystopic scenes, including the following:



Manhattan Project


Disney’s EuroRail

And several still-lifes, including a series of candle scenes:















We talked about how painting from photographs used to be considered “cheating,” just as digital photography wasn’t considered “real” photography. Now the artistry involved in each process is recognized.

Much in the vein of the photorealist style, Ryan painted (and continues to paint, especially on commission) portraits, including a series of pictures of orphans and from pictures taken on missions trips around the world. These include:



An orphan



An image from a missions trip


Ryan’s next phase, closely related to his early photorealist work, and still influenced by the Leipzig School, especially Matthias Weischer, Neo Rauch, and David Schnell, was what I most readily identify as “Cityscapes.” In this period of experimentation, Ryan said he tried just “letting paint do its thing; letting accidents happen.” He used collage, spots of raw canvas peering through, paint drips, marks of turpentine, marks of the trowel. Here are two cityscapes/landscapes:






There is one uncharacteristic piece in this phase inspired by the film “Metropolis”—a German film from 1927 that has recently been restored after the discovery of lost footage. I don’t have an image of it.



II. ART IN SERVICE TO FAITH

Before we talk about Jackson’s current phase, a dedicated study of the materials and techniques of the Baroque masters, here is a conversation we had about how a Christian may use art in direct service of social needs and the communication of Biblical truth.


IA: There are a couple of problems that we face as Christians in the arts. One is: How do we retell the Biblical stories in new ways. Another is: How do we make a difference in the world by means of art. There are a lot of different ways that people have solved these problems: some have done it by subject matter, some have done it by political activism, getting involved. So: The first way that you did it was using your art financially. Selling your paintings and then giving the money to causes?



RJ: Yes. Selling the paintings and then using the money, which is a way my wife Hillary and I found that we could give. Just doing paintings, whether it’s of orphans or the missions series. And that’s been opening up more and more doors. The missions ones: I guess we’re on the third series now, of paintings. I’m selling those, and the money is going off to missions or to support orphans.



IA: To what institutions have you given those donations?



RJ: To Calvary Chapel in Philadelphia, to their missions, and then they are either sending it to missionaries or using it to buy Bibles. And also to Living Hope Adoption agency. My mother has adopted her two sons through that agency.



IA: When you sell these paintings, have they been to private individuals? Have churches or institutions bought them? And where did they buy them? Were they shown in galleries, or was it through personal contacts?



RJ: It was either through personal contacts, commissions, or through Calvary Chapel; Calvary is actually setting up spaces now to put the works up, to put up photographs, paintings, and sell the work, and then the money goes towards missions.

IA: OK. And then the other way that you’re making your faith work in your art is showing the same-old Bible stories with contemporary people in them, and in contemporary settings. Am I describing that all right?



RJ: Yes, that’s right.



IA: So by doing that, you’re saying that the story is still relevant; you’re showing that it is timeless? What else does that show? How else does that work? If I were commissioning a work (I wish I could!) and I wanted it to be a particular Bible story, how would you go about deciding to represent that?



RJ: If you just said, “I want you to paint Job” or something like that? I guess I would do a lot of research, looking back at old paintings, doing a ton of researching, seeing what people had done before, and taking ties from some of the other art history that I know. Kind of like the Hosea one with the three light sources.


Ryan has one amazing work in which he depicts Hosea and his wife Gomer just after Hosea has redeemed her from prostitution. It uses direct, but subtle, narrative representation. Objects or elements of the painting have symbolic resonance: the door is the door out to “The World” (in the worst sense). Stairs represent Gomer’s fall into infidelity and also The Fall of all humankind; black represents sin; there are three light sources (representing three-fold Redemption). There are also allusions for those who really know their art history: a framed image on the wall is reminiscent of the images-within-images in many of Vermeer’s works; Hosea’s hands are straight out of a work by Jan van Eyck. In order to appreciate the rich layers of meaning in Jackson’s work, you really need to know art history, to be fluent in the traditional vocabulary or standard symbols. This prompted me to ask, “How much of all that did you expect me to get, just by looking at the painting?” We ended up with a comparison between viewing such thoughtful visual works and what Bach said about his audience. Bach (according to scholar Michael Marissen) wrote his most complex pieces for several levels of audience comprehension and enjoyment:
1. First, there was the average person who would just enjoy the thrilling sounds of the music, melody and rhythm, without any intellectual analysis.
2. Second, there were members of the learned aristocracy who would get some obvious music allusions, such as “Oh, this metrical pattern is from a royal overture; it used to be played when the king entered the opera house, but set to this Psalm text, it means that Christ the King is coming.”
3. Third, there Bach’s advanced composition students, who would understand all of the most complex things he was doing with counterpoint, modulations, etc.
4. Finally, God, Who would get everything!
Ryan has a similar goal: on the one hand, he wants Christians without any art education at all to be able to relate to the immediately accessible realism; on the other hand, he wants those who have learned historical conventions and techniques to be able to revel in the intellectual and spiritual depth of his pieces.





RJ: There’s something else I don’t want to leave out: just sitting down and praying. That’s one thing I’ve been teaching my daughter every time we get ready to paint. She’s only four, but she comes into my studio and I’ll give her a section: “Here, paint this!” And later I’ll cover it over. But before we paint, we get down on our knees and we pray: “Lord, here are our gifts. We want this to glorify You. You show us what the subject-matter is; You show us how You want us to do this.” And that’s where the “Prodigal Son” series came from. Being willing to yield to the Spirit, being willing to let the Spirit change things. This is part of living into life: listen to His Spirit, walk according to the Spirit, walk according to His word, allow Him to be the influence.



IA: So, you do your research, you do your prayer, and then you set up the scene: you sketch it, you draw out ideas, and then you might get friends or students to pose for the scene?



RJ: Yes. I’ll often do little sketches, little thumbnails, little watercolors, and just start to play around with it. And then allow it somewhat to create itself. I’m getting ready to work one that is Jesus calling Matthew. I’m working from Caravaggio’s “Christ Calling Matthew”. In it, Christ is in the background. That’s one of the things I loved about Caravaggio: he wanted to paint these scenes that depicted real people and told the story, kind of like what I’m doing. At first, a lot of his paintings were not received well. In fact, some of them were taken out of the churches because they looked too real. The authorities thought, “The apostles should be very glamorous, floating off the ground almost, wearing beautiful robes.” His just looked like average, every-day guys with wrinkles and knotty hands. In it, you have Christ. He’s coming and He’s calling Matthew, and Matthew’s sitting at the table, and he’s kind of pointing to himself. Christ is kind of tucked back here, not a major figure. The hands are in the same pose as Michelangelo’s [God and Adam at creation], kind of giving him spiritual life, as it were. You’ve got this spiritual lighting coming down and illuminating Matthew’s face. I have taken the same idea. I have done some sketches where in want to actually take—not knowing how to paint Christ, take Him out completely and just have His hands in there. I have a friend whom I can characterize as what I picture for Matthew. So I’ll take maybe a hundred and fifty pictures of him in different poses, and then manipulate them and kind of—I want to do similar things, but, like with the “Prodigal Son” series, with big, minimalist backgrounds. There might be a window, but I want the light coming down. There will be just Matthew, Christ’s hands, and some lighting. And it may change. It may change several times in the process. I think that’s key: letting the paintings create themselves somewhat and being willing to change and accommodate that.


III. BAROQUE GLAZING

Jackson’s most current experimentations (and, I would say, his most powerful and successful paintings) are growing more and more masterful, larger, darker, more skilful, more dangerous, and more profound. The canvases are huge: I’d guess that the ones in the Prodigal Son series are about eight feet long. Their concepts are impressive: they are not content with showing a static scene or telling a story; they have to do both of those simultaneously, while also exploring theological concepts or serious questions about the human condition. So, in this phase Ryan recently switched to old paints, manufactured in just the way they were in the time of the old masters, made with the same materials (some have lead in them)! They are quite toxic, so he has to use extreme care when he paints. He has learned the Baroque glazing technique, which has to be applied in a slow, painstaking process that requires great patience but results in a rich, shiny surface and a remarkable depth of color. That is his goal with this new/old method: to achieve realism with richness and depth.

His influences in this period include the most notable Baroque masters. Velasquez taught him loose, fluid draftsmanship skills. Jackson raved about the revolutionary but subdued color palette and the amazingly intricate detail in a Velasquez from a distance compared to the loose brushwork and translucent glazes visible up close. Goya also uses those loose brushstrokes. He was influenced by Velasquez, but took his brushwork further and uses a similar palette in the dull red—deep brown—rich gray range. Caravaggio taught him minimalist backgrounds, beautiful contrasts of shade and light, and rich use of glazes. Vermeer used a similar color palette and a particular way of setting up, even staging, his scenes. Although Vermeer employed a small scale and utilized space (which Jackson does not need to do on these large canvases), Vermeer’s influence is obvious in the ways he glazed his colors, chose his range of shades, and used negative space. Manet also copied aspects of his color palette from Vermeer, and Jackson follows this line of inheritance.

Ryan saved his two most recent series, in this Baroque style, for last. First, he took me to a bright white wall on which hung his “Crucifixion” series. There are three paintings in this set that must be viewed together, in order. When I first saw them, I was very confused. What did those squares and rectangles mean? Then Ryan started talking, and I felt as if a curtain of confusion lifted gradually from the paintings and their real genius was revealed. He quoted 2 Corinthians 5:21, which reads: “For He made Him who knew no sin to be sin for us, that we might become the righteousness of God in Him.” He thought about Christ becoming sin. What was sin, to Christ? It was His opposite, His negative. How to depict that visually? Well, by punning on “negative.” So Ryan painted a version of a crucifixion by Bonnat, then had squares of photo-negative color gradually overtaking Christ. Here are the three images:





And then, last of all, Ryan took me around into the inside room contained within the classroom-studio. Here, in their deep Baroque glory and their jeans-and-tee-shirts contemporanity, were four astonishing works, commissioned by Calvary Chapel of Philadelphia. Each is a masterpiece of technique and an immediately visceral experience of human emotion. We talked the longest about the second piece, the party scene in which the prodigal son wastes all his wealth. There is just too much packed into this painting to express in full. There are elements allusive of Goya’s “Witches’ Sabbath,” Velasquez’ “Joseph’s Coat”, and Titian’s “Bacchus and Ariadne” (note the leg of beef on the right). Also, like Rembrandt, a self-portrait sneaks in. Can you find it? This self-portrait is the only figure with eyes; everyone else is empty, blind, and lifeless in this hell of false pleasure. Here are the four paintings in the series:



“Departure”



“Decadence”



“Broken”



“The Return”





IA: We don’t necessarily have to follow what’s being done now-a-days: we can be inspired by it, but we can forge our own way, or we can look at the past.



RJ: Yes. Well, if you look at modernism, you have all these manifestos saying: This is the only way to paint—Surrealism, Cubism—here’s our manifesto for the next thing—Dadaism. And then you kind of get up to the ’70s, ’80s, and then, with, I guess Postmodernism, it becomes picking and choosing from all different styles. You’ll have, for instance, architecture that has several different styles, or paintings like Neil Rausch who has several different styles and techniques merging Abstract Realism. So I think it’s great that now-a-days we can use all sorts of things to create something new.



IA: Would you consider yourself a member of a particular school of thought in painting? Give yourself a label?



RJ: No. No, because I’m just exploring, just seeing what work comes out and where the Lord leads me.



IA: Because you’re not sure where you’ll settle down or if you’ll keep exploring?



RJ: Yes, and at this point I don’t know that I’ll ever settle into one thing, because it’s constantly learning, constantly exploring, constantly changing. Look at somebody like Picasso (not that I’m comparing myself by any means to Picasso! I’m nobody, but…) who has influenced so many different styles. He’s constantly getting bored with one thing and moving on to the next. He has influenced so many different styles: Surrealism, Cubism…. He would explore it until he came to the end of then road and then move to something else.




II. THE NECESSITY OF HISTORICAL EXCELLENCE



IA: Another theme I’ve been picking up today is that as Christians in the arts, technique is just absolutely (to use a Pennsylvania phrase) “where it’s at.” You just absolutely have to master the skill. You can’t just have something to say. It’s not enough to say: “I want to communicate with the world.” You’ve got to study; you’ve got to work; you’ve got to learn the techniques, read the books, and so on. And that’s a mistake Christians in the arts make. They think: “God’s just going to inspire me, so therefore I don’t need to revise, or I don’t need to study, or I don’t need to know the history.” So what I’ve been impressed with today, as we’ve been walking around, (among other things) is your absolute dedication to the technique. Putting in the hours of the hard work. Have you seen that as a problem in Christian art?



RJ: Yes, yes. Especially the Christian arts where things are, what’s the word, not “kitschy,” but there’s a lack of depth to it. And not that God can’t take anyone and use whatever. I don’t want to get so caught up in my human effort that it’s just me. It’s got to be the Holy Spirit. But also, I think, having studied art, seeing how rich art history is, and how there’s so much there, that’s the thing I’ve noticed. Especially in high school: They’re not teaching any art history. So I’ve actually started teaching seminars to art teachers. And I’ve found that most of the art teachers know nothing. They know Vincent van Gogh, and that’s it. Well, what are you teaching? There’s thousands of years of art history and you’re not touching it! And they just say, “Well, we don’t know anything about it.” If you come to teach English or math, you don’t just come in and teach whatever you want. You don’t say, “We’re going to make it up.” But when it comes to art, that’s what people tend to do, especially in high school. “Let’s just make it up. Let’s just make crafts. Let’s make flowers we can stick on Grandma’s fridge.” Well, as Christians, we should be creating the best. We’re doing it for our Lord, and this is what we’re giving him?! There are so many problems, I don’t even know if I can figure it out. But that’s one of the things I’ve been doing with my students. I’ve been teaching them through art history: here’s what happening, here’s what the people who have gone before you have done, here’s what they have accomplished. We learn from both older and contemporary artists. And that’s another problem. Even in other subjects, teachers stop about a hundred years ago. They stop at Impressionism in art. And I’m sure you’ve seen this in literature. There are the classics, which are great, and you need to know them. But what’s happening now-a-days: there are so many innovative things going on and major break-throughs. We can’t leave that out.

No Content

This semester, I am teaching two courses at a local community college: English I and what I jocularly refer to (but not in the presence of students) as English Minus I. The college, of course, has a different numerical system by which English I has been denominated ENG 105 and “English Minus I” is ENG 100. There is also, by the way, yet another course—English Minus II—even lower, which the college calls ENG 099. I am greatly enjoying teaching these two courses, strange though they are to me who has been used to teaching philosophy, Poetry Writing with the British Romantics, Renaissance music composition, Advanced Readings in the Inklings, and other excitingly narrow and sophisticated courses.

I love being useful to these students. They are small heroes struggling through school, fighting to pay tuition, and most likely working full-time jobs while caring for children, elderly relatives, or both. Most of them come from indigent circumstances and harrowing backgrounds. And so, by an impressive leap of imagination, these students reach for a future. For a future, they need an education. For an education, they need to learn to write. They need to learn how to write a sentence, then a paragraph, then an essay, and finally a research paper. It’s an enormous challenge.

They don’t know what a subject or a verb is. They can’t find prepositional phrases. They don’t know how to reason from a premise to a conclusion. The younger ones are not aware of current events or history; the older ones don’t know how to save a Word document or send an email. Then again, neither do the younger ones. They can text faster than a speeding bullet, but can’t figure out how to get their last names into the header.

But none of that is what makes this course hard for me to teach. I am glad to offer these valiant people a chance to learn a valuable skill: setting their thoughts down in an articulate and organized fashion. That’s great.

My problem is that these courses have no content.

These courses teach the skill of writing in a formulaic fashion, step-by-step. It is not liberal education in the sense of shaping the mind; it is physical education in the sense of training in a skill. And so, week to week, I am stymied and don’t know what to do.

That’s a bit of an exaggeration: I do know what to do in many ways. I do powerpoints on grammar. I have sentence diagramming and paragraph drill competitions. I am developing a really exciting unit on basic logic that will be about ¼ of the course in English I. But I’m frustrated, class after class, with how banal and repetitive it all seems. How many times can we practice thesis statements? How many times can we dissect model essays? How many times can we rewrite topic sentences and transitions? How many ways can we make our introductions and conclusions interesting? How many sample MLA entries does it take before our Works Cited pages look nice?

Give me some poetry, lest I die.

See, I long to be that transformative teacher like the Hillary Swank character in “Freedom Writers” or (with reservations) the Robin Williams character in “Dead Poets’ Society.” Don’t we all. More realistically, and, actually, even better: I long to be like my most influential professors from undergrad and grad school. So when I’m planning a lesson I think about how they would do it; after a lesson, I evaluate how it compared to their classes. But the major difference (besides differences in force of character, quality of training, and excellence in work habits!) is that they had content to teach. My most influential professors (from a pedagogical point of view, and some from an interpersonal point of view, too) taught Music History, Romantic Poetry, The Twentieth-century Novel, Greek and Roman Classics, Old Testament Survey, and Decision-Making and the Will of God. Now, that’s content. That’s stuff to teach.

When I have either a huge survey course or an fascinating literature elective to teach, I’m usually pretty confident that I presented the vast breadth or depth of material in engaging, lively, life-changing ways. With this class, it’s totally different.

Again, it’s teaching a skill; it’s not teaching content. It feels more like back when I taught piano lessons: Now, put your thumbs here; that’s right, that’s Middle C. Curve your fingers; loosen your wrists. Now, describe your topic in arguable terms; that’s right, now list your three main points. Or it feels like teaching somebody how to do stomach crunches, or how to plant a garden, or how to cook, or how to—how to anything, rather than how to think. Or rather than how to enjoy. I’d rather serve them a meal of great literature than keep telling them, over and over, how to chop carrots.

But even chopping carrots is a start towards making a feast. And that’s where we are right now: chopping carrots. Over and over and over.