Artist Interview with Brandon Long

Director of Community Arts Center in Danville, KY

David Farmer is the artist in residence at the Community Arts Center in Danville, KY as well as one of our featured artists for August.  Since he is right down the hall from my office, I decided to go with an interview format for this blog.  I truly enjoy his work and hope that you will come and see his exhibit for yourself.

Brandon Long:     The first question that I want to ask is:  Was there a pivotal moment in your life that told you, “I just want to be an artist?”  

David Farmer:      No pivotal moment.  I’ve always identified with it – where I saw illustrations in magazines.  For instance, in the fifties they used a lot of illustrations in the Saturday Evening Post, Collier’s, those types of things – Norman Rockwell particularly.  I just wanted to do that.

BL:      So, even before you had the means to do it, you just kind of associated with it, like, “this is something I want to get into?”

DF:      I loved to draw.  And I tried to draw, but my drawing really wasn’t any better, looking back now, than most any other kid at the time — the difference being I was more interested.  Anytime I saw a painting on a magazine cover, they used illustrations then, not photography – I just looked at it and wished I could do it.

BL:      So it was a secondhand type of painting experience that you had through magazines. . .

DF:      And most painting that I have ever done, actually has been done through looking at other paintings.  That does seem strange, maybe, because some people think artists get all their inspiration from nature and that type of thing.  But with me, I just saw that it was a good painting and wanted to do that.

BL:      There’s definitely no better way to get into art than seeing art.  One thing that always frustrated me in art classes in college was when people would claim “I don’t look at the work of other artists, I like to have my own ideas.”  They went on to make the most redundant paintings I’ve ever seen.

DF:  I thought that was very ridiculous and I think you’ll see that that is often said by people that don’t really do a lot of representational work, I guess.  It’s what known as conceptual art.  They don’t want their own creativity polluted, I suppose.  I guess a lot of what they do is personal and doesn’t make a lot of sense to anybody else.  All the artists that I know that paint in the representational style have learned through copying other artists and illustrations, you have to learn to mix colors.

BL:      Yeah, there are definitely some basics involved.  I always think it’s funny – although they don’t this a lot in America, but the European method of learning was to go to the museums and copy the masters.  There’s not a whole lot of that going on in the US. . .

DF:      You still see that in Washington DC.  I was there a while back at the Smithsonian.

BL:      They still let people do that?

DF:      Yeah, you can get a permit.  You see a lot of that, where they’re copying and they’re pretty good.  They’re learning a lot about brushstrokes and how to mix colors.

BL:      A lot of the older styles of painting, I just don’t know how they did it.  Especially some of the colors they used to represent Mother Mary, the blue that they used on the clothes was just electric.

DF:      It was almost supernatural –some of the sizes that they painted in:  Turner, for example, his paintings were as large as walls and I don’t know how these people did this.  They didn’t have artificial lighting, and early on they had to mix their own colors.  Just getting ready to paint took about half a day.

BL:      I’ll bet they didn’t have paint rollers back then, either.

DF:      (Laughs) No paint rollers, no photography.  I don’t see that the genius in painting has really improved.  Since back in Rembrandt’s day, I don’t know that anyone has gotten any better than that unlike many other aspects of endeavor.  It’s remarkable what they did with what little they had to work with within a limited life span.

BL:      Can you imagine the size of a room you would need to make one of Turner’s paintings, just to be able to step back and look at it.  The looseness that he has in his work is just astounding to think that he good make something so big and so loose at the same time.

DF:      As I say, big as walls in a house. 

BL:      There is one piece in your exhibit with us that is pretty similar to Turner’s work, “Stormy Day” is the name of it.  It’s the first piece in your show.

DF:      Yes, that one was influenced by him, you have a good eye.  What he (Turner) did was realize how much emotion you could evoke just with the atmosphere.  The atmosphere becomes the subject itself.

BL:      To look at it, it almost looks like pure abstraction, but you can kind of make out the treeline and the fields.  I really like the amount of pink in the sky.

DF:      The obvious is what I do not like.  I like to see these things where you can see something different every time – that’s what a painting is.  It means something different to each viewer.  They can project themselves into it and it changes.  It’s organic.  It looks as if it’s going outside the canvas.  Like the impressionists tried to stir up textures, it changes every time you look at it.

BL:      The impressionists work almost makes more sense nowadays than it did when it was created because that was around the time people began to figure out photography, so it makes sense that they were going for a more personal experience.  A lot of people thought painting was completely dead when photography was invented, artists thought they would never make a living.  As far as getting the image, taking a photo was about the same as painting a portrait as far as getting the image, but the personal experience is really what makes the difference.

DF:      Photography really liberated painting in a lot of ways.  It allowed painters to go into a more ambiguous part of the mind.  Things are not so literal.  I really do not like these detailed-type paintings where there is nothing left for the viewer to fill in.

BL:  It’s as if technique is the final image.  You see that in a lot of photo-realistic images.

DF:  I like the paintings where the viewer has to complete the painting.  Parts of the canvas are even visible in some of them.

BL:  That was something that I noticed in the “Stormy Day” painting.  It looks as if part of the canvas is peeking through on that one.  There are some areas where the paint is fairly densely packed, but some parts are left more open.

DF:  All the tactile accidents are there, that sort of thing.  Splotches of paint… it subconsciously brings the viewer into the work because he feels like he’s doing part of it.

BL:      One comment that I liked about your show:  Somebody came in and saw your show earlier and asked, “What is this white area between these trees?” on a painting titled “Autumn”… or was it…

DF:      “Backwoods”

BL:      Yeah, “Backwoods.”  Or something like that. . .

DF:      I hate titles.

(note: actual title is “Woodlands”)

BL:      Anyway there’s this area of white paint between the trees and he was asking, “What is that supposed to be?”  I didn’t paint the picture.  I don’t know what it’s supposed to be or if it’s even “supposed” to be anything, but it was really tempting to tell him that it was just paint.

DF:      I know.  People seem to indicate a certain mindset. . . All paintings are abstractions.

BL:      Really when it comes down to it, it’s all just paint on a canvas.  It’s amazing that painting can still upset people the way that it does.  Even if it’s all one color or a photorealistic scene, it still is not that thing.

DF:      It never will be.  It’s an organic piece of material is what it is.

BL:      Canvas with tint or pigment on it. . .

DF:      The designs produce an illusion.  If you ever include something like an automobile in a painting, I know that really gets people upset.  Left brain men, particularly ask, “What kind of truck is that supposed to be?”  It’s not about the truck.

BL:      Nobody ever asks you, what kind of tree is that?

DF:      Or what kind of shingles are on that roof?

BL:      When you get into trucks, it somehow gets personal . . .

DF:      They bring their own experiences to it and when they have limited experience, their views are limited, is the way I look at it. I’m not really painting for those people anyway.

BL:      As accessible as your work is — you’ve got a lot of scenery that you can look at and definitely tell what it is – It’s funny that people can pick out a section and ask, “What is that supposed to be?”  Even in a landscape situation.  I think it’s great that you have left your work as open to interpretation as you have.

DF:      None of these paintings really have a blade of grass in them.  If you look closely, they’re just gobs of paint.  But it forms in the mind in an assemblage of sorts and they say people bring their own experiences to it.  When I first went to art school, that’s how I thought you were supposed to paint.  Your poor Andrew Wyeth version you know, the details, the fingernails, all that.  I was very quickly disabused of that because that is so static and dead.  Look at Rembrandt closely and you’ll see blobs of color.

BL:      I really like Rembrandt’s tapestries.  If you look at the sleeve of somebody in his paintings it’s just a squiggle of white against black that gives the illusion that it is three dimensional, that it’s silky fabric; but it’s all just one swoop of paint.

DF:      Frans Hal is another great one—loose brush strokes.  There was a group of painters during Robert Henri’s day, the Ash Can School.  Edward Hopper even studied with him and his theory was that you paint with your nerves – the faster you paint the better it is.  But you had had to be educated before you started that way.  They could all complete a painting in a day or less and it’s just a matter of temperament, I can’t spend days and days on a painting – it just gets dead.

BL:      How long does it take for you to complete a painting?

DF:      I can do one in a day.  Sometimes I go back and modify it, but I can usually do one in a day.  It took a long time to get to that point.  A good analogy is the surgeon – they say they can remove your appendix in 45 minutes, but it took them seven years to learn how.  It takes the knowledge of a lifetime.

BL:      One of my art professors once said that people were upset that Picasso could do a drawing in only seconds and charge hundreds, even thousands of dollars for it during his lifetime.  Picasso claimed that the drawing didn’t take seconds; it took a lifetime to learn how.

DF:      Like the mechanic that fixes your car – any other endeavor that requires skill and training, they can do it simply now, but it takes hours and hours behind it.

BL:      What are you trying to accomplish in your paintings?  I notice that you have several series and one of these series is of these old buildings.

DF:      I just keep being drawn back to those. They’re rather difficult to do because of the perspective and everything, but I just keep going back to them.  I’m intrigued by them.  Every time I get out in the countryside and drive around and see these old stores, old gas pumps.  Somehow I want to be part of that, I guess.  I want to record it because it’s kind of startling to be driving down an old country road in the middle of nowhere and see these abandoned places with these old signs.  It’s a record of state, a transformation of the culture and I somehow want to capture that.  I don’t know why I want to do that.  I’ve been told by some people to move on and quit the “Hee-Haw” generally.

BL:      You’re right.  It does kind of show the transformation of the culture from one type to another.  These definitely aren’t “self-service” gas pumps in front of these gas stations, it shows a different culture.

DF:      The old Texaco signs, everything’s plastic now, but in the old days they were iron…

BL:      They were meant to last.

DF:  The old Coca-Cola coolers, it really evokes a lot of childhood memories.  The Coca-Cola coolers or Pepsi coolers that you just opened the cooler reached in, and got the pop out and they were just floating around in there.

BL:      Nowadays the culture is so fast paced that you see these Minit Marts that have been sold out and they put a big piece of red plastic and put it over the “Minit” part of the sign to where it just says, “T Mart.” It’s a culture that is so fast paced that you can’t even get a proper sign on it.

DF:      (Pointing to a painting of a country store) This “Mack’s Grocery” is a place down below Mt. Vernon and it’s been long gone, but back when I was a child and we used to drive to Somerset, we’d stop at that grocery.  We did that for like, five years.  We’d stop to get a pop, we’d always get “Donald Duck Oranges” – there was always the same person in there working.  It was a constant in life.

BL:      Like they were nailed to the floor . . .

DF:      You go in a place now, there’s a different person every week.  Back then, you could just assume that there would be the same person in these places wherever.  But when I-75 came through, those places quickly went out of business.  Now they’re all gone from the roadside too, so I’m lucky I’ve got all these photographs to use as sources for these paintings.  Color is what it’s all about.  The way those sharp angles of the building stand out from the foliage. . .

BL:      It’s sort of a geometric versus organic composition.  Not overly geometric like a modern architect’s design, it’s just a simple southern style store front.

DF:      Time. . . you can feel the time.  The building just seems like it’s growing out of the ground.

BL:      Soon to become another part of the ground.

DF:      It points to the transitory nature of time.  Just how brief it all is.  What we thought one time was permanent, would never change.  Peg-leg Fisher for instance would always be at that store any time you went in.  He was a man that lost both legs hopping a train.  He had a little store and was always there — you just assumed he would always be there, but he died and the store closed and you realized you were in a different world all of a sudden.

BL:      It’s a constantly changing thing.

DF:      It’s all about trying to capture the mood of nature — trying to be part of a mood.  It’s like this portrait of my granddaughter.  It’s a means of getting to be a part of her, if I could record that face.

BL:      I think it’s interesting that you are trying to capture the mood of not only the person or place, but trying to put your own spin on it as well.

DF:      It’s something to be learned.  I had an art teacher one time said, “Painting is something that always has to be learned.  There has never been a prodigy of painting.  The only prodigies have been in math, chess, or music.”  I don’t know how true that is, but I’ve thought about it and it seems right.  I’ve never known anyone who was ever born knowing how to paint.  It takes a lot of time, a lot of failures, and a lot of influences.

BL:      The great thing about painting is that is one art form that has stayed truest to its nature.  Other media has transformed.  Like with sculpture, plastic has been invented, and there are things you can do with that.  Painting, for the most part, has stayed the same.  Rembrandt had the same things that we have.  His paint was probably a bit different, but he had a brush, he had canvas, and he had color.

DF:      That’s what keeps me with these oil paintings.  I know I’ve got all the materials I need.  I don’t have to keep going out and buying new things, like with photography – the latest gizmos.  (With painting) It’s all in the head and hands and we’ve got better materials  than they had a hundred years ago, so it’s really all up to me.  It’s kind of frustrating to be in the middle of an endeavor and realize you are hampered by not having the latest technology or computer or camera.  That’s what I do like about painting. It’s all up to you, in the mind.  It’s a challenge.

BL:      . . .Which makes it more frustrating when you can’t achieve it.

DF:      Very frustrating.  I’ve thought about quitting a lot.  Every artist should always compare their art to the best, unless you’re a hobbyist and just don’t care.  You should never be self-satisfied. Just go to museums and look.  See how good it can be.  It’s humbling.