Author: c-ville-weekly

What are you working on right now? 

I figured out how to capture smoke on paper. I found that, over time, other artists used smoke and burning, but the particular way that I do it, I haven’t found anyone who’s done it. I developed it from an idea of, “What if I do this?” And then I figured out how to make it work. It centers on capturing the smoke on paper—not burning the paper, not burning the image, but herding and corralling the smoke. I get it to do what I want it to do, while doing what smoke does. I’ve created all kind of tools and formats to work with the smoke. I have a room built on to my house to do this. 

Tell us about your day job. 

I teach at PVCC, where I’m coordinator of the Graphic Design program. I also teach studio classes. 

What’s your first artistic memory from childhood?

I always made art and never really stopped. I had lessons at the Cleveland Art Museum around third grade and I remember the instructor—there was a team, actually—they had us in a museum and we were drawing sculptures, like bronze sculptures, and I kind of refused and I was drawing underwater scenes of fish. They would say, “We’re drawing Rodin’s ‘The Age of Bronze,’” and I’m like, “No, I’m drawing a muskellunge eating a rat, because they can do that and it’s so cool.” I remember being a little annoyed they didn’t see how cool drawing underwater fish scenes were.

How do you prepare for your work? 

With what I’ve been doing with the smoke, it’s not very spontaneous. I figure out what I’m doing, and try to get there. It’s so strange because it starts with ideas, and my best ideas come when I’m driving. I’ll have a pad of paper and I’ll write down an idea and go from there, see what I can get done and then go and see visual references. A lot of stuff I do, like horses, I need to look at horses, I need to study horses. I work from photographs, do that kind of thing, then I just plot out from there, what time allows when. 

What’s your daily routine? 

I’m lucky with the kind of teaching I do, where the class time is pretty movable, and preparation time is more liquid. I can prepare in the same way, where I have the planning time, and then execution time is class time. I can move pieces around to benefit my studio time, or I can put off studio time to benefit my teaching time. You just have to focus on the balance of the two. And be flexible.

Of which of your works are you most proud? 

There’s a sales pride and then an aesthetic pride. I sold a piece at an auction in D.C., the Washington Project for the Arts auction, a couple years ago, which was my first time there. It went for the highest bid, which was exciting because there were some international artists there and some national ones. I was kind of a rookie, and mine sold for the most. I got a lot of exposure out of that. 

Locally, who would you like to collaborate with? 

I’m collaborating with a composer I met in France at the residency, which was through Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. He’s a chamber music composer who’s in D.C. His name is Douglas Boyce. We’re going to do a show based on companion pieces, drawings and paintings based on what we went through and experienced in the environment in France, specifically birds and bird activity. He’s going to compose chamber music that explores the same idea in a different way and then the pieces will be presented in the gallery. 

What would you do if you knew you couldn’t fail? 

You fail a lot as an artist. You get rejected a lot, which could be seen as failure. What I’ve learned and can do is not worry about it. I just do it. It’s the idea of finding your “yes.” Failure is productive in the long road. I’m not destroyed by failures. Obviously it stings, but you have to figure it out and keep moving forward.

What were you doing right before we called? 

I was in the process of coming up with a gear list for this recording and live music video that a producer friend of mine, Raphael Wintersberger, and I are trying to do. It’s actually in New York City, so it’s going to be a big trip. Since it’s a music video and a live recording, all the gear has to look cool. The video is going to use a lot of vintage equipment, so we’re just trying to get our list together. 

What are you working on right now? 

I’ve been gathering and cataloging music for licensing and use in sports movies, so I’m doing a project called Sun Wukong—it’s sort of world-trip-hop music. We just finished five tracks and we’re going to put that online and also make it available for production companies.

What’s your first artistic memory? 

When I was young I would take boards, scrap pieces of wood, and start attaching different nails to make junk sculptures. I remember realizing it was something unique I had made and it didn’t really look like anything before, so that was definitely an old, creative experience. I think it was just a project that my Dad would give me to do to occupy myself. He gave me scrap material and a lot of it was neon, because it was in the late ’80s. It would be neon-pink, and there’d be Velcro, because Velcro was a new product. Stuff like that.

Tell us about your day job. 

I work as an engineer and producer. I work at Monkeyclaus Studio and I’m also producing a movie with a company called Filament*, which is a feature film. So I work for a couple different places. The rest of the things I do are freelance, but I have been able to have a full-time job producing or engineering music, I’m into audio/visual arts. 

Tell us about a book/painting/record/piece of art that you wish was in your private collection? 

I was just thinking the other day, wouldn’t it be great if you had the Mona Lisa. Not that I particularly like the imagery of that piece of art, but just the culture status and value attached to that piece of art. It would be interesting to be that one person to have it. 

How do you prepare for work? 

One of the main things I like to do is to make sure I’ve eaten something, have some good food and then I feel ready to go and do stuff. Sushi rice is really good, but I’m not Japanese so maybe I shouldn’t say that. It’s good to have your mind able to think, to make you hungry. It’s not visible but when you get creative it makes you hungry.

Who would you like to collaborate with locally? 

Just to name two people: Loren Oppenheimer and Rahimah von Briesen. A vocalist and tabla player. I want to produce 10 songs with them.

Do you have any superstitions about your work? 

I think I’m having less superstitions about my art, in a way. In general, I’ve had a lot of weird experiences with recording, with things being there that shouldn’t be, or that should be there and aren’t. 

Which of your works are you most proud of? 

I have a song called “Reparations” that was a collaboration between this hip-hop group called Regime Change. It was a serendipitous song. It was great.

What is a concert, exhibit or show that has recently inspired you? 

I think Sade’s new album Soldier of Love is just a great album. She’s an artist that my wife introduced me to and I just think she’s awesome, and I have all of her albums. It’s great.

If you could have dinner with any person, who and why?

All my ancestors. I think that would be interesting to have a huge family dinner. 

What would you do if you knew you couldn’t fail? 

I would fly. Just take off. If you can’t fail, I guess that would be the best thing you could do. I’d probably visit my closest friends and family. Wherever they are.

*Correction made Wednesday, October 13: Filament was incorrectly referred to as a movie. It is, in fact, the name of a local production company, not a film.

 Tell us about your day job. 

My day job is my studio called The POMP, located in Random Row Books. I call it a studio and print shop. I will have screen printing equipment and hopefully other stuff soon, but right now there’s a screen print station, a computer, lots of drawing and painting materials, and lots of other material with which I can make other objects. 

What are you working on right now? 

I’ve been working on masks for performance pieces. I just did an “endurance performance” piece on the Downtown Mall, entited “Grrr vol. 2.0.” I created a large, animal-like mask—some called it a pinecone, others thought it was an owl’s head—and I went shirtless with a mask and had a rowing machine that I retrofitted, so that it functioned as a fan. I set up a chair across from the fan and rowed for two hours on the Downtown Mall to provide some relief from the heat for pedestrians walking by.

I’m also preparing for a trip to New York, to meet with some more clients for my studio. I’m meeting with people from Penguin Books and also some independent book and arts consultant people. One is a woman from the Onassis Foundation, a cultural foundation that connects Greeks and Americans, sharing information for Americans interested in Greece, and Greeks interested in the United States. She’s interested in the prints I did for a book of The Iliad and The Odyssey, published by Chester River Press. I did 50 large illustrations for that.  

What’s your favorite building? 

Jeanne-Claude just passed away, but Christo is still around. He’s got a plan to make this massive pyramid of oil barrels. I just saw a plan of that recently, and if that were to exist, it would be my favorite building/structure. I’m pretty sure it’s supposed to go up in the United Arab Emirates.

What’s your first artistic memory? 

My dad would do these basic outlines of military vehicles and have me color them in, which guided the rest of my drawing in my early youth. I tended to create fantastical, military hovercrafts, snow machines and things like that. My dad is not in the military—he’s a lawyer in town—so I don’t know why he did that. 

Tell us about a piece of art that you wish was in your private collection.

I would really like a Chuck Close portrait, those monumental portraits, but really any of his work from any medium, to hang in my studio’s foyer. I saw him speak when I was in school at UPenn, and I was very impressed with how he described his art and carried himself. He had specific ideas and a system that drove his work and I was impressed when I was in college to see a professional artist and his reasons and love for production.

Locally, who would you like to collaborate with? 

Patrick Costello. He’s a community activist, he’s involved with C’ville Foodscapes, and he’s a puppet maker. We have been making plans to collaborate based around mask-making and interaction of characters we make. We talked about doing a garden installation with performances to go along with it. It’s going to be in Charlottesville, definitely.

Item you’d splurge on? 

Well, I just did. I bought a 20′ long, 1989, former USPS mail truck from a guy in Syracuse, New York. I’m going to use it for a mobile print studio. There’s a national printmaking conference every year, and next year it’s in St. Louis. A friend and I proposed to do a demonstration, and our proposal was accepted. We’re going to set up the retro-fitted mail truck in front of an art museum in St. Louis, create a station from which we’ll make prints and then receive telephone calls to take and deliver orders around town using the mail truck.

What would you do if you knew you couldn’t fail? 

I would be in a band and be up on stage. It would definitely involve costumes. I don’t know if it would fall in the vein of Lady Gaga but it would be a Lady Gaga, Blue Man Group and David Bowie hybrid.

What were you doing when we called?
Picking up flyers for our Jefferson Theater show on September 24…you’ve got to do it yourself.

What are you working on right now?

We’ve been on tour for the last month and a half, but we had a week off in Charleston. We set up a home recording gig and did some demoing for the third record. We’ve got about 10 songs down. The last four years we’ve been touring as a band, we’ve been figuring out the different influences with the three different brothers. There can really be so much monotony to the touring life. In certain ways, it’s a big adventure and in other ways—the clubs, the hotel rooms and Waffle Houses—they’re all the same thing. It’s easy to lose touch with why you got into music in the first place, which is to make great records and great songs.

Tell us about your day job.
I do random tractor jobs, build fences, manual labor—whatever I can get.

What is your first artistic memory?
I’ve been writing songs since I was little, but my first truly artistic memory was, honestly, reading Crime and Punishment… A lot of being a good writer is being able to see an artistic turn when it happens in someone else’s writing. When there’s a specific artistic turn that happens, and it’s really great, you have to see that and feed off it. Crime and Punishment was the first time I was able to do that and I really fed off it. Without trying to sound like a turd, Faulkner says the reason why you would write stories or songs as opposed to philosophy—why writing is an important vocation—is because you’re trying to write about the human spirit in conflict with itself. That’s something you can only tackle with songs, or literature, or drama—all kinds of writing. Good books and good songs try to address that conflict.

What do you make if you’re cooking for one?
An egg burrito. I’ve got my diet down to a nutritional and economic science. I eat an egg burrito once a day—it’s so cheap, it comes out to, like, 36 cents—and I eat a lot of kale and collard greens. Sometimes I blend it up into a smoothie. I can have two meals for two dollars.

What music are you listening to lately?
I went through a phase where I was trying to find more and more obscure bands, really trying to seek out something new and really trying to find something but I just came up dry so many times. The last six months I made a rule: If you made a billion dollars last year, I’m not going to listen to you.

If you could have dinner with any per-son, living or dead, who would it be?
William Faulkner. I’m just fascinated by him, by what he was able to do. He never graduated from high school and he was still able to write some of the greatest American novels. As much as he tried to efface himself from public life, it makes people want to know who he was more. He’s so flippant and ironic in his interviews, I’d really just like to sit down and level with him. There are so many misconceptions about him.

What would you do if you knew you couldn’t fail?
That’s a hard question. Maybe farm. I used to be really ideological, into agrarianism and farming. It’s fallen by the wayside in the last couple years, but I’d love to do it eventually. I love cows, man. I get along with cows better than people. They’re shy and awkward and fat. They’re awesome. I spent a lot of time out west playing cowboy. It’s one part of my life that I really love that I just don’t get to do right now.

 What were you doing when we called?
I was actually working on something top secret. It is an architectural competition to design a sukkah. Basically you design a structure and there are all these rules for it. You’re supposed to inhabit the structure for a week, and that experience is meant to bring you closer to the fact that there is very little standing between you and your destruction. The world is a very temporary place, and you’re supposed to realize that and come closer to God because of that.

What’s your first artistic memory?
I went to a Jewish school in the suburbs of New York and it was Israel’s 30th anniversary when I was in second grade. My teachers said, “Make a birthday card for Israel and we’ll send them along.” So I went out in the area around our house and I found this big flat stone about 12" x 12", and 3" thick. I did this clay relief of the Western Wall. Everybody brought in a piece of paper folded up, and they had to call my Mom to tell her to break it to me gently that they were not going to send my birthday card to Israel.

What are you working on right now?
I’m working on the flag project. This is something I’ve been working on really slowly for the past nine years. It was inspired in the time right after September 11th by all those bumper stickers that came out, and how they started to fade in color. I grew up three blocks from Ground Zero and my folks are still there. I had a very strong physical connection to the place. My physical response continued after the fact. So, seeing these bumper stickers, I thought it really ironic—in a time where patriotism was really strong and the flag was the symbol of that, and the flag was meant to be an unwavering, unchanging symbol—that it was fading. The thought was, “Well, can it fade to white?” And, “if it does, what does that even mean?”

I’ve done some smaller installations of it along the way. The point is that we grow and I keep installing it in different places over time, but now it needs to be done to commemorate those things, not only for myself at this point. The place where it will be installed in its totality at first is going to be up north at Vassar, where I went to school. I recently got a grant to finish it up, and, in fact, the grant has been in tandem with my wife, Dahlia Lithwick, who’s a legal writer and writes for Slate and Newsweek. Over these years I’ve been working on a project that has to do with unity and people coming together, and she’s really been describing the legal landscape in which the laws have become more harsh, more stripped down and how the flag has been used as a decisive symbol.

Tell us about your day job.
The day job really is this project right now. I’ve been getting sponsorships. I’ve gotten a grant and I have people on my Facebook page who have been sponsoring at $250 a flag, helping to cover the hard costs.

Favorite artist outside your medium?
The graphic novelist Chris Ware.

What’s your favorite building?
The Sagrada Familia Schools built by Antoni Gaudí. It was a school built on the Sagrada Familia Cathedral grounds for the sons of the craftsmen that worked in his studio. The building was incredibly economical given that it achieved structural solidity through very sparse use of materials. It was the undulating forms, derived from his understanding of nature and similar to Jefferson’s serpentine walls, that gave the building its rigidity.

 What are you working on right now?
I am doing corporate videos, I am working on my next film project and I am preparing the European festival launch for The Parking Lot Movie. The new film project? All I can say is that it involves unicorns.

What’s your first artistic memory?
My first artistic memory would be when I kicked out the windshield of my Mom’s van when they were taking me to be confirmed, in eighth grade.

Locally, who would you like to collaborate with?
I want to continue collaborating with my current collaborator, Christopher Hlad. He sees the world in quite an original way. He’s a poet and a DJ and we work really well together.

If you could have dinner with any person, living or dead, who and why?
I would like to have dinner in a castle filled with candles with both Werner Herzog and David Lynch. I would like to drink honey mead out of big chalices.

What’s your blind date dealbreaker?
If you don’t offer to pay. That’s definitely a dealbreaker.

What’s your favorite building?
My favorite building would have to be Monticello. I went there recently on my friend’s 40th birthday and we walked around the grounds and played in the gardens.

Tell us about a piece of art that you wish was in your private collection?
I want all of the ArtInPlace sculptures in my backyard.

Item you’d splurge on?
I would need to buy a white golf cart and drive around wearing a white fur coat.

What music are you listening to right now?
I’m really into Danzig of the Misfits. I’m particularly fond of his album Danzig 4. Also Nirvana, their album Nevermind. Kurt Cobain, when they were writing that, wanted it to sound like pared-down children’s stories. I’m really into that concept.

Favorite artist outside your medium?
I already said, I must admit, it would be Danzig for creating the album Danzig 4. It’s a great album.

What would you do if you knew that you couldn’t fail?
I would become an astronaut, because that way I could fly in outer space. My sister always wanted to be an astronaut, and since we have great rivalry I could do what she wasn’t able to do. I’d be up in outer space thinking about how I succeeded in her goals and she was still on Earth.

What were you doing right before we called?
I was working on a CD cover for a local musician, Ian Lawler.

What are you working on right now?
I make my living as a graphic designer and I have several projects I’m finishing up, or gearing up to do. Ian’s is one of three CDs that I’m in different stages with, and I’m doing a T-shirt as a fundraiser for the grad school where I got an MFA in poetry many years ago. I’m also doing a poster for an Off-Broadway musical in New York as part of a benefit for Haiti.

What’s your first artistic memory?
So far, I’ve been talking about my day job as a graphic designer but I think I’m better known around town as a poet and a storyteller and, for many years, as a musician, so it depends on which one you are talking about. I can remember making up my own nursery rhymes when I was very small and figuring out how rhyme worked, getting the feeling that it wasn’t something that had been handed down by the powers-that-be—it was something that people made. It seems profound now but when you’re a kid it seems sort of obvious.

What’s your blind date dealbreaker?
It’s been so long since I had any kind of date, you know, with my wife now of 15 years. I get very uncomfortable if someone wants me to pray with them. I don’t know if I would call it a dealbreaker, but it would make me very uncomfortable. It would be difficult to proceed optimistically with a blind date under those circumstances.

What’s your favorite building?
My favorite building would have to be my childhood home—the Bull Run House—which my father built when I was about 2 years old and that I grew up in until I was about a teenager. It’s in a little town called Catharpin, which is on the outskirts of Manassas on Bull Run Creek, which is why we called it the Bull Run House.

Tell us about a book/painting/record/piece of art that you wish was in your private collection?
There are actually several paintings that my dad did that I wish were in my private collection. There are some paintings that he did that everyone remembers very fondly but were sold many, many years ago and either no one knows where they are, or the people who own them are not willing to sell them back.

Locally, who would you like to collaborate with?
I have the ambition to collaborate with Paul Curreri and John D’earth to add new original music to one of my monologues. I would love to follow through with that project and make a recording and eventually do a live performance. I think it would be great on the radio, but I did it at the old Gravity Lounge originally as the opening act for a Brady Earnhart concert and I was very pleased with the results…I’ve wanted to work with John for 20 years. I saw him doing live jazz with poets at the old Live Arts in the Old Michie Building years ago, and thought, “I want to do that.”

Favorite artist outside your medium?
At the moment there are some people who are working in a medium that’s related to mine but I do think it’s different and those are the guys who do Radio Lab, on NPR. I’m totally in love with that show. I want to run away and join it, like the circus. They make it sound as though it’s just coming directly out of their brain, it sounds very stream of consciousness, very natural. At the same time, it’s not natural. It’s fantastic editing and they clearly have really good personalities to do that kind of show.