David Stier (DS)
PrimalTweet (PT)
PT: Where did you grow up?
DS: I grew up in Princeton. My parents loved antique shopping and they used to love to come out to Bucks County when I was a little kid to go to different restaurants and they used to put me in the back of the car and come out this way . I always got a nice feeling from this area. From a pretty early age I had the idea that i wanted to live here. When I got my drivers license....What do you do when you get your driver's license? I started driving. This is the area that I was drawn to. I even would drive through Carversville. In my mind there was something about the feeling of the landscape here....something that even goes beyond words...there is something magical about this area.
All the world is special but there are certain parts of the world that are, for whatever reasons, extra special. Like many of the painters and artists and writers and playwrights and musicians I was drawn to this area.
PT: You live in Carversville now?
DS: I bought a house right up the street here. I just finished building a studio and put an addition on my house. I live with my girlfriend, Shannon Port who's a writer and her 8 year old son, Jake. I still work in Princeton once a week. I used to teach there at a school for dyslexia called the Lewis school. I went there a long time ago....I have dyslexia. About 15 years ago I made the move to work full time in the studio to be a painter and an artist.
PT: How do you approach your work? Is it a daily pursuit.
DS: Right now I'm framing my work and seeing how I'm going to re-emerge and figure out how I'm going to do that. The art world is changing a lot. I'm trying to figure out what I'm coming back to. To answer your question. I draw a lot. If I'm painting outside I like to go to a particular place and I like to spend a lot of time there at different times of the day...I find a place that I feel like intuitively like I can work and then I may spend a LOT of time just looking and drawing...and I may not even be drawing what's in front of me. I may just go and draw in that space from my imagination and then look up and let things incubate slowly.
PT: SO you let the place affect you in an unconscious way not necessarily even in the level of decision making…”i''m going to inhabit this place, i'm going to play in this place”....until something starts to happen inside of you..
DS: Exactly... Your conscious mind (laughs) is sometimes pushy and greedy. It wants to take. Its already thinking about...the ego is thinking of what it can GET instead of letting things arise from a deeper place. The idea is that you can start with something that you want to do but the journey is ultimately about letting go of that and being open to what happens in the present moment. So that's what living life is...it's not about art...it's the art of living. I'm trying to merge what happens to me as a painter with my every day life. To me working is a state of mind, it's a shift of consciousness, it's an awareness of the present moment. It's hopefully what could be seen as an elevated state of consciousness but it should be "normal".
PT: That begs the question: when you are framing or pricing or doing other more commerce related activities do you have to shift gears away from the poetic.....
DS: This is a complicated question that I'm in the midst of grappling with. As someone told me yesterday, the artist and the creative process and the art world and the gallery have always been fundamentally at odds, because the gallery is concerned with commerce and making money and the artist is concerned with something that goes deeper than that. So you are trying to fit the spirit and intuitive nature of the artist into the commerce structure, paradigm, model....and so they don't HAVE to be are at odds but they often are.
PT: It could be another arena for great creativity and going to "that place" and finding resources...
DS: I can only speak for myself but it is my least favorite....I built an addition on my house. Now I have been in my studio virtually full time for almost 6 months. I wanted to do this before I {re-entered the art world} I have a lot of new work. I didn't want to go out into the world without being in my studio as a working artist. So I waited until the project was finished and I had a new body of work.. It's more complicated now because the galleries are changing. Technology is changing things and the many of the galleries in the art world have adulterated art by...these are not my words... by applying the same financial ethics and practices as Wall St. and therefore ....I don't trust the way the foundation of the art market is founded. Are the paintings that are selling for the most money the ones that have the most intrinsic value? Sometimes yes, sometimes not.
The most important thing to me is not whether you sell something or the commercial success it's the quality of the work and the authenticity of the work whether it is music or art.. Because what is the point if you correlate success with commercial success only, to me that is not negotiable: it has to include an intrinsic quality in the work and sadly it is not always true. I think it is the exception, sadly.
PT: I see a visual vocabulary I recognize. I'm seeing El Greco....It may not even be something that you are conscious of...
DS. For me I don't think it is the artist's job to place his work either in a contemporary context or even an historical context. That's the job of art historians and my work is to follow my own instincts and my own intuition and obviously you will bring to that painting whatever you bring to it.
I work not only from what I see in the visual world but from my imagination. The two inform each other: that is your ability to see and process the outer world informs your ability to interpret and completely reinterpret the world through your imagination. And then as you work from your imagination that also informs how you see the world…
PT: There is something about this place that drew you. I know there is something about the light in Bucks County. There is the external light but there is something in the light that is inspiring people from season to season. There are colors that Bucks county artists when they are painting, even shadows in the winter time....I'm curious if you can say a word about this earth here and this light and how it affects you. DS. I have to answer this in my own my way....I believe that the ability to see and to receive something through ones eyes whether it be a landscape, or a painting or a work of art or a flower is a gift: the gift of reception. I do believe there are people who may even have a better receptive visual language than the artist...which is an expressive visual language, you see... To answer your question, I don't know! Obviously light is really important to me. Every day, every part of the day, every inch a shade in my studio goes up or down changes the light and of course without light we can't see. So of course light reveals form and light has a huge influence on everything conceivable in visual art. It absolutely changes the different time of the year...I love the fall here. There is opportunity and challenges in every time of the year. I mean, It is hard to SEE a lot of the landscape during the summer because there is so much foliage and so much green and so in early spring and early Fall you can see more. That is one obvious difference. Painting is about change and about the moment for me. One of the most obvious times to see that is in the Fall. There is something that goes really deep; I'm pretty sure everyone feels it. Yes, as the Fall comes, nostalgia, a little bit of sadness but of course the end is also the beginning.
To get back to the receptive visual thing...these are just words. Obviously art is a language that goes beyond words. One of my teachers once said, "Art is a silence that speaks"
PT: I looked at some of your landscapes and I saw these bands of color and I was thinking of Barnett Newman and some of these color field painters. And I'm thinking, "Dudes, like seeing abstraction....
DS: go ahead finish.
PT. That's all. I don't have any complete thoughts. You have dyslexia, I have ADHD
DS. (laughing) Which to me are one and the same thing...
Again I'll let the experienced art aficionado and historians make connections between my work and whatever abstract and realist painter they can make connection with. I will say something about the myth of abstract art versus realism. I feel that even paintings that are considered more realistically painted they are first a work about abstraction. The power of great works of art, the foundation that they are build on and the reason that the people respond and that you HAVE to have a response...even if it is the most clearly painted like Ingres or Bouguereau, but that whole thing is sitting on top of many abstractions and as abstract as the most abstract thing you can imagine....underneath.
It is an illusion and in order to translate that illusion there is an abstraction. It is a science and it is a language and hopefully that language becomes attached to something that hopefully has a greater purpose than conveying something in and of itself. It is an abstraction.
PT. So, Nelson Shanks is a hyper realist, but underneath there are theories of color and abstractions in form...
DS. Exactly. Composition is built on very basic abstractions. The most complex work of art is built on very basic triangles and squares and circles- basic things- or doesn't work. There is geometry there in the design. It can be intuitive, but it is there, nonetheless.
When you are working....It's like Dizzy Gillespie said “Master your instrument, Master the music, and then forget all that bullshit and just play.” That is true in visual art. Right now you're listening. You're not thinking about listening. You're speaking. you aren't thinking about speaking you're expressing an idea . Of course the same thing, ideally is true In art where I'm not necessarily consciously making decisions all the time, it's a language that is internalized and fluent, hopefully...otherwise it's contrived.
PT:Do you like cooking?
DS: I love cooking. I'm a huge fan. The more I'm in my studio, the more I'm making foods that are just going to nourish me but I'm a huge foodie. Both my parents are the same way, but I like to cook. I saw Max has one of those "Green Eggs" those Japanese style ceramic smokers. I cook on that every night during the summer I smoke things. I love cooking. I cook mostly simple things almost every day. I don't do a lot of elaborate recipes.
PT. Is there a type of cooking you like...
DS: That's what I'm trying to put my finger on. I'd have to give you the top five.
Whatever I want to make is based on the best seasonal ingredients. Lately it is summer sauces. You pick up local organic fresh tomatoes, spicy peppers, maybe some shallots....I might start with some shallots and poblano peppers or something like that...once that's done add diced up Sicilian eggplant, you saute it a little bit. Dice up tomatoes, they don't have to be plum tomatoes and I cook it in the ceramic egg; it works really well. It's way hotter than a stove and you don't have to boil water inside. It's a ritual. I have aritual at night as the sun goes down, I light the egg (laughs). I usually have an idea of what I'm going to cook. If I'm out I'll swing by that stand over on Creamery Road where he sells the veggies and gives the money to charity, that is one of my favorite places to pick up tomatoes. A lot of good butter and good parmesan cheese and then light on the sauce. Some of the good pasta here at Max's grocery has been my favorite. Really good.
PT: I'd be remiss if I didn't ask you a little bit about your music. I first saw you
face to face in the Carversville square on Carversville day performing....
DS: Yes with the Hazelrig brothers and Michele Riley singing. I used to rehearse in a trio with Micheleand Alexandre Hiele on bass. He's a Parisian bass player, a big guy, who lives in Warrington, PA area now. He went from Paris to Warrington....there's nothing wrong with Warrington...but it's not Paris.
PT: (exaggerated offense) What are you talking about? There's no Wegman's in Paris... this is so much better.(Laughing)
DS. Heile is great and we did rehearse but we just show up and play.
PT: Jazz is ANOTHER language... so you like languages... You've got visual language, culinary language...
DS: Yes, I'm still trying to get English under my belt (laughing)
PT: When you sit down and you're improvising is that your happy place?
DS: (Hesitating) Um, Yeah....yeah, if it's not tortured it is happy. (laughs)
PT: It's a fine line?
DS: It IS a fine line. I think you nailed it. You know, the obvious main difference between being a musician and being a fine artist is, other than when you have a gallery opening, you are not creating while people are watching. It's taken me years and I'll always be coming to terms with the performance element. I do slip in and out of loving to perform for people but it is probably not my nature. I'm more of a private person that way.
