Q: Did you ever have any struggles with your inner

critic? And if so, what steps did you take to make

that manageable?

Uhm... I do have problems with my internal critic but it's

part of my process that... It's part of a larger talk on art
education and rules.

I spoke a little bit about it yesterday.. are you guys

familiar with a book of Edgar Payne's on composition?
How many people know that book? Not too many. Edgar
Payne was a landscape painter 100 years ago. He came
up with a really cool little book on the principles of
landscape painting. As I look through it, and you guys
can look it up, I can't think of anything more damaging
than looking at that book and rules that are involved and
letting them into your head.

It's stuff that's to obv.. "Don't put the horizon line in the
middle of the picture." And so much formula and crap is
taught at different points in art education, it's really
difficult to know when someone's teaching you some
really good basic wisdom, information that you can
always rely on and formulaic crap that clogs you up like
calcium in your brain.
I have a very deep distrust of the things that I have
learned and been taught and that they are relevant in the
context to a certain genre or certain culture at best. That
they are not universal. And if I really want my work to
evolve and change and develop, I have to get them out
of my head.
And if I get these rules of composition out of my brain,
what do I have left to tell me whether what I'm doing is
good or bad? I'm out there all alone, I have my inner
critic.

In order to make that work, your inner critic has to be

very very fierce and not accept the first solution, or it
needs to be very severe.
And that leads to an unpleasant artistic life sometimes
because you're always beating yourself up. It's never
good enough. Ever.
I said yesterday in my talk, I don't understand why I'm
here, I feel that half the people in this room can probably
draw better than I can and maybe the only reason I am
here is I was there first.
If you ever find any way of not destroying yourself
critique wise... I've tried it the other way, of becoming a
zen buddhist, completely ignoring your ego totally and
getting rid of it.
You can't do anything. You can't do any artwork at all. At
some level you've gotta believe you're the greatest thing
since sliced bread just to get out of bed and do your
artwork in the morning.
Think of the hubris of doing the artwork... you're doing
something that Rembrandt did, youre doing something
all of these old masters did, and what, you think you
have something to offer do you? Well, probably not.
So it's easy to get down on yourself and I don't have any
solutions for that. Because being hard on myself is part
of the way I try to do things in an intuitive way. And I
pay for that freedom by being hard on myself.
Q: After all these years, have you reached your
goals as an artist, and as a human being, what's
your next goal?

A: What's my next goal? relax. I've been beating myself

into dust for a long time. I don't have any more
mountains to climb. To a certain extent, would you ask
the same question of a plumber?
"You've been cleaning pipes for 20 years. You've reached
the vista of cleaning pipes?" I think of myself as a worker
that way. There is nothing inherently special in being an
artist, to me people that are artists that can only work
with their inspiration, you just need to get at it and be a
worker. I don't think of any big meta terms about me or
my work, I try not to, I find it's a little pretentious to do
that. I saw one artist where they put the entrance page is
the painting they've done, and then they put the date, of
the year they were born in parenthesis, and then a dash
and then nothing - and it said, "Art history is not dead
yet." Or people who write their website in the third
person. laughs, Please.
So I'm kind of a worker bee.

Q: I was wondering if you could touch on the talk

you had prepared and go into that. There's a lot of
us that still have aspirations of working in concept
art.

A: "Umm.. Yeah." Most of the things that I was going to

talk about I worked into the answers to these questions.
Advice to people who want to become concept artists. It
depends on their long term and short term needs. Like I
was talking about earlier with these schools. Do you have
the resources to afford a good liberal arts education? By
that I mean a broad education in becoming a capable
illustrator and delineator? If you can afford that, it's
clearly the best way to go. You will be employable if you
have good basic skills.
But it takes a long time and is expensive You need a job
right away.. The other way to do it is go to a trade
school, learn a narrow slot and narrow skill.
"I retopologize feet." That's what I do really well. You get
put in the slot and get to work right away.

Then it's up to you to go back and learn the

fundamentals on your own that you had to short change
in order to get a job in the short term. But I don't think
you can do both. Any school that tells you you can draw
like Iain mccaig in six months. It's not gonna happen. I
don't think any school does that, but it's implied. Of
course they imply things, of how wonderful the school is,
but it's not actual. You just can't expect that.

You know um... guys try to think back to when you first
saw the work of your favorite artists. When's the first
time I saw a significant number of works by that person.
DId you feel your mind getting wrenched open like a
metal can?

That it's getting physically bigger, that the universe you

lived in is getting bigger and better that each piece you
looked at, each one is a revelation?

When you do artwork, like in Quantum physics, they say

the idea is that there are these universes creating and
collapsing all the time. When I take a piece of paper and
make a single mark on it, I have made a universe.
And every artwork is it's own universe and is it's own set
of physical laws, and you're creating it. You are the god
of that. And you can go anywhere and do anything with
it. There are no rules with it. Stay away from rules.

It's so difficult to let the formulas go. For instance, I love

the brandywine school, it's a very formulaic school. I
loved working in that genre and all the answers are
there. I could spend the rest of my career doing cheap
Dean Cornwell ripoffs. But getting that out of my head,
once you've know something it's difficult to get out of
that. That's what I'm saying, you make a piece of paper
you making another universe. It doesn't have to be what
these horrible formulas are telling you. And the formulas
have their uses. They might have been very instructive
and very comforting to you in your period of
development. But at a certain point you have to move on
from them and make new formulas to infect other
people, like memes.

And that's kind of what you should be thinking about in

the work you're doing personally, like manga, or Glen
Keane designing his characters. It's a genre of art that
was invented by generally one people over a long period
of time, and thats what Im talking about, like a formula.

My kids are drawing now, and I would love for them to

draw something other than a higher order of organization
like manga, something that's predigested, I would like for
them to go back to reality first rather than a highly
stylized way right away.

But when you really can accept that you're creating a

new world with every drawing, that you can let go of
those formulas, you can be the one who will create over
a long period of time a new genre of your own, it
becomes your own style. And other people looking at
your work, they will have same reaction that you did to
that favorite artist. That feeling of having your mind
expanded with each image that you look at.

And to me it's very important. I can't look at a painting.

It's fascinating to look at the differences between a
painting of an artist and their entire work because each
piece supports every other piece and it is a completely
different experience to look at 50 paintings by a certain
artist as opposed to one. And it's far more effective to me
to look at a wide number of paintings of a particular
artist.

I remember my Mum and Dad bought my the Carter

Ratcliffe Sargent book and just looking when I was 20
and just looking through it, I still remember turning each
page and thinking 'these are my people!' The idea that he
was painting random snapshots of back corners with bad
composition and horrible lighting... YES! I loved that.

I think to wrap it up, that really is the reason why we

look at art, that is the reason why we make it, that one
day eventually you might be that wizard that opens up
someone else's mind, that expands their world and
changes it forever.

And that's what I've always tried to do. I've tried to make
worlds that people can get lost in. certain aspects of
narrative that get left dangling to draw the viewer in. I've
gotten emails of people putting the most amazing
interpretations on the paintings that I do. And none of it
was intentional, maybe some of it was subconscious, but
your goal has to be to create artwork and something that
is rich enough that holds people's attention, for longer
than simply.. it's an illustration or something.

The highest aspiration is if your illustration outlives the

project for which it was made, and I think that should be
everybodys goal here. To do artwork on that level. If
you're stuck retopping feet in a chain somewhere, then it
has to be after work then.

But don't give up because you'll get there.

Q: Do you take inspiration by some other artists or

by history itself?

A: Um, both. But you know, I really feel it is important to

balance out exposure to other artists and exposure to the
world and life in general, because art is about both of
them. And I find that especially in our world it tends to
be biased towards the incestuous a little too much. So I
say, go and get rid of your "art of" books and get rid of
you goodbrush links and go out into the world and don't
make art about other art. I'm as guilty as that as
anybody. And it's a tendency I have to get away from.